The Revenge of Captain Paine (30 page)

But though cornered, the glass-eyed man was, by no means, finished. Taking out a knife from his monkey coat, he pulled the shaking canon towards him and held the blade to his throat. Behind the ink-black tangle of hair, his one good eye shone with a peculiar malevolence. Someone had seen what was happening and screamed for assistance. Other anguished cries followed. Pyke held up the palms of his hands and took a stride towards the table.

‘Stay there, cully,’ the glass-eyed man barked, ‘or the priest gets cut.’ He started to back away towards the entrance down to the crypt, dragging the canon along with him. As he did so, he picked up the communion cup with his one free hand and took a swig of the wine, streaks of the claret liquid spilling down the sides of his mouth into his tangle of hair. He let out a burp and grinned. ‘Tell that bitch of yours to watch her back,’ he said in a low, gruff voice that sounded almost animalistic in its tone. Around them, the air was thick with the smell of candle wax.

Hot with anger, Pyke started to follow him but the glass-eyed man dug the sharp point of the blade into the canon’s throat and ordered to him to stay where he was. At the top of the stairs that led down to the crypt, a good twenty or thirty yards from where Pyke was standing, he drew the blade across the canon’s throat in a single motion, let the stricken man fall to his feet and turned and disappeared down the steps. But by the time Pyke had covered the ground across to the top of the stairs, checked to see that the canon could not be saved, blood pouring from his neck where the jugular had been severed, and descended the stone steps three at a time, the glass-eyed man had left the building through one of the many side doors and was nowhere to be seen. Above him, Pyke could hear wails of grief and outrage, and rather than trudge back up the stairs and face the combined wrath of the clergy and the congregation, he slipped out of the same door the glass-eyed man had used and closed it behind him.

SEVENTEEN

It was just a short step from the cathedral to his uncle’s shop in St Paul’s Yard and Pyke decided to take refuge there, rather than attempt to run the gauntlet of the massed ranks of police constables who would doubtless be summoned to the cathedral and would soon be looking for the priest’s assassin. In the deserted yard, a squally wind had whipped the sodden pages of a discarded newspaper into the air. Digging his shaking hands into his pockets, Pyke thought of the priest who had been killed for no other reason than that of being in the wrong place and wondered what kind of human being would kill a man of the cloth without pausing for thought, as though the act of taking a life were akin to having a piss or discarding a half-eaten pie. He also thought about the threat that had been made against Emily and decided that, having seen his uncle, he would return to Hambledon to make sure she was safe.

The stone steps that led down to Godfrey’s basement shop were wet from the rain and at the bottom Pyke was surprised to see that the door was ajar. Godfrey liked to complain bitterly about the ill effects of the cold weather. It wasn’t just raining, though. A fog had rolled up the river from the east and made it difficult to see the top of Wren’s dome, even though the cathedral was just a few yards away.

Peering through the door, Pyke shouted out his uncle’s name, his eyes straining to see through the darkness.

He heard Godfrey’s cry before he saw the state of the shop; even in the dim light produced by half a dozen candles, the chaos was evident. Books had been torn apart, piles of manuscripts had been riffled through and strewn on the floor, and bundles of letters had been cut open and discarded.

At the back of the shop, two men wearing tailored swallow-tailed coats over knee-length breeches and wellington boots had pinned Godfrey against the wall. With knife in his hand, Pyke steadied himself and took aim, sending the weapon corkscrewing through the air. The blade tore into one of the men’s flesh, embedding itself deep into the leg. The wounded man screamed in agony and fell to the floor, giving Pyke time to move carefully through the shop. The other man looked up, visibly startled. He wasn’t physically favoured, by any stretch of the imagination, but his quick, darting movements and powerful forearms made him someone to be reckoned with. But Pyke didn’t stop to take stock of the situation and assess the threat posed by the two men. Rather he sprinted through the shop and threw himself at the larger man, driving him backwards into the wall and winding him in the process. He landed a clean blow on his jaw and watched as he collapsed.

Godfrey had slumped to the floor and was wheezing like an injured hog, clutching his chest. Pyke knelt beside him and asked whether he was all right. Godfrey tried to whisper a few words but they wouldn’t form on his tongue.

