it for her.’
Minnie Maude stared at him as if he had lost his wits.
‘Please,’ he added.
‘Yer’ll pardon me, sir,’ Minnie Maude said shakily. ‘But yer look like yer bin dragged through an ’edge backwards.’
Pitt pushed his hand through his hair. ‘She wouldn’t recognise me if I didn’t. Don’t leave her standing in the hall. Bring her here.’
‘She in’t in the ’all, sir. She’s in the parlour,’ Minnie Maude told him with disgust at his imagining she would do anything less.
‘I apologise. Of course she is. Bring her here anyway.’
Defeated, she went to obey.
Pitt ate the last mouthful of his supper and cleared the table as Vespasia arrived in the doorway.
‘I always liked this room,’ she observed. ‘Thank you, Minnie Maude. Good evening, Thomas. I am sorry to have interrupted your dinner, but it is unavoidable.’
Behind him Minnie Maude skirted around her and put the kettle onto the hob. Then she began to wash out the teapot in which Pitt’s tea had been made, and prepare it to make a different brew for Vespasia. Her back was very straight and her hands shook just a little.
Pitt did not interrupt Vespasia. He held one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs for her to be seated. She declined to take off her cape.
‘I have just heard from Victor,’ she told him. ‘On the telephone, from a railway station not far from the city. Charlotte was with him, and perfectly well. You have no need to concern yourself about her health, or anything else. However, there are other matters of very great concern indeed. Matters that require your immediate and total attention.’
‘Narraway?’ His mind raced. She was being discreet, no doubt aware that Minnie Maude could hear all they said. It would be cruel, pointless and possibly even dangerous to frighten her unnecessarily. Certainly she did not deserve it, apart from the very practical matter that he needed her common sense to care for his household and, most importantly, his children — at least until Charlotte returned. And, he admitted, he rather liked her. She was good-natured and not without spirit. There was something about her not totally unlike Gracie.
‘Indeed.’ Vespasia turned to Minnie Maude. ‘When you have made the tea, will you please go and pack a small case for your master, with what he will need for one night away from home. Clean personal linen and a clean shirt, and his customary toiletries. When you have it, bring it downstairs and leave it in the hall by the bottom step.’
Minnie Maude’s eyes widened. She blinked, as if wondering whether she dare confirm the orders with Pitt, or if she should simply obey them. Who was in charge?
They were giving the poor girl a great deal to become accustomed to in a very short while. Pitt smiled at her. ‘Please do that, Minnie Maude. It appears I shall have to leave you. But also, I shall return before too long.’
‘You may be extremely busy for some time,’ Vespasia corrected him. ‘It is a very good thing that Minnie Maude is a responsible girl. You will need her. Now let us have tea and prepare to leave.’
As soon as the tea was poured and Minnie Maude was out of the room Pitt turned to Vespasia. The look on his face demanded she explain.
‘It is a conclusion no longer avoidable that both you and Victor were drawn away from London for a very specific purpose,’ she said, sipping delicately at her tea. ‘Victor was put out of office, with an attempt to have him at least imprisoned in Ireland, possibly hanged. You were lured away from London before that, so you, as the only person at Lisson Grove with an unquestionable personal loyalty to him, and the courage to fight for him, would not be there. He would be friendless, as indeed he was.’
Pitt would have interrupted Narraway to ask why, but he did not dare interrupt Vespasia.
‘It appears that Charles Austwick is involved,’ she continued. ‘To what degree, and for what purpose, we do not yet know, but the plot is widespread, dangerous and probably violent.’
‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I think after all I can rely on Stoker, but so far as I can see, at the moment, he is the only one. There will be more, but I don’t know who they are, and I can’t afford any mistakes. Even one could be fatal. What I don’t understand is why Austwick made so little fuss at being removed from the leadership. It makes me fear that there is someone else who knows every move I make and who is reporting to him.’
She set her cup down. ‘The answer is uglier than that, my dear,’ she said very quietly. ‘I think that what is planned is so wide and so final in its result that they wish you to be there to take the blame for Special Branch’s failure to prevent it. Then the Branch can be recreated from the beginning with none of the experienced men who are there now, and be completely in the control of those who are behind this. Or alternatively, it might be disbanded altogether, as a force that has served its purpose in the past, but is now manifestly no longer needed.’
The thought was so devastating that it took Pitt several moments to grasp the full import of it. He was not promoted for merit, but as someone completely dispensable, a Judas goat to be sacrificed when Special Branch took the blame for failing to prevent some disaster. He should have been furiously angry, and he would be, in time, when he absorbed the enormity of it and had time to think of himself. Now all he could deal with was the nature of the plot, and who was involved. How could they ever begin to fight against it?
He looked at Vespasia. He was startled to see the gentleness in her face, a deep and hurting compassion.
He forced himself to smile at her. In the same circumstances she would never have spent time pitying herself. He would not let her down by doing so.
‘I’m trying to think what I would have been working on had I not gone to St Malo,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if poor West was actually going to tell me anything that mattered, such as that Gower was a traitor, or if he was killed only to get me chasing Wrexham to France. I thought it was the former, but perhaps it wasn’t. Certainly that was the end of my involvement over here.’
‘If you had been here you might have prevented Victor from having been removed from office,’ she concluded. ‘On the other hand, you might have been implicated in the same thing, and removed also. .’ She stopped.
He shrugged. ‘Or killed.’ He said what he knew she was thinking. ‘Sending me to France was better, much less obvious. Also, it seems they want me here now, to take the blame for this failure that is about to descend on us. I’ve been trying to think what cases we were most concerned with, what we may have learned had we had time.’
‘We will consider it in my carriage on the way to our appointment,’ Vespasia said, finishing her tea. ‘Minnie Maude will have your case packed any moment, and we should be on our way.’
He rose and went to say good night, and — for the very immediate future — goodbye to his children. He gave Minnie Maude last instructions, and a little more money to ascertain that she had sufficient. Then he collected his case and went outside to Vespasia’s carriage where it was waiting in the street. Within seconds they were moving briskly.
‘I’ve already looked over everything that happened shortly before I left, and in Austwick’s notes since,’ he began. ‘And in the reports from other people. I did it with Stoker. We saw something that I don’t yet understand, but it is very alarming.’
‘What is it?’ she asked quickly.
He told her about the violent men who had been seen in several different parts of England, and watched her face grow pale and very grave as he told her how old enemies had been seen together, as if they had a common cause.
‘This is very serious,’ she agreed. ‘There is something I also have heard whispers of while you were away. I dismissed it at first as being the usual idealistic talk that has always been around among dreamers, always totally impractical. For example, certain social reformers seem to be creating plans as if they could get them through the House of Commons without difficulty. Some of the reforms were radical, and yet I admit there is a certain justice to them. I assumed they were simply naive, but perhaps there is some major element that I have missed.’
They rode in silence for the length of Woburn Place towards Euston Road, then turned right with the stream of traffic and continued north until it became the Pentonville Road.
‘I fear I know what element you have missed,’ Pitt said at last.
‘Violence?’ she asked. ‘I cannot think of any one man, or even group of men, who would pass some of the legislation they are proposing. It would be pointless anyway. It would be sent back by the House of Lords, and then
