Bloody Winter: A Pyke Mystery

by Andrew Pepper

  An awkward silence ensued. Knox wondered why the old man had felt the need to justify himself.

  ‘Will that be all, your Lordship?’

  ‘Asenath. Call me Asenath.’ He wandered across to where Knox was standing. ‘You’re a good boy.’ Stretching out his hand, he tapped Knox gently on the cheek.

  Knox shifted his weight from foot to foot and waited to be dismissed.

  ‘Your mother has been a good and faithful servant to this family.’ Cornwallis waved his hand, as though flicking away a fly. ‘She’s asked to see you. You’ll find her in the kitchens.’

  His mother took him in her arms, even though her hands were covered in stuffing. Knox was known by most of the women who worked there and they shouted their greetings. Pulling back from her hug, Knox surveyed his mother with affection. She was tall and elegant. Her thin, straw-coloured hair was tied up under a lace bonnet and her skin was blotchy from the heat of the kitchen. He still thought her a fine-looking woman, for her age, but each time he saw her, he worried that she seemed older. This time she also seemed thinner, but he reassured himself with the thought that there wasn’t likely to be a shortage of food in Cornwallis’s kitchen.

  ‘How are you, son?’ She wiped her hands on her apron and touched him on the cheek. ‘And James?’

  James was his son, her grandson. He noticed she hadn’t asked after his wife. ‘They’re fine. Martha’s fine, too.’

  ‘It’s the wee’un I worry about.’

  Knox looked at the goose lying in front of her and the vegetables waiting to be cut. ‘It’s sometimes hard to believe people are dying of starvation.’

  ‘Quiet, boy. You don’t want his Lordship to hear you talkin’ like that, do you?’

  ‘You think what he’s done, what he’s doing, is right? Turning families out of their homes?’

  His mother looked at him, half-amused. This was familiar ground and usually they chose to respect each other’s different opinions of the aristocrat. ‘Is it his fault the crops failed again this year?’

  This time, Knox felt, there was a prickliness to her tone and he wondered whether he should speak his mind or not.

  His mother sighed. ‘I’ve served him for almost forty years and I swear, he’s not a bad man. And he’s been good to us, all of us, your brothers, your father, you too.’

  Knox felt a pang of guilt. He hadn’t seen his youngest brother, Peter, for a number of months and it struck him that with the spread of disease brought on by the famine he was more at risk than most. Peter had always been a sickly child but a bout of the pox when he was eight had nearly finished him off. Six or seven years on, his speech and mental faculties were still those of a young boy. As a result Peter had never been able to work and the family did what they could to protect him from the hardships of the world. Even their father did his bit, but it was Knox’s mother who bore the brunt of the care.

  ‘How is Peter?’

  ‘You’d know if you ever paid us a visit.’

  Knox didn’t answer. He wondered whether his mother knew the real reason he kept away from the family cabin and why he hadn’t made more of an effort to get to know his two much younger brothers.

  As if reading his mind, his mother said, ‘Your father’s back has been playing up.’

  Knox shuffled from foot to foot and looked around the kitchen. He didn’t want to talk about his father. ‘I should get going. I have to ride back to Cashel and it’ll be dark in a couple of hours.’

  His mother smiled and nodded. ‘You take good care of yourself, son. These are terrible times.’ Her smile evaporated, lines deepening on her forehead.

  Knox wondered whether she knew that a man had been killed only a few hundred yards from where they were standing. ‘Can I ask you a question before I go?’

  Sarah Knox tucked in a loose strand of hair that had escaped from her bonnet. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s about my position …’

  As a rule, policemen weren’t meant to take up positions in their native counties or the counties they were attached to by marriage. But eight years earlier, there had been a shortfall in numbers and a notice had been placed in the local newspaper. Knox had applied and had been accepted. He’d always thought that he had been accepted for the position on his own merit.

  ‘When I first applied, did his Lordship put in a good word for me with Hastings?’

