by Anne Perry
Bridget continued staring at him, as if willing him to look back at her.
On the stage the drama heightened. Charlotte was only dimly aware of it, for her emotional concentration was upon the audience. John Tyrone was still watching the players. At last the man Bridget was watching turned and looked back up at the boxes. It was Phelim O’Conor. As soon as she saw his profile Charlotte knew him. He remained with his eyes fixed on Bridget, his face unreadable.
Bridget looked away just as her husband became aware of her again, and switched his attention from the stage. They spoke to each other briefly.
In the audience below, O’Conor turned back to the stage. His neck was stiff, his head unmoving.
During the second intermission, McDaid took Charlotte back outside to the bar where once more refreshments were liberally served. The conversation buzzed about the play. Was it well performed? Was it true to the intention of the author? Had the main actor misinterpreted his role?
Charlotte listened, trying to fix her expression in an attitude of intelligent observation. But really she was watching to see whom else she recognized among those queueing for drinks or talking excitedly to people they knew. All of them were strangers to her, and yet in a way they were familiar. Many were so like those she had known before her marriage that she half expected them to recognize her. It was an odd feeling, pleasant and nostalgic, even though she would have changed nothing of her present life.
“Are you enjoying the play?” McDaid asked her. They drifted toward the bar counter, where Cormac O’Neil had a glass of whiskey in his hand.
“I am enjoying the whole experience,” she replied. “I am most grateful that you brought me. I could not have come alone, nor would I have found it half so pleasant.”
“I am delighted you enjoy it,” McDaid replied with a smile. “I was not sure that you would. The play ends with a superb climax, all very dark and dreadful. You won’t understand much of it at all.”
“Is that the purpose of it?” she asked, looking from McDaid to O’Neil and back again. “To puzzle us all so much that we will be obliged to spend weeks or months trying to work out what it really means? Perhaps we will come up with half a dozen different possibilities?”
For a moment there was surprise and admiration in McDaid’s eyes; then he masked it and the slightly bantering tone returned. “I think perhaps you overrate us, at least this time. I rather believe the playwright himself has no such subtle purpose in mind.”
“What meanings did you suppose?” O’Neil asked softly.
“Oh, ask me in a month’s time, Mr. O’Neil,” she said casually. “There is anger in it, of course. Anyone can see that. There seems to me also to be a sense of predestination, as if we all have little choice, and birth determines our reactions. I dislike that. I don’t wish to feel so … controlled by fate.”
“You are English. You like to imagine you are the masters of history. In Ireland we have learned that history masters us,” he responded. The bitterness in his tone was laced with irony and laughter, but the pain was real.
It was on her tongue to contradict him, until she realized her opportunity. “Really? If I understand the play rightly, it is about a certain inevitability in love and betrayal that is quite universal—a sort of darker and older Romeo and Juliet.”
O’Neil’s face tightened, and even in the lamplight of the crowded room Charlotte could see his color pale. “Is that what you see?” His voice was thick, almost choking on the words. “You romanticize, Mrs. Pitt.” Now the bitterness in him was overwhelming. She was as aware of it as if he had touched her physically.
“Do I?” she asked him, moving aside to allow a couple arm in arm to pass by. In so doing she deliberately stepped close to O’Neil, so he could not leave without pushing her aside. “What harder realities should I see? Rivalry between opposing sides, families divided, a love that cannot be fulfilled, betrayal and death? I don’t think I really find that romantic, except for us as we sit in the audience watching. For the people involved it must be anything but.”
He stared at her, his eyes hollow with a kind of black despair. She could believe very easily that Narraway was right, and O’Neil had nursed a hatred for twenty years, until fate had given him a way to avenge it. But what was it that had changed?
“And what are you, Mrs. Pitt?” he asked, standing close to her and speaking so McDaid almost certainly would not hear him. “Audience or player? Are you here to watch the blood and tears of Ireland, or to meddle in them, like your friend Narraway?”
She was stunned. So he did know that she was linked to Narraway. The hushed anger with which he now confronted her seemed on the verge of boiling over at last. Surely to feign innocence would be ridiculous?
“I would like to be a deus ex machina,” she replied. “But I imagine that’s impossible.”
“God in the machine?” he said with an angry shrug. “You want to descend at the last act and arrange an impossible ending that solves it all? How very English. And how absurd, and supremely arrogant. You are twenty years too late. Tell Victor that, when you see him. There’s nothing left to mend anymore.” He turned away before she could answer again, pushing past her and spilling what was left of his whiskey as he bumped into a broad man in a blue coat. The moment after, he was gone.
Charlotte was aware of McDaid next to her, and a certain air of discomfort about him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. There was no point in trying to explain. “I allowed myself to express my opinions too freely.”
He bit his lip. “You couldn’t know it, but the subject of Irish freedom, and traitors to the cause, is painfully close to O’Neil. It was through his family that our great plan was betrayed twenty years ago.” He winced. “We never knew for sure by whom. Sean O’Neil murdered his wife, Kate, and was hanged for it. Even though it was because she was the one who told the English our plans, some thought it was because Sean found her with another man. Either way, we failed again, and the bitterness still lasts.”
