Betrayal at Lisson Grove (16 page)

‘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 a 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, as much to commit herself before she could let her caution prevent her as to assure Narraway. ‘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. ‘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, emotionally 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 travelling costume and extremely untidy hair.

‘My father married your mother, after my mother died,’ he began.

She was about to express sympathy, then realised she had no idea whether his mother was dead, or if he were 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 London. 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, anger at loss, then it was gone. ‘He died some time ago. Keep the mother you have. You and I have become close only recently. This trip is in part for that purpose.’ An unreadable expression flickered through his eyes and vanished again.

‘Why Ireland?’ she asked. ‘Someone is bound to ask me.’

‘My grandmother 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 humour. ‘But she’s dead too. She won’t mind.’

‘I see,’ she said quietly. ‘And this relative that 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 our hosts 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 and they left Molesworth Street, and in the pleasant spring evening walked in companionable silence the half a 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 recognised 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. They could easily have been 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 it would be discourteous to stare. He would not know she admired it rather than criticised. And they had no time for such indulgence anyway.

‘You’ll be wanting to go to the theatre,’ Fiachra McDaid went on, looking at Charlotte. It was a discreet regard, passing as no more than courteous interest, but she noticed that he was studying her quite carefully.

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 theatre.’ With a touch of satisfaction she saw an instant of puzzlement in his eyes. It had been a trivial remark, such as a woman might make who cares what others thought of her rather than who she was to herself – not a person Narraway would befriend by choice. What had he told this man of her? For that matter, what did Fiachra McDaid know of Narraway? She had asked, but he had not answered.

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 theatre, at one time or another,’ she said aloud.

‘Indeed,’ McDaid nodded his head. ‘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 accepted. 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 of being an outsider privileged to be included by some means of favour owed or returned.There were already more than a dozen people present, men in formal black and white, women in exactly the same variety of colours 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 had 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 grandmother’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 colour, 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. How on earth would she get out of it, if there were?

‘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. At that rate it could take half a year before she acquired any information that led to finding who had betrayed him into the wilderness.

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.