The Revenge of Captain Paine (35 page)

‘So you believe me now?’

Pyke walked ahead and, having gathered up her skirt, she hurried to keep up with him. ‘How much did Eddy borrow?’

‘Ten thousand.’

She absorbed this information without comment or apparent response. ‘Then why don’t you produce the loan papers, together with the deeds, and lodge your claim against Eddy’s estate?’

‘You sound angry at this prospect.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be? Bankers always have a way of clawing back their money.’

This time, he stopped to look at her. ‘But it still doesn’t explain where the money went, does it?’

‘You mean, the money you
claimed
you lent him?’

‘Your husband walked out of my bank with ten thousand pounds of my money. I intend to get it back.’

Out of the blue, Marguerite broke into a throaty laugh and said, ‘God, you haven’t changed much, have you, Pyke. You were always so serious, especially when money was being discussed.’

‘Back in those days it was harder for some of us to earn our bread than others,’ he said, walking ahead. In the distance, he could the drum of a military band.

Marguerite hurried after him. ‘And you were always a self-righteous prig too,’ she said, a little out of breath.

Above them, the night sky was momentarily illuminated by a volley of fireworks. They paused for a moment, to look up at the spectacle, sparks of light fanning out across the sky in a giant spider’s web. ‘Look, I’ll make you a deal,’ she added, in the same flinty tone. ‘If you can unearth the deeds to Cranborne Park, I’ll give you Eddy’s shares in the Grand Northern.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Right now, they’re hardly worth the paper they’re written on.’

‘How many shares are we talking about?’

‘I don’t know. Five thousand, maybe.’

Pyke did a quick calculation. At face value these shares were worth fifty thousand pounds. Marguerite was quite right to say their actual valuation was far lower, but even so they could be sold on the stock exchange for perhaps five thousand, still a vast amount of money. He was immediately suspicious. ‘And why would you make me such a generous offer?’

‘I need the deeds. Eddy gave them to you as collateral for a loan you made him. If you give them back to me, I’m prepared to make it worth your while. That’s how business is done.’

‘But at current value, the shares still don’t cover the cost of the loan.’

Marguerite turned to him and smiled. ‘So find the money you loaned my husband and you can keep that, as well.’

‘And where would I look for it?’ Pyke caught her eyes and felt a sudden jolt in his stomach. ‘Under your pillow?’

But Marguerite had walked ahead of him without answering and the moment was lost. Pyke followed her, as they headed off the beaten track. ‘Do you know when the next meeting of the Grand Northern committee is?’

She looked at him, laughing bitterly. ‘You mean when they can all pick over poor Eddy’s carcass?’

‘And decide what will happen to the railway.’

‘Next week, I think. But you can find out for yourself easily enough.’ Marguerite shrugged, as though the matter weren’t important.

They walked for a while in silence. ‘There was a man at your ball with a mastiff. Jake Bolter. He said you gave him permission to bring the dog with him.’

‘So?’ Marguerite continued to walk, but a note of caution had crept into her voice.

‘So I was curious to know how you first became acquainted with someone of his character.’

‘I take it the two of you didn’t see eye to eye.’

‘You could say that.’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘I don’t tend to think too warmly of people involved in the procurement and selling of children for profit.’

This time she stopped to face him. Her expression was a mixture of bewilderment and anger. ‘That’s a terrible thing to accuse him of. I’ve found him uncouth, of course, but quite reasonable.’

‘So you do know him, then?’

She looked over his shoulder. ‘From time to time, I donate a little bit of money to the orphans’ school in Tooting where he works. The man’s never been anything less than courteous to me. Unlike others I could mention.’

‘The man who owns the school, Bartholomew Prosser, procures children from the workhouses in the city, earns a fee from the workhouse managers, and then sells them to the sweaters in the East End, who put the children to work in their hovels for sixteen hours a day and pay them slave wages.’ He paused. ‘Your good friend Bolter helps to transport the children from the school to the sweat hovels.’