“It was an uprising that you intended?” she asked quietly. She heard the chatter around her.
“Of course,” McDaid replied flatly. “Home Rule was in the very air we breathed then. We could have been ourselves, without the weight of England around our necks.”
“Is that how you see it?” She turned as she spoke and looked at him, searching his face.
His expression softened. He smiled back at her, rueful and a little self-deprecating. “I did at the time. Seeing Cormac brings it back. But I’m cooler-headed now. There are better places to put one’s energy—causes less narrow.” She was aware of the color and whisper of fabric around them, silk against silk. They were surrounded by people in one of the most interesting capital cities in the world, come out to an evening at the theater. Some of them, at least, were also men and women who saw themselves living under a foreign oppression in their own land, and some of them at least were willing to kill and to die to throw it off. She looked just like them, cast of feature, tone of skin and hair, and yet she was not; she was different in heart and mind.
“What causes?” she asked with interest.
His smile widened, as if to brush it aside. “Social injustices, old-fashioned laws to reform,” he replied. “Greater equality. Exactly the same as, no doubt, you fight for at home. I hear there are some great women in London battling for all manner of things. Perhaps one day you will tell me about some of them?” He made it a question, as if he were interested enough to require an answer.
“Of course,” she said lightly, trying to master facts in her mind so she could answer sensibly, if the necessity arose.
He took her arm as people milled around her, returning to their seats, courteous, hospitable, full of dry wit and a passion for life. How easy, and dangerous, it would be for her to forget that she did not belong here.
NARRAWAY WAS UNCERTAIN WHAT Charlotte would learn at the theater. As he walked along Arran Quay, on the north bank of the Liffey, his head down into the warm, dam
p breeze off the water, he was afraid that she would discover a few things about him that he would very much rather she not know, but he knew no way to help that.
He smiled bitterly as he pictured her probing relentlessly for the facts behind the pain. Would she be disillusioned to hear his part in it all? Or was that his vanity, his own feelings—that she cared enough for him that disillusion was even possible, let alone something that would wound her?
He would never forget the days after Kate’s death. Worst was the morning they hanged Sean. The brutality and the grief of that had cast a chill over all the years since.
But he did not want Charlotte’s grief for him, particularly if it was based on a misconception of who he was.
He laughed at himself; it was just a faint sound, almost drowned by his quick footsteps along the stones of the quayside. Why, at this time in his life, did he care so much for the opinion of another man’s wife?
He forced his attention to where he was going, and why. If he did not learn who had diverted the money meant for Mulhare, anything else he learned about O’Neil was pointless. Someone in Lisson Grove had been involved. He blamed none of the Irish. They were fighting for their own cause, and at times he even sympathized with it. But the man in Special Branch who had done this had betrayed his own people, and that was different. He wanted to know who it was, and prove it. The damage he could cause would have no boundary. If he hated England enough to plan and execute a way of disgracing Narraway, then what else might he do? Was his real purpose to replace him? This whole business of Mulhare might be no more than a means to that end. But was it simply ambition, or was there another, darker purpose behind it as well?
Without realizing it he increased his pace, moving so softly he almost passed the alley he was looking for. He turned and fumbled in the dark. He had to feel his way along one of the walls. Third door. He knocked sharply, a quick rhythm.
He had brought Charlotte because he wanted to, but she had her own compelling reasons to be here. If he was right, that there was a traitor in Lisson Grove, then one of the first things that person would do would be to get rid of Pitt. If Pitt was fortunate, he would simply be dismissed. There were much worse possibilities.
The door opened. He was let into a small, extremely stuffy office piled high with ledgers, account books, and sheaves of loose papers. A striped cat had claimed itself a space in front of the hearth and did not stir when Narraway came in and took a seat on a chair opposite the cluttered desk.
O’Casey sat in the chair behind it, his bald head gleaming in the gaslight.
“Well?” Narraway asked, masking his eagerness as closely as he could.
O’Casey hesitated.
Narraway considered threatening him. He still had power, albeit illegal now. He drew in his breath. Then he looked at O’Casey’s face again and changed his mind. He had few enough friends; he could not afford to alienate any of them.
“So what is it you expect of me, then?” O’Casey asked, cocking his head a little to one side. “I’ll not help you, not more than I owe. For old times’ sake. And that’s little enough.”
“I know,” Narraway agreed. There were wounds and debts between them, some still unpaid. “I need to know what’s changed for Cormac O’Neil—”
“For God’s sake, leave the poor man alone! Have you not already taken all he has?” O’Casey exclaimed. “You’ll not be after the child, will you?”
“The child?” For a moment Narraway was at a loss. Then memory flooded back. Kate’s daughter by Sean. She had been only a child, six or seven years old when her parents died. “Did Cormac raise her?” he asked.
“A little girl?” O’Casey squinted at him contemptuously. “Of course he didn’t, you fool. And what would Cormac O’Neil do with a six-year-old girl, then? Some cousin of Kate’s took her, Maureen, I think her name was. She and her husband. Raised her as their own.”
