Treason at Lisson Grove Page 11

  She was shivering when Narraway came out again and spoke to the driver, then at last to her.

  “There are rooms here. It is clean and quiet and we shall not be noticed, but it is perfectly respectable. As soon as we are settled I shall go to make contact with the people I can still trust.” He looked at her face carefully. She was aware that she must look rumpled and tired, and probably ill-tempered into the bargain. A smile would help, she knew, but in the circumstances it would also be idiotic.

  “Please wait for me,” he went on. “Rest if you like. We may be busy this evening. We have no time to waste.”

  He held out his arm to assist her down, meeting her eyes earnestly, questioningly, before letting go. He was clearly concerned for her, but she was glad that he did not say anything more. Though they would both feel terrible doubt and strain in the days to come, she should not forget that, after all, it was his career that was ruined, not hers. It was he who would in the end have to bear it alone; he was the one accused of theft and betrayal. No one would blame her for any of this.

  But of course there was every likelihood that they would blame Pitt.

  “Thank you,” she said with a quick smile, then turned away to look at the house. “It seems very pleasant.”

  He hesitated, then with more confidence he went ahead of her to the front door. When the landlady opened it for them, he introduced Charlotte as Mrs. Pitt, his half sister, who had come to Ireland to meet with relatives on her mother’s side.

  “How do you do, ma’am,” Mrs. Hogan said cheerfully. “Welcome to Dublin, then. A fine city it is.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hogan. I look forward to it very much,” Charlotte replied.

  NARRAWAY WENT OUT ALMOST immediately. Charlotte began by unpacking her case and shaking the creases out of the few clothes she had brought. There was only one dress suitable for any sort of formal occasion, but she had some time ago decided to copy the noted actress Lillie Langtry and add different effects to it each time: two lace shawls, one white, one black; special gloves; a necklace of hematite and rock crystals; earrings; anything that would draw the attention from the fact that it was the same gown. At least it fit remarkably well. Women might be perfectly aware that it was the same one each time she wore it, but with luck men would notice only that it became her.

  As she hung it up in the wardrobe along with a good costume with two skirts, and a lighter-weight dress, she remembered the days when Pitt had still been in the police, and she and Emily had tried their own hands at helping with detection. Of course that had been particularly when the victims had been from high Society, to which they had access, and Pitt could observe them only as a police officer, when behavior was unnatural and everyone very much on their guard.

  At that time his cases had been rooted in human passions, and occasionally social ills, but never secrets of state. There had been no reason why he would not discuss them with her and benefit from her greater insight into Society’s rules and structures, and especially the subtler ways of women whose lives were so different from his own he could not guess what lay behind their manners and their words.

  At times it had been dangerous. But she had loved the adventure of both heart and mind, the cause for which to fight. She had never for an instant been bored, or suffered the greater dullness of soul that comes when one does not have a purpose one believes in passionately.

  Charlotte laid out her toiletries both on the dressing table and in the very pleasant bathroom that she shared with another female guest. Then she took off her traveling skirt and blouse, removed the pins from her hair, and lay down on the bed in her petticoat.

  She must have fallen asleep because she woke to hear a tap on the door. She sat up, for a moment completely at a loss as to where she was. The furniture, the lamps on the walls, the windows were all unfamiliar. Then it came back to her and she rose so quickly she was dragging the coverlet with her.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Victor,” he replied quietly, perhaps remembering he was supposed to be her brother, and Mrs. Hogan might have excellent hearing.

  “Oh.” She looked down at herself in her underclothes, hair all over the place. “A moment, please,” she requested. There was no chance in the world of redoing her hair, but she must make herself decent. She was suddenly self-conscious about her appearance. She seized her skirt and jacket and pulled them on, misbuttoning the latter in her haste and having then to undo it all and start anew. He must be standing in the corridor, wondering what on earth was the matter with her.

  “I’m coming,” she repeated. There was no time to do more than put the brush through her hair, then pull the door open.

  He looked tired, but it did not stop the amusement in his eyes when he saw her, or a flash of appreciation she would have preferred not to be aware of. Perhaps she was not beautiful—certainly not in a conventional sense—but she was a remarkably handsome woman with fair, warm-toned skin and rich hair. And she had never, since turning sixteen, lacked the shape or allure of womanhood.

  “You are invited to dinner this evening,” he said as soon as he was inside the room and the door closed. “It is at the home of John and Bridget Tyrone, whom I dare not meet yet. My friend Fiachra McDaid will escort you. I’ve known him a long time, and he will treat you with courtesy. Will you go … please?”

