Betrayal at Lisson Grove
Page 13
She introduced her fictitious grandmother again.
‘Really?’ Talulla Lawless said with surprise, raising her thin, black eyebrows as soon as Charlotte mentioned the name, now as determined to be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. She would gain nothing by timidity, and time was short. ‘You sound fond of her,’ Talulla continued. She was a slender woman, almost bony, but with marvellous eyes, wide and bright, and of a shade neither blue nor green.
Charlotte thought of the only grandmother she knew, and found impossibly cantankerous. ‘She told me wonderful stories of Dublin society, of the intrigue,’ she lied confidently. ‘I dare say they were a little exaggerated, but there was a truth in them of the heart, even if events were a trifle inaccurate in the retelling.’
Talulla exchanged a brief glance with a fair-haired man called Phelim O’Conor, but it was so quick that Charlotte barely saw it.
‘Am I mistaken?’ Charlotte asked apologetically.
‘Oh, no,’ Talulla assured her. ‘That would be long ago, no doubt?’
Charlotte swallowed. ‘Yes, about twenty years, I think. There was a cousin she wrote to often, or it maybe it was her cousin’s wife. A very beautiful woman, so my grandmama said.’ She tried rapidly to calculate the age Kate O’Neil would be were she still alive. ‘Perhaps a second cousin,’ she amended. That would allow for a considerable variation.
‘Twenty years ago,’ Phelim O’Connor said slowly. ‘A lot of trouble then. But you wouldn’t be knowing that – in London. Might have seemed romantic to your grandmother, Charles Stewart Parnell, and all that. God rest his soul. Other people’s griefs can be like that.’ His face was smooth, almost innocent, but there was a darkness in his voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Charlotte said quietly. ‘I didn’t mean to touch on something painful. Do you think perhaps I shouldn’t ask?’ She looked from Phelim to Talulla, and back again.
He gave a very slight shrug. ‘No doubt you’ll hear anyway. If your cousin’s wife was Kate O’Neil, she’s dead now, God forgive her . . .’
‘How can you say that?’ Talulla spat the words between her teeth, the muscles in her thin jaw clenched tight. ‘Twenty years is nothing! The blink of an eye in the history of Ireland’s sorrows.’
Charlotte tried to look totally puzzled, and guilty. Actually she was beginning to be a little afraid. The rage in Talulla was like the touch on an exposed nerve.
‘Because there’s been new blood, and new tears since then,’ Phelim answered, speaking to Talulla, not Charlotte. ‘And new issues to address.’ He left the sentence hanging as if there were more to say.
Good manners might have dictated that Charlotte apologise again and withdraw, leaving them to deal with the memories in their own way, but she thought of Pitt in France, alone, trusting in Narraway to back him up. She feared there were only Narraway’s enemies in Lisson Grove now, people who might so easily be Pitt’s enemies too. Good manners were a luxury for another time.
‘Is there some tragedy my grandmother knew nothing of?’ she asked innocently. ‘I’m sorry if I have woken an old bereavement, or injustice. I certainly did not mean to. I’m so sorry.’
Talulla looked at her with undisguised harshness, a slight flush in her sallow cheeks. ‘If your grandmother’s cousin was Kate O’Neil, she trusted an Englishman, an agent of the Queen’s government who courted her, flattered her into telling him her own people’s secrets, then betrayed her to be murdered by those whose trust she gave away.’
O’Conor winced. ‘I dare say she loved him. We can all be fools for love,’ he said wryly.
‘I dare say she did!’ Talulla snarled. ‘But that son of a whore never loved her, and with half a drop of loyalty in her blood she’d have known that. She’d have won his secrets, then put a knife in his belly. He might have been able to charm the fish out of the sea, but he was her people’s enemy, and she knew that. She got what she deserved.’ She turned and moved away sharply, her dark head high and stiff, her back ramrod straight, and she made no attempt to offer even a glance backward.
‘You’ll have to forgive Talulla,’ O’Conor said ruefully. ‘Anyone would think she’d loved the man herself, and it was twenty years ago. I must remember never to flirt with her. If she fell for my charm I might wake up dead of it.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that it’d be likely, God help me!’ He did not add anything more, but his expression said all the rest.
Then with a sudden smile, like spring sun through the drifting rain, he told her about the place where he had been born and the little town to the north where he had grown up and his first visit to Dublin when he had been six.
‘I thought it was the grandest place I’d ever seen,’ he said with a smile. ‘Street after street of buildings, each one fit to be the palace of a king. And some so wide it was a journey just to cross from one side to another.’
Suddenly Talulla’s hatred was no more than a lapse in manners, and was easily forgotten as someone accidentally knocking your elbow and spilling your wine.
But she did not forget it. O’Conor’s sudden charm had been as much a desire to hide something he was ashamed to expose in front of a stranger, as his own clear love for the lyrical voice of his countrymen. She was certain that he would find Talulla afterwards, and when they were alone, berate her for allowing a foreigner, and an Englishwoman at that, to see a part of their history that should have been kept private. It was like a family airing soiled linen where any passer-by could see it, and read their secrets.
