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.”
