The Last Days (35 page)

‘Or that an aristocrat arranges the slaughter of innocent people for no other reason than to satisfy his own bigotry?’

Emily stared with consternation but she did not know how to answer him.

‘What if punishing this person could not be achieved without hurting other people?’

‘You’re asking me to sanction the loss of innocent lives as a way of legitimising this feud between you and my father?’ She sounded weary.

‘I’m not asking for your sanction.’ Pyke walked across to the bay window. The curtains were drawn. ‘I’m asking for your understanding.’ He turned to face her. ‘You make it sound as though my reasons for hating him are entirely selfish.’

‘So you do hate him?’

‘Don’t you?’

Emily shrugged. ‘I have my reasons.’

Pyke peeked through the curtains and looked down at the empty street below him. He thought about Emily’s mother and wondered how she was settling into her new living arrangements.

Emily had followed him across to the window and when he turned around she was standing so close to him that he could count the freckles on her nose. He reached out and touched her face. Her smile was a sad one.

‘What is it that you want from me?’ he said, finally. His fingertip brushed across the top of her lip.

‘Who says I want anything from you?’

‘I seem to disappoint you.’ He shrugged.

That drew a puzzled expression. ‘I’m not disappointed by you.’

‘But?’

‘You paint me as this saintly prig.’

‘Because you’re always talking about your work.’ He waited for a moment. ‘Not about what you want, what you desire . . .’

Outside on the street, a coach came to halt.

‘You don’t think I desire you?’ Emily said, in part distracted by the sound of someone approaching the front door.

Moments later, they were interrupted by a knock on the door. Jo peered into the room. She said that Lord Edmonton’s coachman was downstairs in the hall, demanding that Emily, on her father’s explicit orders, accompany him back to Hambledon.

‘But it’s so late . . .’ Emily looked at Pyke, frowning.

‘The coachman is quite insistent. Apparently your father is demanding your presence,’ Jo said, with a shrug. ‘Perhaps you could talk to him yourself?’

‘Of course.’ As Emily gathered her shawl and bonnet, she turned to Pyke and said, ‘I shall have to travel to Hambledon tonight. If I refused, it would cause more trouble than it’s worth.’ She shrugged apologetically.

‘Do you think it might have something to do with the robbery?’

‘It might.’ She began to tie her bonnet. ‘But my father is notorious for his temperamental behaviour. I am guessing he just wants someone to listen to his rants.’

She picked up her gloves and turned to face him. Her smile was forced. ‘I’m sorry I have to leave . . .’

‘And I am sorry for some of my intemperate remarks.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s just . . .’

‘Yes?’ Her eyes lit up with hope.

But he could not bring himself to say what he imagined that she wanted to hear. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Oh.’ She seemed disappointed but sought to conceal this by pulling her shawl tightly around her shoulders. ‘You shall stay here tonight, of course. There is a bed on the upper floor but you might find it more hospitable on the sofa.’

‘When will I see you again?’

From the doorway, she turned around. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ Her tone was formal, perhaps because Jo was waiting for her on the landing.

‘Emily . . .’

Her expression seemed both annoyed and expectant.

‘Yes?’

Pyke swallowed his disconcertion. ‘I hope that your father doesn’t suspect you.’

‘I hope so too.’ And she was gone.

Pyke watched her leave from the drawing-room window and settled down on the sofa. Jo had already laid out a blanket and a pillow for him. He had not planned to stay the night in Edmonton’s house - in spite of Emily’s insistence, he did not think it was entirely safe for him to do so - but the long trip to Portsmouth and the exertions of the robbery had taken their toll, and as soon as he laid his head on one of the pillows and pulled the blanket over him, tiredness overcame him. He remembered thinking that he should rouse Jo and ask her whether she had indeed followed him to the Blue Dog tavern and warned him of Flynn’s presence, but as his face burrowed down into the soft pillow, such thoughts ebbed away and, before he knew it, he had slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

TWENTY-ONE

T
he following afternoon, Pyke met Townsend at the Red Lion inn in Highgate and there they hired a private coach and driver to take them around a collection of villages located within Edmonton’s two-thousand-acre estate, just to the north of the outer fringes of the metropolis. It was only late September but already there was an autumnal chill in the air; the leaves had turned from green to gold and many had already fallen on to muddy ground. The overcast skies did little to lift the melancholy air that seemed to hang over the villages they visited, places made up of little more than a few shacks, a church and a solitary public house. They had passed through the suburbs and were now deep in the countryside. The fields were busy with labourers bringing in the last of the harvest, the rickyards and barns were brimming with flax, and the narrow tracks were choked with wagons and carts.

Townsend had arranged for them to be accompanied by James Canning, a shoemaker, and Jack Saville, a straw-plait merchant from Bedfordshire. Both men had made a name for themselves in radical circles and both were known, or known of, by at least someone in the different village inns. In each place, they heard a variation of the same story: Edmonton was a corrupt landlord who charged his tenant farmers an exorbitant rent, which meant that the farmers had no choice but to squeeze as much work as possible from their labourers, for an insulting wage that did not even cover their basic subsistence.

Townsend had informed Canning and Saville that Pyke was an acquaintance of Hunt and was exploring the possibilities of forming links between metropolitan and rural political activists.

The villagers were hostile to outsiders, and spoke to them only because they knew, or had heard of, Canning and Saville. Ale lubricated their tongues, though, and most willingly and bitterly complained of Edmonton’s high-handed manner and greedy ways. Once they had finished with him, they started in on other targets: the combination of low wages and a reduction in their Poor Law allowances, which meant that most could not afford to feed their children; the increased use of threshing machines rather than their own labour to break corn in the quiet winter months; the terrible harvest and the bleak prospect for the upcoming winter; the poor weather; and the business of tithing, which meant that a tenth of their meagre income went directly to the Anglican Church.