  His mother retreated to the wooden table where the goose was waiting. ‘I honestly don’t know, son. I might’ve mentioned that I didn’t want you to leave home. What mother wouldn’t do that?’

  Knox went over to her and gently touched her face. ‘I’m not angry with you. But a few moments ago, you said we all owed his Lordship something and I just wanted to know what you meant.’

  His mother sighed. ‘I was referring to the wages he pays me, that’s all.’ Having made sure no one was looking, she picked up a thick cut of cured meat and stuffed it into his pocket. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she whispered. ‘Just take it, for you, Martha and the infant.’

  Knox wanted to give it back but one of the other kitchen-servants had just come into the room. If someone saw what his mother had done and reported her, she could lose her job.

  He went to kiss her on the cheek and, as he did so, she grabbed his wrist. ‘You’re a good boy, Michael,’ she whispered, ‘always was, and I love you very much, but this time you need to think about the whole family.’

  The first potato crop had failed the previous autumn. On that occasion, the local authorities – in consort with the government in London – had made relief provisions and only a few people had perished. But when the crop had failed a second time one year later, the new Whig administration decided to leave the relief efforts to the traders, supposing they would import the necessary food. When the scale of the crisis became apparent, the traders tried to purchase additional maize and corn from Europe and the United States but prices had soared throughout the autumn and the first part of the winter. Now most ordinary people couldn’t afford to eat and there was little that impecunious local boards could do.

  Earlier in the year, Knox and other policemen had helped to protect convoys of wheat departing for Waterford and eventually England, where the grain would earn the greatest price. As far as he knew, the grain had reached its final destination, but in light of the current shortages, the decision to export so much food seemed immoral if not downright wicked.

  He thought about the food he’d just seen in Cornwallis’s kitchen and trembled at the injustice. Knox liked to think of himself as honest and plain speaking, but given the opportunity to confront the aristocrat, he had said and done nothing. He tried not think about how this reflected on his character.

  The sky in the west was flushed with pale streaks of light and the air felt cool and damp on his skin. Knox kept up a gentle pace, keen not to drive the horse too hard, since Maxwell wouldn’t have thought to feed or water it. Just before departing, he had talked to the labourer who’d first discovered the body. The man had told him nothing new and had strenuously denied taking anything from the dead man’s pockets. With nothing but the wind for company, Knox’s thoughts turned to the cured meat. He hadn’t eaten in twelve hours and his stomach was swollen with hunger. Taking it from his pocket, he brought it up to his nose and sniffed. Knox hadn’t seen, let alone eaten, meat for six months, and the urge to gnaw at it was almost too much to bear. Just one mouthful, he told himself. But if he ate a mouthful, he would end up gobbling the whole thing, and then how could he face his wife? Instead he returned the meat to his pocket, tried to distract himself by thinking about the body behind him.

  About halfway along the old road a pauper scampered out in front of him, waving his arms. Knox thought it was some kind of ruse and that the man was part of a gang of robbers. He tugged the reins and went to retrieve his pistol. Quickly, though, he could see that the man was in distress; he was talking rapidly in broken Irish. Knox told him to slow down and explain what had happened. The man yanked Knox’s arm
and led him through a gate to his cabin, where a lantern was hanging on a hook by the door. In halted speech he said that he’d left for a week in order to find road-building work in Thurles. Pushing open the door, Knox could smell the rotting corpses. There were three of them, limbs tangled up in the middle of the room, their carcasses gnawed almost clean by rats. Knox stared at them, not knowing what to say. Next to him, the husband slumped to his knees and started weeping. Knox sniffed the air and looked for a shovel. If the women and two children had died from a fever it was important to bury them as quickly as possible, to halt the spread of disease.

  He told the man that the cemeteries were full and the undertakers were turning people away. The man looked at him, hollow-eyed. Knox doubted whether he’d be able to pay what they were demanding.

  Without thinking, he thrust the cured meat into the man’s outstretched hand. Trade it for a coffin, he said, or just eat it.

  The man looked down at the meat but said nothing.

