Felix didn’t know what to do. ‘Are they real?’ he asked, afraid to reach out and touch them.
‘Try lifting one up. You’ll need both hands.’
Felix did as Pyke suggested and tottered unconvincingly under the weight of one of the bars before letting it drop back on to the pile. ‘Where have they come from?’ he asked eventually, still adjusting to the wonder of it all.
‘That doesn’t matter. What matters is they’re ours. Yours and mine. This is our secret. I want you to shake my hand; then we’ll both swear we’ll never tell another living soul about it.’
They shook hands and made the pledge. Pyke lifted one of the bars out of the trunk and put it in a satchel he’d brought with him. The market price was something in the region of eight hundred pounds; Ned Villums had offered to pay him half that. But it would be more than enough to settle his debts and pay his bills for the foreseeable future.
‘What are we going to do with them all?’
Pyke smiled at the speed with which his son had accepted his ownership of the bars. ‘Keep them here. From time to time I might sell one. But this is our future. I promised I’d try harder. This is the start of it.’
‘But what if someone else comes and digs them up?’
‘No one else knows about them. As long as we don’t tell anyone else, they’ll be more than safe right here.’
Later, as they walked back towards the house, the sun was setting in the west and the entire sky was washed with streaks of orange and gold. Copper trotted ahead on his three good legs and Felix walked next to Pyke holding his hand.
It took Pyke another month after he had seen Mary on to the steamer at Southampton to summon the necessary fortitude to face Silas Malvern in his own home. He was ushered in by the same butler into the same greenhouse he had visited three or four months earlier. This time, though, Malvern almost seemed pleased to see him and even made the butler fetch two glasses of his best cognac. He also ordered the man to bring a chair for Pyke and put it close by so that they could talk without being interrupted. He seemed to be in good spirits and, if anything, his health had improved slightly since Pyke had last seen him outside the Sessions House.
‘Now, sir, to what do I owe the dubious honour of this visit?’ he asked, once the butler had returned with the chair and the brandies.
‘You once expressed a desire to be reunited with your brother, Phillip. I’m sorry to tell you he’s dead.’
Malvern’s expression crumpled and his top lip began to quiver. ‘I see.’ He tried to regain control of his mouth. ‘Can I ask where and how he died ...’ Closing his eyes, he went on, ‘and what has become of his body? I should like to honour him in death in a manner I wasn’t able to in life.’
‘He fell in with the wrong people. It’s likely his body will never be found.’
‘Will you at least tell me about the circumstances of his death and the identity of these people you refer to?’
‘On certain conditions.’
Malvern licked his lips. ‘Such as?’
‘I want you to own up to what you did. An innocent man was sacrificed to preserve your family’s good name.’
Malvern paused and then nodded his head slowly, as though acknowledging the truth of what Pyke had just said. With a lazy movement he waved his hand, as though swatting an imaginary fly. ‘What would be the purpose of raking over old ground?’
The almost casual manner with which Malvern had admitted to his part in the plot to fabricate the evidence against Morel-Roux took Pyke’s breath away.
‘You’ve clung on to your honour and fortune and Pierce has been promoted to the rank of superintendent. But a good man is dead for no other reason than he was poor and foreign and therefore expendable. Is that something you want to take to your grave?’
‘If I ever felt the need to confess my sins, I’d do so in the presence of a priest, not a common thief.’
‘I’m not talking about making a statement before the Church or even the law. I know you’d never do it. I just want you to admit what you did to me.’
‘Why?’ This time Malvern seemed genuinely curious. ‘You already seem to have made up your mind anyway.’
‘Because I want to hear the words come from your lips.’
The idea of exacting his own justice had crossed Pyke’s mind, but such an act would only play into the hands of the Jamaican conspirators. He wondered what he had really hoped to achieve by confronting the old man.
When Malvern didn’t answer, Pyke added, ‘I realise that some vague information about a brother you haven’t seen in more than twenty years is perhaps insufficient inducement here, so I’m prepared to sweeten my offer.’
‘Sweeten in what sense?’
‘I also have some information about your daughter.’
That made him sit up straighter. ‘What do you mean? What information do you have about my Elizabeth?’
Pyke pretended not to have heard him. ‘But you see, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll tell you what I know only if you’ll agree to make a confession in front of Sir Richard Mayne and Fitzroy Tilling.’
He sat back and watched the old man’s bewilderment, enjoying it until he considered his own motivations for doing what he was about to do. Until now it hadn’t been clear to him, but suddenly it was: he wanted to ruin Pierce and break Malvern. Any hint of wrongdoing on Pierce’s part would bring about his dismissal and the truth about Elizabeth Malvern would surely send the old man to his grave. What Pyke was doing had nothing to do with justice, with avenging the Swiss valet’s death.
