In order to smooth things over with Ned Villums, Pyke paid a visit to his associate Barnaby Hodges at his gaming house on Regent Street and told him about the money Jem Nash had blackmailed from Morris and which could be retrieved from beneath the floorboards of Nash’s lodgings in Fulham. Pyke’s former colleague and henchman, Townsend, died that winter, too. Pyke paid for his funeral and made sure that the grave was adorned with a headstone bearing his name and dates. He didn’t know anyone else at the funeral and left without introducing himself. On his way back to Hambledon, Pyke thought about his association with Townsend and wondered why, though they had known each other for fifteen years, they had never been friends.
During that first winter after Emily’s death, Pyke took long walks with Felix and Copper in the grounds of the estate and spent time in the field where she had been buried, a picturesque spot in the shadow of oak and sycamore trees. It was only during those months that Pyke felt he got to know his son for the first time, what he thought and felt about the world, and it relieved him to discover that a keen, unsentimental intelligence lay behind his frail appearance. One night, soon after the servants’ return to the hall, Felix had complained of hearing noises coming from somewhere below him and, though Pyke knew for a fact they couldn’t have been made by Gore, he paid one final visit to the tomb he had built deep under the cellar, only to be greeted by a long, sombre silence. That night he, too, had heard the voices, and for a while he truly believed that the banker’s ghost had returned to haunt him. After that, Pyke encouraged Copper to sleep on the floor beside Felix’s bed, and soon after that the lad and the slobbering mastiff were inseparable. It never ceased to amaze Felix how a dog as large as Copper could walk and even run using only three good legs.
Taking a rest from his business, Godfrey often stayed with them at the old hall and entertained them with gruesome stories of criminal wrongdoing. He would tell the stories in such a way that, by the end, even Felix and Jo were cheering for those who faced the scaffold. Though he knew that Emily wouldn’t have approved, Pyke felt it was somehow still appropriate. By the time spring finally came, the once plentiful wine cellar had been nearly depleted.
But those first few months after Emily’s death were also the worst of times. After Felix and the servants had retired to bed, Pyke would roam the dark passageways of the old hall with only his memories and laudanum to comfort him. Unable to sleep, he would pass silently through the house, trying to remember happier times: when he’d first met her, in the drawing room as she had played the piano, apparently unimpressed by his appearance; when she’d risked her own life to help him escape from the condemned block at Newgate; and the first time they had kissed, though now he couldn’t remember where it had been. He remembered their marriage, an intimate affair in which her desire to keep her family name had been matched by his desire not to reveal his first name to her. He also remembered their arguments, but even these brought him some comfort. Emily had always been as obstinate as him. It was what people loved about her. Her passion lit her up from the inside and made people want to know her. Her passion, her grace, her playfulness and her intelligence. Shortly after her death, Pyke had given up the house in Berkeley Square a full eleven and a half months before the lease was due to expire. Emily hadn’t known the house and he wouldn’t have felt right about moving there. In fact, spending time alone in the old hall finally taught Pyke to appreciate it and, in a cruel twist, it was only once he had started to feel at home there for the first time that a lawsuit was brought against him by a distant relative of Emily’s father, claiming that now Emily had died, the estate and its title should revert back to him. Pyke instructed the best solicitors in London and spent tens of thousands of pounds fighting the case, but even a year later the matter had still not been resolved.
The famous Florentine philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli, once wrote, ‘I believe it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half to be controlled by ourselves.’ In the days and months following Emily’s bloody death and the wilful devastation that had ensued, Pyke thought often about Machiavelli’s claim and while it sometimes struck him as outrageous prevarication, more often than not he saw its truthfulness. Pyke had done what he had done, and while those actions may have led to the death of his wife, fortune, too, had played its hand, and fortune, as it always did with men who took risks and imposed themselves on the world, would shine on him again.