In one village, Pyke listened while an elderly cabinetmaker told him about the untimely death of the local Member of Parliament.

‘Means Lord Edm’nton will ’ave to choose himself a new man.’ He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘This is the rottenest borough of the lot. Folk ’ere can only vote what got a chimney and an ’arth, and Lord Edm’nton owns all of the cottages with chimneys and ’arths. ’Less you vote the way he says, he throws you out.’

Another said, ‘He’ll sell the seat to the ’ighest bidder.’

Still another said, ‘I ’eard he’s already found his man. I also ’eard the other chap’s death may not have been an accident.’

‘Poppycock,’ the cabinetmaker said. ‘I ’eard he died of an ’eart attack.’

‘Drowned, he did.’

They talked this way for a further half-hour without openly condemning Edmonton, and Pyke found his patience beginning to wane.

It was only in the last place they called into that something happened to elicit Pyke’s attention.

Pyke thought himself to be immune to stories of other people’s suffering, but there was something about the old man’s broken-down manner, his hobbling gait, weather-beaten hands and watery eyes, which he could not dismiss.

The old man had, until very recently, lived with his heavily pregnant daughter and son-in-law in a small thatched cottage built on common land which had subsequently been appropriated by Edmonton. His family had lived in the cottage for two hundred years, or so the old man reckoned, but since they did not own the land, they weren’t entitled to any compensation when Edmonton decided that he needed the cottage for other purposes. At the previous election, the old man hadn’t bothered to vote, in spite of the fact that, since he resided in a property that boasted a hearth, he was one of the few who was entitled to do so. With another election looming, Edmonton’s emissary had informed the old man that his master required someone more reliable in the property. The old man and his family had been evicted a month before his daughter was due to give birth. Two days later, the daughter had gone into premature labour. Both mother and child had perished. A week later, the son-in-law had taken his own life.

With each sentence, the old man had to pause and collect himself, as if the memories were so painful to him he could hardly bear to relive them.

‘There was a time when rich folk liked to frighten poor folk with the idea that Boney and the French were coming and used fear to steal all the land.’ The old man grabbed Pyke’s sleeve. ‘Tell me that time’s gone, mister.’

Outside, a wagon passed by and Pyke heard the flattened chink of milk cans.

Without missing a beat, the old man fixed his stare on Pyke. ‘You’ll make him pay, won’t you?’

Pyke removed his sleeve from the old man’s surprisingly firm grip. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, eventually.

The old man nodded sadly, as though he understood what Pyke was telling him. ‘You don’t, I’ll kill ’im myself.’

Later that night, Pyke and Townsend visited ten farms on Edmonton’s estate. Carrying burning torches with them on horseback, they rode along narrow tracks using the moonlight to guide them, and set light to rickyards, barns and outhouses brimming with recently harvested crops. As they did so, Pyke thought about the old man’s determination to see that Edmonton was properly punished. Part of him wanted to believe that destroying property on land owned by Edmonton constituted some kind of payback for the grievances suffered by the old man, but he knew that his affinity with such people had long since passed and that his actions, then as now, were motivated by less selfless inclinations.

Still, the damage looked impressive and briefly Pyke wondered whether the old man might hear of, or even witness, the fires and think that his plea for action had somehow been answered. For if anyone had thought to position themselves at the epicentre of the paths they had taken between the various farms, they would have witnessed a night sky that shone so fiercely under the orange glare of burning hay that they might have believed themselves transported to Hell.

The following night Pyke made arrangements to sleep in a draughty old church in Saffron Hill. Godfrey knew the rector and, without indicating who Pyke was or what he had done, had persuaded him to allow Pyke to make a bed out of one of the pews. In the light of the attention that was still being paid to him in the newspapers and the extent of the reward being offered for information leading to his arrest, it was now far too dangerous for him to return to the Old Cock tavern.

When Godfrey arrived, a little after ten o’clock, carrying blankets and a bottle of gin, he was out of breath and sweating. After assuring Pyke that he had not been followed, Godfrey recounted that there had been alleged sightings of Pyke right across the city from the Ratcliffe highway in the east to Battersea Fields in the west. He explained that a man who apparently resembled Pyke had been lynched outside the Plough inn, around the corner from his own gin palace. Godfrey told him the gin palace had been further ransacked by fortune hunters who had heard a rumour that Pyke may have been hiding there.

‘Did you bring my laudanum?’ Pyke asked, while digesting these developments.

Reluctantly, Godfrey produced the small bottle from his coat pocket.

‘Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?’ His uncle’s expression suggested both concern and discomfort. ‘You do know the farmers lost everything. Barns, equipment, the entire harvest. I fancy this was the point. I mean, they won’t be able to pay Edmonton what they owe him in rent.’

‘Is that my problem?’ Pyke stood up and walked to the end of the pew.

‘What of the ordinary men and women who’ll go hungry this winter because there isn’t enough food to go around?’

It was dark inside the church, but not so dark that Pyke could not see the expression on Godfrey’s face.

‘People are starving right now because Edmonton is squeezing every last penny from them.’ Pyke dug his hands into his pockets to keep them warm.

‘And he’ll continue to squeeze and eventually someone will bite back and then he’ll squeeze even harder, and more and more people will be hurt in the process.’ Godfrey seemed puzzled. ‘Is that what you want?’