The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by T.F. Banks Page A

well.”
    “You'll take him my regards?”
    “Indeed, just as I'm sure he would have sent his, had he known I would visit.”
    Setting her cup on the table, his mother leaned her head against the high back of the chair, closed her eyes, and inhaled the fragrance of her garden. “I worry about you, Henry,” she said. “You don't know what it's like to be a parent and have your only child chasing about London after footpads and murderers.”
    “It's the footpads you should be concerned for,” Morton said.
    She smiled. “But even so, I wish you'd gone into the church as we'd planned.”
    “The church was never a plan I was party to. Anyway, you forget that I had to leave the university when Lady Beaufort died.”
    “I forget nothing, Henry,” his mother said—and it was true. It was from her that he'd inherited his remarkable memory and whatever wit he might claim. From his father he got only his appearance, apparently.
    “It was unfortunate that she didn't live a few years more.”
    “I'm only sorry that she didn't die sooner,” Morton said.
    His mother opened her eyes. “Now, Henry, where would we have been without her?”
    “I don't know. Someplace where you wouldn't have had to atone for your ‘sin’ twice daily. Someplace where we wouldn't have had to shoulder the blame for her brother's transgression.” Morton took up his cup, calming himself. “But it's all past,” he said.
    His mother grinned suddenly. “You don't miss your evening Bible readings? What of the inestimable—and inexhaustible—works of Hannah More? I can hear you reading them still. Did a word ever register in your mind?”
    “I do remember being particularly struck by the word ‘salubrious,’ one day,” Morton said. “Evangelical literature, however, did give me a great desire for other books. Any other books. And it taught me to pray. ‘Please Lord,’” Morton intoned, “ ‘deliver me from the writings of Hannah More.’”
    His mother cuffed him gently on the arm, but laughed. “Amen,” she said. And then more seriously: “But you received an education you should not have otherwise.”
    “Yes, I suppose I should thank her for that—incomplete as it was.”
    This promise of education had been the reason his mother had swallowed her pride a dozen times a day. It was the chain that had bound them both to that cold, proud woman. Pride, Morton noted, was a sin, yet the supposedly pious Lady Beaufort had exhibited it in a manner and degree that Morton had never before encountered.
    In Lady Beaufort's house, however, no one else was allowed pride. Certainly not his mother—or Morton. Lady Beaufort had found them, when his mother had been forced to leave her employment after being got with child by her much older and more worldly employer. She had been sixteen.
    She had had no family to go to. Only this remote and haughty widow—sister to Morton's blood-father—who took her on out of charity and to see her atone for her wickedness. Which Rebecca did twice daily, kneeling and asking God for forgiveness, while Lady Beaufort looked on. And then any number of times more in the way she was treated. She had stayed because of the promise that her son—Lady Beaufort's bastard nephew—would receive an education. That a position would be secured for him in some small parish. That he would have some kind of legitimacy in the end.
    But Lady Beaufort had died and no provision had been made for either Henry or Rebecca Morton in her will.
    “It is odd, isn't it?” Morton said. “The twists and turns of a person's life?”
    His mother turned her head a little toward him, widening her eyes. “If we'd not met John Townsend, you mean?”
    “I suppose. Or to go back one step; if Lady Beaufort hadn't been robbed.”
    “Yes, and if the old crone hadn't suspected us,” his mother said bitterly, “as though we'd ever given her cause to think us thieves.”
    The scarlet face of a panting girl appeared over the gate at that moment, and