The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  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.

  ‘Top floor, along the passageway, last door on the right.’

  Feeling the tension drain from him, he thanked them for their time and turned to leave the room. One of them shouted after him, ‘What about that reward?’ Pyke ignored him. But the man with fat cheeks and greasy lips shuffled after him and said, ‘Mostly we don’t go up there. It’s meant to be kept for men who fought in the war but the real reason is none of us much care for the smell. Ripe flesh and camphor don’t make for a pleasant odour.’ He was carrying a lantern and offered it to Pyke, who rummaged in his pocket for a few coins. The man accepted them gratefully and shuffled along the passageway back to the kitchen.

  But there was nothing of interest in the room that had been described to him and Pyke was just about to make his way back along the passageway when he noticed a light in the room opposite.

  He knocked on the door and pushed it open. The room was tidy and warm, a fire blazing in the grate. Sitting in front of it was a gre
y-haired gentleman in a rocking chair. A blanket warmed his legs. He introduced himself as Midshipman Salt and proceeded to complain about the ‘thieves’ and ‘vagabonds’ that had taken over what had once been a respectable convalescence home. Since men like him who had not been badly injured in the war did not merit a place at Chelsea, he explained bitterly, this was the only place left to them. He spoke about the war as though it had happened the previous year rather than more than twenty years earlier. Pyke found himself feeling sorry for him.

  He asked the old man whether he’d known Jimmy Trotter, who had once used the room opposite him. Salt shook his head, muttering that Trotter was a ‘bad egg’ who liked to hurt people out of a misplaced sense of enjoyment. He added that he was happy Trotter had gone and said, no, he didn’t know where he had gone to and, quite frankly, didn’t care. ‘If someone had gouged out his eyes with a spoon,’ he said, reflecting on the matter, ‘it would have been too good a death.’ But when Pyke asked him why he felt so strongly about the man, Salt wouldn’t answer him.

  Pyke looked around the well-ordered room. There were framed prints of ships on the wall. That was when he had the idea. ‘What about a man called Jake Bolter? Never goes anywhere without his mastiff, Copper.’

  The older man’s face reddened, his hands starting to shake. He tried to recover his composure but Pyke had seen the reaction and the ex-sailor knew that he had seen it.

  ‘Bolter had a room here?’ Pyke tried to keep his excitement in check. This was what he’d been looking for, something that tied Trotter to Bolter and Rockingham.

  The old man stared down at his blanket. ‘For a long while, Jake lived in the room across the hall.’

  ‘And then Trotter moved in too?’

  ‘I thought we were friends.’ The midshipman’s eyes filled with water. ‘For years, we’d sit here in this very room and talk about the old days.’

  ‘And Trotter’s arrival disrupted all that?’

  The man nodded sullenly. ‘Jake’s an impressionable chap, easily gulled. Jimmy Trotter got him involved in something rotten and after that he stopped coming to see me. To my mind, he couldn’t face me out of the shame.’

  ‘But you don’t know what it was?’

  ‘No.’

  Pyke digested this information. ‘Did they both move out about the same time?’

  The midshipman stared forlornly into the fire. ‘About three months ago, I’d say.’

  They talked in halting sentences for a few minutes more but Salt had no additional information about Trotter or Bolter and didn’t know where they might have gone to. Pyke made his excuses to leave and Salt muttered something under his breath, refusing to meet his stare.

  It was hard not to feel sorry for the old man. He had faithfully served his country and had been rewarded with a drab, windowless room in a convalescence home that had long since been overrun by thieves. Still, there was also something pitiful about someone who’d spent the last twenty years of his life reliving former glories and, in the end, Pyke had nothing more to say to him, no words of reassurance that might lift his despondency. He left quickly without saying goodbye.

  It was a ten-minute walk through the deserted wharves and jetties back to London Bridge and after just a few paces Pyke realised he was being followed. It was just a sense at first, an intuitive feeling heightened by his awareness that the man he was trying to find posed a very serious threat to his personal safety. It was as though his footsteps along the slippery, creaking wharf were somehow echoing fifty or a hundred yards behind him. To prepare himself, Pyke took one of the pistols in his hand and coiled his finger around the trigger. He kept on walking, though, and even picked up his pace a little, to see whether his pursuer would follow. Whoever it was, and Pyke had no idea whether Trotter had seen him enter the former crimping house or not, displayed an adeptness for courting shadows. Whenever he glanced behind him, his pursuer would somehow disappear from view. But when he continued on his way, the faint thud of someone else’s footsteps filled the eerie silence, and if he stopped suddenly, the footsteps behind stopped, too. He had hoped that whoever was behind him would get too close to him and afford him the chance of an ambush, but his pursuer took care to maintain a discreet distance between them. Pyke took a quick note of what lay around him: on one side was the river itself, extending off into the darkness; on the other side were a collection of warehouses, some used and some derelict. If he could duck into one of the warehouses, and wait for whoever was following him to do likewise, he might stand a better chance of apprehending them. His armpits were moist with sweat. In the distance, he could see the vague outline of the new London Bridge, the old one, nearer, and now dilapidated, like a relic of a bygone era, crumbling into the river. Ahead, he saw an alleyway running alongside one of the warehouses and ducked into it. He waited; the only noise he could hear was the thumping of his heart. The footsteps came to a halt. Pyke raised the barrel of the pistol and waited. Nothing moved; the air was utterly still.

