“Nonsense,” he replied quietly.
She looked up, startled by his abruptness.
He was smiling, but the sharp morning light showed very clearly the tiredness in his face. Her resolve to lie to him wavered. There were many ways in which he was unreadable, but not in the deep-etched lines in his face or the hollows around his eyes.
“All right,” she conceded. “They were hospitable and a certain glamour in it was fun. Is that more precise?”
He was amused. He gave nothing so obvious as a smile, but it was just as plain to her.
“Whom did you meet, apart from Fiachra, of course?”
“You’ve known him a long time?” she asked, remembering McDaid’s words with a slight chill.
“Why do you say that?” He took more toast and buttered it. He had eaten very little. She wondered if he had slept.
“Because he asked me nothing about you,” she answered. “But he seems very willing to help.”
“A good friend,” he replied, looking straight at her.
She smiled. “Nonsense,” she said with exactly the same inflection he had used.
“Touché,” he acknowledged. “You are right, but we have known each other a long time.”
“Isn’t Ireland full of people you have known a long time?”
He put a little marmalade on his toast.
She waited.
“Yes,” he agreed. “But I do not know the allegiances of most of them.”
“If Fiachra McDaid is a friend, what do you need me for?” she asked bluntly. Suddenly an urgent and ugly thought occurred to her: Perhaps he did not want her in London where Pitt could reach her. Just how complicated was this, and how ugly? Where was the embezzled money now? Was it really about money, and not old vengeances at all? Or was it both?
He did not answer.
“Because you are using me, or both of us, with selected lies?” she suggested.
He winced as if the blow had been physical as well as emotional. “I am not lying to you, Charlotte.” His voice was so quiet, she had to lean forward a little to catch his words. “I am … being highly selective about how much of the truth I tell you …”
“And the difference is?” she asked.
He sighed. “You are a good detective—in your own way almost as good as Pitt—but Special Branch work is very different from ordinary domestic murder.”
“Domestic murder isn’t always ordinary,” she contradicted him. “Human love and hate very seldom are. People kill for all sorts of reasons, but it is usually to gain or protect something they value passionately. Or it is in outrage at some violation they cannot bear. And I do not mean necessarily a physical one. The emotional or spiritual wounds can be far harder to recover from.”
“I apologize,” he responded. “I should have said that the alliances and loyalties stretch in far more complicated ways. Brothers can be on opposite sides, as can husband and wife. Rivals can help each other, even die for each other, if allied in the cause.”
“And the casualties are the innocent as well as the guilty,” she said, echoing McDaid’s words. “My role is easy enough. I would like to help you, but I am bound by everything in my nature to help my husband, and of course myself …”
“I had no idea you were so pragmatic,” he said with a slight smile.
“I am a woman, I have a finite amount of money, and I have children. A degree of pragmatism is necessary.” She spoke gently to take the edge from her words.
He finished spreading his marmalade. “So you will understand that Fiachra is my friend in some things, but I will not be able to count on him if the answer should turn out to be different from the one I suppose.”
“There is one you suppose?”
“I told you: I think Cormac O’Neil has found the perfect way to take revenge on me, and has taken it.”
“For something that happened twenty years ago?” she questioned.
“The Irish have the longest memories in Europe.” He bit into the toast.
“And the greatest patience too?” she said with disbelief. “People take action because something, somewhere has changed. Crimes of state have that in common with ordinary, domestic murders. Something new has caused O’Neil, or whoever it is, to do this now. Perhaps it has only just become possible. Or it may be that for him, now is the right time.”
He ate the whole of his toast before replying. “Of course you are right. The trouble is that I don’t know which of those reasons it is. I’ve studied the situation in Ireland and I can’t see any reason at all for O’Neil to do this now.”
She ignored her tea. An unpleasant thought occurred to her, chilling and very immediate. “Wouldn’t O’Neil know that this would bring you here?” she asked.
Narraway stared at her. “You think O’Neil wants me here? I’m sure if killing me were his purpose, he would have come to London and done it. If I thought it was simply murder I wouldn’t have let you come with me, Charlotte, even if Pitt’s livelihood rests on my return to office. Please give me credit for thinking that far ahead.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought bringing someone that nobody would see as assisting you might be the best way of getting around that. You never suggested it would be comfortable, or easy. And you cannot prevent me from coming to Ireland if I want to. You could simply have let me do it alone, which would be inefficient, and unlike you.”
“It would have been awkward,” he conceded. “But not impossible. I had to tell you something of the situation, for Pitt’s sake. For your own, I cannot tell you everything. I don’t know any reason why O’Neil should choose now. But then I don’t know any reason why anyone should. It is unarguable that someone with strong connections in Dublin has chosen to steal the money I sent for Mulhare, so to bring about the poor man’s death. Then they made certain it was evident first to Austwick, and then to Croxdale, and so brought about my dismissal.”
He poured more tea for himself. “Perhaps it was not O’Neil who initiated it; he may simply have been willingly used. I’ve made many enemies. Knowledge and power both make that inevitable.”
“Then think of other enemies,” she urged. “Whose circumstances have changed? Is there anyone you were about to expose?”
“My dear, do you think I haven’t thought of that?”
“And you still believe it is O’Neil?”
“Perhaps it is a guilty conscience.” He gave a smile so brief it reached his eyes and was gone again. “ ‘The guilty flee where no man pursueth,’ ” he quoted. “But there is knowledge in this that only people familiar with the case could have.”
“Oh.” She poured herself fresh tea. “Then we had better learn more about O’Neil. He was mentioned yesterday evening. I told them that my grandmother was Christina O’Neil.”
He swallowed. “And who was she really?”
“Christine Owen,” she replied.
He started to laugh. She said nothing, but finished her toast and then the rest of her tea.
CHARLOTTE SPENT THE MORNING and most of the afternoon quietly reading as much as she could of Irish history, realizing the vast gap in her knowledge and becoming a little ashamed of it. Because Ireland was geographically so close to England, and because the English had occupied it one way or another for so many centuries, in their minds its individuality had been swallowed up in the general tide of British history. The empire covered a quarter of the world. Englishmen tended to think of Ireland as part of their own small piece of it, linked by a common language—disregarding the existence of the Irish tongue.
So many of Ireland’s greatest sons had made their names on the world stage indistinguishably from the English. Everyone knew Oscar Wilde was Irish, even though his plays were absolutely English in their setting. They probably knew Jonathan Swift was Irish, but did they know it of Bram Stoker? Did they know it of the great duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo, and later prime minister? The fact that these men had left Ireland in their youth did not in any way alter their heritage.