Bedford Square - Anne Perry [48]
Charlotte gave her mind over to the evidence such as they possessed. Cole had been found dead on Balantyne’s doorstep with the snuffbox in his pocket. He had served on the same Abyssinian campaign twenty-five years before. Somebody had sent the threatening letter to Balantyne but had not yet actually asked for anything, except the snuffbox, as a pledge of intent, and Balantyne had been too aware of the damage they could do him to refuse it.
“What else might they want, apart from money?” she said aloud.
He swung around, startled. “What?”
She repeated the question.
A slow color spread up his cheeks, and he looked away.
“Perhaps just the exercise of power,” he replied. “For some people that is a purpose in itself.”
She spoke from impulse, before she had time to question herself and perhaps lose her courage, or think better and be more tactful.
“Have you some idea who it is?”
He stopped, wide-eyed, staring at her with amazement.
“No. I wish to God I had.” He colored faintly. “I’m sorry. But that is one of the very worst aspects of it all … I think of everyone I can imagine, every man I know and have considered a friend, or at least someone I could respect, whether I liked him or not, and now I wonder. It is beginning to poison my views of everyone. I catch myself wondering if people know, if they are secretly smiling, watching me and knowing what I fear, and waiting for me to lose my nerve. And all of them but one will be totally innocent.” A bitter anger filled his eyes. “That is one of the greatest evils of secret accusation; the poison of it, how it slowly destroys your trust in all those to whom you should be able to turn with honor and regard. And how could the innocent forgive you for not having known they were innocent, for having allowed it to even enter your thoughts that they could do such a thing?” His voice dropped. “How could I ever forgive myself?” A woman walking a small dog passed them, and Balantyne was too distracted even to acknowledge her by raising his hat, a gesture so automatic to him he would normally have done it without thought.
Impulsively, Charlotte reached out her hand and rested it on his arm, holding him lightly. “You must forgive yourself,” she said earnestly. “And no one else will need to forgive you, because they will not know. This may be precisely what the blackmailer wants, to make you so demoralized that when he asks for whatever it is, you are willing to give it to him simply to be rid of the fear and the doubts, to know at last who your enemy is so you can also know your friends.”
She felt the muscles in his arm tighten as he clenched them, but his hand did not move and he stayed close to her.
“I have had a second letter,” he said, watching her face. “It was much the same as the first. Cut from the Times again and pasted onto paper. It came by first post this morning.”
“What did it say?” she asked, trying to keep perfectly steady. He must not see how alarmed she was.
He swallowed. He was very pale. It was obviously difficult for him even to repeat the words. “That my friends would shun me, cross over in the street to avoid me, if they knew I was a coward and ran from battle, and was saved by a private soldier, and then would not even own up to my shame but let him conceal it for me.” He swallowed, his throat jerking painfully. His voice was hoarse. “That my wife, who had already suffered so much, would be ruined, and my son would have to disown his name or his career would be finished.” He stared at her in helpless misery. “And not a word of it is true, I swear that in the name of God.”
“I had not doubted you,” she said quite calmly. The depth of his distress had the strange effect of setting a deep resolution in her to fight the issue in his defense to the very last iota of her strength or imagination, and not give in even after that. “You must never allow him to think he has won,” she said with utter conviction. “Unless, of course, it should be a tactical ploy, to lead him to betray himself. But I cannot see, at the moment, how