Ashworth Hall (10 page)

“Quite by accident,” Piers replied, obviously happy to discuss anything to do with Justine. He could not keep from glancing at her, and when he did she colored very faintly and lowered her eyes. Emily had the distinct impression it was not shyness of him, or any ordinary self-consciousness, but a shyness of her prospective parents-in-law, sitting only two or three places away. Such modesty was what was expected, and she was going to do exactly what any young woman would, to the least thing.

Emily would have done the same.

Everyone appeared to be listening.

“I was leaving the theater with a group of friends,” Piers continued enthusiastically. “I don’t even remember what I saw, something by Pinero, I think, but it went right out of my head the moment I met Justine. She was leaving also, with one of my professors—a brilliant man, lecturer in diseases of the heart in particular, and of the circulation. It was quite appropriate that I should speak with him, and I had to seize the chance to be introduced to Justine.”

He smiled a little self-mockingly. “I knew she could not be his wife. He is a fellow of the college. I was afraid she might be a niece and he would not approve of a mere student seeking an acquaintance with her.”

Justine glanced up at Ainsley, who was looking at her. He looked down again immediately. She seemed uncomfortable.

“And was she?” Eudora enquired.

“No,” Piers said with relief. “She was merely a friend. He said she was the daughter of an old student of his with whom he had kept in touch, until he had unfortunately died young.”

“How very sad.” Eudora shook her head a little.

“And you did not allow the single introduction to be the end to it?” Emily deduced with a smile.

“Of course he didn’t.” Padraig looked from one to the other of them. “No young man worth his salt would. If you see the one woman in the world who is right for you, you follow her wherever she goes, through cities and countryside, mountains and high seas, to the ends of the earth, if need be. Isn’t that so?” He was addressing the table at large.

Piers grinned. “Of course it is.”

Iona kept her eyes on her plate.

“Wherever it takes you,” Fergal agreed suddenly, looking up at Padraig, then at Piers. “Grip your courage in both hands, and to the devil with fears.”

Kezia ground her fork into the last piece of her game pie.

“Come heaven or hell, honor or dishonor,” she said very clearly. “Just go on, take what you want, never count the cost or look to see who pays it.”

Piers looked disconcerted. He was one of the few who had no idea what had happened that morning, but he was not so blinded by his own happiness that he missed the pain in her voice—and no one at all could have missed the anger, even not knowing what it was for.

“I didn’t mean that, Miss Moynihan,” he answered. “Of course, I would not have pursued her had there been anything dishonorable in it, for her or for me. But thank heaven, she was as free as I am, and seems to return my feelings.”

“Congratulations, my boy,” Padraig said sincerely.

The butler served Justine with a little cold salmon, sliced cucumber and potatoes with herbs, and offered her chilled white wine.

Somebody made a comment about an opera currently playing in London. Someone else said they had seen it in Dublin. Padraig remarked on the difficulty of the soprano role, and O’Day agreed with him.

Emily glanced at Jack, and he smiled back guardedly.

The butler and footmen were waiting to serve the next course, as were one or two of the valets. Finn Hennessey was there. Tellman was not, which was almost certainly a good thing.

The men returned to their political discussions. At least outwardly there appeared very little rancor. If they had even approached argument on anything at all it was not hinted at.

The ladies decided to go for a walk in the woods. It was a bright afternoon with a few light clouds and a mild breeze. It could not be counted upon to last. Even the evening could change and bring rain or a sudden drop in temperature. The next day there could be gales, frost, steady drumming sleet, or it could be as pleasant as today.

The six of them set out across the lawn. Emily led the way with Kezia. She tried a conversation but it very quickly became apparent that Kezia did not wish to speak, and Emily allowed it to lapse into a polite silence.

Eudora took Justine and they followed a few yards behind, a marked contrast to each other: Eudora handsome figured, the light bright in her auburn hair, walking with her head high; Justine very slender, almost thin, her hair black as a crow’s wing, her movements peculiarly graceful, and when she turned in profile to speak, the extraordinary nose.

Charlotte was left to walk with Iona. It was not something she wished to do, but social duty required it, and loyalty to Emily made it a necessity. She wished she knew the woods better so that they might furnish some subject to discuss. All she could think of was Emily’s warnings not to discuss politics, religion, divorce, or potatoes. Almost everything that came to her mind seemed to lead to one or the other of them. It was better to walk in silence than be reduced to making remarks about the weather.