  Knox deposited the vagrant’s body in the cellar at the barracks and walked the mile and a half back to his cottage on the outskirts of town. Martha was waiting up for him; she had been waiting for hours. His first thought was for the infant, James, but she reassured him that everything was fine.

  ‘I thought something terrible had happened to you,’ she said, embracing him.

  At twenty-three, Martha was five years younger than Knox and much better looking. She had thick, black straight hair, pale, freckled skin and delicate cheekbones. He had met her at a town fair three summers ago and they had married the following spring. Their marriage had been condemned by both families but it had been harder for Martha, especially as the ceremony had taken place in an Anglican church. Until the birth of their son, Martha had worked in the Union workhouse. In recent months, however, with the assistance of a Quaker family from Cork, she had given up this position to help run a soup kitchen which fed those who had been turned away from the workhouse.

  ‘Do you know how much the Cornwallis estate has contributed to the poor relief fund?’ she’d asked him the previous evening. ‘A hundred pounds. That’s all. Over the whole of last year.’

  When he hadn’t responded, she’d added, ‘It hasn’t stopped him claiming for five and a half thousand against the public works scheme. And why? So he can pay his own tenants out of the general rate to square his fields and drain his land. Land, I don’t need to tell you, which was taken from those who needed it most.’

  Later, he told Martha what he’d seen that day and what had happened to him in Dundrum. Afterwards they lay in silence, listening to the tree branches tapping against the windowpane.

  ‘People are dying and there’s no corn in the depot, not here, not in Clonmel and not even, I’ve heard, in Cork.’

  Knox thought about the provisions the constabulary gave its men but decided not to say anything. Martha, he suspected, didn’t want or expect him to comment.

  ‘On the way to the house this morning,’ he said eventually, ‘I passed the time imagining what I’d say to Moore, how I would stand up to him and make him see the error of his ways.’ In private, this was what they both called Cornwallis, an obvious marker of disrepect. ‘But when I had the chance, I did nothing.’

  Turning around, Martha kissed him gently on the cheek. ‘You have your mother and your family to think about.’

  Knox listened to the sound of the infant sleeping. This was what his mother had meant. The family’s well-being depended on Moore’s patronage and the aristocrat had wanted to remind him of this. ‘Moore ordered me to bury the whole matter. I said I would.’

  Martha waited a moment before saying, ‘And will you?’

  ‘What choice do I have?’

  Martha ran her fingers through his still-damp hair. He could see one side of her face illuminated by moonlight shining in through the half-open curtains. ‘You’re a good man, Michael Knox. When the time comes, I know you’ll do what is right. That’s why I married you. Well, it’s one of the reasons at least.’ She tapped him playfully on the arm.

  Knox let out a sigh. It was true. He did always try to do what was right, but this time he didn’t share his wife’s optimism.

  THREE

  MONDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 1846

  London, England

  Pyke had begun to feel his age.

  It was the little things, he noticed. Such as the pain when he emptied his bladder in the mornings and the fact that when he first staggered out of his bed, his joints were so stiff he couldn’t walk without a limp. This morning he felt fuzzy-headed and disoriented. He had taken to drinking wine on his own, to ward off the loneliness, now that Felix, his only son, had left home. Dry-mouthed, he rubbed the crust from his eyes and yawned. He had opened a second bottle, he remembered, as he listened to the empty house creaking in the autumn wind. He would get up in another five minutes.

  It had been harder to get going, Pyke had found, since Felix’s departure in the summer. Perhaps it was simply that he no longer had an example to set. But Pyke hadn’t been sleeping well for other reasons. A month earlier one of his sergeants, Frederick Shaw, had been killed during a botched raid on a warehouse, but not by of the one of the robbers they’d been hoping to apprehend. It was Pyke who had shot him by mistake. He had given his men orders not to enter the warehouse while he reconnoitred it but shots had been fired and chaos had broken out. Later, having listened to the evidence, the jury at the inquiry had declared the death to be an accident, but Pyke hadn’t been able to absolve himself of blame. He had been distracted; his head had been thick from the previous night’s wine; someone ahead of him had moved and he had ordered them to stop. He’d reacted too quickly or not quickly enough and now a man, one of his very best men, was dead.

