The Last Days (3 page)

‘Perhaps three years. In the case of your staff, nearer to six, I would fancy. You could get a man for less money, but not one who might be able to recover what was stolen.’

‘Of course, I forget that recovering stolen items is a particular skill of yours.’ Any trace of amusement disappeared from his expression. Pyke wondered how much he knew about their previous business arrangement.

‘Are we agreed upon two and a half?’

Edmonton stared at him for a while without saying a word.

‘Then if we’ve nothing left to talk about, perhaps you would have one of your servants inform my driver that I intend to leave at once.’

‘By God, man, will you stop being so damn hasty?’ Edmonton took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. ‘I’m persuaded that a fee in the order of two hundred and fifty guineas might be appropriate in these very exceptional circumstances. Of course, it goes without saying such a fee would only be paid on successful completion of the task. Should you fail, you would receive nothing.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Good,’ Edmonton said, shaking his hand. ‘Now, perhaps, I can tell you about this rascal Swift. My brother, I am afraid to say, made the mistake of hiring this man six months ago and put him in charge of security for the Cornhill office. I am told he served with the duke in Spain. He is the only man apart from my brother and the branch managers who knows where and when any monies are to be transported. Since the managers only have knowledge of their own affairs, and the two carriages robbed thus far hailed from different banks, we can safely rule them out. That’s why I suspect this Swift fellow. He’s your man, I would lay my life on it.’ Edmonton spoke as if his life was worth a great deal. ‘Follow him from the bank’s Cornhill offices. My brother can furnish you with the address. That scoundrel will lead you to the money or at least to the brigands who took it. It will be the easiest fee you’ve ever earned.’

In the entrance hall, while Pyke waited for his coat, he witnessed an encounter between Edmonton and his daughter that made him reassess his first impression of her. In fact, he heard as much as he saw; raised voices swelled into full-blown shouts, Emily’s as well as her father’s. Pyke was sufficiently intrigued by their argument to approach the half-closed doors behind which their altercation was taking place, but before he could determine what was being argued about, Emily flew through the doors and almost knocked him down. He had no choice but to fend her off with his hands, but his touch seemed to provoke her to further outrage. Brusquely she pushed him away and, gathering up her skirt, ran past him without uttering a word.

TWO

A
fter an hour spent trawling the numerous taverns and alehouses surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral, Pyke found his uncle, Godfrey Bond, in the Boar tavern on Fleet Street across the road from Middle Temple Gate. The old man was slumped back in his seat in the corner of the taproom. Since there was no natural light and the room was illuminated only by candles and the reddish flame of occasional grease lamps, it was difficult, if not impossible, to tell who anyone was. This suited most of the customers, who appeared less interested in social activities than in pouring gin down their throats.

The exposed brick walls and the low ceiling, covered with begrimed, grey-patterned wallpaper, augmented Pyke’s fear of confined spaces. He had suffered from the condition for as long as he could remember. Or rather ever since, as a ten-year-old boy, he had watched his father lose his footing in a stampeding crowd and disappear under their feet. Forty thousand people had been gathered outside Newgate prison to witness the execution of Holloway and Haggerty, two robbers who had been convicted of stabbing a London botanist and leaving him to die at the side of a turnpike in Hounslow. The crowd had been too great for the space they had been herded into and chaos had ensued. Pyke had seen women and children suffocating to death as they were pressed against walls and barricades. Later, once the crowd had finally dispersed, he had found his father lying battered and not breathing in a ditch. His face had been crushed and his clothes were dirty with other people’s shoe and boot prints.

Pyke pushed his way through the mass of bodies gathered in the tiny room and chose to ignore the stares of ill-concealed antipathy from those who either recognised him or simply disliked being watched by a stranger.

Collapsed between empty pewter ale pots and gnawed pork chops was the unconscious frame of his uncle’s drinking companion. Pyke recognised the Reverend Foote, Ordinary at Newgate prison. Godfrey often plied Foote with drink in exchange for stories of woe and despair that Foote collected or overheard from the prison’s condemned men and women. It was Foote’s task to compile an account of their lives. For a small fee, he would pass these details to Godfrey, who would then print and sell them for a penny to the assembled crowd on the day of the execution.

