Treason at Lisson Grove

by Anne Perry

  When they had returned to the tavern Sean and Cormac had been there, and they had drunk rye whiskey by the fire. He could recall the smell of the peat, and Kate saying it was a good thing he didn’t want vodka because potatoes were too scarce to waste on making it.

  There were other memories as well, all sharp with emotion, torn loyalties, and regret. Wasn’t it Wellington who had said that there was nothing worse than a battle won—except a battle lost? Or something like that.

  Was the record accurate, as far as he had told anyone? Sanitized, of course, robbed of its passion and its humanity, but the elements that mattered to Special Branch were correct and sufficient.

  Then something occurred to him, maybe an anomaly. He stood up, turned the gaslight higher again, and took the papers back out of the envelope. He reread them from beginning to end, including the marginal notes from Buckleigh, his superior then.

  Narraway found what he feared. Something had been added. It was only a word or two, and to anyone who did not know Buckleigh’s turn of phrase, his pedantic grammar, it would be undetectable. The hand looked exactly the same. But the new words added altered the meaning. Once it was only the addition of a question mark that had not been there originally, another time it was a few words that were not grammatically exact, a phrase ending with a preposition. Buckleigh would have included it in the main sentence.

  Who had done that, and when? The why was not obscure to him at all: It was to raise the question of his role in this again, to cause the old ghosts to be awakened. Perhaps this was the deciding factor that had forced Croxdale to remove him from office.

  He read through the papers one more time, just to be certain, then replaced them in the envelope and went upstairs to waken Stoker so he could leave well before dawn.

  By the time he had opened the door Stoker was standing beside the bed. In the light from the landing it was clear that the quilt was barely ruffled. One swift movement of the hand and it was as if he had never been there.

  Stoker looked at Narraway questioningly.

  “Thank you,” Narraway said quietly, the emotion in his voice more naked than he had meant it to be.

  “It told you something,” Stoker observed.

  “Several things,” Narraway admitted. “Someone else has been judiciously editing it since Buckleigh wrote his marginal notes, altering the meaning very slightly, but enough to make a difference.”

  Stoker came out of the room, and Narraway handed him the envelope. Stoker put it under his jacket where it could not be seen, but he did not fold it, or tuck it into his belt so the edges could be damaged. It was a reminder of the risk he was taking in having it at all. He looked very directly at Narraway.

  “Austwick has taken your place, sir.”

  “Already?”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Pitt’s over the channel, and you’ve no friends at Lisson Grove anymore. At least not who’ll risk anything for you. It’s every man for himself,” Stoker said grimly. “I’m afraid there’s no one for sure who’ll help Mr. Pitt either, if he gets cut off or in any kind of trouble.”

  “I know that,” Narraway said with deep unhappiness.

  Stoker hesitated as if he would say something else, then changed his mind. He nodded silently and went down the stairs to the sitting room. He felt his way across the floor without lighting the gas lamps. He opened the French doors and slipped out into the wind and the darkness.

  Narraway locked the door behind him and went back upstairs. He undressed and went to bed but lay awake staring up at the ceiling. He had left the curtains open, and gradually the faintest softening of the spring night made a break in the shadows across the ceiling. The glimmer was almost invisible, just enough to tell him there was movement, light beyond.

  Only a matter of hours had passed since Austwick had come into Narraway’s office. Narraway had thought little enough of it: a nuisance, no more. Then Croxdale had sent for him, and everything had changed. It was like going down a steep flight of stairs, only to find that the last one was not there.

  He lay until daylight, realizing with a pain that amazed him how much of himself he had lost. He was used to getting up whether he had slept or not. Duty was a relentless mistress, but suddenly he knew also that she was a constant companion, loyal, appreciative, and above all, never meaningless.

  Without her he was naked, even to himself. Narraway was accustomed to not particularly being liked. He’d had too much power for that, and he knew too many secrets. But never before had he not been needed.

  CHARLOTTE SAT BY THE fire in the parlor alone in her armchair opposite Pitt’s. It was early evening. The children were in bed. There was no sound except now and then the settling of ashes as the wood burned through. Occasionally she picked up a piece of the mending that was waiting to be done—a couple of pillowcases, a pinafore of Jemima’s. More often she simply stared at the fire. She missed Thomas, but she understood the necessity of his having pursued whoever it was to France. She also missed Gracie, the maid who had lived with them since she was thirteen and now, in her twenties, had finally married the police sergeant who had courted her so diligently for years.

  Charlotte picked up the pinafore and began stitching up the hem where it had fallen, doing it almost as much by feel as by sight. The needle clicked with a light, quick sound against her thimble. Jemima was thirteen and growing tall very quickly. One could see the young woman that she would shortly become. Daniel was nearly three years younger, and desperate to catch up.

  Charlotte smiled as she thought of Gracie, so proud in her white wedding gown, walking down the aisle on Pitt’s arm as he gave her away. Tellman had been desperately nervous waiting at the altar, then so happy he couldn’t control the smile on his face. He must have thought that day would never come.

