‘No, but we met in France, while I was overseeing the construction of a waterway near Paris.’
‘I don’t know anyone by the name of Marguerite.’ For some reason, this thought made Pyke feel better.
Morris winked conspiratorially. ‘Actually, her name used to be plain old Margaret but she changed it to Marguerite after she moved to the Continent.’
‘Margaret? As in Maggie?’ Suddenly he could feel his heart beating a little quicker.
‘I’ve only ever known her as Marguerite. But she’s the most bewitching creature I’ve ever met in my life.’
Men had said the same thing about Maggie Shaw. Maggie, who’d left London to start a new life on the Continent . . .
Pyke took a deep breath and struggled to get a grip of himself. It couldn’t be her. But the thought that it
might
be her wouldn’t go away, and half an hour later, when the carriage swept along the driveway and came to a halt at the front of the steps leading up to Morris’s elegant Palladian villa, his stomach was iced with apprehension.
THREE
More than half of his life had passed since Pyke had last seen her. Then she had merely been plain old Maggie Shaw, daughter of hard-working costermonger parents, but it was clear even then that her efforts to scrape off the dirtiness associated with her family’s job would find success. Maggie may have sworn, blasphemed and fucked like everyone else in the rookery, but even in the foulest conditions she’d glide through ankle-deep mud like a ballerina gracing the Parisian stage.
If she recognised Pyke, she did not show it. As she shook his hand, she could just as easily have been looking at a butcher’s boy delivering a tray of meat. ‘I’m happy to make your acquaintance, sir,’ she purred in an unrecognisably polished voice. Her hollow stare gave nothing away.
Time evaporated.
Fifteen years earlier, he’d watched from behind a flower stall as she had boarded a stagecoach bound for Dover, wondering with mounting panic whether he would ever see her again. Now, all these years later, he could still recall her face as she’d looked up and down the street, trying to conjure him out of thin air, using only the ferocity of her will. It had taken all of his self-control not to push the flower seller to one side and join her on the coach, and ever since then the scent of primroses conspired to induce feelings of such melancholy he could barely move his limbs.
She was as beautiful as he remembered, more so perhaps, if that was possible, but she no longer possessed the false naivety of the young girl he had once known. Standing there, he could admire her flawless complexion, her buxom, well-proportioned figure, her cool, intelligent eyes and her slender, creamy white arms, but he couldn’t help mourning the girl he’d once known and a time in their lives that could never be recovered.
‘Do come in, old chap,’ Morris boomed, oblivious to his discomfort, leading them through an airy saloon that extended through the full height of the house. ‘I’m delighted you accepted my invitation. Perhaps next time we might have the pleasure of your wife’s company?’
Pyke bowed his head just low enough that he could continue to study Marguerite’s expression.
‘So you’re married, Mr Pyke,’ she whispered in a low, smoky voice that reminded him of an oboe.
‘Pyke. It’s always just been Pyke.’ He met her stare but it slipped effortlessly from his face.
‘And what’s your wife’s name,
Mr
Pyke?’
‘Emily.’
‘Delightful. How long have you been married?’
‘Almost six years.’ Instinctively he wrapped his fingers around a length of silver chain fixed to his belt with two keys attached to it. One of the keys opened the safe in the vault of his bank; the other, an old rusty object, had a more personal significance. During their courtship, Emily had risked her liberty by smuggling it to his cell in the condemned block at Newgate. Pyke had used the key to release his handcuffs and leg-irons and aid his escape from the prison. Even six years later, the sheer audaciousness and courage of her actions took his breath away, and he had carried it with him ever since as a reminder of what she had done for him.
‘Any children?’
‘We have one boy.’
‘A boy.’ Her lips quivered as she stole a glance at her husband. ‘And what, pray, is
his
name?’
‘Felix. He’s almost five.’
‘Five?’ For a moment Marguerite seemed to lose the thread of her own thoughts. ‘A wonderful age.’
This torture was mercifully interrupted when a servant appeared carrying a shawl and handed it to Marguerite.
Taking it gratefully, she turned to face them. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I was about to take some air.’ A lantern fixed to the wall illuminated her face and it struck Pyke that she may have been crying. The skin under her eyes looked sore and puffy and her eyes were bloodshot.
