‘I want to know about my son.’
‘Your son?’
Pyke tried to assess whether the bluff was genuine; whether Zephaniah really had no idea about, and therefore no hand in, what had happened to Felix.
‘My son arrived in Merthyr on or around the twenty-third of November to visit me. A few days later, I found his corpse laid out on a bed at the courthouse.’
This was another thing he hadn’t been able to work out — why someone had left Felix’s corpse for him to find, rather than burying it in an unmarked grave up on the mountain. It was almost as if someone had wanted him to find the body.
Doubt had crept into the old man’s eyes. This was something he hadn’t expected, something that altered the balance of negotiations. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Felix would have gone to the station-house to find me. I’m guessing Smyth snatched him and took him to the courthouse.’
‘I had no idea you even had a son.’
‘Smyth didn’t share this information with you?’
Zephaniah tried to swallow. ‘Not with me, not with my son.’
‘I buried my son in London and I’ve come back here for answers.’
‘As I said, Smyth has fled to Ireland.’
‘Then I want the address of his estate.’
Zephaniah looked at the pistol, still in Pyke’s hand. ‘His family own land in Tipperary, near a place called Lisvarrinane.’
‘And Johns?’
‘All I know is that he grew up on an estate in Dundrum.’
‘Nothing else?’ Pyke took the pistol, aimed it at Zephaniah’s head and waited.
‘That’s all I know.’
‘Then it looks like our business is done.’ He lowered the pistol, and tucked it into his belt.
‘You’re going to let me live?’ There was a hint of incredulity in Zephaniah’s voice.
‘Did I say that?’
Turning suddenly, Pyke clenched his fist and smashed it against the old man’s face, felt his bones crumble under the impact. Zephaniah passed out.
Downstairs, Pyke found a tin of lamp oil in the pantry and took it upstairs to Jonah’s room. He doused the curtains with half of it, and took the other half to Zephaniah’s room and did the same. Then Pyke lit a match and tossed it on to the curtains. Flames shot up the fabric. In Jonah’s bedroom, he did likewise and waited to make sure the flames spread.
By the time he’d retraced his steps down to the cellar and out through the passageway, smoke was pouring out of the upstairs windows, and when he’d climbed up the mountain and turned around to inspect his work, flames had engulfed an entire wing of the Castle, plumes of orange lighting up the night sky.
As he stood and watched the fire, Pyke tried to feel something, anger, despair even, but nothing would come. He would go and find Captain Kent.
TWENTY-SEVEN
WEDNESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 1847
Clonoulty, Co. Tipperary
Knox had wandered for most of the night, not really knowing where he was, where he was going, only vaguely aware that he was heading north and west in the direction of Clonoulty. The sound of his father’s sobs echoed in his ears, except that he wasn’t Knox’s father, Asenath Moore was. At one time, his mother had willingly lain down next to the man and had borne him two children — John Johns, who she had given up to the childless gatekeeper, and him, the child she’d kept. Time and again, he thought about his childhood, his mother keeping him close to her, protecting him against his father’s drunken rages, his mother the saint, his father the devil, all of it now turned upside down. As he walked, Knox saw his father through new eyes; he understood his anger, his hatred of his wife, his self-hate, his self-pity. Knox hadn’t asked about his two brothers but he didn’t need to. They looked like their father and it was clear he loved them; loved them in a way he had never loved Knox. But how could he have loved another man’s child? His father had suffered in silence, drowned his anger in alcohol, taken it out on him and his mother, a broken man before he had become a broken father. How had it been for him, knowing that each day his wife went to work in the kitchens of a man she had slept with, a man whose children she had secretly given birth to?
His mind turned to one of his recent visits to the house, Martin Knox comfortable in the presence of his two sons, his real sons, a gentle man embittered by circumstances.
As the first skeins of milky light gnawed at the sky, Knox stumbled almost by accident on the flint track, Clonoulty just a few miles farther along.
By the time he reached Father Mackey’s house, the sun was pale and orange in the east. He paused on the doorstep, remembering for the first time in hours that his son was gravely ill. He let himself into the house, careful not to make any noise. It didn’t matter. One of the servants met him in the hall.
Knox stepped into the drawing room where he could hear voices. He saw Mackey first, standing by the window. Then he saw Martha, both of them up, despite the early hour. He saw her face, the deadness in her eyes, and felt his stomach lurch.
‘Is James…?’
‘The doctor thinks he’ll make it.’ Relief flooded her face. ‘It was touch and go for a while but the fever has passed. He doesn’t think it was cholera after all, just a fever.’
Knox went to hug her but she pushed him away. ‘I had to go through all of this on my own, Michael. Do you know how lonely I’ve been? How afraid? You said you were only going to the barracks…’
Already exhausted, Knox blinked, not knowing what to say; how to make this better. ‘Can I see him?’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say, Michael?’
‘I…’ Knox wanted to tell her what he’d found out, about his father, about Moore, but the words wouldn’t come.
When he tried to take her in his arms for a second time, tried to hug her, to comfort her, she pushed him away. ‘You just weren’t here, Michael. You haven’t been here for a while.’
Mackey coughed and then excused himself — he couldn’t get out of the room quickly enough.
Martha’s face was like a suit of armour. ‘Where have you been, Michael? What could have been more important than being here with us?’
Knox felt light-headed. All he could see was his father’s face; all he could hear were the man’s sobs.
‘You made your choice, Michael. You chose to chase after a dead man, find justice for a corpse.’
What he wanted to say was: there is no justice. Not at this time. Not in this land.
‘I don’t know you any more, Michael. I don’t know who you are, what you believe in. I want to be by myself for a while.’
‘But James is going to live. He’s going to pull through. Isn’t that the important thing?’
Martha stared at him. She wanted him to say something else, to reassure her, to be the husband she hoped he still was. Knox could see this, see how much she needed him.
I am not who I thought I was. This same thought kept racing through his mind. He tried to find the words but they wouldn’t come. A tear rolled down his cheek.
Martha’s expression was sorrowful, yet also defiant. ‘I think you should go, Michael.’
Knox looked at her and again tried to summon the words he wanted to say, the words she wanted to hear. None came to him.
‘What’s happened to you, Michael? What’s happened to all the goodness that used to be in there?’ She tapped his chest.
His mother had always told him to be good. Never tell a lie. He could hear her say it. My good little boy. It was all a sham.
Martha looked at him, bemused. ‘How can we have fallen apart so badly? We were always the strong ones.’
Knox thought about all the dead bodies he’d seen, the needless suffering, the families torn apart, the lives sacrificed. What he’d done had been a protest, small and insignificant as it was, against the affairs of men like Asenath Moore. His father. The man who’d driven families from their homes and left them to die. How could Knox have sat back and done nothing?
‘I’d like to come back tomorrow.’ Knox tried to remember who he was, who his wife was. It was like looking at a stranger.