Bedford Square (11 page)

By late afternoon, when the air was hot and still and a haze had settled over the City, the river winding below in a glittering ribbon, Pitt walked up the hill from the landing stage towards the Greenwich Naval Hospital to see the onetime ship’s surgeon, Mr. Rawlinson.

Rawlinson was busy, and Pitt had to wait in an anteroom for over half an hour, but he was reasonably comfortable and the unaccustomed sights and sounds held his interest.

When Rawlinson came he was dressed in a white shirt with the neck open and the sleeves rolled up, as if he had been hard at work, and there were bloodstains on his arms and several places on his body. He was a big man, well muscled, with a broad, amiable face.

“Bow Street police station?” he said curiously, eyeing Pitt up and down. “Not one of our people in trouble, surely? Not over the river and on your patch, anyway.”

“Not at all.” Pitt turned from the window, where he had been watching the water and the traffic going up to the Port of London. “I wanted to ask you about an officer who served with you in the past … John Cornwallis.”

Rawlinson was incredulous. “Cornwallis! You can’t mean he’s come to your attention. I thought he was in the police himself. Or was it the Home Office?”

“No, police.” It seemed explanations were unavoidable. He had promised discretion. How could he honor that and still be of any use? “This is an incident in the past that has been … misinterpreted,” Pitt replied tentatively. “I am looking into it on Captain Cornwallis’s behalf.”

Rawlinson pursed his lips. “I was a ship’s surgeon, Mr. Pitt. I spent a great deal of my time in the orlop.”

“The what?”

“The orlop. The lower deck, aft, where the wounded are taken and we do our operating.”

Below them on the river a clipper with canvas full set was drifting up tide towards the Surrey Docks, its magnificent sails white in the sun. There was something sad about it, as if its age were already dying.

“Oh. But you did know Cornwallis?” Pitt insisted, dragging his mind back.

“Certainly,” Rawlinson agreed. “Sailed under his command. But being the captain of a ship is not a very sociable position. If you haven’t been at sea you probably haven’t much of an idea of the power a captain has and the necessary isolation that requires.” Unthinkingly, he wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers, unaware of smearing them with traces of blood. “You can’t be a good commander without keeping a certain distance between yourself and the men, even the other officers.” He turned and led the way into a wide gallery through a glass-paned door and down the steps to the grass, the panorama of the river beyond the sloping ground.

Pitt followed, listening.

“The whole structure of the crew is built on a very tight hierarchy.” Rawlinson waved his hands as he spoke. “Too much familiarity and men lose that edge of respect for the captain. He has to be more than human to them, close to infallible. If they see his vulnerability, his doubt, ordinary weaknesses or fears, something of the power is lost.” He glanced at Pitt. “Every good captain knows that, and Cornwallis did. I think much of it came naturally to him. He was a quiet man, solitary by choice. He took his position very seriously.”

“Was he good?”

Rawlinson smiled, leading the way across the grass in the sun. The breeze from the river smelled of salt. The tide was running sharply. Overhead, gulls circled, crying loudly.

“Yes,” he answered. “Actually, he was very good.”

“Why did he come ashore?” Pitt asked. “He’s comparatively young.”

Rawlinson stopped, his expression guarded, defensive for
the first time. “Forgive me, Mr. Pitt, but why does that concern you?”

Pitt struggled for the right reply. Surely only some element of the truth would serve Cornwallis now?

“Someone is endeavoring to hurt him,” he replied, watching Rawlinson’s face. “Damage his reputation. I need to know the truth in order to defend him.”

“You want to know the worst they could say, with any honesty?”

“Yes.”

Rawlinson grunted. “And why should I not suspect that the enemy you speak of is you yourself?”

“Ask Cornwallis,” Pitt responded.

“In that case, why don’t you ask him what the worst or the best is of his career?” It was said with wry amusement, no ill will at all. He stood in the sun with his bloodstained arms folded, a smile on his face.

“Because we don’t always see ourselves as others do, Mr. Rawlinson,” Pitt replied. “Does that need explaining?”

Rawlinson relaxed. “No, it doesn’t.” He began to walk again, waving his hand in invitation to Pitt to accompany him. “Cornwallis was a brave man,” he answered. “Both physically and morally; perhaps a trifle short in imagination. He had a sense of humor, but it didn’t show very often. He took his pleasures quietly. He liked to read … all manner of things. He was a surprisingly good artist with watercolors. Painted light on water with a sensitivity that astounded me. Showed a completely different side of the man. Made one understand that sometimes genius is not in what you put in but what you leave out. He managed to convey”—he circled his hands in a sweeping motion—“air! Light!” He laughed. “Would never have thought he had such … daring … in him.”

