smoothed the milk into her face over and over again, then into her neck, then her face once more, pressing her hands up to her temples, regardless of getting it into her hair. It was ten more minutes before she turned out the gas lamp and crawled into bed beside Pitt. She touched him gently, but he was already asleep.
Breakfast was extremely trying. Charlotte made the effort to rise early, though she did not feel in the least like it, but she could not leave Emily to cope alone. As it was, she was the first to arrive, followed almost immediately by Padraig Doyle. She welcomed him, watching with interest as he helped himself to food from the sideboard and took his place. As he had been every day since he arrived, he was immaculately dressed, and his sleek, dark hair was brushed almost to a polish. His long face, with its humorous eyes and mouth, was set in lines of perfect composure.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pitt,” he said with a slight lift to his voice. She was not sure if it was genuine indifference to the distress in the house, a determination to overcome it, a natural will to fight despair and the courage to sustain the battle, or simply the music of the Irish brogue. She could not help responding to it. Regardless of its reason, one felt better for it. She liked him so much better than Fergal Moynihan, with his somber, rather dour air. If she had been Iona, looking for someone to fall in love with, she would have chosen Padraig Doyle far sooner, regardless of the twenty years or so between them. He would have been so much more interesting, more fun to be with.
“Good morning, Mr. Doyle,” she replied with a smile. “Have you seen what a clear sky it is? It will make walking in the woods very pleasant.”
He smiled back; it was a gesture of understanding as well as friendship.
“A relief,” he agreed. “It is rather difficult to find sufficient to do on a wet day, when conversation is as full of pitfalls as ours.”
She allowed herself to laugh very slightly, and reached for the toast and apricot preserves.
Iona came in, greeting them both and taking her place. As usual, she declined the food on the sideboard and took instead toast and honey. She was dressed in a deep, romantic blue which heightened the shadowed blue of her eyes. She ate without speaking again. She was remarkably self-contained. Her beauty was dramatic, almost haunting, but it had a remoteness to it which to Charlotte was cold. Was it because she was absorbed in her own problems and they consumed everything else she might have felt? How deeply did she love Fergal Moynihan? Why? Had she ever loved her own husband, or had it been a marriage made for other reasons? Charlotte did not know how old Iona had been at the time of her marriage. Perhaps only seventeen or eighteen, too young to have realized much of the woman she would become in the next fifteen years, or what hungers would waken in her during that time.
Did Lorcan love her? He had seemed angry and embarrassed at the awful scene in the bedroom, rather than emotionally shattered. If she had been deceived by Pitt like that, her world would have ended. Lorcan looked far from so destroyed. But then, people do not always wear their emotions where everyone else can see them. Why should they? Perhaps his way of dealing with such pain was to hide it. It would be natural enough. Pride was important to most people, especially men.
Was Iona lurching from one disaster to another, looking for companionship, some passion or shared charm, where she would never find it? Was it to fire Lorcan with jealousy, to waken in him a hunger or a need which had grown stale? Or was it the simple outrageousness of it, something no one else would do, something to make her talked of, a name to run like fire on every tongue, a bid for her own immortality, another Neassa Doyle, only alive?
As Charlotte was thinking, Fergal came in. “Good morning,” he said politely, looking at each of them in turn. Everyone murmured a reply, Iona glancing up quickly and then down again.
Fergal took a portion of eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes and kidneys, and sat down almost the length of the table away from Iona, but where he could look at her—in fact, where he could hardly avoid it. His face in the hard morning light was smooth, only the faintest of lines around his eyes, and a deeper score from nose to mouth. There seemed an inner complacency about him. If any emotion tore him apart, he hid it with a consummate skill. There were slight shadows under his eyes, but no tension, not the ravages of sleeplessness Charlotte thought she would have suffered in a like situation.
Was that what Iona saw in him, what she needed, some cold challenge to thaw with the heat of her dreams, some icebound heart upon which to exercise her magic?
Or was Charlotte being unfair because she did not like Fergal herself? And was that because she saw him through Kezia’s eyes, through her hurt and anger?
“Looks like another agreeable day,” Padraig observed, regarding the sky beyond the long windows. “Perhaps we shall have an opportunity for a little walk after luncheon.”
“The rain might hold off,” Fergal agreed.
“I don’t object to a touch of autumn rain.” Padraig smiled. “Patter of it among the fallen leaves, smell of the damp earth. Better than the conference room!”
“You’ll not get away from the conversation,” Fergal warned. He did not look at Iona, but Charlotte had the sense that he was acutely conscious of her, as if he had to exercise an effort of will to keep his eyes from her.
Iona was concentrating on her tea and toast as single-mindedly as if it were a complicated fish full of bones.
No one had brought in the morning newspapers. Was that because the verdict of the Parnell-O’Shea divorce would be in them?
The atmosphere was crackling stiff, like overstarched linen. Charlotte could not decide whether she should try to say something, artificial as it would sound, or if that would only make it worse.
Justine came in, greeting everyone.
“Good morning. How are you?” She hesitated a moment for the tacit reply of nods and half smiles.
“Well, thank you,” Padraig answered. “And you, Miss Baring? This can hardly be what you expected when you arrived here.”
“No, of course not,” she said gently. “No one ever expects tragedy. But we must support each other.” She took a small serving from the sideboard and then sat opposite Charlotte, smiling at her, not blindly in mere politeness, but with a sharp light of understanding, and not without a dry humor.
“I noticed a wonderful bank of hawthorn beyond the beech trees to the west,” she observed, mostly to