  The funeral had been terrible. Pyke had decided to attend it, at the bidding of the other detectives, but he hadn’t known what to say to Shaw’s wife and his young son. Throughout the service, he had listened to their sobs. Later he had visited the widow at home and had spent an hour with her, offering his sympathies and telling her what a fine man her husband had been. She had greeted him politely and seemingly bore him no ill will, but once or twice the mask had slipped and he’d seen what she really thought about him, the fear and revulsion. The boy had bawled throughout his visit. He would now grow up without a father and Pyke knew from his own experience the disadvantages this would bring. Pyke had assured Shaw’s widow that she would receive a generous pension but he knew this wouldn’t be enough to bring up the child. He’d left her an envelope with a hundred pounds stuffed into it. Blood money, he’d thought as he said goodbye.

  ‘I called out to him. I identified myself,’ Pyke said after the funeral to Jack Whicher, one of his detectives. ‘Why didn’t he react? Why didn’t he let me know who he was?’

  Whicher hadn’t been able to give him an answer.

  ‘I’m not sure I can do this any more.’

  ‘This?’ Whicher had put his hands up to his eyes to shield them from the dull glare of the winter sun.

  ‘If I hadn’t been there, in that warehouse, Shaw might well be alive now.’

  Whicher shook his head. ‘It was Shaw’s mistake, not yours. If he hadn’t gone into the warehouse, none of this would have happened.’

  That conversation had taken place a month earlier, but if anything Pyke’s disquiet had intensified. He hadn’t been able to put Shaw’s little boy out of his head, trying to imagine what kind of man he would grow up to be. It wasn’t guilt he felt – he’d done a lot worse in his life – it was just how quick and needless it had all been. Yet the repercussions would last a lifetime: Shaw’s boy would find this out for himself. It was at times like these that Pyke missed his uncle: Godfrey would have known what to say, how to put things into perspective.

  Pyke got up and emptied his bladder into the commode. Downstairs, he lit the fire that his housekeeper, Mrs Booth, had prepared and waited for the kettle to boil on the range. As he broke three eggs into a jug and whisked the white and yo
lk together he wondered – not for the first time – whether he’d meant what he’d said to Jack Whicher.

  Did he really want to resign his position? Could he afford to?

  As an inspector he enjoyed a modest salary, most of which he spent on the running of the household. He owned the house in Islington and had inherited a small sum from his uncle Godfrey, the best part of which he was using to pay for Felix’s education. From time to time, he took the opportunity to augment his income by keeping back some of the items recovered from robberies or by pocketing jewels or other valuables that no one came forward to claim. He was comfortable rather than well off, but didn’t know whether he’d be able to support himself without his detective’s salary.

  Once he’d poured the boiling water into the teapot, he collected the newspaper and the post from the doormat and began to sift through it, looking for anything interesting. There was a letter postmarked Merthyr Tydfil. He read the name on the reverse and it took him a moment to place it.

  Pyke hadn’t thought about Jonah Hancock for five years. His wife, Cathy, had been the daughter of one of Godfrey’s friends.

  Tearing the envelope, Pyke couldn’t think how the man knew his home address, until he recalled he’d written to Cathy to tell her about arrangements for Godfrey’s funeral. She hadn’t attended but had sent him a letter of condolence. Pyke tried to remember her as she’d been five years earlier, the last time he’d seen her: barely eighteen years old and pretty, her fine blonde hair arranged into ringlets. Pyke had seen for himself that she didn’t love or even much care for the man she was about to marry, yet he’d said nothing. Perhaps it hadn’t been any of his business. Still, if he was honest, he had known – he had always known – that she admired him and would have listened to him. At the time, he hadn’t wanted to court intimacy with her; she was too young for any good to come of it.