“Was he ambitious?” Pitt tried to phrase it to earn an honest answer, not one motivated primarily by loyalty.

Rawlinson considered for a moment before he replied. “In his own way, yes, I think so. But it wasn’t readily observable, not as it was in many men. He did not want to seem excellent so much as actually to be so. The pride in him, the hunger,
was not for appearances but for reality.” He looked at Pitt quickly, to see if he understood. “It made him …” 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 see
much 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:

It was a stiff and very formal way of saying that he very much needed the friendship she had offered, but the fact that he had written at all made his feelings most plain.

She folded the paper with a quick movement and rose from the kitchen table to lift the lid from the stove and put it in. The flames consumed it with an instant flare, and it was gone.

“I shall be going out this morning,” she told Gracie. “I have a desire to look at the Egyptian exhibit in the British Museum. I cannot say when I shall be back.”

Gracie shot her a look of fierce curiosity, but she forbore from asking any questions.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said with wide eyes. “I’ll see ter everythink.”

Charlotte went upstairs and took out her second-best summer morning dress, not the pale yellow which was her best—she had worn that the first time—but a pink-and-white muslin she had been given by Emily, whom it had not become as she had hoped.

The British Museum was in comfortable walking distance, which was presumably why he had selected it, and she set out at ten past eleven in order to be at the exhibit by half past. This was a meeting of friendship, not a romantic or society appointment where lateness could be considered fashionable or a suitably modest reluctance.

She was there by twenty-five minutes past, and saw him immediately, standing upright, shoulders straight, hands behind his back, the light on his head, catching the fair hair turning to gray. He looked extraordinarily lonely, as if the other people passing by were all part of some great unity which excluded him. Perhaps it was his stillness that marked
him apart. He was very obviously waiting for someone, because his gaze did not appear to move as it would were he actually looking at the mummified figures in front of him or at the intricate carving and gold of the sarcophagus.

She walked over to him, but for a moment he was unaware of her.

“General Balantyne …”

He turned quickly and his face filled with delight, and then embarrassment at his betrayal of emotion.

“Mrs. Pitt … how kind of you to have come. I hope I do not presume … I …”

She smiled. “Of course not,” she assured him. “The Egyptian exhibit is something I have always wished to see, but no one else I know has the least interest in it, and if I came down and stood around looking at it alone, I might be taken for a most undesirable kind of woman and attract attention I do not wish.”

“Oh!” He obviously had not thought of that. Being a man gave him a freedom he had taken for granted. “Yes … indeed. Well … let us look at it.”

He had misunderstood. She could have seen it any time—with Emily, or Great-Aunt Vespasia, or Gracie, for that matter. She was trying to make him feel a little less ill at ease by making a joke of it.

“Have you ever been to Egypt?” she asked, staring at the sarcophagus.

“No. Well … only to pass through.” He hesitated, then, as if making a great decision, he continued. “I have been to Abyssinia.”

She glanced at him. “Have you? Why? I mean, was it to do with interest in the country or were you sent there? I didn’t know we had ever fought Abyssinia.”

He smiled. “My dear, we have fought just about everywhere. You would be hard put to name a place on the face of the earth where we have not meddled at some time or other.”

“Why did we meddle in Abyssinia?” she asked with genuine interest, as well as a desire to make him speak of something in which he was comfortable.

“It is a preposterous story.” He was still smiling.

“Good,” she encouraged. “I love preposterous stories, the more so the better. Tell me.”

He offered her his arm, and she took it as they walked slowly around the exhibits one after another, without seeing any of them.

“It was in January of 1864,” he began, “that it really came to a head. But it started long before. The Emperor of Abyssinia, whose name was Theodore—”

“Theodore!” she said with disbelief. “That doesn’t sound like an Abyssinian name. It should be … I don’t know … African! At least foreign. I’m sorry—please go on!”

“He was born of very humble family,” he resumed. “His first calling was as a scribe, but he earned very little at it, so he took to banditry instead, at which he did so well that by the time he was thirty-seven he was crowned Emperor of Abyssinia, King of Kings, and Chosen of God.”

“I have obviously underrated banditry!” She giggled. “Not only its social acceptability but its religious significance.”