The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [149]
Godfrey smiled knowingly. ‘You’ll have to ask her yourself.’
EPILOGUE
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