of pocket because he lavished jewelry on Maire?
I wanted to sprint down the stairs, to fly, to slide down the banister, anything to get me down as quickly as possible, but I couldn’t attract attention. It required all I possessed to come down the steps at a sedate pace. I wandered into the parlor, still holding my head.
“I say, Miss O’Casey, I wonder if I might trouble you for a cold cloth for my head?”
“I do hope you are not catching a fever, Mr. Penrith,” the girl said, coming up and placing the back of her hand against my forehead. If I was feverish, it was more to do with the news I had to impart to Barker than any feigned illness. “A slight one, perhaps. I’ll get that cloth for you.”
She left the room and I moved over to her desk, where Barker was seated. He sensed I had something to tell him.
“Letters,” I whispered. “Love letters. A stack of them, along with jewelry. Expensive jewelry, if I am any judge. And you can’t imagine who sent them.”
“Tell me,” Barker murmured.
“Seamus O’Muircheartaigh.”
19
Barker suggested that miss O’Casey brew a cup of tea for me, and while I sat and sipped, making small talk with the girl and feigning a headache, he flew up the stairs to the box and read her private correspondence. Normally, of course, doing so would be an unconscionable act, but then most girls did not receive declarations of love from dangerous criminals. Even then, talking with beautiful and wholesome Maire, I could not picture her with the hard, dry Mr. O’Muircheartaigh, who, for one thing, was almost twice her age.
I used Barker’s diversion, and asked her to show me the Gaelic book she was using, but what I really wanted to do was to talk to her about what had happened at the lighthouse. Though it had only been one kiss, I felt betrayed. Willie Yeats was one thing, but that chilling fellow I’d met at Ho’s was quite another.
“You are not paying attention, Mr. Penrith,” she admonished lightly.
“Call me Thomas, Miss O’Casey. You must forgive me. This headache has put me out of sorts. Tell me more about your lessons.”
Twenty minutes later, I found Barker standing in the window of our room, absently playing with one of his razor-edged coins, deep in thought. There was a smile on his lips. He had discovered an enemy’s weakness, and was considering how to turn it to his advantage.
“Who would have thought it?” my employer murmured. “I would stake my life these letters are genuine. You missed an envelope at the very bottom of the stack. The letters are half a year old, from when the O’Caseys were living in Dublin. Seamus makes mention of meeting her at the O’Connell Bridge. He must have been seeing her in Ireland.”
“How did they meet?”
“He doesn’t say. Presumably, there must be some meeting of the I.R.B. factions. As far as I know, that is their only link.”
“I cannot imagine she would encourage his suit,” I said a trifle bitterly.
“I did not see any indication from the letters that she had. Twice he accuses her of being cool, and he only hints at a possible proposal of marriage, as if testing the waters. To be truthful, I hardly thought O’Muircheartaigh had it in him to play the romantic swain. Miss O’Casey has nothing to offer in the way of money or influence, yet he speaks of her as his equal. I can assume she has her beauty to recommend her.”
“Oh, she has that,” I stated.
“You should know, you rascal,” he said. “But what does she possess that O’Muircheartaigh might want?”
“She possesses a presence and a keen mind,” I said. “She has the ability to put an entire group of men in their place and to have them do her bidding. Surely that is enough, even for someone like him. Do you think him involved in this? Is he the faction’s true leader?”
“One should never underestimate him. He is as silent and lethal as a poisonous spider. Think of this, lad: if a man speculates and is able to cause a war between two nearby countries, he could invest heavily in munitions and arms on both sides and make a fortune. Even if it never came to that, the mere rattling of sabers would be enough to drive the stock exchange prices through the roof.”
“Good heavens!” I said.
“Exactly. O’Muircheartaigh would be the next Rothschild. I believe the possibility of hundreds of deaths on both sides because of an Irish insurrection means little to him. We must watch Miss O’Casey a little more closely. She could be the conduit for messages from London.”
That gave me much to think upon, and none of it pleasant. I had been impressed by Maire’s purity, as well as her beauty, and to think that she might be receiving secret messages with plans and monies quite sullied my belief in her. Perhaps Barker was right, and she was not the girl I thought her to be.
Dunleavy came to dinner, annoyance and petulance on his face. The money from the Irish Americans was being delayed, as Barker and I already knew, and he could not be certain it would arrive in time. I thought he was working himself into another drinking bout, and I was correct. He was churlish when none of us seemed disposed to drink with him. Finally, Fergus McKeller arrived, and we spent the evening watching Dunleavy alternate between complaining about his past failures and crowing about his future successes. Between that and the news about Maire, I went to bed feeling very low indeed.
Barker was standing at the window of our room. Something had awakened him, if he had been asleep at all. It was past ten, and we’d been upstairs for about half an hour.
“What is it?” I asked my employer.
“Someone has just left the house. It appears to be your Miss O’Casey. Throw some clothes over your nightshirt, and hurry.”
It is not an easy task to go from sound sleep to fully dressed and out the door in three minutes, but somehow I managed it. I wouldn’t pass inspection in Savile Row, with my collarless nightshirt thrust into my trousers, but at that point, I was glad to have each shoe on the right foot. We stealthily moved down the stairs, but once we were outside, Barker was off like a shot.
“Are you sure it was Maire?” I asked, still skeptical that she wasn’t in bed, enjoying a well-deserved slumber. “Perhaps it was Dunleavy.”
“The figure I saw was in a cloak, but only Miss O’Casey is that small. Hurry along, lad. Don’t dawdle.”
For the hundredth time, I wished I had my employer’s long legs and his stamina. It took all I had to keep up with him, and he was sporting half a stone of extra weight.
We reached the intersection of Water Street and the Strand and headed deeper into the poor section of Liverpool.
“Could it have been another woman delivering a message?” I asked, still convinced it could not be Maire.
“Possibly,” he growled. “This part of town has been a front for more than one faction, or so Dunleavy has informed me.”
“So someone could have sent the O’Caseys a message,” I insisted.
“Or Miss O’Casey herself is delivering one in return.”
I pondered that for a moment as we walked along Strand Street. We were in the Irish slums now. Broken- down tenements stood on either side of the street. My attention was distracted by a beggar child, and when I looked up, the figure ahead of us had disappeared like a will-o’-the-wisp.
“Where did she go?”
Barker pointed to the left. “Into that court there.”