  “Of course I will,” she said instantly. “Tell me something about Mr. McDaid, and about Mr. and Mrs. Tyrone. Any advantage I can have, so much the better. And what do they know of you? Will they be startled that you suddenly produce a half sister?” She smiled slightly. “Apart from someone looking for distant family in Ireland. And how well do you and I know each other? Do I know you work with Special Branch? We had better have grown up quite separately, because we know too little of each other. Even one mistake would arouse suspicion.”

  He leaned against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets. He looked completely casual, nothing like the man she knew professionally. She had a momentary vision of how he must have been twenty years ago: intelligent, elusive, unattainable—but to some women that in itself was an irresistible temptation. Before her marriage, and occasionally since, she had known women for whom that was an excitement far greater than the thought of a suitable marriage, even than a title or money.

  She stood still, waiting for his reply, conscious of her traveling costume and extremely untidy hair.

  “My father married your mother after my mother died,” he began.

  She was about to express sympathy, then realized she had no idea whether it was true, or if he was making it up for the story they must tell. Perhaps better she was not confused with the truth, whatever that was.

  “By the time you were born,” he continued. “I was already at university—Cambridge—you should know that. That is why we know each other so little. My father is from Buckinghamshire, but he could perfectly well have moved to London, so you may have grown up wherever you did. Always better to stay with the truth where you can. I know that area. I would have visited.”

  “What did he do—our father?” she asked. This all had an air of unreality about it, even ridiculousness, but she knew it mattered, perhaps vitally.

  “He had land in Buckinghamshire,” he replied. “He served in the Indian army. You don’t need to have known him well. I didn’t.”

  She heard the sharpness of regret in his voice. “He died some time ago. Keep the mother you have. You and I have become acquainted only recently. This trip is in part for that purpose.”

  “Why Ireland?” she asked. “Someone is bound to ask me.”

  “My mother was Irish,” he replied.

  “Really?” She was surprised, but perhaps she should have known it.

  “No.” This time he smiled fully, with both sweetness and humor. “But she’s dead too. She won’t mind.”

  She felt a strange lurch of pity inside her, an intimate knowledge of loneliness.

  “I see,” she said quietly. “And these relatives I am looking for—
how is it that I remain here without finding them? In fact, why do I think to find them anyway?”

  “Perhaps it is best if you don’t,” he answered. “You merely want to see Dublin. I have told you stories about it, and we have seized the excuse to visit. That will flatter them, and be easy enough to believe. It’s a beautiful city and has a character that is unique.”

  She did not argue, but she felt that nothing very much would happen if she did not ask questions. Polite interest could be very easily brushed aside and met with polite and uninformative answers.

  CHARLOTTE COLLECTED HER CAPE. They left Molesworth Street and in the pleasant spring evening walked in companionable silence the half mile to the house of Fiachra McDaid.

  Narraway knocked on the carved mahogany door, and after a few moments it was opened by an elegant man wearing a casual velvet jacket of dark green. He was quite tall, but even under the drape of the fabric Charlotte could see that he was a little plump around the middle. In the lamplight by the front door his features were melancholy, but as soon as he recognized Narraway, his expression lit with a vitality that made him startlingly attractive. It was difficult to know his age from his face, but he had white wings to his black hair, so Charlotte judged him to be close to fifty.

  “Victor!” he said cheerfully, holding out his hand and grasping Narraway’s fiercely. “Wonderful invention, the telephone, but there’s nothing like seeing someone.” He turned to Charlotte. “And you must be Mrs. Pitt, come to our queen of cities for the first time. Welcome. It will be my pleasure to show you some of it. I’ll pick the best bits, and the best people; there’ll be time only to taste it and no more. Your whole life wouldn’t be long enough for all of it. Come in, and have a drink before we start out.” He held the door wide and, after a glance at Narraway, Charlotte accepted.

  Inside, the rooms were elegant, very Georgian in appearance. Their contents could easily have been found in a home in any good area of London, except perhaps for some of the pictures on the walls, and a certain character to the silver goblets on the mantel. She was interested in the subtle differences, but had no time to indulge in such trivial matters anyway.

  “You’ll be wanting to go to the theater,” Fiachra McDaid went on, looking at Charlotte. He offered her sherry, which she merely sipped. She needed a very clear head, and she had eaten little.

