Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain Read Online Free

tangible.
    ‘Gentlemen, I hope you will join me in prayer,’ he said, bringing his long delicate fingers together, and bowed his head. I followed. Blake looked stonily ahead.
    ‘Dear Lord, show us the way. Give us the strength to gain self-mastery, to do good, to help the weak, the lost and the fallen. To see evil and to lay waste to it. To fight wickedness and to defeat the snares of pride, vanity and indolence. Amen.’
    After a considerable silence His Lordship opened his eyes, looking dazed, as if he were having to drag himself down from some higher heavenly plane.
    My knowledge of Anselm Bertram Vickers, Viscount Allington, derived from
The Times
and political gossip from my father’s circle in Devon. He was a member of the new Tory government, but better known as a philanthropist and for his religious piety – not qualities readily associated with the aristocracy. He was very well connected. Through his mother alone he was related to the Earl of Aberdeen and the Duke of Buccleuch. He chaired a legion of committees of charitable and religious organizations which were especially devoted to the needs of children. In Parliament he had attempted with some success to prevent young children from working in mines, mills and as chimney sweeps. He had seen through laws to improve the treatment of lunatics, and had led the thus far failed campaign to reduce working hours in factories and mines to ten hours a day. There were those who said that his work denied poor families the chance to bring home a decent income, and that he was at least partly motivated by the desire to confound the rich mill and mine owners of the Whig party. As for his personal life, he was unmarried but considered highly eligible. I had seen him described as ‘the prince of philanthropy, with the looks of an angel’. It was also widely rumoured that he was on very ill terms with his father, the famously unpleasant Earl of Pewsey, who had tried and failed to stall Allington’s inheritance of a fortune from a great-aunt, and that the two could not be in the same room together. Since Allington was a Tory, my father more or less approved of him, though he was suspicious of the Viscount’s churchiness and philanthropy. He delighted, however, in the fury Allington’s campaigns inspired among the opposition, the Whigs, whom he regarded as the enemy.
    Brown Cape began to speak, but His Lordship raised his hand.
    ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I asked Sir Theophilus Collinson to recommend two men with a strong sense of duty, two men incorruptible and undeflectable. He named you. I must admit, this was most agreeable to me. Apart from this refuge for the poor Lascars, I amon the Indian Board of Control and am much concerned both to improve the lot of the natives there and to combat the evils of Hindooism.’ At this, Blake’s brows twitched into the briefest frown. ‘Your association with Xavier Mountstuart was for me no small added incentive for seeking you out,’ His Lordship continued. ‘I applaud your brave efforts to save him at the hour of his death.
    ‘Captain Avery, may I congratulate you on your various acts of bravery, most recently on the Afghan campaign. The Company’s loss is England’s gain. Mr Blake, Sir Theo likes to say of you simply that you have a talent for “finding things”. I know, however, that your exploits are something of a byword.’
    I will confess that it was exceedingly pleasant to find myself complimented by Lord Allington. At the same time I had the strongest feeling that Blake had taken against His Lordship and was about to say something disobliging, and that the whole enterprise would collapse before it had begun. I did not wish this to happen and so I struck out before he could.
    ‘Your Lordship, I know we would both be glad to help in any way we may.’
    Blake said nothing. I judged he would hate an untidy contradiction and it felt peculiarly satisfying to have outmanoeuvred him, if only for a moment.
    ‘Perhaps