‘Really, my dear. It’s a beastly night. Can’t it wait until the morning?’ It was hard not to detect the tension in Morris’s tone and briefly Pyke wondered whether ‘it’ simply referred to her desire to take the air.
‘I’m quite sure you gentlemen have some pressing matters to discuss.’ She turned on her heels and said, almost as an afterthought, ‘It was nice to make your acquaintance,
Mr
Pyke. Please pass on my regards to your wife.’
Watching her depart, Pyke started to pick through the jumble of contrary thoughts her unexpected appearance had produced.
‘She’s had a rather hard time of it recently,’ Morris confided after Marguerite had left. ‘I’m just hoping she’ll regain her
joie de vivre
soon.’
Pyke wanted to ask precisely what Morris was referring to but restricted himself to an innocuous question about their marriage.
After the butler had brought them champagne, Morris raised his flute and said, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s difficult to fathom why a woman like Marguerite would even notice, let alone agree to marry, a plain old man like me, isn’t it?’
A rich old man, Pyke wanted to say, but held his tongue. He raised his glass and smiled. Maggie had always been attracted to rich men, just as she’d always been able to turn a hand of twos and threes into aces and kings.
Later, after Pyke had bid Morris goodnight, he instructed the coachman to pull in by the side of the driveway and wait there until he returned.
The rain had ceased and the clouds had cleared, the darkness lifted by an almost full moon that hung low and heavy in the sky. Pyke eventually found her standing alone in a field about half a mile from the house, not moving, the woollen shawl wrapped tightly around her shivering body.
She seemed to sense his presence before turning around to face him. ‘I don’t want you here, Pyke. Of all places I don’t want you here.’ Her voice was close to breaking.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness now and he saw that she was standing next to what looked like an open grave.
He walked across and was about to peer into the hole when she pushed him away with her hands. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? I don’t want you here.’
‘Is that why you insisted that your husband buy a country estate bordering on land belonging to my wife’s family?’ He glanced across at the hole. It wasn’t large enough for a full-sized body.
This time her expression softened a little. ‘It’s eerie, isn’t it, that we’re both living off our respective wives and husbands.’
‘I don’t take a penny from my wife.’
‘But you get to play the country gentleman.’
‘Except I hate the countryside. I’ve always preferred the city.’
‘But you’re here, aren’t you?’
He waited to see whether she was going to explain where ‘here’ was but she just threw her head back and laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘It’s funny you’re here with me. It’s funny we’re neighbours. It’s funny because we’re both such a long way from St Giles.’
‘Neighbours,’ he said, carefully. ‘Except that isn’t a coincidence, is it?’
She looked at the house in the distance, silhouetted against the starry sky. ‘Do you sometimes think that people like us don’t actually belong in places like this?’
‘I don’t know. You seem to have adapted well enough, Marguerite.’
‘Think what you like, Pyke. I’m not the same person you once knew.’
He watched her face twitch in the darkness. ‘I’m not sure I knew that person very well in the first place.’ He waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he added, ‘But you’ve married a good man. That tells me something.’
A bitter laugh spilled from her. ‘And I find out you’re married, as well.’ The moonlight played over her features. Her dimples vanished together with her smile. ‘Perhaps we should all play happy families one of these days.’
‘And I’m meant to think it’s just a coincidence, you turning up here after all these years?’
‘Work it out for yourself, Pyke. You never did trust other people’s logic.’
‘Are you going to tell your husband we knew each other in the old days?’
‘Are you going to tell your wife?’ When Pyke didn’t answer her, she added, in the same tone, ‘Eddy knows about my past. He’s under no illusion about the kind of woman I am. I hope for your sake your wife is robust enough to take you for who you are.’
‘And who’s that?’ he asked, feigning amusement.
Briefly their eyes met and a tiny spark of attraction passed between them.
‘It’s good to see you after all these years.’ She wound her finger around a coil of her curly blonde hair. ‘I was nervous when Eddy first mentioned your name and told me you lived close by. He said that he’d recently moved his account to your bank and that he planned to invite you for dinner. I knew I’d have to see you again and I didn’t know how I might feel.’
‘And how do you feel now you’ve seen me?’
‘That’s just it,’ she said, turning around to face the house. ‘I don’t feel a thing.’
‘Then nothing much has changed, has it?’
