by Anne Perry
It was as if he had last seen the people only a few days ago. He could remember the smell of the peat fire in the room where he and Kate had talked long into the night about the planned uprising. He could almost bring back the words he had used to persuade her it could only fail, and bring more death and more bitterness with it.
He could bring back with exactness that still hurt the look in her eyes, the lamplight on her skin, the sound of her voice when she spoke his name – and the guilt.
Even with his eyes open, in his mind he could see Cormac O’Neil’s fury, and then his grief. He understood it. They all had reason to hate Narraway. But for all its vividness, it had been twenty years ago.
He looked up at Stoker. ‘Why these?’ he asked. ‘This case is old, it’s finished.’
‘The Irish troubles are never finished,’ Stoker said simply.
‘Our more urgent problem is here now,’ Narraway replied. ‘And possibly in Europe.’
‘Socialists?’ Stoker said drily. ‘They’re always grumbling on.’
‘It’s a lot more than that,’ Narraway told him. ‘They’re fanatic. It’s the new religion, with all the fire and evangelism of a holy cause. And just like Christianity in its infancy, it has its apostles and its dogma – and its splinter groups, quarrels over what is the true faith.’
Stoker looked puzzled, as if this were all true but irrelevant.
‘The point is . . .’ Narraway said sharply, ‘. . . they each consider the others to be heretics. They fight each other as much as they fight anyone else.’
‘Thank God,’ Stoker said with feeling.
‘So when we see disciples of different factions meeting each other in secret, working together, then we know that it is something damned big that has healed the rifts, temporarily.’ Narraway heard the edge in his own voice, and saw the sudden understanding in Stoker’s eyes.
Stoker let out his breath slowly.
‘How close are we to knowing what they’re planning, sir?’
‘I don’t know,’ Narraway admitted. ‘It all rests on Pitt now.’
‘And you,’ Stoker said softly. ‘We’ve got to sort this money thing out, sir, and get you back.’
Narraway drew in his breath to answer, and felt a sudden wave of conviction so profound – a helplessness, a loss, an awareness of fear – that no words were adequate.
Stoker held out the papers he had brought. ‘We can’t afford to wait,’ he said urgently. ‘I looked through everything I could that had to do with informants, money and Ireland, trying to work out who’s behind this. This case seemed the most likely. Also I’m pretty sure someone else has had this out lately.’
‘Why?’
‘Just the way it was put back,’ Stoker answered.
‘Untidy?’
‘No, the opposite. Very neat indeed.’
Now Narraway was afraid for Stoker. He would lose his job for this; in fact, if he were caught, he could even be charged with treason himself. All sorts of possibilities raced through his head, including that of a deliberate trap. Even if it were, he wanted to read the pages, but not with Stoker present. If this were the act of personal loyalty it seemed, or even loyalty to the truth, he did not want Stoker to take such a risk. It would be better for both of them for him not to be caught.
‘Where did you get them?’ he asked.
Stoker looked at him with a very slight smile. ‘Better you don’t know, sir.’
Narraway smiled back. ‘Then I can’t tell,’ he agreed wryly.
Stoker nodded. ‘That too, sir,’
There was something about Stoker calling him ‘sir’ that was stupidly pleasing, as if he were still who he had been this morning. Did he value the respect so much? How pathetic!
He swallowed hard and drew in his breath. ‘Leave them with me. Go home, where everyone expects you to be. Come back for them when it’s safe.’
‘Sorry, sir, but they have to be back by dawn,’ Stoker replied. ‘In fact, the sooner the better.’
‘It will take me all night to read these and make my own notes,’ Narraway argued, but he knew as he said it that Stoker was right. To have them absent from Lisson Grove even for one day was too dangerous. Then they could never be returned. Anyone with two wits to rub together would look to Narraway for them, and then to whoever had brought them to him. He had no right to jeopardise Stoker’s life with such stupidity. It was poor thanks for his loyalty, if that was what it was. Perhaps it wasn’t – he might have his own entirely different reasons – but Narraway clung to the thought that it was loyalty. He needed it to be that, and a belief in the truth.
‘I’ll have them read before dawn,’ he promised. ‘Three o’clock. You can return then and I’ll give them to you. You can be at the Grove before light, and away again. Or you can go and sleep in my spare room, if you prefer. It would be wiser. No chance then of being caught in the street.’
Stoker did not move.
‘I’ll stay here, sir. I’m pretty good at not being seen, but no risk at all is better. Wouldn’t do if I couldn’t get back.’
Narraway nodded. So Stoker understood the risk he was taking. Perhaps it was as well. Never underestimate the enemy. He himself was only just beginning to taste the power of this one.
‘Up the stairs, across the landing to the left,’ he said aloud. ‘Help yourself to anything you need.’
Stoker thanked him and left, closing the door softly.
Narraway turned up the gas a little more brightly, then sat down in the big armchair by the fireplace and began to read.
The first few pages were about the Mulhare case: the fact that a large sum of money had been promised Mulhare if he co-operated. It was paid not as reward so much as a means for him to leave Ireland and go, not as might be expected, to America, but to Southern France, a less likely place for his enemies to seek him.
