Free The Revenge of Captain Paine by Andrew Pepper

Pyke had tracked down the two rampsmen and retrieved the rings they’d stolen from her, he had asked whether the incident had shaken her commitment to her work. She had given him a puzzled look, as though the question were an irrelevant one, and told him she didn’t blame the men for what they had done.
    That was the thing about Emily.
    Just when Pyke thought he had her figured out, she’d act in a way that made him alter his opinion of her. She wasn’t a social chameleon, like Marguerite, a flibbertigibbet who changed her skin to suit her own desires. Rather, Emily was led by her convictions, and these changed according to circumstances over which she had no control. Two years earlier she had split from Elizabeth Fry’s society of women, middle-class do-gooders and busybodies concerned primarily with temperance and for whom prison visits constituted the limits of their horizons. As a free agent, she’d used her financial independence to fund individuals agitating for workplace reform and to promote communitarian ideas borrowed from Robert Owen, the socialist. Recently she had turned her attention to the burgeoning trade union movement and had helped to organise and broker a meeting to find common ground between moderates and radicals who were agitating for wider disruption.
    Pyke had expected that Emily’s commitment to her work would have waned after the birth of their son but, strangely, it had intensified. In fact, he often felt that her zeal for her work had increased in direct proportion to his success as a banker: the more money he drew from the bank, the less she seemed to need or even ask for. He sometimes wondered whether her apparent selflessness - wilfully ignoring her own needs - was in fact another form of selfishness, a way of validating her own difference. He’d put this to her once and received a scornful reply.
    The meeting was held in an upstairs room of the Standard of Liberty at one end of Brick Lane. As a Bow Street Runner, Pyke had once pursued a child rapist to the building across the street from the Standard. The man had made for the cellar, maybe hoping Pyke wouldn’t follow him, but had lost his footing on the stairs and had fallen into a cess pool. Pyke could still remember the scene: the rapist floundering in the dark, viscous liquid, his arms and head covered in thick soil. Pyke had neither come to his rescue nor precipitated his death. At the time he hadn’t known whether he had done the right thing, whether he’d robbed the mother of the injured child of the justice she and her child deserved, but when he had told her what had happened, she had thanked him and broken down in tears. The neighbourhood had not significantly changed in the intervening years: on the same side of the road as the Standard of Liberty, he counted a tavern, two ginneries, a brothel, a couple of pawnshops and a lodging house where donkeys and sheep roamed freely in and out of the door.
    The meeting had already begun by the time they arrived, and having persuaded two men on the door that they weren’t police spies, Pyke and his uncle took their seats at the back of the cramped room, just as the gathered men were applauding heartily. He saw Emily on the stage: she had clearly just addressed the meeting and had spoken well, for there was a jovial, enthusiastic atmosphere in the room. Some of the mob whistled their appreciation, at which Emily gave a mock curtsy. This drew further laughter. Pyke looked at his uncle and shrugged. He had no idea that Emily actually spoke at these meetings, and now that he had missed her speech he kicked himself for arriving late and wondered what she had said to the men. They seemed to have treated whatever it was with a degree of seriousness, or at least hadn’t barracked her with a deluge of sexual innuendos. Emily bowed again and climbed down from the stage. Her place was taken by a white-haired speaker who didn’t engage the audience in the same manner that Emily seemed to have