They walked for another hundred yards in silence, into an area of the gardens that was deserted and shrouded in darkness. ‘What’s it like?’ Marguerite asked eventually. ‘To always be right? To always know what to do and make the choices. It must be hard being so perfect.’

They were now facing one another and he could feel the heat coming off her face. ‘Is that what you think? That I don’t have to live every day with the consequences of bad choices I’ve made?’

‘Give me an example.’

‘My bank lent the sweater I’ve just described the money to start up his business.’

That mollified her a little. When Marguerite next looked up at him, her eyes had moistened and she even managed a smile. ‘And was letting me go all those years ago one of those bad choices, too?’

Pyke was momentarily lost for words.

‘Or marrying the wrong woman?’

In the darkness he could see her breath vaporise in the chilly night air. ‘Who said I married the wrong woman?’ But he could feel his heart beating a little quicker.

‘Don’t you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d come with me to France?’

Pyke swallowed some cold air and tried to avoid meeting her stare. ‘You know, I watched you climb aboard that stagecoach from the other side of the street. I hid behind a flower stall.’

‘You were there?’ Her voice was suddenly softer, warmer. ‘I looked up and down the street for you, willing you to appear.’

‘But you still left without me.’

‘And you chose not to join me,’ she said, stiffly. ‘I didn’t have a choice. I
had
to leave.’

She had owed money to someone, he remembered, and faced the prospect of a few years in a debtor’s prison.

‘We always have choices, Maggie. It’s just that the things we have to choose between aren’t always pleasant.’

This time her laugh was without any warmth. ‘You always did know how to hide behind false principles.’

Pyke chose not to respond and a fragile silence settled between them.

‘Do you remember how it used to be?’ Marguerite said eventually, while fingering the stitching on her skirt.

‘Fifteen years is a long time.’

‘Nearly sixteen.’ Marguerite hitched up her skirt and turned to leave. ‘And what pains me the most is thinking about the good life we could have had together.’ But before he had the opportunity to respond, she had started to walk away, leaving him in the park alone.

 
When Pyke returned to Blackwood’s bank, Sir Henry Bellows was waiting for him in a carriage parked opposite the Royal Exchange on Cornhill. At first Pyke thought about ignoring him, but one of his officers made it clear that the chief magistrate wanted to talk to him so finally Pyke relented. But rather than climbing into the carriage, Pyke peered in through the open window. Bellows sat forward, the light from a gas lamp illuminating his high forehead.

‘What do you know about a man called Septimus Yellowplush?’ Bellows wanted to know.

The question took Pyke by surprise. He hadn’t imagined that the chief magistrate had connections with Huntingdon. ‘Why is Yellowplush any of your business?’

‘His body was dug up the other day in a field outside the town.’ Bellows’s voice was as dry as a tinderbox. ‘He had been shot.’

‘It would seem that Huntingdon’s a dangerous place at the moment. Just ask the navvies who died there.’

‘An off-duty soldier was also shot and killed while pursuing a suspect.’

‘Then the question you should be asking is what an off-duty soldier was doing trying to keep the peace.’

Bellows leaned forward and whispered, ‘There are a dozen witnesses who saw you playing cards with Yellowplush on the night before he was shot in a coaching inn on the High Street.’

‘I thought your jurisdiction ended at Temple Bar.’

‘So you don’t deny arguing with Yellowplush?’

‘I asked him how much his integrity as a judge had cost. I might ask you the same question.’

Bellows looked at him, almost amused. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re dealing with here, do you?’

‘So enlighten me.’

‘Two fine men died that night in Huntingdon. As a man of the law, I intend to see that justice is served.’

‘And will the navvies get the same kind of justice?’

The skin wrinkled at the corners of the chief magistrate’s eyes. ‘Go back to your family and stay out of this.’ He paused for a few moments, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. ‘And if you had any sense, you would persuade your wife to do the same.’

Pyke put his head through the carriage window. The inside smelt mildewed and sour. ‘What did you just say, Bellows?’

‘You heard me the first time. I’m not going to repeat myself.’

‘Then clear something up for me. Did you just threaten my wife?’

