Southampton Row - Anne Perry [75]
What was there in his son’s death that had driven Kingsley so far? And if the answer were blackmail, was it by Maude Lamont herself, or had she only supplied the information to someone else, someone still alive, and who would continue to use it?
Such as a member of the Inner Circle—even Charles Voisey himself?
That was what Narraway would like it to be! And it had nothing to do with whether it was the truth or not. Perhaps Pitt was seeing Voisey where he had no part. Fear itself could be an element of his revenge, maybe better even than the actuality of the blow.
He stood up, leaving his dishes on the table where Mrs. Brody would find them and clear them away. He went outside. He was hot by the time he had walked as far as Tottenham Court Road and stopped on the pavement to hail a hansom.
He spent the morning with the official military records tracing the career of Roland Kingsley. No doubt Narraway would have searched them, if he did not already know the facts, but Pitt wanted to see for himself, in case his interpretation of the records was different.
There was little personal comment. He read through it all quickly. Roland James Walford Kingsley had joined the army at eighteen, like his father and grandfather before him. His career spanned over forty years, from his early discipline and training, his first foreign posting in the Sikh Wars of the late 1840s, the horror of the Crimean War of the mid-1850s, where he had been mentioned several times in dispatches, and the immediately following bloodbath of the Indian Mutiny.
Later he had turned to Africa, the Ashanti Campaign of the mid-1870s, and the Zulu War at the end of the decade, where he had been decorated for extraordinary valor.
After that he had returned to England, seriously injured, and seemingly also wounded in spirit. He never again left the country, although still honoring all his commitments, and retiring in 1890 at the age of sixty.
Pitt then looked up Kingsley’s son, seeking his death in those same Zulu Wars, and found it recorded on July 3, 1879, during the fiasco crossing the White Mfolozi. It was the action in which Captain Lord William Beresford had won a Victoria Cross, the highest honor given for supreme gallantry on the field of battle. Two other men had also been killed, and several wounded, in a superbly executed Zulu ambush. But then Isandlwana had proved the Zulu as warriors of not only courage but exceptional military skill. At Rorke’s Drift they had brought out the best in British discipline and honor. That action lived in history and fired the imagination of men and boys as they heard the story of how eight officers and a hundred and thirty-one men, thirty-five of whom were sick, had withstood the siege of nearly four thousand Zulu warriors. Seventeen British had been killed, and eleven Victoria Crosses awarded.
Pitt stood in the middle of the floor and closed the book holding the records, the bare words which made little attempt to describe the burning, dusty countryside of another continent, and the men—good and bad, cowardly and brave—who had gone there out of service or adventure, obedience to an inner voice or an outer necessity, and lived and died in the conflicts.
But as he thanked the clerk and walked down the steps and into the clearing air, the pavement cloud and sunshine patterned, he felt emotion constricting his chest, pride and shame and a desperate desire to preserve all that was good in a land and a people he loved. The men who had faced the enemy at Rorke’s Drift stood for something far simpler and cleaner than the secrecy of the Inner Circle and political betrayal for ambition’s sake.
He took a cab as far as Narraway’s office and then paced the floor with mounting anger as he was obliged to wait for him.
When Narraway arrived nearly an hour later he was