‘I’ve just received a letter from my daughter.’ Malvern stared at him with ill-concealed hostility. ‘It would appear she’s decided to remain in Jamaica for the time being and she’s quite adamant that I’m not to sanction the sale of Ginger Hill.’ Pyke couldn’t tell whether he welcomed this move or not.
He thought about Mary Edgar and the way the skin around her eyes creased when she smiled. But he also thought about what she and Webb and Harper and Bertha and Sobers had done, or tried to do, and how close they were to realising their ambitions. He’d thought about little else in the month or so since Mary had departed on the steamer bound for Kingston.
‘It would appear we’ve reached an impasse, sir,’ Malvern said, sipping his cognac. ‘You see, I’m sufficiently curious about this new information you claim to have acquired regarding my daughter to at least consider your request, even if it comes at great personal cost to myself.’
‘But?’
‘But I can’t agree to honouring this agreement until I know more about the specific nature of your information.’
Pyke felt his stomach tighten. ‘Perhaps I could ask you a question, in the meantime?’
Malvern nodded.
‘What’s become of your intention to donate a tranche of land at Ginger Hill to Knibb’s church?’
‘I signed the papers before Knibb sailed for Jamaica.’
‘A hundred acres?’
Malvern hesitated, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘More like fifty.’
‘Like fifty, or fifty?’
‘Forty perhaps. No, definitely forty.’
Pyke contemplated what he’d just been told. ‘But the estate at Ginger Hill encompasses more than five hundred acres.’
‘That’s correct, sir.’
‘And you think that donating a paltry forty acres is enough to make up for the profits your family has accrued from the forced labour of slaves? That is your expression of remorse - forty acres?’
Malvern pulled his blanket up over his knees and took another sip of brandy. ‘I know you’ve visited the island, sir, and know a little of the challenges faced by planters and negroes alike. But you can’t simply tear down one system and replace it with another overnight. That takes time. Little by little change will come, and if the negroes show themselves capable and worthy of adjusting to their new circumstances as citizens of the Crown, more opportunities will come their way. But they will have to prove themselves first. Even
Knibb would tell you the same thing.’
Pyke thought about Webb and Harper, but most of all about Mary Edgar. Had they proved themselves?
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, sir. I’ve had a change of heart.’ Pyke stood up and looked down at Malvern’s face.
‘What do you mean, a change of heart?’
‘If you were to be seized by a sudden desire to unburden yourself to Mayne or Tilling, I for one would welcome it. But I see no further reason for continuing this conversation.’
He started to walk towards the door. Malvern tried to climb up from his chair but the act was beyond him. ‘What about your news of Elizabeth? What’s happened to her? You can’t leave me like this. Sir, I beg you.’
On the steps outside Malvern’s house, Pyke steadied himself against the stone column and watched a milkmaid pass by on the pavement, two metal churns balancing on either side of a wooden yoke. It was a cool, overcast day and the air smelled of wet leaves, but Pyke’s thoughts were not of the imminent change of season, nor even about the conversation he’d just had with a frail old man. Rather, he thought of a place high in the mountains where people grew their own food and lived in their own houses, and whether it was possible to commit terrible acts in the name of a general good - and still be able to face your own reflection without hating what you saw.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is dedicated to Debbie Lisle, who has tirelessly read, scribbled all over and commented on countless versions of it, at each stage of the writing process. My gratitude and love go to her.
I would also like to thank Helen Garnons-Williams and Kirsty Dunseath, my editors at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, for their detailed, imaginative and thoughtful advice and their general good sense. Thanks also to Luigi Bonomi, my agent, Dave Torrens at No Alibis in Belfast and David and Daniel at Goldsboro Books for all their support. The initial idea for this novel came from reading Thackeray’s ‘Going to see a man hanged’ about the execution of Courvoisier for the murder of Lord William Russell, and from finding an account on the Bank of England Museum website about a sewer-man who, in 1836, accessed the bullion vault via an underground tunnel. In terms of my research, James Parrent, of Falmouth Heritage Renewal, pushed me in the right direction while visiting Falmouth, but my guides were mostly books, and those that deserve particular mention include Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Planter, A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, Peta Jensen’s The Last Colonials: The Slog of Two European Families in Jamaica and, for its general context, Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867. Details of Knibb’s speech at the Anti-Slavery Society meeting in London (which I doctored slightly for my purposes) were gleaned from Madhavi Kale’s essay in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850. Ed Glinert’s East End Chronicles and Watts Phillips’s The Wild Tribes of London were particularly helpful for their accounts of life in and around London’s docks and the Ratcliff Highway, while Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon offered an excellent introduction to the murky world of Victorian pornography. Suffice to say all of the mistakes, and the really nasty bits in the book, are mine.
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