Bedford Square by Anne Perry Page B

…” He searched for a way to express what he was looking for. “It made him seem remote at times. Some people even thought him evasive, where I think he was only complex, and different from them. He was his own hardest taskmaster. He was driven, but not in order to please or impress anyone else.”
    Pitt walked beside him in silence, thinking that if he did not speak, then the other man would continue.
    He was right.
    “You see,” Rawlinson went on, “he lost his father when he was quite young, eleven or twelve, I think. Old enough to know him, from a boy’s eye, not old enough to be disillusioned or challenge him in any way.”
    “Was his father in the navy?”
    “Oh, no!” Rawlinson said swiftly. “He was a nonconformist minister, a man of profound and simple belief, and the courage both to practice and to preach it.”
    “You knew him better than you intimated.”
    Rawlinson shrugged. “Perhaps. It was only one night, really. We’d had a bad skirmish with a slaver. Boarded them and took the ship all right, but it was teak and burned.” He glanced at Pitt. “I see that means nothing to you … how could it? Teak splinters are poison, not like oak,” he explained. “We had a few men hurt, but our first officer, a good man—Mr. Cornwallis had a great affection for him—was in a bad way. He helped me remove the splinters and do all we could for him. But he went into a fever and we sat up all night, spelled each other the next day and the next night.” He reached the gravel path and turned to walk back up the slope, Pitt keeping pace with him.
    “Not a captain’s job, you’ll say, and neither was it. But we were well away from the coast by then and the slaver was dealt with. He took one watch on deck, the other with me.” His mouth pulled tight. “God knows when he slept. But we saved Lansfield. Lost a finger, that’s all. I suppose we talked a bit then. Men do, in the watches of the night, when they’re desperate and there’s nothing they can do to help. Didn’t seemuch of him after that, except as duty required. I suppose I always think of him as he was then, the lamplight yellow in his face, gaunt with worry, angry and helpless, and so tired he could hardly keep his head up.”
    Pitt did not bother to ask if he would have taken credit for another man’s act of courage; there was no need. He thanked Rawlinson and left him to go back to his patients. He walked in the bright, late-afternoon light down towards the river and the landing stage where he could catch a ferry back up past Deptford, Limehouse, Wapping, the Tower of London, under London Bridge, Southward Bridge, and probably get off at last at Blackfriars.
    He knew far more of Cornwallis, and if anything he was even more determined to defend him from the blackmailer, but he had little more idea of who that might be, except that it was even harder to think it was anyone who had served with him and genuinely believed the charge to be true.
    He remembered the way the letter was written, the grammatical correctness, not to mention the spelling and the choice of words. It was not an ordinary seaman, nor was it likely to be one of their dependents, such as a wife or sister. If it was the son of a seaman, then he had definitely improved his position in the world since childhood.
    As he reached the river’s edge the smells of salt and weed sharp in his nostrils, the slap of water, the damp air, the cry of gulls, light on their wings, he knew he still had a very long way to go.
    That morning Charlotte opened the first delivery of mail and found a letter addressed to her in handwriting which swept away the years like leaves on the wind. Even before she opened it she was certain it was from General Balantyne. What was written inside was very brief:
    My dear Mrs. Pitt,
    It was most generous of you to be concerned for my welfare, and to offer your renewed friendship in this present unpleasantness.
    I thought of taking a brief walk around the British