There was one invoice in particular he queried. It was only for twenty pounds but twenty pounds to an apothecary for just a single month’s supply of ointments, diuretics and emetics. Castor oil, camphor, spirits of lavender, blistering plasters, arsenic mixtures, liniments, leeches and, of course, his own supply of laudanum, which Emily knew nothing about.
‘What are we running here? A sick house?’ He surveyed the itemised list. ‘Was it really necessary for Jones to visit ten times in a month?’
Royce bowed his head, showing off his bald scalp. ‘I believe he had an abscess, sir. Mighty painful it was too, by all accounts.’
‘And should I really be footing the bill for Mary’s lip ointments?’ Already hating himself for sounding so petty.
‘I’m told these colder days make ’em terrible dry, sir.’ Royce
despised
him. Pyke could hear it in his tone.
What he wanted to say was that he knew Royce was pilfering from him but in the end he held his tongue. He didn’t necessarily mind that Royce was doing so - he expected it, in fact - but he didn’t like the fact that the servant might be laughing at him behind his back.
When Emily appeared in the dining room later for breakfast she was wearing a white linen dress with an Empire waistline covered by a woollen shawl. She kissed him on the cheek and took her chair opposite him. Felix, their five-year-old son, had already taken his breakfast, Pyke informed her, and was being prepared by Jo, Emily’s maid and Felix’s nursemaid, for a walk.
‘Will you be attending to your fatherly duties this morning, then, my lord?’ Emily asked, in a mocking tone. She often teased him by addressing him this way because she knew it irritated him.
‘The boy needs fresh air,’ he said, not rising to the bait, glancing at the newspaper spread out on the table in front of him. There was nothing new about the headless corpse in Huntingdon.
Emily explained that she had some letters to write, or else she would have joined them. ‘I’m organising a charity event in Coventry next month, for the weavers there, and I want to petition Thomas Wakley to table a question in the House about the exploits of the sweaters who’ve moved into the East End.’
Pyke didn’t look up from the newspaper, but he thought about the money his bank had lent to such people.
‘Pyke?’
This time he looked up and saw her eyes were shining. ‘Yes?’
‘We should try and do what we did last night more often,’ she whispered, so none of the servants would hear her. Her pale skin reddened slightly.
‘What? Practising with the pistol?’
That drew a throaty chuckle. ‘It didn’t seem like you needed much practice from where I was positioned.’
‘Staring up at the ceiling counting the cracks in the paintwork?’
‘I got to ten and lost count.’ She was smiling now.
‘You got as far as ten?’
‘Don’t get conceited.’ She reached over and touched his hand. ‘But I just wanted to say it was . . .
nice
.’
‘Nice?’ he said, playfully. ‘A puppy is nice.’
‘I meant it just felt right. I hardly saw you in the last week.’
Royce entered the room with the morning post on a tray and placed it on the table next to Emily. He departed with a bow of the head.
‘Mrs Garner from the lodge wants to know whether we’ll be hosting a midwinter ball this year,’ Emily said, a few minutes later, looking up from the letter she had been reading.
That was another thing. Their neighbours hated Pyke, too, because, unlike Emily’s father, he refused to throw open the doors of the hall for such social occasions.
‘Tell that old harridan this year will be no different to last year or the year before that,’ Pyke said, not looking up from the newspaper. ‘If she wants a ball, she should host it on her own backside. It’s large enough.’
Emily laughed out loud. ‘Don’t you think we should, one of these years? It might be fun.’
‘What? A room full of gormless twits and giggling girls might be
fun
?’ This time he glanced up from his paper, just in time to see Emily pulling a face at him. ‘I saw that,’ he added.
Despite the bantering of their morning, the hall had come between them during their six years of marriage. Since Emily’s mother had died about a year earlier, Pyke had argued that a move into the city would give them more time together, but Emily couldn’t bring herself to break up the household and claimed it was their duty to maintain the old hall until Felix came of age and decided for himself whether he wanted to take the place on and adopt her father’s title. Anyway, Emily always said, making the one argument she knew he couldn’t refute, the country air was much better for Felix than the dirty, smog-filled air in the city.