  Peering out from his hiding place, Pyke tried to determine where his pursuer was, and how close. But the wharf was deserted; nothing stirred. He was about to give up when he saw a cloaked figure disappear into a doorway about fifty yards behind him and he set off in pursuit, pistol in one hand. He followed the figure into the warehouse and waited - listening - trying to decide whether to take the staircase or push ahead into the building. He heard footsteps somewhere above him and decided to climb the stairs. At the top Pyke followed a passageway as far as it took him, passed through a doorway and entered a storage room, with wooden crates stacked in rows, three or four on top of each other. He saw the figure disappear through another door on the far side of the room and set off after him. For a moment, he thought about firing the pistol but he didn’t have a clear shot. The door led to another flight of stairs and at the top, having sprinted the length of a dark, narrow corridor, Pyke found himself on the flat roof of the old building. Momentarily breathless, he stopped to assess the situation, and realised that the cloaked figure had nowhere else to go. He aimed the pistol and shouted, ‘Stop right there. Don’t take another step or I’ll shoot you.’ He kept the pistol raised and walked quickly across the roof to where the man had backed away, almost to the edge of the building. The figure was slight in stature and wore a black cloak over his head to conceal his identity. ‘Who are you?’ Pyke called out, as he came closer. Still breathless from the pursuit, he was about fifteen or twenty yards away when the figure pulled off the cloak and he found himself staring at the apologetic face of his own wife.

  ‘What are you . . .?’ But Pyke couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence. He was too confused, his bewilderment quickly turning to anger. ‘I could have shot you. I could have killed you, Emily.’

  Emily bowed her head. She was breathing heavily too. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to see me.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make it acceptable?’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  Pyke put the pistol back in his belt, his anger abating a little. ‘So why were you following me?’

  ‘I had some business in the city this evening. It finished earlier than I’d expected. So I went to your office, to see whether you were still there. I thought we could ride home together. When I got there you were just leaving. I should have called out but you seemed so serious. I was curious. You didn’t hail a cab, so I guessed you weren’t about to go back to Hambledon. On the spot, I decided to follow you. It’s stupid, I know, but I thought you might be meeting her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Marguerite.’

  Pyke stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘Is this what we’ve been reduced to? Is that how little we trust each other?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Emily. This is a dangerous part of the world at night. Do you have any idea what the jackals here would do to a woman of your looks and standing, if they came upon you?’ Pyke shook his head.

  ‘I can take care of
myself well enough,’ Emily muttered.

  ‘And if you came across someone like Jimmy Trotter?’

  She screwed up her face. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The blackguard who killed the canon in St Paul’s. The man who threatened you,’ Pyke said, still shaking from the thought of what might have happened, the fact that he’d considered firing a shot. ‘That’s what I was doing tonight. Trying to track him down.’

  ‘There will always be threats. You can’t deal with them all.’

  ‘Why will there always be threats, Emily?’ Pyke took a step towards her. ‘Isn’t it time we started being honest with each other?’

  ‘What I do is upsetting to some people.’

  ‘And what exactly do you do?’

  ‘I’m a socialist, Pyke. An Owenite. A radical. I don’t believe the current system can be reformed. I think we need to tear it down and start again.’

  ‘The men of the French Revolution tried that already and look where it got them. Their own heads on poles.’

  Emily shook her head. ‘This isn’t the time and place for a political argument. This should be about us. You and me, Pyke. Why we’re standing on a roof in the middle of the city at past midnight.’

  ‘Why you took it upon yourself to follow me,’ he reminded her.

  ‘What? And you’ve been entirely open and honest with me?’

  Pyke held her stare. ‘I had a visit tonight from Sir Henry Bellows, chief magistrate at Bow Street. He told me I had no idea what I was dealing with. He warned me to stay at home and not get involved in whatever I’m supposed to be involved with. He also advised you to do the same. That’s two threats made against you in as many days. How can I keep you safe if you won’t tell me what you’re doing?’

  ‘It’s not that I won’t. I can’t. I promised.’ Emily offered him a pained look.

  ‘Promised who? Jackman?’