“What meanings did you suppose?” O’Neil asked softly.
“Oh, ask me in a month’s time, Mr. O’Neil,” she said casually. “There is anger in it, of course. Anyone can see that. There seems to me also to be a sense of predestination, as if we all have little choice, and birth determines our reactions. I dislike that. I don’t wish to feel so … controlled by fate.”
“You are English. You like to imagine you are the masters of history. In Ireland we have learned that history masters us,” he responded. The bitterness in his tone was laced with irony and laughter, but the pain was real.
It was on her tongue to contradict him, until she realized her opportunity. “Really? If I understand the play rightly, it is about a certain inevitability in love and betrayal that is quite universal—a sort of darker and older Romeo and Juliet.”
O’Neil’s face tightened, and even in the lamplight of the crowded room Charlotte could see his color pale. “Is that what you see?” His voice was thick, almost choking on the words. “You romanticize, Mrs. Pitt.” Now the bitterness in him was overwhelming. She was as aware of it as if he had touched her physically.
“Do I?” she asked him, moving aside to allow a couple arm in arm to pass by. In so doing she deliberately stepped close to O’Neil, so he could not leave without pushing her aside. “What harder realities should I see? Rivalry between opposing sides, families divided, a love that cannot be fulfilled, betrayal and death? I don’t think I really find that romantic, except for us as we sit in the audience watching. For the people involved it must be anything but.”
He stared at her, his eyes hollow with a kind of black despair. She could believe very easily that Narraway was right, and O’Neil had nursed a hatred for twenty years, until fate had given him a way to avenge it. But what was it that had changed?
“And what are you, Mrs. Pitt?” he asked, standing close to her and speaking so McDaid almost certainly would not hear him. “Audience or player? Are you here to watch the blood and tears of Ireland, or to meddle in them, like your friend Narraway?”
She was stunned. So he did know that she was linked to Narraway. The hushed anger with which he now confronted her seemed on the verge of boiling over at last. Surely to feign innocence would be ridiculous?
“I would like to be a deus ex machina,” she replied. “But I imagine that’s impossible.”
“God in the machine?” he said with an angry shrug. “You want to descend at the last act and arrange an impossible ending that solves it all? How very English. And how absurd, and supremely arrogant. You are twenty years too late. Tell Victor that, when you see him. There’s nothing left to mend anymore.” He turned away before she could answer again, pushing past her and spilling what was left of his whiskey as he bumped into a broad man in a blue coat. The moment after, he was gone.
Charlotte was aware of McDaid next to her, and a certain air of discomfort about him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. There was no point in trying to explain. “I allowed myself to express my opinions too freely.”
He bit his lip. “You couldn’t know it, but the subject of Irish freedom, and traitors to the cause, is painfully close to O’Neil. It was through his family that our great plan was betrayed twenty years ago.” He winced. “We never knew for sure by whom. Sean O’Neil murdered his wife, Kate, and was hanged for it. Even though it was because she was the one who told the English our plans, some thought it was because Sean found her with another man. Either way, we failed again, and the bitterness still lasts.”
“It was an uprising that you intended?” she asked quietly. She heard the chatter around her.
“Of course,” McDaid replied flatly. “Home Rule was in the very air we breathed then. We could have been ourselves, without the weight of England around our necks.”
“Is that how you see it?” She turned as she spoke and looked at him, searching his face.
His expression softened. He smiled back at her, rueful and a little self-deprecating. “I did at the time. Seeing Cormac brings it back. But I’m cooler-headed now. There are better places to put one’s energy—causes less narrow.” She was aware of the color and whisper of fabric around them, silk against silk. They were surrounded by people in one of the most interesting capital cities in the world, come out to an evening at the theater. Some of them, at least, were also men and women who saw themselves living under a foreign oppression in their own land, and some of them at least were willing to kill and to die to throw it off. She looked just like them, cast of feature, tone of skin and hair, and yet she was not; she was different in heart and mind.
“What causes?” she asked with interest.
His smile widened, as if to brush it aside. “Social injustices, old-fashioned laws to reform,” he replied. “Greater equality. Exactly the same as, no doubt, you fight for at home. I hear there are some great women in London battling for all manner of things. Perhaps one day you will tell me about some of them?” He made it a question, as if he were interested enough to require an answer.
“Of course,” she said lightly, trying to master facts in her mind so she could answer sensibly, if the necessity arose.
He took her arm as people milled around her, returning to their seats, courteous, hospitable, full of dry wit and a passion for life. How easy, and dangerous, it would be for her to forget that she did not belong here.
NARRAWAY WAS UNCERTAIN WHAT Charlotte would learn at the theater. As he walked along Arran Quay, on the north bank of the Liffey, his head down into the warm, damp breeze off the water, he was afraid that she would discover a few things about him that he would very much rather she not know, but he knew no way to help that.
He smiled bitterly as he pictured her probing relentlessly for the facts behind the pain. Would she be disillusioned to hear his part in it all? Or was that his vanity, his own feelings—that she cared enough for him that disillusion was even possible, let alone something that would wound her?
He would never forget the days after Kate’s death. Worst was the morning they hanged Sean. The brutality and the grief of that had cast a chill over all the years since.
But he did not want Charlotte’s grief for him, particularly if it was based on a misconception of who he was.
He laughed at himself; it was just a faint sound, almost drowned by his quick footsteps along the stones of the quayside. Why, at this time in his life, did he care so much for the opinion of another man’s wife?