  But Charlotte missed Gracie’s cheerfulness, her optimism, her candor, and her courage. Gracie never admitted to being beaten in anything. Her replacement, Mrs. Waterman, was middle-aged and dour as a walk in the sleet. She was a decent woman, honest as the day, kept everything immaculately clean, but she seemed to be content only if she was miserable. Perhaps in time she would gain confidence and feel better. It was sincerely to be hoped.

  Charlotte did not hear the doorbell ring and was startled when Mrs. Waterman knocked on the parlor door. The older woman immediately came in, her face pinched with displeasure.

  “There’s a gentleman caller, ma’am. Shall I tell him that Mr. Pitt is not at home?”

  Charlotte was startled, and her first thought was to agree to the polite fiction. Then her curiosity intruded. Surely at this hour it must be someone she knew?

  “Who is it, Mrs. Waterman?”

  “A very dark gentleman, ma’am. Says his name is Narraway,” Mrs. Waterman replied, lowering her voice, although Charlotte could not tell if it were in disgust or confidentiality. She thought the former.

  “Show him in,” she said quickly, putting the mending out of sight on a chair behind the couch. Without thinking, she straightened her skirt and made sure she had no badly straying hairs poking out of her rather loose coiffure. Her hair was a rich dark mahogany color, but it slithered very easily out of control. As the pins dug into her head during the day, she was apt to remove them, with predictable results.

  Mrs. Waterman hesitated.

  “Show him in, please,” Charlotte repeated, a trifle more briskly.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” Mrs. Waterman said with a slight twist of her mouth that was definitely not a smile. She withdrew, and a moment later Narraway came in. When Charlotte had seen him a few days ago he had looked tired and a little concerned, but that was not unusual. This evening he was haggard, his lean face hollow-eyed, his skin almost without color.

  Charlotte felt a terrible fear paralyze her, robbing her of breath. He had come to tell her terrible news of Pitt; even in her own mind she could not think the words.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so late,” he said. His voice was almost normal, but she heard in its slig
ht tremor the effort that it cost him. He stood in front of her. She could see from his eyes that he was hurt; there was an emptiness inside him that had not been there before.

  He must have read her fear. How could he not? It filled the room.

  He smiled thinly. “I have not heard from Thomas, but there is no reason to believe he is other than in excellent health, and probably having better weather than we have,” he said gently. “Although I daresay he finds it tedious hanging about the streets watching people while trying to look as if he is on holiday.”

  She swallowed, her mouth dry, relief making her dizzy. “Then what is it?”

  “Oh dear. Am I so obvious?”

  It was more candid than he had ever been with her, yet it did not feel unnatural.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I’m afraid you look dreadful. Can I get you something? Tea, or whiskey? That is, if we have any. Now that I’ve offered it, I’m not sure we do. The best of it might have gone at Gracie’s wedding.”

  “Oh yes, Gracie.” This time he did smile, and there was real warmth in it, changing his face. “I shall miss seeing her here. She was magnificent, all five feet of her.”

  “Four feet eleven, if we are honest,” Charlotte corrected him with answering warmth. “Believe me, you could not possibly miss her as much as I do.”

  “You do not care for Mrs.… Lemon?”

  “Waterman,” she corrected him. “But Lemon would suit her. I don’t think she approves of me. Perhaps we shall become accustomed to each other one day. She does cook well, and you could eat off the floors when she has scrubbed them.”

  “Thank you, but the table will do well enough,” Narraway observed.

  She sat down on the sofa. Standing so close to him in front of the fire was becoming uncomfortable. “You did not come to inquire after my domestic arrangements. And even if you had known Mrs. Waterman, she is not sufficient to cause the gravity I see in your face. What has happened?” She was holding her hands in her lap, and realized that she was gripping them together hard enough to hurt. She forced herself to let go.

  There was a moment or two with no sound in the room but the flickering of the fire.

  Narraway drew in his breath, then changed his mind.

  “I have been relieved of my position in Special Branch. They say that it is temporary, but they will make it permanent if they can.” He swallowed as if his throat hurt, and turned his head to look at her. “The thing concerning you is that I have no more access to my office at Lisson Grove, or any of the papers that are there. I will no longer know what is happening in France, or anywhere else. My place has been taken by Charles Austwick, who neither likes nor trusts Pitt. The former is a matter of jealousy because Pitt was recruited after him, and has received preferment in fact, if not in rank, that has more than equaled his. The latter is because they have little in common. Austwick comes from the army, Pitt from the police. Pitt has instincts Austwick will never understand, and Pitt’s untidiness irritates Austwick’s orderly, military soul.” He sighed. “And of course Pitt is my protégé … was.”

  Charlotte was so stunned her brain did not absorb what he had said, and yet looking at his face she could not doubt it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  She understood what he was apologizing for. He had made Pitt unpopular by singling him out, preferring him, confiding in him. Now, without Narraway, he would be vulnerable. He had never had any other profession but the police, and then Special Branch. He had been forced out of the police and could not go back there. It was Narraway who had given him a job when he had so desperately needed it. If Special Branch dismissed him, where was there for him to go? There was no other place where he could exercise his very particular skills, and certainly nowhere he could earn a comparable salary.