The party continued. The food was excellent, the wine flowed generously. There was laughter, sharp and poignant wit, even music as the evening approached midnight. But Charlotte did not forget the emotion she had seen, and the hatred.
She rode home in the carriage with Fiachra McDaid, and in spite of his gentle enquiries, she said nothing except how much she had enjoyed the hospitality.
‘And did anyone know your cousin?’ he asked. ‘Dublin’s a small town, when it comes to it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she answered easily. ‘But I may find trace of her later. O’Neil is not a rare name. And anyway, it doesn’t matter very much.’
‘Now there’s something I doubt our friend Victor would agree with,’ he said candidly. ‘I had the notion it mattered to him rather a lot. Was I wrong, then, do you suppose?’
For the first time in the evening she spoke the absolute truth. ‘I think maybe you know him a great deal better than I do, Mr McDaid. We have met only in one set of circumstances, and that does not give a very complete picture of a person, do you think?’
In the darkness inside the carriage she could not read his expression.
‘And yet I have the distinct idea that he is fond of you, Mrs Pitt,’ McDaid replied. ‘Am I wrong in that too, do you suppose?’
‘I don’t do much supposing, Mr McDaid . . . at least not aloud,’ she said. The certainty was increasing inside her that it was Narraway of whom Talulla had been speaking when she referred to Kate O’Neil’s betrayal – both of her country, and of her husband – because she had loved a man who had used her, and who then allowed her to be murdered for it. Then she remembered what Phelim O’Conor had said of Narraway, and she wondered how much she really knew him.
There must be more to the story; there always was. But would it make the tragedy and the ugliness of it any better? Narraway had said Cormac O’Neil had sought revenge. The only mystery was why he had waited twenty years for it.
Pitt had believed in Narraway; Charlotte knew that without doubt. But she also knew that Pitt thought well of most people, even if he accepted that they were complex, capable of cowardice, greed and violence. But had he ever understood any of the darkness within Narraway, the human beneath the fighter against his country’s enemies? They were so different. Narraway was subtle, where Pitt was instinctive. He understood people because he could imagine himself in their place. He understood weakness, fear; he had felt need and knew how powerful it could be.
But he also understood gratitude. Narraway h
ad offered him dignity, purpose and a means to feed his family when he had desperately needed it. He would never forget that.
Was he also just a little naïve?
She remembered with a smile how disillusioned he had been when he had discovered the shabby behaviour of the Prince of Wales. She had felt his shame for a man he thought should have been better. He had believed more in the honour of his calling than the man did himself. She loved Pitt intensely for that, even in the moment she understood it.
Narraway would never have been misled; he would have expected roughly what he eventually found. He might have been disappointed, but he would not have been hurt.
Had he ever been hurt?
Could he have loved Kate O’Neil, and still used her? Not as Charlotte understood love.
But then perhaps Narraway always put duty first. Maybe he was feeling a deep and insuperable pain for the first time, because he was robbed of the one thing he valued: his work, in which his identity was so bound up.
Why on earth was she riding through the dark streets of a strange city, with a man she had never seen before tonight, taking absurd risks, telling lies, in order to help a man of whom she knew so little? Why did she ache with a loss for him?
Because she imagined how she would feel if he were like her – and he was not. She imagined he cared about her, because she had seen it in his face in unguarded moments. It was probably loneliness she saw, an instant of lingering for a love he would only find an encumbrance if he actually had it.
‘I hear Talulla Lawless gave you a little display of her temper,’ McDaid interrupted her thoughts. ‘I’m sorry for that. Her wounds are deep, and she sees no need to hide them. But it is hardly your fault. But then there are always casualties of war, the innocent often as much as the guilty.’
She turned to look at his face in the momentary light of a passing carriage lamp. His eyes were bright, his mouth twisted in a sad little smile. Then the darkness shadowed him again and she was aware of him only as a soft voice, a presence beside her, the smell of fabric and a faint sharpness of tobacco.
‘Of course,’ she agreed very quietly.
They reached Molesworth Street and the carriage stopped.
‘Thank you, Mr McDaid,’ she said with perfect composure. ‘It was most gracious of you to have me invited, and to accompany me. Dublin’s hospitality is all that has been said of it, and believe me, that is high praise.’
‘We have just begun,’ he replied warmly. ‘Give Victor my regards, and tell him we shall continue. I won’t rest until you think this is the fairest city on earth, and the Irish the best people. Which of course we are, in spite of our passion and our troubles. You can’t hate us, you know.’ He said it with a smile that was wide and bright in the lamplight.
‘Not the way you hate us, anyway,’ she agreed gently. ‘But then we have no cause. Good night, Mr McDaid.’
Chapter Five
Charlotte faced Narraway across the breakfast table in Mrs Hogan’s quiet house the next morning, her mind still in conflict as to what she would say to him. She needed far more time to weigh what she had heard, although even that might not help.
‘Very enjoyable,’ she answered his enquiry as to the previous evening. And she realised with surprise how much that was true. It was a long time since she had been at a party of such ease and sophistication. Although this was Dublin, not London, society was not very different.