  “Naturally,” she answered with a smile. “I could hardly hold my head up in Society at home if I came to Dublin and did not visit the theater.” With a touch of satisfaction she saw an instant of puzzlement in his eyes. What had Narraway told this man of her? For that matter, what did Fiachra McDaid know of Narraway?

  The look in McDaid’s eyes, quickly masked, told her that it was quite a lot. She smiled, not to charm but in her own amusement.

  He saw it and understood. Yes, most certainly he knew quite a lot about Narraway.

  “I imagine everybody of interest is at the theater, at one time or another,” she said.

  “Indeed.” McDaid nodded. “And many will be there at dinner tonight at the home of John and Bridget Tyrone. It will be my pleasure to introduce you to them. It is a short carriage ride from here, but certainly too far to return you to Molesworth Street on foot, at what may well be a very late hour.”

  “It sounds an excellent arrangement,” she said, accepting. She turned to Narraway. “I shall see you at breakfast tomorrow? Shall we say eight o’clock?”

  Narraway smiled. “I think you might prefer we say nine,” he replied.

  CHARLOTTE AND FIACHRA MCDAID spoke of trivial things on the carriage ride, which was, as he had said, quite short. Mostly he named the streets through which they were passing, and mentioned a few of the famous people who had lived there at some time in their lives. Many she had not heard of, but she did not say so, although she thought he guessed. Sometimes he prefaced the facts with “as you will know,” and then told her what indeed she had not known.

  The home of John and Bridget Tyrone was larger than McDaid’s. It had a splendid entrance hall with staircases rising on both sides, which curved around the walls and met in a gallery arched above the doorway into the first reception room. The dining room was to the left beyond that, with a table set for above twenty people.

  Charlotte was suddenly aware that her inclusion, as an outsider, was a privilege someone had bought through some means of favor. There were already more than a dozen people present, men in formal black and white, women in exactly the same variety of colors one might have found at any fashionable London party. What was different was the vitality in the air, the energy of emotion in the gestures, and now and then the lilt of a voice that had not been schooled out of its native music.

  She was introduced to the hostess, Bridget Tyrone, a handsome woman with very white teeth and the most magnificent auburn hair, which she hardly bothered to dress. It seemed to have escaped her attempts like autumn leaves in a gust of wind.

  “Mrs. Pitt has come to see Dublin,” McDaid told her. “Where better to begin than here?”

  “Is it curiosity that brings you, then?” John Tyrone asked, standing at his wife’s elbow, a dark man with bright blue eyes.

  Sensing rebuke in the question, Charlotte seized the chance to begin her mission. “Interest,” she corrected him with a smile she hoped was warmer than she felt it. “Some of my mother’s family were from this area, and spoke of it with such vividness I wanted to see it for myself. I regret it has taken me so long to do so.”

  “I should have known it!” Bridget said instantly. “Look at her hair, John! That’s an Irish color if you like, now, isn’t it? What were their names?”

  Charlotte thought rapidly. She had to invent, but let it be as close to the truth as possible, so she wouldn’t forget what she had said or contradict herself. And it must be useful. There was no point in any of this if she learned nothing of the past. Bridget Tyrone was waiting, eyes wide.

  Charlotte’s mother’s mother had been Christine Owen. “Christina O’Neil,” she said with the same sense of abandon she might have had were she jumping into a raging river.

  There was a moment’s silence. She had an awful thought that there might really be such a person.

  “O’Neil,” Bridget repeated. “Sure enough there are O’Neils around here. Plenty of them. You’ll find someone who knew her, no doubt. Unless, of course, they left in the famine. Only God Himself knows how many that’d be. Come now, let me introduce you to our other guests, because you’ll not be knowing them.”

  Charlotte accompanied her obediently and was presented to one couple after another. She struggled to remember unfamiliar names, trying hard to say something reasonably intelligent and at the same time gain some sense of the gathering, and whom she should seek to know better. She must tell Narraway something more useful than that she had gained an entry to Dublin Society.

  She introduced her fictitious grandmother again.

  “Really?” a women named Talulla Lawless said with surprise, raising her thin black eyebrows as soon as Charlotte mentioned the name. “You sound fond of her,” Talulla continued. Talulla was a slender woman, almost bony, but with marvelous 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,” she lied confidently. “I daresay 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 may be 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’Conor 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. But in truth she was beginning to feel a little afraid. Rage sparked in Talulla as if she’d touched 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.”

  Good manners might have dictated that Charlotte apologize 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 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.”