There was a cold luncheon waiting when he got downstairs and found the dining room. The factotum served it without a word, and withdrew, leaving him to help himself to cheese and fruit. He enjoyed an unhurried meal, and ventured through the adjoining conservatory into the garden. Noticeably overgrown lawns sloped from the house to an orchard, beyond which gleamed the Thames. Hearing a slight cough, he strolled in that direction.
‘Ah, Mr Sargent,’ said Rossanna. ‘I was wondering whether we should see you. You feel refreshed. I hope?’
‘Famously, thank you, miss.’
‘Please call me Rossanna.’ She spoke from a hammock slung low between two apple-trees. Dappled sunshine played over her gently oscillating form, dressed for the afternoon in ivory-coloured cotton lawn, trimmed with lace. Her father sat nearby in his invalid chair, a wide-brimmed straw hat angled so that it obscured the top of his mask, without interfering with his vision. ‘And have you taken lunch?’
‘I have, thank you.’
She smiled in that way that, rightly or wrongly, seemed charged with ulterior meanings. ‘Then you cannot possibly have anything to do but talk to me. It is time we got to know you better, don’t you agree? If you go back to the conservatory, you will find a cane chair. Bring it out in the sunshine, Mr Sargent, and place it just there under the tree, where we both can see you.’
He was not deceived by the casual charm of the invitation, nor the setting. Every move he had made since coming downstairs had been artfully contrived to get him into the garden in a compliant frame of mind. She had staged it alclass="underline" the solitary meal, the open door into the garden, the cough to catch his attention, McGee silently present, herself indolently posed in the hammock, waiting for him. It was different only in detail from being dragged struggling into a room and roped to a chair. The interrogation in the next two hours was no less searching or persistent. Her thoroughness in extracting every detail of his story would have provided an object-lesson for any aspirant to detective work. The Clan-na-Gael was not proposing to admit a novice to its ranks without first sifting his personal history over and over for the possibility of deception.
Cribb, for his part, was not unprepared. He had decided to apply a principle that had served him well in his selection interview for the C.I.D. six years before. He would give so much prominence to the things his questioner wanted to hear that anything adverse would be crowded out. Of course, it was difficult crowding out an entire career in the Force, as distinct from a few minor insubordinations, but the principle was there. After a substantially accurate account of his childhood, he waxed eloquent about his army days, making three years sound like the greater part of his life. From there, he moved deftly on to his career as a mercenary, careful not to include any detail that could betray him. His knowledge of dynamite, he explained, was gained in Paris, in service with the anarchist movement. The names of Kropotkin and Malatesta rolled from his tongue as naturally as the words of the official caution to prisoners-thanks to some profitable reading at Woolwich. In 1882, he said, he had severed his links with the Black International, after the arrests of Cyvogt and Kropotkin, and returned to London.
If Cribb thought his recital was over, Rossanna did not. She continued to press him for more information, verifying dates, names and places. The questions followed no logical sequence, but tested his story at every conceivable point. He was forced to take chances, and more than once faltered and desperately hoped she and father would put it down to lapses of memory.
‘Thank you, Mr Sargent,’ she finally said. ‘You must think me the most inquisitive woman alive.’
‘Good Lord, no, miss,’ Cribb gallantly replied. ‘Anyone in your father’s position is entitled to make reasonable inquiries about a person in his employment, and I’m sure you were putting the questions on his behalf. I’m a professional man. I don’t object to such procedures.’
She smiled. ‘Then you will understand that I must now confer with my father. Would you be so kind as to help me to the ground?’
He took her hands and drew her forward. She swung her legs clear of the hammock and stood upright, so that he felt the touch of her dress against his legs. He made to take a discreet step back, but she continued to hold his hands, momentarily detaining him. ‘You are more than kind,’ she said, and then went to McGee.
When the dumb-language was done, Cribb saw with satisfaction that her expression was still friendly. ‘Father has asked me to take him indoors now,’ she told him, ‘but there are things I must say to you, important things. If you will wait here for me, we can take a turn around the garden in a few minutes.’
Leaning there against the apple-tree while Rossanna wheeled the invalid chair towards the house, Cribb tried to account for the peculiar effect he seemed to have on her. A man the wrong side of forty needed to guard against miscalculations where young women were concerned, but he was strongly of the opinion that she was making overtures to him. It was not the sort of thing one was accustomed to, working for the Yard. He supposed adventurers encountered it more often, by the nature of their work. That rope-ascent the previous night had been a stirring demonstration of agility, he was bound to admit. Yet he would have thought the brutal dressing down he gave the girl after she shot Malone would have put a stop to any sentimental stirrings. Not at alclass="underline" it seemed to have stimulated them. The breakfast she had cooked him, the unpinning of her hair, the invitation to use her Christian name had not indicated much hostility or resentment. Nor had the business beside the hammock.
The odd thing was that Devlin had given the impression that the girl was exclusively devoted to her father. The presence of two strapping young athletes in the house had not moved her in the least. One way of accounting for it was that she was play-acting, coldly and deliberately putting the recruit through some kind of test. The only other explanation Cribb could supply was that she was one of those unusual members of her sex uninterested in young men, preferring to submit to the authority of older, more masterful partners. To such women, a reprimand was an affirmation of affection. He pulled a leaf off the tree and thoughtfully dissected it.
She came across the lawn again in a muslin shawl she had not been wearing before. ‘Being so near the river, we get droves of gnats and flies invading the garden late in the afternoon,’ she explained. ‘It invites disaster to walk about with one’s arms exposed.’ She linked her left hand lightly and naturally under his right forearm and they set off slowly in the direction of the river-bank. ‘Do you know what impressed Father most about your story? You made no claim at all to be a patriot of Ireland. That would have been the most obvious way to curry favour with us.’
‘I told you,’ said Cribb in his most masterful manner, ‘I’m a mercenary. A professional adventurer. I don’t care a tinker’s damn for Ireland unless the money’s right.’
‘It will be. Tell me, Mr Sargent, have you ever heard of the Skirmishing Fund?’
Cribb shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Then I must educate you. It is a sum of money which has been raised in America by public subscription, to finance the skirmishing of England until Ireland gains her freedom. It was started some years ago in the columns of a New York newspaper, the Irish World, by Diarmuid O’Donovan-the Rossa, as he is known.’
‘The Fenian,’ said Cribb.
‘The same. We don’t talk much of Fenians now, Mr Sargent. They were totally discredited when the Rising failed in 1867. Imagine the incompetence of an organisation which postpones its revolution and fails to get the information to County Kerry! The men of Kerry had captured a coastguard station and a police barracks before they discovered their mistake and had to be sent home. And when the Rising did take place three weeks later it was in a blinding snowstorm and never looked like succeeding. You may still hear talk of Fenians, but the organisation is dead. There is only one revolutionary body of any importance, and that was founded in 1869, when most of the Fenians were in prison. Clan-na-Gael is its name.’