The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [146]
He had warned Townsend that Edmonton’s militia would be armed. The rest was up to them.
Pyke was not an impetuous man but when he finally laid eyes on Edmonton, sprawled out on his four-poster Queen Anne bed, he had to resist an urge to attack him without further ceremony. Edmonton seemed both unsettled and gratified by Pyke’s intrusion, fumbling to retrieve something he had hidden under the many pillows and bolsters that were propping him up. The bedroom itself was a plush, elaborately decorated affair. Lit up by candles that sat on top of the marble mantelpiece and the mahogany dresser, the gilt-striped wallpaper seemed to glisten in the light.
Edmonton finally produced a flintlock pistol, and waved it triumphantly at Pyke, nearly knocking over a decanter filled with port that adorned his bedside table.
‘I see that you have availed yourself of the view,’ Pyke said, not bothered by the pistol, as he walked across the room to the window that overlooked the main gate. ‘Maybe the mob will storm the defences, ransack the hall and cut off your head.’
‘This is England, not the Continent.’ Edmonton laughed. ‘And the mob will never get in here. I’ve offered the men outside a bonus of ten guineas for every peasant they shoot dead.’ He was holding the pistol as though his life depended on it.
‘I had no problem getting in here.’
That elicited a fatuous smile. ‘The past few months have demonstrated that I am more than capable of taking care of you.’
‘I’ll admit I had no proper understanding of the extent of your depravity.’
‘Ah, excellent. A lesson in ethics from a common thief and convicted murderer. I bow to your superior wisdom.’
‘Better a common thief than a moral simpleton with innocent blood smeared over his fat hands.’
‘In what way am I a moral simpleton?’ Edmonton seemed amused rather than annoyed. ‘Tell me this. Do you really want a country full of papist spies running amok in every department of state, passing our secrets to the foul Roman Church? Conspiring to replace our goodly Anglican brethren with depraved, child-molesting Catholic priests? In God’s name, don’t you understand what’s been happening? One day soon, papist traitors like O’Connell will be able to stand up in the House and vote on matters concerning the true Church. What if I was to stand back and do nothing? We would soon have rosary beads adorning every mantelpiece, incense burning in every home, and lust-driven monks roaming the streets preying on our innocent Protestant children.’
Pyke had come to Hambledon in the expectation that he might find something that explained the terrible scene that he had witnessed in that lodging room. Now, though, as he stared into Edmonton’s reptilian eyes, it was hard not to conceive of his pathetic ranting as a form of madness, and as such he felt less outrage than he had expected to; less outrage but no pity.
Pyke supposed it was relatively easy for Edmonton to despise Catholics: to see them somehow as subhuman and not deserving of life. For him, it was simply a matter of personal preference, an opinion that could be strongly held precisely because it did not impinge on his life in any way, except in abstract terms. Catholics were akin to demons; monstrous figures that existed only in his imagination. For Andrew Magennis, or his son Davy, or even for Jimmy Swift, it was different. At least their hatred, malignant and debilitating as it was, had a history; it made some kind of perverse sense in the context of two hundred years of religious animosity and upheaval. It made sense because they had lived among and fought with people who, in the process, had become their bitterest enemies. For Edmonton, though, Catholics were faceless