Narraway felt a stab of pity for the child—Kate’s child. That should never have happened.
“But she knows who she is?” he said aloud.
“Of course. Cormac would have told her, if no one else.” O’Casey lifted one shoulder slightly. “Although, of course, it might not be the truth as you know it, poor child. There are things better left unsaid.”
Narraway felt chilled. He had not thought of Kate’s daughter.
Looking back, even weeks afterward, he had known that Kate had crossed sides because she believed it was a doomed rising, and more Irishmen would die in it than English, far more. But she knew Sean as well. He had been willing enough to use her beauty to shame Narraway, even lead him to his death, but in his wildest imagination he had never considered that she might give herself willingly to Narraway or, worse, care for him.
And when she did, it was beyond Sean’s mind or heart to forgive. He had said he killed her for Ireland, but Narraway knew it was for himself, just as in the end Sean knew it too.
And Cormac? He had loved Kate also. Did he feel an Irishman bested in deviousness by an Englishman, in a fight where no one was fair? Or a man betrayed by a woman he wanted and could never have: his brother’s wife, who had sided with the enemy—for her own reasons, political or personal?
What had he told Talulla?
Could it possibly be anything new in the last few months? And if it were, how could she have moved the money from Mulhare’s account back to Narraway’s, using some traitor in Lisson Grove? Not by herself. Then with whom?
“Who betrayed Mulhare?” he asked O’Casey.
“No idea,” O’Casey answered. “And if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. A man who’ll sell his own people deserves to have his thirty pieces of silver slip out of his hands. Deserves to have it put in a bag o’ lead around his neck, before they throw him into Dublin Bay.”
Narraway rose to his feet. The cat by the fire stretched out and then curled up on the other side.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t come back,” O’Casey replied. “I’ll not harm you, but I’ll not help you either.”
“I know,” Narraway replied.
CHARLOTTE DID NOT HAVE the opportunity to speak at any length with Narraway after returning from the theater that night. She had hoped to tell him all that she had seen and learned there the following morning, but when they met for breakfast, the presence of others eating at nearby tables kept her from revealing what had transpired. Narraway said he had business to attend to, that he had heard from Dolina Pearse that Charlotte would be most welcome to attend the opening of an art exhibition, if she cared to, and to take tea with Dolina and her friends afterward. He had accepted on her behalf.
“Thank you,” she said a little coolly.
He caught the intonation, and smiled. “Did you wish to decline?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
She looked at his dark face. To have taken the slightest notice of his pride now would be idiotic. He was facing disgrace, and further, his own downfall would destroy his friend’s life. If he failed to exonerate himself, Pitt too might lose all the worldly possessions he had; cutting most deeply would be the loss of his ability to support his family, most particularly the wife who had stepped down so far from financial and social comfort to marry him.
“No, of course not,” she replied, smiling at Narraway. “I am just a little nervous about it. I met some of them at Bridget Tyrone’s party, and I am not sure that the encounter was entirely amicable.”
“I can imagine,” he said wryly. “But I know you, and I know something of Dolina. Tea should be interesting. And you’ll like the art. It is impressionist, I think.” He rose from the table.
“Victor!” She used his name for the first time without thinking, until she saw his face, the quickening, the sudden vulnerability. She wanted to apologize, but that would only make it worse. She forced herself to smile up at him where he stood, half turned to leave. He was naturally elegant; his jacket perfectly cut, his cravat tied with care.
She hardly knew how to begin, and yet certain necessity c
ompelled her.
He was waiting.
“If I am to go to the exhibition I would like to purchase a new blouse.” She felt the flush of embarrassment hot in her face. “I did not bring …”
“Of course,” he said quickly. “We will go as soon as you have finished your breakfast. Perhaps we should get two. You cannot be seen in precisely the same costume at every function. Will you be ready in half an hour?” He glanced at the clock on the mantel.
“Good heavens! I could have luncheon as well in that time. I shall be ready in ten minutes,” she exclaimed.
“Really? Then I shall meet you at the front door.” He looked surprised, and quite definitely pleased.
THEY WALKED PERHAPS THREE hundred yards then quite easily found a hansom to take them into the middle of the city. Narraway seemed to know exactly where he was going and stopped at the entrance to a very elegant couturier.
Charlotte imagined the prices, and knew that they would be beyond her budget. Surely Narraway must know what Pitt earned? Why was he bringing her here?
He opened the door for her and held it.
She stood where she was. “May we please go somewhere a little less expensive? I think this is beyond what I should spend, particularly on something I may not wear very often.”
He looked surprised.
“Perhaps you have never bought a woman’s blouse before,” she said a little tartly, humiliation making her tongue sharp. “They can be costly.”
“I wasn’t proposing that you should buy it,” he replied. “It is necessary in pursuit of my business, not yours. It is rightly my responsibility.”
“Mine also …,” she argued.
“May we discuss it inside?” he asked. “We are drawing attention to ourselves standing in the doorway.”
She moved inside quickly, angry with both him and herself. She should have foreseen this situation and avoided it somehow.