Their breakfast was interrupted again when Royce suddenly announced they had a visitor, and before Pyke could tell him they weren’t receiving visitors, Reverend Cole had shuffled into the dining room, apologising for his unannounced visit.
Even before the curate had opened his pinched mouth, Pyke knew why the man had come. With Emily’s blessing, Pyke had scrapped the practice of tithing on the estate. None of the farmers who rented their land was compelled to give anything to the church and, as a result, its income had plummeted and the church itself had fallen into disrepair. Pyke couldn’t have cared less whether the building and its congregation sank into a deep bog but the murmurings of discontent among parishioners had reached a new high and various figures had been dispatched to the hall to plead with him for the reintroduction of tithing.
Reverend Cole was an odious creature with sharp, twitching features and ferret-like eyes. His humpback was the most obvious sign of his deformity but rumour had it that his feet were webbed. He was a pompous, self-regarding little man and had made a nasty habit of intruding on them at inconvenient times - deliberately so, Pyke had often thought.
Standing up, Pyke strode across to greet the diminutive curate and put a friendly arm around his shoulder. ‘If you ever show your nasty, rat-like face at this hall without a prior invitation again,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll come down to your church with a blunderbuss and shoot every single one of the stained-glass windows you’re so proud of.’ He gave the terrified man a final squeeze before releasing him. ‘Is that understood?’
Ashen faced, the curate scurried from the room. Pyke looked across at Emily, who had raised her eyebrows.
‘What? I didn’t say anything.’
‘Really? It looked to me like the man had just soiled his undergarments.’
‘I just said I’d be happy to donate some money to the church’s poor fund.’
She gave him a hard look. ‘You’ve got to understand people are a little frightened of you.’
‘Frightened of me?’ Pyke tried to hide his delight at this prospect.
‘Yes.’
He came up behind her and threaded his arm around her neck. ‘I suppose I can be a very frightening person.’ He kissed the whiteness of her neck.
‘The servants, too. Jo tells me these things. ‘ Emily tried to push him away.
‘The servants hate me because I’m not your father.’ Surprised by her reticence, he put on a frown, adding, ‘Are you saying you don’t want to go back up the stairs and have me ravish you all over?’
‘Jo’s only just combed my hair,’ Emily said, laughing. But her arm was peppered with gooseflesh.
‘We could always fuck here on the table but I dread to think what Royce would do if he saw us.’
Emily giggled at this prospect and at Pyke’s crude impression of the elderly butler, and when he next tried to embrace her, she looked around to make certain they were alone before kissing him back. ‘Are you quite sure you’ve got enough powder left in your pistol?’
Pyke gave her a look of mock consternation. ‘Enough to see off an invading army, my dear.’
‘I told you, it’s my lady, not my dear,’ she said, as he carried up her the stairs in his arms.
As Pyke lay in her bed, the air thick with her perfume and his sweat, he closed his eyes and tried to remember when he had last been this happy. Then he recalled his brief conversation with Marguerite and the stranglehold Peel enjoyed over him and he felt his good mood begin to fade.
‘A few weeks ago, you mentioned a meeting you were hoping to attend, bringing together different radical and trade union figures in the capital.’
She looked over at him, surprised. It wasn’t often he asked about her work. ‘What of it?’
‘I was wondering when it was, that’s all.’
‘This Monday.’ Wrinkles furrowed her brow. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I thought I’d come and support you.’
Emily sat up in the bed. ‘Why? You’ve not shown much interest in what I’ve been doing before.’
Pyke put on a hurt expression. ‘Don’t you want your capitalist husband there? Are you afraid I’ll embarrass you in front of the mysterious Captain Paine?’
‘Who said Captain Paine will be there?’ This time there was a note of suspicion in her voice.
‘So you think he actually exists?’
She gathered the sheet around her and stared out of the window. ‘Where has all this suddenly come from?’
