you is that I have no more access to my office at Lisson Grove, or any of the papers that are there. I will no longer know what is happening in France, or anywhere else. My place has been taken by Charles Austwick, who neither likes nor trusts Pitt. The former is a matter of jealousy because Pitt was recruited after him, and has received preferment in fact, if not in rank, that has more than equaled his. The latter is because they have little in common. Austwick comes from the army, Pitt from the police. Pitt has instincts Austwick will never understand, and Pitt’s untidiness irritates Austwick’s orderly, military soul.” He sighed. “And of course Pitt is my protege … was.”
Charlotte was so stunned her brain did not absorb what he had said, and yet looking at his face she could not doubt it.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
She understood what he was apologizing for. He had made Pitt unpopular by singling him out, preferring him, confiding in him. Now, without Narraway, he would be vulnerable. He had never had any other profession but the police, and then Special Branch. He had been forced out of the police and could not go back there. It was Narraway who had given him a job when he had so desperately needed it. If Special Branch dismissed him, where was there for him to go? There was no other place where he could exercise his very particular skills, and certainly nowhere he could earn a comparable salary.
They would lose this house in Keppel Street and all the comforts that went with it. Mrs. Waterman would certainly no longer be a problem. Charlotte might well be scrubbing her own floors; indeed, it might even come to scrubbing someone else’s as well. She could imagine it already, see the shame in Thomas’s face for his own failure to provide for her, not the near luxury she had grown up in, nor even the amenities of a working-class domesticity.
She looked up at Narraway, wondering now about him. She had never considered before if he was dependent upon his salary or not. His speech and his manner, the almost careless elegance of his dress, said that he was born to a certain degree of position, but that did not necessarily mean wealth. Younger sons of even the most aristocratic families did not always inherit a great deal.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“How like you,” he replied. “Both to be concerned for me, and to assume that there is something to be done.”
Now she felt foolish.
“What are you going to do?” she asked again.
“To help Pitt? There’s nothing I can do,” he replied. “I don’t know the circumstances, and to interfere blindly might do far more harm.”
“Not about Thomas, about yourself.” She had not asked him what the charge was, or if he was wholly or partially guilty.
The ashes settled even further in the fire.
Several seconds passed before he answered. “I don’t know,” he admitted, his voice hesitant for the first time in her knowledge. “I am not even certain who is at the root of it, although I have at least an idea. It is all … ugly.”
She had to press onward, for Pitt’s sake. “Is that a reason not to look at it?” she said quietly. “It will not mend itself, will it?”
He gave the briefest smile. “No. I am not certain that it can be mended at all.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.
He was startled. “I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t have anything better,” she apologized. “But you look uncomfortable standing there in front of the fire. Wouldn’t sitting down with a hot cup of tea be better?”
He turned slightly to look behind him at the hearth and the mantel. “You mean I am blocking the heat,” he said ruefully.
“No,” she replied with a smile. “Actually I meant that I am getting a crick in my neck staring up and sideways at you.”
For a moment the pain in his face softened. “Thank you, but I would prefer not to disturb Mrs.… whatever her name is. I can sit down without tea, unnatural as that may seem.”
“Waterman,” she supplied.
“Yes, of course.”
“I was going to make it myself, provided that she would allow me into the kitchen. She doesn’t approve. The ladies she is accustomed to working for do not even know where the kitchen is. Although how I could lose it in a house this size, I have no idea.”
“She has come down in the world,” Narraway observed. “It can happen to the best of us.”
She watched as he sat down, elegantly as always, crossing his legs and leaning back as if he were comfortable.
“I think it may concern an old case in Ireland,” he began, at first meeting her eyes, then looking down awkwardly. “At the moment it is to do with the death of a present-day informant there, because the money I paid did not reach him in time to flee those he had … betrayed.” He said the word crisply and clearly, as if deliberately exploring a wound: his own, not someone else’s. “I did it obliquely, so it could not be traced back to Special Branch. If it had been it would have cost him his life immediately.”
She hesitated, seeking the right words, but watching his face, she had no impression that he was being deliberately obscure. She waited. There was silence beyond the room, no sound of the children asleep upstairs, or of Mrs. Waterman, who was presumably still in the kitchen. She would not retire to her room with a visitor still in the house.
“My attempts to hide its source make it impossible to trace what actually happened to it,” Narraway continued. “To the superficial investigation, it looks as if I took it myself.”