Mulhare had not received the money, according to Austwick. Instead he had remained in Ireland, and been killed. Narraway still did not know exactly what had gone wrong. He had paid the money out. At least he had completed all the paperwork to have it paid, and had checked that it had gone. Then, it now seemed, inexplicably, it had reappeared. Someone had evidently intervened so that the end result had been the exact opposite from what Narraway had instructed, and Mulhare had been murdered in the very way he’d feared.
The papers also referred to a twenty-year-old case that he would like to have forgotten. It was at a time when the passion and the violence were even higher than usual.
Charles Stewart Parnell had just been elected to Parliament. He was a man of fire and eloquence, a highly active member in the council of the Irish Home Rule League, and everything in his life was dedicated to that cause. There was a sudden resurgence of hope that Ireland might at last throw off the yoke of domination and govern itself again. The horrors of the great potato famine could be put behind them. Freedom beckoned.
Of course, 1875 was before Narraway had become head of Special Branch. He was simply an agent in the field at that time, in his mid-thirties; wiry, strong, quick-thinking and with a considerable charm. With his black hair and almost black eyes, his dry wit, he could easily have passed for an Irishman himself. When that assumption was made, as it was, he did not deny it.
One of the leaders of the Irish cause then had been a man called Cormac O’Neil. He had a dark, brooding nature, like an autumn landscape, full of sudden shadows, storms on the horizon. He loved history, especially that handed down by word of mouth, or immortalised in old songs. He knew half of it was probably invented, but he believed in the emotional truths, the remembered grief. He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have.
Narraway thought of that wryly, remembering still, with regret and guilt, Cormac’s brother, Sean, and more vividly, Kate. Beautiful Kate, so fiercely alive, so brave, so quick to see reason, so blind to the wounded and dangerous emotions of others.
In the silence of this comfortable London room, with its very English mementoes, Ireland seemed like
the other side of the world. Kate was dead, so was Sean. Narraway had won and their planned uprising had failed without bloodshed on either side. There had been nothing spectacular, just a quiet fading, cold as a winter dusk. That was Narraway’s victory; nobody even knew it had happened.
Even Charles Stewart Parnell was dead now too, just three and a half years ago, October 1891, of a heart attack. But it was his wild, disastrous affair with Mrs O’Shea that had brought about his fall.
And Home Rule for Ireland was still only a dream, and the anger remained.
Narraway shivered here in his warm, familiar sitting room with the last of the embers still glowing, the pictures of trees on the wall, and the gaslamp shedding a golden light around him. The chill was inside, beyond the reach of any physical ease, perhaps of any words either, any thoughts or regrets now.
Was Cormac O’Neil still alive? There was no reason why he should not be. He would barely be sixty, perhaps less. If he were, he could be the one behind this. God knew, after the failed uprising, and Sean and Kate’s deaths, he had cause enough to hate Narraway, more than any other man on earth.
But why wait twenty years to do it? Narraway could have died of accident or natural causes any time between then and now, and robbed Cormac of his revenge.
Could something have prevented him in the meantime? A debilitating illness? Not twenty years long. Time in prison? Surely Narraway would have heard of anything serious enough for a term so long. And even from prison there was communication.
Perhaps this case had nothing to do with the past. Or could it be that Cormac really understood that Narraway was only fighting for his own country, his own beliefs, as they all were, and this vengeance was not personal so much as against England? Perhaps this was the time when Special Branch would be most vulnerable if Narraway were taken from it and his work discredited? The present stakes for Cormac might be incidental, only an exquisite touch that added to the flavour. Perhaps it had to do with the socialist revolution planned by the European anarchist reformers who would sweep away the old order, with its corruption and inequality, the only way they believed would work, with violence.
He closed the papers and put them back in the envelope Stoker had brought, then sat quietly in the dark and thought about it.
The old memories returned easily to his mind. He was walking again with Kate in the autumn stillness, fallen leaves, red and yellow, frozen and crunching under their feet. She had no gloves and he had lent her his. He could feel his hands ache with the cold at the memory. She had laughed at him for it, smiling, eyes bright, all the while making bitter jokes about warming the hands of Ireland with English wool.
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. He had not replied. Even thirty years on, the ruin of the famine still scarred the land. Nothing he could say would heal it, or excuse 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? Sanitised, 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. He had not studied them the first time he read it because he knew exactly what they said, and had no desire to be reminded. His own lies had been believed too easily, even if they were largely lies of omission. But then the operation had been on Buckleigh’s orders, so he had to accept it. Morally he was also to blame.
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, only slightly, but enough to cast doubt on Buckleigh’s acceptance of Narraway’s account. 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 into 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. Doubts were enough, if they were sufficiently serious. One did not wait for proof that might never come.
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.
Narraway knocked on the spare-room door and heard Stoker’s voice answer him. 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 the account 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, you’ve no friends at Lisson Grove any more. 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 over the fact that he could no longer protect Pitt also from the envy or distrust of those who were part of the Establishment before Narraway took him on.
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 gaslamps. 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, and finding the last step was not there. You were plunged into a void, arms flailing, and there was nothing at all to catch on to.
He lay until daylight, realising 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, above all never meaningless.
Without her he was naked, even to himself, let alone to others. He was accustomed to being not particularly liked. He had had too much power for that, and he knew too many
secrets. But he had never before not been needed.
Chapter Three
Charlotte sat by the fire in the parlour alone, 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 Pitt, 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 took up the pinafore and began stitching 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 in her 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 total candour, 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.