As far as Pyke could tell, these stories carried several contradictory messages: on the one hand they suggested crime did not pay, that it was a sin against God, and that the most heinous crimes were still punishable by death; and on the other hand they made it clear that crime was exciting and heroic, and that criminals acted as they did because society left them no other option. Pyke thought all these explanations were too simple. For him, crime was simply a means to an end. If stealing was the only available means to achieving one’s freedom and well-being, then it made sense to steal.

In his earlier life, Pyke’s uncle had been a respectable publisher of radical political pamphlets and as a much younger man had counted figures such as Paine, Wollstonecraft and Godwin as his friends. He had long since abandoned such lofty inclinations, and for the last twenty years had scraped a living publishing sensational tales of criminal wrongdoing which he cobbled together from the annals of old Newgate calendars and from confessions sold to him by Foote. His editorial policy was to concentrate on tales that were especially gruesome and dwell upon specific instances of deviance. In each case, he would try to remove attempts by previous writers to impose moral judgements on the stories. The published sheets were cheaply reproduced and sold for a penny, mostly to the working poor. Godfrey would often tell Pyke that his readers found more of their own lives reflected in his stories than in tales penned by Jane Austen.

Godfrey was the closest thing Pyke had to a father. But theirs had always been an ambivalent relationship that reflected their shared desire both to remain independent and to cultivate familial support and companionship. It was a bond that had finally found its own equilibrium. While they no longer shared the same living space or felt any compunction to intervene in one another’s lives, a certain degree of warmth had begun to emerge in their dealings.

As a surrogate parent, Godfrey had never imposed even a modicum of discipline on him. Rather, he had provided Pyke with a small room in the attic of his Camden Town apartment and allowed him to come and go as he pleased. It was an arrangement that had suited Pyke, and one that permitted him to gain his education in the ways of the street, in such a manner that if things ever got too dangerous or intimidating, then the door of his uncle’s home was always open.

‘Oh, it’s you, dear boy. You know Arthur, don’t you?’ At the mention of his name, Foote did not actually move but, for a moment, stopped snoring. ‘All he can offer me these days, it seems, are dreary tales of common thievery and domestic woe. Think about it. Who wants to read about real life? If I published the stuff he’s giving me, I’d bore my readers half to death. They want piracy and mass murder, not stories about the grinding effects of poverty.’ He shook his head, wistfully. ‘Where, I ask you, are the Jack Sheppards and Jonathan Wilds? Outlaws who defined an age. Who do we get instead? Who are our heroes? Bentham? Peel? That oaf Bulwer? Where’s the unpleasantness or the proper violence in his stories? Believe me, dear boy, I feel like a vulture gnawing on a stripped carcass.’ Godfrey rubbed his eyes and yawned. ‘So tell me, what brings you down to this gutter to see me?’

Godfrey had a mane of unkempt white hair and was not preoccupied by how he looked. He cared little for contemporary fashion and, aside from his small publishing business, he took an interest only in what he could eat and imbibe. Though his sexual proclivities were a mystery to Pyke, he’d warmed to abstinence in recent years with a dedication that surprised those who knew him.

Pyke told Godfrey about his visit to Edmonton’s country home and asked what he knew about the man’s business.

‘Edmonton, you say? Hmmm.’ He closed his eyes. ‘His wife’s a descendant of the earl of Essex, if he’s the one I’m thinking about. You say his brother owns a bank?’ He frowned. ‘I’ve heard Edmonton’s tight with the Tory Ultras but that’s hardly news. I’m afraid that’s it, but if you give me a couple of days, I can ask around, see what else I can dig up.’

‘There’s a daughter, too. Emily Blackwood. She’s part of Elizabeth Fry’s circle.’

‘A daughter, eh?’ Godfrey’s grin widened so that Pyke could see his blackened teeth. ‘That sounds intriguing.’ His grin evaporated. ‘And dangerous.’

‘Anything you can find out for me would be much appreciated.’

‘Acquaintances, business associates . . . corset sizes?’

‘I’m reliably informed that Edmonton doesn’t wear corsets,’ Pyke said, smiling at last.

