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 maybe 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’Connor 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. Actually she was beginning to be a little afraid. The rage in Talulla was like the touch on 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.’ He left the sentence hanging as if there were more to say.
Good manners might have dictated that Charlotte apologise again and withdraw, leaving them to deal with the memories in their own way, but she thought of Pitt in France, alone, trusting in Narraway to back him up. She feared there were only Narraway’s enemies in Lisson Grove now, people who might so easily be Pitt’s enemies too. Good manners were a luxury for another time.
‘Is there some tragedy my grandmother knew nothing of?’ she asked innocently. ‘I’m sorry if I have woken an old bereavement, or injustice. I certainly did not mean to. I’m so sorry.’
Talulla looked at her with undisguised harshness, a slight flush in her sallow cheeks. ‘If your grandmother’s cousin was Kate O’Neil, she trusted an Englishman, an agent of the Queen’s government who courted her, flattered her into telling him her own people’s secrets, then betrayed her to be murdered by those whose trust she gave away.’
O’Conor winced. ‘I dare say she loved him. We can all be fools for love,’ he said wryly.
‘I dare say she did!’ Talulla snarled. ‘But that son of a whore never loved her, and with half a drop of loyalty in her blood she’d have known that. She’d have won his secrets, then put a knife in his belly. He might have been able to charm the fish out of the sea, but he was her people’s enemy, and she knew that. She got what she deserved.’ She turned and moved away sharply, her dark head high and stiff, her back ramrod straight, and she made no attempt to offer even a glance backward.
‘You’ll have to forgive Talulla,’ O’Conor said ruefully. ‘Anyone would think she’d loved the man herself, and it was twenty years ago. I must remember never to flirt with her. If she fell for my charm I might wake up dead of it.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that it’d be likely, God help me!’ He did not add anything more, but his expression said all the rest.
Then with a sudden smile, like spring sun through the drifting rain, he told her about the place where he had been born and the little town to the north where he had grown up and his first visit to Dublin when he had been six.
‘I thought it was the grandest place I’d ever seen,’ he said with a smile. ‘Street after street of buildings, each one fit to be the palace of a king. And some so wide it was a journey just to cross from one side to another.’
Suddenly Talulla’s hatred was no more than a lapse in manners, and was easily forgotten as someone accidentally knocking your elbow and spilling your wine.
But she did not forget it. O’Conor’s sudden charm had been as much a desire to hide something he was ashamed to expose in front of a stranger, as his own clear love for the lyrical voice of his countrymen. She was certain that he would find Talulla afterwards, and when they were alone, berate her for allowing a foreigner, and an Englishwoman at that, to see a part of their history that should have been kept private. It was like a family airing soiled linen where any passer-by could see it, and read their secrets.
The party continued. The food was excellent, the wine flowed generously. There was laughter, sharp and poignant wit, even music as the evening approached midnight. But Charlotte did not forget the emotion she had seen, and the hatred.
She rode home in the carriage with Fiachra McDaid, and in spite of his gentle enquiries, she said nothing except how much she had enjoyed the hospitality.
‘And did anyone know your cousin?’ he asked. ‘Dublin’s a small town, when it comes to it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she answered easily. ‘But I may find trace of her later. O’Neil is not a rare name. And anyway, it doesn’t matter very much.’
‘Now there’s something I doubt our friend Victor would agree with,’ he said candidly. ‘I had the notion it mattered to him rather a lot. Was I wrong, then, do you suppose?’
For the first time in the evening she spoke the absolute truth. ‘I think maybe you know him a great deal better than I do, Mr McDaid. We have met only in one set of circumstances, and that does not give a very complete picture of a person, do you think?’
In the darkness inside the carriage she could not read his expression.
‘And yet I have the distinct idea that he is fond of you, Mrs Pitt,’ McDaid replied. ‘Am I wrong in that too, do you suppose?’
‘I don’t do much supposing, Mr McDaid. . at least not aloud,’ she said. The certainty was increasing inside her that it was Narraway of whom Talulla had been speaking when she referred to Kate O’Neil’s betrayal — both of her country, and of her husband — because she had loved a man who had used her, and who then allowed her to be murdered for it. Then she remembered what Phelim O’Conor had said of Narraway, and she wondered how much she really knew him.
There must be more to the story; there always was. But would it make the tragedy and the ugliness of it any better? Narraway had said Cormac O’Neil had sought revenge. The only mystery was why he had waited twenty years for it.
Pitt had believed in Narraway; Charlotte knew that without doubt. But she also knew that Pitt thought well of most people, even if he accepted that they were complex, capable of cowardice, greed and violence. But had he ever understood any of the darkness within Narraway, the human beneath the fighter against his country’s enemies? They were so different. Narraway was subtle, where Pitt was instinctive. He understood people because he could imagine himself in their place. He understood weakness, fear; he had felt need and knew how powerful it could be.
But he also understood gratitude. Narraway had offered him dignity, purpose and a means to feed his family when he had desperately needed it. He would never forget that.
Was he also just a little naive?
She remembered with a smile how disillusioned he had been when he had discovered the shabby behaviour of the Prince of Wales. She had felt his shame for a man he thought should have been better. He had believed more in the honour of his calling than the man did himself. She loved Pitt intensely for that, even in the moment she understood it.
Narraway would never have been misled; he would have expected roughly what he eventually found. He might have been disappointed, but he would not have been hurt.
Had he ever been hurt?
Could he have loved Kate O’Neil, and still used her? Not as Charlotte understood love.
But then perhaps Narraway always put duty first. Maybe he was feeling a deep and insuperable pain for the first time, because he was robbed of the one thing he valued: his work, in which his identity was so bound up.
Why on earth was she riding through the dark streets of a strange city, with a man she had never seen