There were no other guests in the dining room this late in the morning. Most of the other tables had already been set with clean, lace-edged linen ready for the evening. She concentrated on the generous plate of food before her. It contained far more than she needed for good health. ‘They were most kind to me,’ she added.
‘Nonsense,’ he replied quietly.
She looked up, startled by his abruptness.
He was smiling, but the sharp morning light showed very clearly the tiredness in his face, and something that might even have been fear. Her resolve to lie to him wavered. There were many ways in which he was unreadable, but not in the deep-etched lines in his face or the hollows around his eyes.
‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘They were hospitable, and a certain glamour in it was fun. Is that more precise?’
He was amused. He gave nothing so obvious as a smile, but his expression was just as plain to her.
‘Whom did you meet, apart from Fiachra, of course?’
‘You’ve known him a long time?’ she asked, remembering McDaid’s words with a slight chill.
‘Why do you say that?’ He took more toast and buttered it. He had eaten very little. She wondered if he had slept.
‘Because he asked me nothing about you,’ she answered. ‘But he seems very willing to help.’
‘A good friend,’ he replied, looking straight at her.
She smiled. ‘Nonsense,’ she said with exactly the same inflexion he had used.
‘Touché,’ he acknowledged. ‘You are right, but we have known each other a long time.’
‘Isn’t Ireland full of people you have known a long time?’
He put a little marmalade on his toast.
She waited.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But I do not know the allegiances of most of them.’
‘If Fiachra McDaid is a friend, what do you need me for?’ she asked bluntly. Suddenly to learn that seemed very urgent. Was she a diversion, someone to watch while he did the real discovering? Then a worse thought occurred to her: perhaps he did not want her in London where Pitt could reach her. Just how complicated was this, and how ugly? Where was the embezzled money now? Was it really about money, and not old vengeances at all? Or was it both?
It was more urgent than ever that she learn the truth, or at least all of it that still shadowed the present.
He had not answered.
‘Because you are using me, or both of us, with selected lies,’ she suggested.
He winced as if the blow had been physical as well as emotional. ‘I am not lying to you, Charlotte.’ His voice was so quiet she had to lean forward a little to catch his words. ‘I am . . . being highly selective about how much of the truth I tell you.’
‘And the difference is . . . ?’ she asked.
He sighed. ‘You are a good detective – in your own way almost as good as Pitt – but Special Branch work is very different from ordinary domestic murder.’
‘Domestic murder isn’t always ordinary,’ she contradicted him. ‘Human love and hate very seldom are. People kill for all sorts of reasons, but it is usually to gain or protect something they value passionately. Or it is outrage at some violation they cannot bear. And I do not mean necessarily a physical one. The emotional or spiritual wounds can be far harder to recover from.’
‘I apologise,’ he responded. ‘I should have said that the alliances and loyalties stretch in far more complicated ways. Brothers can be on opposite sides, as can husband and wife. Rivals can help each other, even die for each other, if allied in the cause.’
‘And the casualties are the innocent as well as the guilty.’ She echoed McDaid’s words. ‘My role is easy enough. I would like to help you, but I am bound by everything in my nature to help my husband, and of course myself . . .’
‘I had no idea you were so pragmatic,’ he said with a slight smile.
‘I am a woman, I have a finite amount of money, and I have children. A degree of pragmatism is necessary.’ She spoke gently to take the edge from the sting in her words.
He finished spreading his marmalade. ‘So you will understand that Fiachra is my friend in some things, but I will not be able to count on him if the answer should turn out to be different from the one I suppose.’
‘There is one you suppose?’
‘I told you: I think Cormac O’Neil has found the perfect way to be revenged on me, and has taken it.’
‘For something that happened twenty years ago?’ she questioned.
‘The Irish have the longest memories in Europe.’ He bit into the toast.
Narraway ate the whole of his toast before replying. ‘Of course you are right. The trouble is that I don’t know which of those reasons it is. I’ve studied the situation in Ireland and I can’t see any reason at all for O’Neil to do this now.’
She ignored her tea. An unpleasant thought occurred to her, chilling and very immediate. ‘Wouldn’t O’Neil know that this would bring you here?’ she asked.
Narraway stared at her. ‘You think O’Neil wants me here? I’m sure if killing me were his purpose, he would have come to London and done it. If I thought it was simply murder I wouldn’t have let you come with me, Charlotte, even if Pitt’s livelihood rests on my return to office. Please give me credit for thinking that far ahead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I thought bringing someone that nobody would see as assisting you might be the best way of getting round that.You never suggested it would be comfortable, or easy. And you cannot prevent me from coming to Ireland if I want to.’ He was not Pitt’s superior any more: he was simply a clever and dangerous man who had been a good friend, and was now in trouble of his own.
‘I had to tell you something of the situation, for Pitt’s sake,’ he said. ‘For your own, I cannot tell you all that I know, of Ireland or anywhere else. I don’t know any reason why O’Neil should choose now. But then I don’t know any reason why anyone should. It is unarguable that someone, with strong connections in Dublin, has chosen to steal the money I sent for Mulhare, and so bring about the poor man’s death. Then they made certain it was evident first to Austwick, and then to Croxdale, and so brought about my dismissal.’