‘Threaten is an ugly word. Let’s just say I’ve simply given you a friendly warning.’

‘And if I don’t choose to take it?’ Pyke hesitated. ‘And if my wife chooses not to take it?’

Bellows looked at him and shrugged. ‘Then you’ll only have yourselves to blame, won’t you?’

As Pyke watched the carriage disappear along the street, he couldn’t get rid of the sour taste their exchange had left.

TWENTY

A fine mist had drifted up the Thames by the time Pyke reached the creaking old wharf at Cowgate, a mist that just obscured the tops of the ships’ masts as they bobbed up and down in the choppy waters of the river. It was late, maybe as late as midnight, and the wharf was deserted. Early morning was the time to see warehousemen carrying crates of sugar, rum, rubber, tea and coffee to the stores, and gangs of coal-whippers unloading the colliers lined up along the river. Pyke looked over towards the Southwark bank, the giant brewery just about visible through the dense forest of rigging, cables and masts, though it, too, was silent. What never changed, he thought, was the smell. The river was at low tide and when this happened, the raw sewage that flowed into the river from the cess trenches that criss-crossed the city gathered on exposed banks to form mountains of slime; slime that produced gas bubbles whose stench was bad enough to make your teeth rattle.

Pyke found the former crimping house easily enough. In fact, he had once tracked down a man who had returned from transportation to one of its rooms and remembered its inside a little. During the Napoleonic wars, the building had been used to hold ‘pressed’ seamen before they were transported to vessels, and afterwards it had briefly been used as a place where sailors wounded in combat could convalesce. But money made available by the Admiralty had long since dried up, and in recent years the building had become home to every kind of docker, mudlark and scavenger that depended upon the river to earn their living. Downstairs, there was a long, narrow passageway that led to a communal kitchen, if he remembered correctly, and upstairs was a rabbit warren of interconnecting rooms and passageways. He would have to be lucky to surprise Trotter, if he was there, and even if he was, the chances were that Trotter would hear him coming and escape to somewhere else in the building.

There was another possibility, of course, one he didn’t like to think about, and to ward it off he had brought with him two fully loaded flintlock pistols and a knife that he had strapped to his left ankle. Even then, he felt somehow underprepared, as though the weapons at his disposal were a poor match when pitted against the ferocity and cruelty of the man he was attempting to capture. Villums’s warning was still ringing in his ears when he pushed open the front door.

The smell was a familiar one: damp, stale food and human sweat. At the end of the long passageway, he stepped into the kitchen, both pistols hidden under his black cutaway coat. Four men were sitting on makeshift furniture around a fire that burned warmly in the grate; all looked up at him but none with very much interest. Their clothes were dirty and torn and their faces smudged with soot. Checking behind him, Pyke walked a little farther into the dilapidated room and cleared his throat. ‘I’m looking for Jimmy Trotter,’ he said, in barely more than a whisper. If Trotter was somewhere in the building, Pyke didn’t want to alert him.

No one looked across at him. Rather, the four continued to stare gloomily into the fire, minding their own business.

‘I said I’m looking for Jimmy Trotter. I was told he sometimes puts his head down here.’ This time, he pulled back his coat and let the four men see his pistols. He put some metal into his voice, too.

‘That blackguard ain’t been here in months,’ one of them muttered.

‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

The man shrugged. ‘Didn’t ask and don’t care. But it’s good riddance as far as I’m concerned. Man was nothing but trouble.’

‘How about the rest of you? Anyone know where I can find him?’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘There’s a reward in it.’

‘How much?’ one of them asked.

‘Do you know anything or not?’ Pyke rested his fingers on the wooden butt of one of his pistols.

But the man shook his head; the others did likewise. One told him that Trotter had boasted about coming into some money and said he wasn’t likely to be back.

‘Did he have any friends or acquaintances when he was here?’

A man with fat cheeks and vermilion lips looked at him, frowning. ‘A cully like that don’t make friends.’

‘Which room did he use when he stayed here?’ Perhaps Trotter had left something that might be of use.