Pyke had never been able to tell what colour Marguerite’s eyes were; they seemed to change with her mood. But when she turned to confront him they were as black as coal, and for a few moments she struggled to contain her indignation.
‘You always did know how to make a lady feel good about herself.’
Pyke let her walk off towards the house but shouted after her, ‘The Maggie Shaw I remember wasn’t a lady.’
Pyke always woke early, a product of the many years he had lived in the vicinity of Smithfield Market, where the bleating and lowing of frightened creatures being herded through narrow streets by drove-boys and their dogs could have roused a dead man. For a while, he watched Emily while she slept next to him. Her skin was the smoothest he had ever seen and her cheekbones were prominent and finely crafted. Under her nightshirt, he could just about see a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry above her breast, and her silky chestnut hair fell around her face on the pillow. But as beautiful as she still was, it wasn’t her looks he had fallen in love with. As the only child of a deceased aristocrat who claimed lineage as far back as Tudor times, she had inherited none of her father’s traits: his cruelty, meanness, vanity and greed. Perhaps because she’d learnt to despise him from a young age, she’d wilfully set out to create a different life for herself and had succeeded in doing so, beyond her wildest imagination. Pyke could say that, without any doubt, she was the kindest, most intelligent woman he’d ever known. This didn’t mean she was incapable of selfishness but rather that hers was a morality where the ends always justified the means. Having conspired with Pyke to see off her father, she’d used the income accrued from his estate to fund the charitable causes that she had devoted her life to supporting.
The previous night, after he had returned from Cranborne Park and they had eaten supper, he’d given her further instruction about how to load and fire a pistol. On the lawn, with only the light produced by the candles in the dining room to guide her, Emily had hit a tin sconce from twenty paces. Later, he had carried her upstairs to the bedroom and now he noticed that his fingers still smelled of powder and sex.
Quietly, Pyke left Emily sleeping and returned to his bedroom, where one of the housemaids had lit a fire and Royce, his valet and butler, had prepared his washstand and filled the basin with hot water. His razor and soap rested on a shelf above the basin and, in the corner of the room, a copper hip bath had also been filled with steaming hot water. Stirred by his presence, Royce appeared at the door and Pyke dismissed him with a few words of gratitude.
Like all of the servants, Royce hated him. They hated him because one of his first acts as the new master had been to cut the household staff in half; hated him because he didn’t believe in tradition, because he’d closed down the old brew- and bakehouses and ordered the household bread and beer from suppliers in Edmonton; hated him because he wasn’t Emily’s father and didn’t come from aristocratic lineage, because he came from the same stock as they did and because he knew their tricks, knew they fiddled the books to make a little extra for themselves. A few pennies here and a few pennies there, Royce and the housekeeper between them. They hated him and he despised them; despised them for mourning a petty tyrant like Emily’s father, despised them for their small-mindedness and arcane country ways.
If Pyke had had his way, he would have closed down the hall and moved into the city, and they knew this - they had perhaps overheard his many arguments with Emily on the subject. Most of all they hated him because they feared him, feared that he would some day put an end to the only life they had ever known, a life that, under Emily’s father, must have seemed so secure.
Before breakfast, Pyke found Royce sitting at his table in the butler’s pantry and he spent half an hour going through the invoices. The expense of maintaining and running the hall never ceased to amaze him, and while the rents received from the tenant farmers just about covered the costs, more so now the costs had been scaled back, and left a little in reserve which Emily used as she saw fit (this had been one of the stipulations of the wedding contract), Pyke always baulked at the idea of spending so much money on things he barely noticed and didn’t care about: veterinary bills, repairs to cracked windowpanes and chipped stone floors, the installation of new sashes, the replacement of old mattresses and rebinding of old books, payments to chimney sweeps, vermin removers, apothecaries, marble polishers, plasterers and picture gilders, as well as the usual moneys to the brewer, butcher, fish-man, grocer, laundrywoman, blacksmith, bell-hanger, post-boy, slaughter-man, charwoman and the dung and night-soil collector. This was without the wages of the permanent staff. The butler/valet (who also acted as the house steward), cook, coachman, under-butler (who also acted as footman), housekeeper, three housemaids, land steward, gardener, groom, stable-boy, and four gamekeepers. A permanent staff of sixteen, slashed from almost forty when Emily’s father had still been alive: forty men and women serving one man.