The Last Days (44 page)

‘But you failed, Edmonton. Catholic emancipation passed through both Houses. Peel remains in office. Swift is dead. And I’m still here.’ Pyke walked across the room towards the four-poster bed. ‘And it will be my very great pleasure to take away everything you have left.’

‘How delightfully naive,’ Edmonton said, still waving the pistol. But he was perspiring like a hog.

‘I’m here to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.’

‘You’re here to ask me?’ Edmonton started to laugh. ‘That’s rich. Rather wonderful, actually. You’re quite the brigand, aren’t you?’ His feigned laughter subsided. ‘But did you actually imagine I would give you my blessing?’

‘Is that a yes or a no?’

‘By God, you’re certainly a man to admire, that’s for certain. A cad and a brigand. Obstinate. Quite obstinate.’ Edmonton’s rosy cheeks glowed in the candlelight.

Pyke nodded, as though Edmonton had given him the answer he had been expecting. ‘By the way, that pistol is quite useless. While you were preparing for bed, I found it under one of the pillows and disarmed it.’

Edmonton looked down at the pistol, then up at Pyke, cocked the trigger and fired it. Nothing happened.

‘Let me rephrase the question. I’m going to marry your daughter. There. No longer a question, was it?’ He smiled easily.

‘The two of you can do whatever you damn well like, but you won’t ever see a penny of my money.’ His eyes narrowed.

‘Not even when you’re dead?’

This drew a leering grin. ‘Especially when I’m dead.’

‘Oh?’ Pyke said, happy to play along with him for the moment.

‘If she should marry unwisely, she loses everything. The estate would pass to a distant cousin in America.’

‘Really? And how is this business of an “unwise marriage” characterised in your will?’

‘It’s not in my original will,’ Edmonton said, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘But I had the foresight to draw up a codicil.’

‘A codicil?’

‘An amendment to my original will which names you in person. It means that if she were ever to marry you, then she would lose the estate and any claim to it.’

‘Is that legal?’

‘Perfectly.’ Edmonton was grinning. ‘She also loses the estate if she uses any income accrued from it or from the sale of land to benefit that damn charity of hers.’

‘That will hurt her,’ Pyke said, digesting this news.

‘It will, won’t it?’

‘You put that in this codicil, too?’

‘I did indeed.’ Edmonton appeared relaxed. ‘At heart, my daughter is as self-interested as you or I. She won’t want to give up her inheritance either for you or her damn charity. So you see, this proposed marriage is nonsense.’

Pyke nodded amiably. ‘I discussed this with your lawyer earlier this afternoon.’

‘My lawyer?’

‘On Chancery Lane,’ Pyke said, nodding.

‘What business did you have with my lawyer?’

‘Well, I knew for a start you did not keep certain important documents here at the hall.’

‘Who told you that?’

Pyke shrugged as though it was not important. ‘Dammit, what did you say to my lawyer?’

‘I put a pistol to his head and told him that if he didn’t produce your will from inside his safe, I would blow his brains out.’

Edmonton stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘And did he?’

‘The will and the codicil. I looked at both. I told him to hold on to the will. I kept the codicil for myself.’

He produced the document from his pocket and tossed it on to the bed so Edmonton could see that it was the genuine article.

‘I’ll destroy it after I have killed you, of course,’ Pyke said, calmly.

‘But if you shoot me, there’ll be an investigation. My lawyer will talk. In which case, you will never get your hands on my money.’ There was a rushed, panicky tone in his voice.

Pyke picked up one of Edmonton’s pillows and plumped it with his fist. ‘But let’s just imagine for a minute that you were to die peacefully. From a heart attack. The stress of having to watch all those angry people gathered outside your gates.’ Pyke shrugged. ‘You’re no longer a young man and, I have to say, you’re not in the best physical condition. Do you think anyone would really find it so surprising?’

Edmonton cowered as Pyke stood over him, holding the pillow with both hands. ‘There won’t even be an investigation.’

‘Now really, Pyke, be a good chap. I’m sure that we can come to some kind of . . . manly accommodation.’

