Bennet Burleigh (1840-1914)

Bennet Burleigh

BURLEIGH IS the Syrtis Major correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a leading London daily, posted to Mars just as his paper once posted him wherever the Empire went to war. Scottish-born, he fled to America as a young man, fought for the Confederacy, was captured, escaped, and rode with a raiding party against Union shipping on the Great Lakes before the law finally caught up with him and sent him home in disgrace. He remade himself as a journalist and spent the better part of a decade following British arms through Egypt and the Sudan. He watched the campaign of '82 unfold from the canal works outside Ismailia, and three years later he was attached to the Desert Column on the Nile when Burnaby flew Gordon out of a besieged Khartoum by aerial launch, an escape that saved one man's life but neither the city's nor the column's. He does not consider himself a sentimental man, but he has watched enough relief efforts arrive after the fact to recognize the shape of the problem before anyone else in the room does.

Burleigh files fast, files first, and is not above petty sabotage to keep a rival correspondent's dispatch off the wire behind his own. He has no patience for Colonial Office caution and even less for a good story spoiled by a cautious editor, but he is scrupulously accurate about facts he can verify himself, having learned the hard way that a correspondent's whole worth is his word.

Reporter (Veteran NPC)
Att.		Skills
Str:	3	Fisticuffs: 2, Throwing: 1, Close Combat 2 (edged weapons)
Agl:	3	Stealth: 2, Marksmanship: 2 (pistol)
End:	5	Wilderness Travel: 4 (desert), Fieldcraft 3, Tracking 1
Int:	5	Observation: 5, Science: 1 (geography)
Chr:	4	Eloquence: 5, Linguistics 3 (Arabic, French, Spanish), Theatrics 3, Bargaining 3
Soc:	3	Riding: 3 (horse), Piloting: 1 (aerial flyers)
Motives: Ambitious, Adventuresome, Ruthless
The correspondent on a battlefield. Appearance: Burleigh is a stocky, weathered man in his late forties, thick through the shoulders from decades of campaign living, with a heavy mustache gone mostly grey and a Glasgow burr that thickens when he is angry or excited. His hands are permanently ink-stained, and he carries a battered dispatch case everywhere, along with a revolver he has owned since his American days and has no intention of surrendering to peacetime habits. His campaign clothes are practical rather than fashionable, patched more than once, and he shows no self-consciousness about it in company that would notice. He has a habit of watching a room's exits before he watches the people in it, a leftover instinct from a young manhood spent one step ahead of Federal patrols. When he smells a story, he becomes suddenly, disarmingly charming, a quality that has gotten him into headquarters tents closed to every other correspondent on three worlds. Background: Prior careers include soldier of fortune and journalist. Bennet Burleigh is 49 years old and is from the middle class

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