‘What a pity. I do so like a man who’s concerned about his figure.’ Godfrey patted his own girth but his expression became serious. ‘They’re an abominable lot, the Ultras. Edmonton, Eldon, Newcastle, Cumberland. All of ’em would shit in their own food and eat it if it would hold up reform,’ Godfrey said, working his way around the various ale pots, looking for dregs.

Still drunk, Foote heaved his head off the table and stared at Pyke, confused. Saliva hung from his mouth. ‘That’s right, an abomination. We’re an abomination to them, you know. A veritable abomination. Mark my words, times are changing, boy. We’ll be for the rope. Our faces don’t fit. They won’t tolerate us for much longer. The whole thing’s a disgrace.’ Foote looked up at him, expectant of an answer, but since Pyke didn’t know what was a disgrace and who ‘we’ or ‘they’ referred to, he said nothing.

But Godfrey nodded solemnly in agreement. ‘We’re a dying breed, that’s for certain. A dying breed.’ He reached for an empty ale pot. ‘Hail to the new captains of industry, the bureaucrats, the politicians. The future is yours.’

It saddened Pyke to see Godfrey so old and out of sorts. As someone who had witnessed his uncle hold his own against Godwin, discussing the relative merits of polite anarchy, or Paine, arguing about the evils of organised religion, Pyke felt angrier than he had expected that Arthur Foote now constituted his uncle’s preferred drinking companion. As he left, Pyke kicked the chair away from under Foote’s hulking frame and watched him tumble on to the floor.

 

From the position Pyke had taken up in Batson’s, the coffee house across the road from William Blackwood’s Cornhill office, there was plenty of time, over the following two days, to assess his subject. Swift, if that was the man’s name (for Pyke took nothing Edmonton told him at face value), was punctual, arriving at the office on the dot of nine and leaving at five. He appeared to live an orderly life. On both days, Swift took the same route from work to his moderate apartment on Finsbury Square, and on both occasions it had taken him exactly twelve and a half minutes, walking at a brisk pace.

Swift was moderately built, with sandy hair and bushy eyebrows. He had a large brown mole on his chin. If Pyke had to make a snap judgement, he would say that he didn’t care for the man. Like many ex-military sorts, Swift had a mincing, almost arrogant gait that suggested that the folk who traversed the pavements in his immediate vicinity were necessarily of a lower order.

On the third afternoon Pyke had taken up his usual position in the window of the coffee house when he spotted a carriage rattle past him carrying Emily Blackwood and a female companion. On impulse, he picked up his coat and set off after the carriage, which had slowed to allow a procession of sheep and their drover to pass by, heading north to Smithfield market. It took him a few moments to catch his breath, and while he did so, Pyke peered into the well-appointed interior of the carriage.

Emily did not seem to recognise Pyke or did so only reluctantly, once he had made his introductions. He made an inconsequential remark about the cold weather.

Her companion, Jane Norman, was introduced as a member of Emily’s committee of female prison visitors. She couldn’t contain her excitement. ‘But has Miss Blackwood told you our wonderful news? It seems an anonymous benefactor has bequeathed a not insignificant sum of money to us and we will be moving to more respectable offices on the Strand, no less, within the month.’ As she spoke, she pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders.

Pyke said it was good news and, with a broad grin, added he’d always felt it was easier to spend other people’s money on frivolities than his own.

This drew an amused look from Emily. ‘Mr Pyke is, indeed, a dour, puritanical soul who does not believe in frivolities of any kind.’ She was wearing a heavy overcoat, a printed wool dress and a matching wide-brimmed bonnet. She wore no gloves and her slim fingers had turned blue in the icy temperature.

Mrs Norman screwed up her face. ‘Really? What does he do for amusement?’

Emily turned to face him. ‘What do you do for amusement, Mr Pyke?’ she asked, her eyebrows arched.

‘You mean when I’m not robbing from the undeserving rich?’

That seemed to upset Mrs Norman but Emily just laughed. ‘And oppressing or locking up the deserving poor?’

Mrs Norman asked, ‘Is this man really a thief?’

‘He’s a Bow Street Runner,’ Emily explained, looking at Pyke. ‘I’m told it’s the next best thing.’

‘Except when you come face to face with a real villain and you holler for someone to keep you safe.’ He held her stare and whispered, so that her companion could not hear, ‘Tuck you up in bed.’