‘Swift is dead. So is Fox. It’s time to answer for what you have done.’ Pyke stood over him, waiting. ‘I found your wife in an asylum in Portsmouth. Very soon, she’ll be back here at Hambledon where she belongs.’

The shock in Edmonton’s eyes was as palpable as his disbelief. But before he had the opportunity to register it in words, Pyke pressed the pillow down on his face. As he did so, he said, ‘Before you die I want you to be aware of what is going to happen. Your daughter will inherit your estate. I will marry your daughter. If or when Emily produces a son, then he will inherit your title. My son will inherit your title.’

Edmonton struggled, of course, but he was no match for Pyke’s superior physical strength. All in all, it did not take more than a few minutes. Once it was finished Pyke placed the pillow down on the bed, wiped the saliva from his mouth, and arranged Edmonton’s corpse to make it seem as if he had passed away in his sleep.

Pyke should have felt elated, but as he contemplated the previous days and months - and thought about his own complicity in what had happened - he felt no satisfaction. Instead, as he wandered across to the window and looked down at the protesters who were gathering outside the main gates, he felt a gnawing sense of guilt and loneliness that would not be easily put to rest.

Outside, he heard a rifle shot.

 

Lord Edmonton’s funeral was a solemn but elaborate affair. His giant coffin, covered with a pall embroidered with the family’s coat of arms, was carried into St Paul’s Cathedral by eight heavy-set pall-bearers, preceded by two feathermen carrying trays of black plumes, a man holding a staff with a black ribbon tied around it, countless pages and attendants and, of course, the mourners themselves. The roll-call of those who attended the funeral read like a ‘who’s who’ of London society. There was an impressive turnout from the Tory party grandees. Lord Eldon attended in a wheelchair. The duke of Cumberland arrived wearing the uniform of a Hanoverian general and wept bitterly throughout the long service. The duke of Wellington - the Prime Minister himself - represented the government and studiously avoided, among others, Lord Winchelsea, with whom he had recently conducted an aborted duel over the issue of the duke’s apparent ‘about-turn’ over the Catholic question. During the service, Sir Edward Knatchbull was heard to utter to his friend Lord Newcastle that Edmonton’s death marked ‘the end of an era’. Peel did not attend but sent a garland. The men were indistinguishable in their black coats, black trousers, black cloaks and tall black hats. A few of the hats had weepers tied around them.

As Edmonton’s surviving child and heiress to his estate, Emily wore a black scarf and hood over a black dress. As she followed the coffin up the aisle at the end of the service, Pyke, who had watched the proceedings from a concealed position in the cathedral’s gallery, studied her reaction carefully. Her face was a mask of composure.

Earlier in the week, Pyke had asked his uncle how Emily had reacted when she had first laid eyes on her mother. Godfrey chuckled and said, ‘After the shock had subsided?’ He waited a moment and added, ‘She burst into tears.’

‘And then?’

‘She hugged her, wouldn’t let go. The poor old woman didn’t know what had happened to her.’

‘And then?’

‘You mean did she say anything about your role in the business?’

‘Well?’

‘She wanted to know how you’d found out . . .’

‘But was she . . .’

‘Grateful? Indebted? Happy?’

Pyke shrugged, not knowing what to say.

Godfrey smiled knowingly. ‘You’ll have to ask her yourself.’

The marriage was not announced in any newspaper, nor did news of their nuptials appear in any gossip magazine or society column. Given the proximity of the ceremony to Edmonton’s funeral service, Emily felt it would be prudent to delay any announcement until at least after Christmas. As it was, Pyke’s pardon elicited much attention and controversy. Newspaper journalists and columnists pursued him relentlessly, even after he had resigned his position as a Bow Street Runner. They wanted to know how someone who had been fairly tried for murdering his mistress and who had sensationally escaped from Newgate prison, having killed the prison’s governor in the process, could be deserving of a Home Office pardon. For a while, one or two of the more committed journalists sought to make a connection between Pyke’s pardon and the St Giles murders, but none of them ever got close to determining what had taken place.

To escape this unwanted attention, Pyke and Emily retired to the Hambledon estate, together with Emily’s mother, who had not recovered her mental faculties but was nonetheless doted on by her daughter. Emily had decided against making her mother’s ‘return from the dead’ public because she did not want to draw further attention to her family’s affairs.