But the two attackers hadn’t finished with him. The larger man, the uninjured one, had retrieved a broken table leg and was advancing towards him, swinging it wildly in the air like a machete. The first swing missed Pyke’s cheek by a whisker but the follow-up swipe caught him a little off balance and gave his attacker enough time to push past him and run for the door.

Rather than setting after him in pursuit, Pyke decided to concentrate his efforts on apprehending his companion, who, by this stage, had managed to haul himself up on to his legs and hobble to the back of the shop, where a door opened out on to a small court. In the doorway, and just in time, Pyke saw the glint of a gun barrel and fell to the ground before a blast of powder sent ball-shot fizzing over his head.

Pyke moved after the wounded man with more caution. Outside in the courtyard, he followed the trail of blood along a high-walled alleyway, catching sight of the man as he turned the corner into another alleyway, which led to Ludgate Hill. The injured man was moving slowly but Pyke opted to keep his distance, in case the pistol contained another shot.

Ludgate Hill was deserted apart from a street sweeper and a costermonger pulling his barrow by hand. From the entrance to the alleyway, Pyke looked across the street and saw what the wounded man clearly hadn’t: a two-wheeled phaeton pulled by a couple of strapping mares bearing down on him out of the swirling fog. The driver saw the man too late to change his course but tried to pull on the horses’ reins. For his part, the wounded man saw what was about to happen and held up the palms of his hands, a final, pitiful act of defiance before he was trampled under the hoofs of the terrified horses, run over by the wheels of the carriage and impaled on the axle, which had snapped in two as a result of the collision.

First at the scene of the accident, Pyke checked to see that the driver of the phaeton would live and then turned his attention to the dead man, who, minutes earlier, had tried to attack Godfrey in his shop. Pulling the knife from the man’s leg, Pyke wiped the blade on what seemed to be an expensive coat and briefly rummaged through his pockets. The only thing of interest that he found was a brass cravat pin supporting some kind of military coat of arms. The police would have to deal with yet another dead body, Pyke thought grimly as he wandered back to Godfrey’s shop. Two in a night, both within a few hundred yards of each other. Perhaps they would try to connect the two. Perhaps they
were
connected, he mused.

Back in the shop, his uncle was sprawled out on the floor. He wasn’t moving and when Pyke tried to rouse him, he groaned slightly and clutched his chest, wincing with evident pain. ‘It’s my heart, dear boy,’ he wheezed. ‘I don’t know if I’ll make it.’ His eyelids fluttered and closed.

 
But Godfrey did not pass away that night or, indeed, the following day, and by the next evening he had rallied sufficiently to take a few sips of water and two mouthfuls of bread. Pyke had paid for a room in St Bartholomew’s, and also for Sir Henry Halford, the well-respected royal physician, to attend to him around the clock. Pyke hardly slept at all on the first night and remained with his uncle throughout the following day. Emily visited in the evening with victuals and they sat across from one another, each holding one of Godfrey’s withered hands, their thoughts drowned out by the terrified grunts and squeals of animals being herded into the market outside.

‘You know, it was Godfrey who taught me how to read,’ Pyke said, on the second night.

Emily smiled warmly and took Pyke’s other hand in hers.

Pyke looked at her but his mind was elsewhere. The previous night it had struck him, maybe for the first time, that his uncle might die, and he realised how unprepared he was for this eventuality. ‘I still remember the first thing he ever read to me.’

‘Yes?’ Emily looked up at him.

‘
The Life and Times of Sawney Beane
.’

‘Who’s that?’ One side of her face was lit up by the candlelight.

‘Sawney Beane.’ He met her gaze across the bed. ‘He robbed people and ate their flesh.’

That drew a knowing smile. ‘And how old were you at the time?’

‘A little older than Felix.’

‘I was going to say it hasn’t done you any harm.’

Pyke smiled. ‘Godfrey always reckoned you could do more damage than good by trying to shield young minds from the less palatable aspects of life.’

Emily regarded him with a thoughtful expression. ‘It sounds very different from our son’s upbringing.’

Pyke reached out and stroked his uncle on the forehead. ‘I’m just saying he never felt the need to censor. Good, bad, gruesome, uplifting. He read them all and let me come to my own conclusions.’