  They would lose this house in Keppel Street and all the comforts that went with it. Mrs. Waterman would certainly no longer be a problem. Charlotte might well be scrubbing her own floors; indeed, it might even come to scrubbing someone else’s as well. She could imagine it already, see the shame in Thomas’s face for his own failure to provide for her, not the near luxury she had grown up in, nor even the amenities of a working-class domesticity.

  She looked up at Narraway, wondering now about him. She had never considered before if he was dependent upon his salary or not. His speech and his manner, the almost careless elegance of his dress, said that he was born to a certain degree of position, but that did not necessarily mean wealth. Younger sons of even the most aristocratic families did not always inherit a great deal.

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  “How like you,” he replied. “Both to be concerned for me, and to assume that there is something to be done.”

  Now she felt foolish.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked again.

  “To help Pitt? There’s nothing I can do,” he replied. “I don’t know the circumstances, and to interfere blindly might do far more harm.”

  “Not about Thomas, about yourself.” She had not asked him what the charge was, or if he was wholly or partially guilty.

  The ashes settled even further in the fire.

  Several seconds passed before he answered. “I don’t know,” he admitted, his voice hesitant for the first time in her knowledge. “I am not even certain who is at the root of it, although I have at least an idea. It is all … ugly.”

  She had to press onward, for Pitt’s sake. “Is that a reason not to look at it?” she said quietly. “It will not mend itself, will it?”

  He gave the briefest smile. “No. I am not certain that it can be mended at all.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.

  He was startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t have anything better,” she apologized. “But you look uncomfortable standing there in front of the fire. Wouldn’t sitting down with a hot cup of tea be better?”

  He turned slightly to look behind him at the hearth and the mantel. “You mean I am blocking the heat,” he said ruefully.

  “No,” she replied with a smile. “Actually I meant that I am getting a crick in my neck staring up and sideways at you.”

  For a moment the pain in his face softened. “Thank you, but I would prefer not to disturb Mrs.… whatever her name is. I can sit down without tea, unnatural as that may seem.”

  “Waterman,” she supplied.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I was going to make it myself, provided that she would allow me into the kitchen. She doesn’t approve. The ladies she is accustomed to working for do not even know where the kitchen is. Although how I could lose it in a house this size, I have no idea.”

  “She has come down in the world,” Narraway observed. “It can happen to the best of us.”

  She watched as he sat down, elegantly as always, crossing his legs and leaning back as if he were comfortable.

  “I think it may concern an old case in Ireland,” he began, at first meeting her eyes, then looking down awkwardly. “At the moment it is to do with the death of a present-day informant there, because the money I paid did not reach him in time to flee those he had … betrayed.” He said the word crisply and clearly, as if deliberately exploring a wound: his own, not someone else’s. “I did it obliquely, so it could not be traced back to Special Branch. If it had been it would have cost him his life immediately.”

  She hesitated, seeking the right words, but watching his face, she had no impression that he was being deliberately obscure. She waited. There was silence beyond the room, no sound of the children asleep upstairs, or of Mrs. Waterman, who was presumably still in the kitchen. She would not retire to her room with a visitor still in the house.

  “My attempts to hide its source make it impossible to trace what actually happened to it,” Narraway continued. “To the superficial investigation, it looks as if I took it myself.”

  He was watching her now, but not openly.

  “You have enemies,” she said
.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I have. No doubt many. I thought I had guarded against the possibility of them injuring me. It seems I overlooked something of importance.”

  “Or someone is an enemy whom you did not suspect,” she amended.

  “That is possible,” he agreed. “I think it is more likely that an old enemy has gained a power that I did not foresee.”

  “You have someone in mind?” She leaned forward a little. The question was intrusive, but she had to know. Pitt was in France, relying on Narraway to back him up. He would have no idea Narraway no longer held any office.

  “Yes.” The answer seemed to be difficult for him.

  Again she waited.

  He leaned forward and put a fresh log on the fire. “It’s an old case. It all happened more than twenty years ago.” He had to clear his throat before he went on. “They’re all dead now, except one.”

  She had no idea what he was referring to, and yet the past seemed to be in the room with them.

  “But one is alive?” she probed. “Do you know, or are you guessing?”

  “I know Kate and Sean are dead,” he said so quietly she had to strain to hear him. “I imagine Cormac is still alive. He would be barely sixty.”

  “Why would he wait this long?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “But you believe he hates you enough to lie, to plan and connive to ruin you?” she insisted.

  “Yes. I have no doubt of that. He has cause.”

  She realized with surprise, and pity, that he was ashamed of his part in whatever had happened.

  “So what will you do?” she asked again. “You have to fight. Nurse your wound for a few hours, then gather yourself together and think what you wish to do.”

  Now he smiled, showing a natural humor she had not seen in him before. “Is that how you speak to your children when they fall over and skin their knees?” he asked. “Quick sympathy, a hug, and then briskly get back up again? I haven’t fallen off a horse, Charlotte. I have fallen from grace, and I know of nothing to get me back up again.”