Meanwhile, in order to address the problem of disturbances on the Hambledon estate, Pyke lowered the exorbitant rents that were charged to farmers on the proviso that they agreed to pay their labourers more and offer better terms of employment. He also scrapped the unsavoury practice of tithing. In a stormy meeting with outraged local church leaders, he informed them they would have to earn or deserve any money that was paid to them in the future. But he could do nothing to prevent the arrest of fifteen protesters, including Saville and Canning, and when they were tried and found guilty of criminal damage and inciting revolution, it took another meeting with Tilling to persuade the Home Secretary to commute their sentences. They were transported to an Australian penal colony rather than hanged.

The following year saw the outbreak of agricultural rioting across many of the southern counties, but Hambledon remained largely untouched by the trouble.

In the end, Edmonton’s will was uncontroversial and uncontested. The estate passed to Emily, as his only direct descendant. By the same token, Godfrey, who had ‘inherited’ Pyke’s gin palace, having tried initially to return it to its former ‘glory’, signed the establishment over to an acquaintance after a particularly nasty brawl had left two men dead and another wounded.

On the night of their wedding, surrounded by the clothes that they had discarded, Pyke had watched the shadow of Emily’s lean body flicker against the white wall of their bedroom in the ebbing candlelight. He remembered being surprised by the potency of his own feelings; the air around them was cool and reassuring and he had run his trembling fingers through her hair, kissed her mouth and pulled her down gently on to him. She hadn’t seemed at all nervous. He remembered the way she had smiled at him, confident, in control. Aside from this, her look had been unreadable. Later, she had dug her fingernails into the small of his back and whispered that she loved him, as though the notion surprised even her; and he had felt a tidal wave of euphoria sweep through him and, before he could stop it, he had finished in a series of painful spasms.

Afterwards, as they lay still, wrapped in each other’s limp arms, she’d asked him what his first name was.

‘Isn’t it strange that we’re now married and I still don’t know what to call you?’ Her tone was affectionate.

‘What’s the problem? Just call me Pyke,’ he said, gently running his fingers across her bare shoulder.

‘The same as everyone else.’

‘You’ll never be the same as anyone else.’

‘Fine words.’ She punched him playfully on the arm.

A little later, Pyke decided to ask her a question that had been bothering him for a long time. ‘The second or third time I met you, after you’d given me a tour of Newgate, you said to me, “People aren’t who you imagine them to be,” and then added, “That applies to you as well as me.” ’

He felt her stiffen a little in his arms. ‘You have a good memory.’

‘What did you mean?’ He hesitated, ‘Why did you say it?’

Emily laughed, unconvincingly. ‘I don’t remember now.’

Pyke, though, wasn’t ready to let the subject go. ‘In what way were you not the person I might have imagined?’

‘How can I possibly answer that, Pyke?’ She sounded irritated. ‘I don’t know how you imagined me, do I?’

‘Oh, I imagined you to be virtuous, honest, generous, open.’

For a while, they were both silent. ‘And you don’t think I am those things now?’ She wouldn’t look at him.

‘I didn’t say that.’

Emily wriggled free from his grasp and sat up. ‘So what are you saying, then?’

‘I was watching you talk to Jo today. I noticed how close the two of you seem to be.’

‘What’s this all about, Pyke? Am I being accused of inappropriate interactions with my servant?’ Her tone and body language suggested she was tired but Pyke knew she was rattled, too.

‘I’m not accusing you of anything.’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘But if I asked what business your servant Jo had following me even before I had first visited Hambledon, what would you say?’

In the darkness, he could not make out Emily’s expression. ‘I don’t understand, Pyke.’

He told Emily about his sighting of Jo in the Blue Dog tavern and said Jo’s intervention had possibly saved his life.

‘But why might Jo have been following you?’

‘Perhaps she was assessing me.’

‘Assessing you? For what purpose?’ Something in Emily’s voice struck an odd note.

‘Or for what role?’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘And I was also wondering what if Jo knew more than she let on, the time she came and visited me in the church.’