She was amazed at the age of the city, but she would not allow him to see that he had impressed her so easily. It might look as if she were being deliberately gentle with the grief she knew he must be feeling.
“Really? Is that because our journey is enormously long after all, or because you know less than I had supposed?”
“Actually there is something of a gap between 7500 BC and the Celts arriving in 700 BC,” he said with a smile. “And after that not a great deal until the arrival of Saint Patrick in AD 432.”
“So we can leap eight thousand years without further comment,” she concluded. “After that surely there must be something a little more detailed?”
“The building of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in AD 1192?” he suggested. “Unless you want to know about the Vikings, in which case I would have to look it up myself. Anyway, they weren’t Irish, so they don’t count.”
“Are you Irish, Mr. Narraway?” she asked suddenly. Perhaps it was an intrusive question, and when he was Pitt’s superior she would not have asked it, but now the relationship was far more equal, and she might need to know. With his intensely dark looks he easily could be.
He winced slightly. “How formal you are. It makes you sound like your mother. No, I am not Irish, I am as English as you are, except for one great-grandmother. Why do you ask?”
“Your precise knowledge of Irish history,” she answered. That was not the real reason. She asked because she needed to know more about his loyalties, the truth about what had happened in the O’Neil case twenty years ago.
“It is my job to know,” he said quietly. “As it was. Would you like to hear about the feud that made the King of Leinster ask Henry the Second of England to send over an army to assist him?”
“Is it interesting?”
“The army was led by Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow. He married the king’s daughter and became king himself in 1171, and the Anglo-Normans took control. In 1205 they began to build Dublin Castle. ‘Silken’ Thomas led a revolt against Henry the Eighth in 1534, and lost. Do you begin to see a pattern?”
“Of course I do. Do they burn the King of Leinster in effigy?”
He laughed, a brief, sharp sound. “I haven’t seen it done, but it sounds like a good idea. We are at the station. Let me get a porter. We will continue when we are seated on the train.”
The hansom pulled up as he spoke, and he alighted easily. There was an air of command in him that attracted attention within seconds, and the luggage was unloaded into a wagon, the driver paid, and Charlotte walked across the pavement into the vast Paddington railway station for the Great Western rail to Holyhead.
It had great arches, as if it were some half-finished cathedral, and a roof so high it dwarfed the massed people all talking and clattering their way to the platform. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and a good deal of noise and steam and grit.
Narraway took her arm. For a moment his grasp felt strange and she was about to object, then she realized how foolish that would be. If they were parted in the crowd they might not find each other again until after the train had pulled out. He had the tickets, and he must know which platform they were seeking.
They passed groups of people, some greeting one another, some clearly stretching out a reluctant parting. Every so often the sound of belching steam and the clang of doors drowned out everything else. Then a whistle would blast shrilly, and one of the great engines would come to life beginning the long pull away from the platform.
It was not until they had found their train and were comfortably seated that they resumed any kind of conversation. She found him courteous, even considerate, but she could not help being aware of his inner tensions, the quick glances, the concern, the way his hands were hardly ever completely still.
It would be a long journey to Holyhead on the west coast. It was up to her to make it as agreeable as possible, and also to learn a good deal more about exactly what he wanted her to do.
Sitting on the rather uncomfortable seat, upright, with her hands folded in her lap, she realized she must look very prim. It was not an image she liked, and yet now that they were embarked on this adventure together, each for their own reasons, she must be certain not to make any irretrievable mistakes, first of all in the nature of her feelings. She liked Victor Narraway. He was highly intelligent, and he could be very amusing at rare times, but she knew only one part of his life.
Still, she knew that there must be more, the private man. Somewhere beneath the pragmatism there had been dreams.
“Thank you for the lesson on ancient Irish history,” she began, feeling clumsy. “But I need to know far more than I do about the specific matter that we are going to investigate; otherwise I may not recognize something important if I hear it. I cannot possibly remember everything to report it accurately to you.”
“Of course not.” He was clearly trying to keep a straight face, and not entirely succeeding. “I will tell you as much as I can. You understand there are aspects of it that are still sensitive … I mean politically.”
She studied his face, and knew that he also meant they were personally painful. “Perhaps you could tell me something of the political situation?” she suggested. “As much as is public knowledge—to those who were interested,” she added. Now it was her turn to mock herself very slightly. “I’m afraid I was more concerned with dresses and gossip at the time of the O’Neil case.” She would have been about fifteen. “And thinking whom I might marry, of course.”
“Of course,” he nodded. “A subject that engages most of us, from time to time. All you need to know of the political background is that Ireland, as always, was agitating for Home Rule. Various British prime ministers had attempted to put it through Parliament, and it proved their heartbreak, and for some their downfall. This is the time of the spectacular rise of Charles Stewart Parnell. He was to become leader of the Home Rule Party in ’77.”
“I remember that name,” she agreed.
“Naturally, but this was long before the scandal that ruined him.”
“Did he have anything to do with what happened with the O’Neil family?”
“Nothing at all, at least not directly. But the fire and hope of a new leader was in the air, and Irish independence at last, and everything was different because of it.” He looked out the window at the passing countryside, and she knew he was seeing another time and place.
“But we had to prevent it?” she assumed.
“I suppose it came to that, yes. We saw it as the necessity to keep the peace. Things change all the time, but how its done must be controlled. There is no point in leaving a trail of death behind you in order merely to exchange one form of tyranny for another.”
“You don’t have to justify it to me,” she told him. “I am aware enough of the feeling. I only wish to understand something of the O’Neil family, and why one of them should hate you personally so much that twenty years later you believe he would stoop to manufacturing evidence that you committed a crime. What sort of a man was he then? Why has he waited so long to do this?”
Narraway turned his head away from the sunlight coming through the carriage window. He spoke reluctantly. “Cormac? He was a good-looking man, very strong, quick to laugh, and quick to anger—but it was usually only on the surface, and gone before he would dwell on it. But he was intensely loyal, to Ireland above all, then to his family. He and his brother Sean were very close.” He smiled. “Quarreled like Kilkenny cats, as they say, but let anyone else step in and they’d turn on them like furies.”