Pyke watched her from the other side of the bed. It was at moments such as these, he mused, that you realised what people meant to you. He had experienced a similar blind panic when Emily had almost died while giving birth to Felix. She had lost consciousness for a few days and Pyke had remained at her bedside for the entire time, trying to keep her alive with the strength of his will.

In the intervening years, he had often wondered why she hadn’t conceived again. The first time, it had happened quite quickly, within a year of the marriage, allaying fears carried over from a former attachment that he might be infertile. But Emily’s recovery had been long and slow and it had taken a full year before she had been ready to try for more children. The physician who had treated her said there was no reason why this shouldn’t happen, but for some reason it never had and, in recent months, they had stopped talking about it as a possibility.

Pyke looked down at his uncle’s sleeping face. ‘Apart from Felix, the only people that matter to me are right here in this room.’

Emily squeezed his hand and smiled gently. ‘Do I detect a subtle rebuke in your tone?’

‘Captain Paine may want to improve the lot of the poor and destitute. I just want to keep my family safe.’

It seemed to amuse her. ‘Is that what you were doing the other afternoon when we visited Granby Street?’ She hesitated, licking her lips. ‘Or why that little girl is in one of the rooms at Hambledon?’

Pyke took her hand and waited for a few moments. ‘The other night, just before I found Godfrey in his shop, I turned the tables on this man who’d been following me. I chased him into St Paul’s where he killed one of the priests. You might have read about it in the newspaper. Just before he escaped - he was holding a knife to the priest’s throat at the time - he made a threat against you.’

‘What kind of a threat?’

‘His exact words were, “Tell that bitch of yours to watch her back.” Pyke stared at her across the bed. ‘Why would he say something like that?’

Emily shrugged. ‘You don’t know who he was and why he was following you?’

‘No.’ He didn’t want to tell her about the glass-eyed man’s brutality and unnecessarily scare her but he wanted her to know that his threat was a serious one.

‘Then I don’t see what I can do about it.’

Pyke let go of her hand and glanced down at his uncle. ‘Perhaps you should think twice about maintaining such a public presence.’

‘You want me to stop doing what I do?’ A hardness had entered her voice.

‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing,’ Pyke said, losing his patience. ‘That’s my point. If I did, I could judge the potential threat to your safety.’

‘And how about what
you
do? Have you thought to tell me about the problems you seem to be facing?’

‘We can talk about this another time,’ Pyke said, noticing that Godfrey had stirred ever so slightly. ‘But for now, promise me you’ll take extra precautions. I’m being deadly serious, Emily. This man was not someone to be taken lightly. I just think you should lie low for the next week or so, while I see if I can turn up any information.’

Emily left shortly after that, saying she wanted to get back to Hambledon in time to say goodnight to Felix. Pyke asked her to send Felix his love and make sure that Milly was all right.

It was only on the third day after the attack that Godfrey rallied sufficiently for the physician to declare that he was ‘out of immediate danger’. That afternoon, after Halford had departed, his pockets loaded with money, Pyke helped his uncle to a few sips of beer he’d smuggled into the hospital from the Old Red Lion.

‘It’s not gin but I suppose it’ll have to do,’ Godfrey said, as streaks of the brown liquid dribbled down his chin.

Pyke wanted to tell Godfrey how much he meant to him and how scared he’d been at the thought of the old man’s death but somehow the words wouldn’t come. Instead, he explained to Godfrey that the libel charges against him had been dropped. That seemed to cheer him up no end.

‘That’s bloody marvellous news,’ Godfrey said, taking another swig of ale. ‘How did it happen? They seemed to have the bit between their teeth this time.’

Pyke told him about his dealings with Abraham Gore and Gore’s intervention on Godfrey’s behalf.

‘The banker?’ Godfrey didn’t bother to conceal his surprise. ‘Why would he want to help me?’

‘I think he wants me to like him.’

‘And do you?’

‘I don’t know. He’s always been very open and honest with me.’ Quickly he told the story of Gore’s arrival at the coroner’s meeting and the invectives he’d heaped on Sir Henry Bellows.