‘I’m just trying to show an interest,’ he said, playing up the hurt.
That seemed to placate her a little. ‘Before the meeting, I have to visit the trustees of an orphanage in Hackney. Would you like to come with me?’
Pyke sank back into the mattress. ‘I was just wondering whether you’ve met him, that’s all.’
‘Have I met Captain Paine?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t answer him and continued to stare out of the window as though something outside had gripped her attention.
Later that morning, Pyke took Felix for a walk in the grounds of the Hambledon estate. In order to reach the starting point, they took the carriage to the outer fringes of the estate and from there walked briskly across open fields. It was a crisp autumnal day and above them the sky was a vast uninterrupted expanse of blue. Beneath their feet the mud track was hard and the verges were choked with blackberries and nettles.
Pyke had expected his own progeny to be fearless and hardy, rather than the frail specimen scampering along beside him. This frailty did not make him love the little boy any less - he felt a fierce protectiveness towards his son that meant he would do anything in his power to see that the lad came to no harm - but Pyke sometimes wondered how it had happened; how
he
, of all people, had fathered a child whose arms and legs were as thin as pipe cleaners and who was so prone to illness.
They walked for a while in silence.
‘Nanny Jo read me a story last night but I fell asleep before the end,’ Felix started. ‘It was about a fox and a donkey and a lion.’
Pyke nodded his head. ‘One of Aesop’s fables.’ He racked his brains to remember the story.
‘Do you know what happens in the end?’
‘The one where the donkey, fox and lion go hunting together and the fox makes a pact with the lion to give up the donkey?’
Felix took his hand. ‘I think so.’
‘Well, so the fox persuades the donkey to follow him and arranges that he should fall into a deep pit.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the fox thinks, wrongly as it turns out, he can save himself from the lion by giving up the donkey.’
‘What happens next?’
‘When the donkey has been pushed into the pit, the lion turns on the fox and eats him. Then he eats the donkey.’
Pyke looked down and noticed his son’s terrified expression. ‘So the lion kills the donkey
and
the fox?’
‘Eats them, too.’ There was no point in sugar-coating the tale.
‘Why?’
‘To teach the fox a lesson.’
‘What lesson?’
‘Don’t trust anyone, especially not your natural enemies.’ Pyke considered this for a moment. ‘It’s a useful lesson for business, too.’
Felix screwed up his tiny face. ‘Is that what you do, Father? Business?’
‘Indeed it is.’ Pyke patted him gently on the head. ‘But if I had been the fox, I wouldn’t have turned my back on the lion.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you always have to keep those stronger than you in full view.’
Felix thought about this. ‘What if you were the lion?’
‘If I was the lion, I’d make sure I was so fierce that the donkey and the fox would never dare to plot against me.’
‘Why would they try and plot against you?’ Felix seemed confused. ‘What if they were your friends?’
‘There are no friends in business. People will always try and cross other people to make money.’
‘What’s money?’
Pyke was momentarily startled by a magpie that landed on the path in front of them. Quickly he looked around for another. ‘Money is freedom, Felix, but you can’t have freedom without security. Security is like curling up inside your blanket. If you can’t protect your family and loved ones from other donkeys and foxes, you’re not a good husband or father. And you won’t ever be free to do what you want.’
At some point they had crossed over into Morris’s land, and though Pyke could just about see the outline of Morris’s Palladian house in the distance, it took him another ten or fifteen minutes to locate the field where he had been the previous night.
They weren’t alone, either. Marguerite and another gentleman, this time definitely not Morris, stood over the grave. Concealed behind an oak tree, Pyke watched them more closely. The man had a shovel in one hand and a dog leash in the other; at the other end of the leash, an enormous English mastiff was trying to peer down into the grave. Even from this distance Pyke could see that the man was not Marguerite’s equal. His appearance and clothes were too scruffy and he stood a deferential distance away from the grave. Who or what had just been buried? he wondered. A family pet perhaps? Or a young child? But if a child had just been buried, why was Morris not there at the graveside? And why was there no clergyman presiding over the events?