She could see Eudora talking to Justine, apparently asking her questions. It was as if she were hungry to learn of a courtship she knew nothing about. Charlotte wondered why Piers had said nothing to her before.

Some remark about Piers and Justine was on her lips, then she bit it off, realizing romance must now be another forbidden subject. What on earth did one say to a married woman one had surprised in bed with another man only that morning? It was a subject no etiquette manual broached. Presumably, well-bred ladies made sure they never did such a thing. If one should be so unfortunate, or so careless, one pretended it had not happened. But that was not possible when someone was screaming at the top of her lungs.

A magpie flew across their path just as they reached the end of the lawn and started down the rhododendron walk.

“Oh, isn’t it beautiful!” Charlotte exclaimed.

“One for sorrow,” Iona answered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It is unlucky to see a single magpie,” Iona elaborated. “One should see either a pair or none.”

“Why?”

Now Iona looked mystified. “It just … is!”

Charlotte kept her tone polite and interested. “Unlucky for whom? Do farmers say so, or bird-watchers?”

“No, for us. It is a …”

“A superstition?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry. How silly of me. I thought you were serious.”

Iona frowned, but said nothing, and Charlotte realized with a jolt that she had been serious. Perhaps she was as much mystic Celt as modern Christian. There was a romantic bravado about her, a recklessness, as if she could see some reality beyond the physical or social world. Perhaps that was the quality in her which had most captured the rather literal-minded Fergal. She must represent for him a realm of magical possibilities, dreams and ideas that had never crossed his thoughts. In a sense he had come newly alive. Charlotte wondered what he gave Iona. He seemed a trifle unyielding. Perhaps it was the challenge. Or perhaps she imagined in him something that was not there?

She cast about for something else to say. The silence was uncomfortable. She noticed the rich quantities of hips on the wild roses as they entered the woods.

“A hard winter coming,” Iona said, then flashed a sudden smile. “General knowledge, not superstition!”

Charlotte laughed, and suddenly they were both easier. “Yes, I’ve heard that too. I’ve never remembered what they were like long enough to see it if was true.”

“Actually,” Iona agreed, “neither have I. Looking at all those berries, I hope it isn’t.”

They walked under the smooth trunks of the beeches, the wind in the bare branches overhead, their feet crunching on the carpet of rust and bronze fallen leaves.

“There are bluebells here in the spring,” Charlotte went on. “They come before the leaves do.”

“I know,” Iona said quickly. “It’s like walking between two skies ….”

They accomplished the rest of the journey sharing knowledge of nature, Iona telling her stories from Irish legend about stones and trees, heroes and tragedies of the mystic past.

They returned in different order, except that Eudora still walked with Justine, still asking about Piers. Emily shot Charlotte a look of gratitude and exchanged Kezia for Iona.

They saw bright pheasants picking over the fallen grain at the edge of the fields bordering the woods, and Charlotte remarked on them. Kezia answered, but with only a word.

The sun was low in the west, burning flame and gold. The shadows lengthened across the plowed field to the south, its furrows dark and curving gently over the rise and fall of the land. The wind had increased and the starlings were whirled up like driven leaves against the ragged sky, spreading wide and wheeling back in again.

The sunset grew even brighter, the clear stretches of sky between the clouds almost green.

The thought of hot tea and crumpets by the fire began to seem very pleasant.

Gracie was very preoccupied as she helped Charlotte dress for dinner in the oyster silk gown.

“It looks very beautiful, ma’am,” she said sincerely, and the magnitude of her admiration for it was in her eyes. Then the moment after she added, “I learned a bit more about why them folks is ’ere today. I ’ope they really can make peace and give Ireland its freedom. There’s bin some terrible wrongs done. I in’t proud o’ bein’ English w’en I hear some o’ their stories.” She put a final touch to Charlotte’s hair, setting the pearl-beaded ornament straight. “Not as I believes ’em all, o’ course. But even if any of ’em is true, there’s bin some awful cruel men in Ireland.”

“On both sides, I expect,” Charlotte said carefully, regarding her reflection in the glass, but her mind at least half upon what Gracie had said. She looked at Gracie’s small face, pinched now with anxiety and compassion. “They’re working as hard as they can,” she assured her. “And I think Mr. Greville is very skilled. He won’t give up.”

“ ’E better ’adn’t.” Gracie stopped all pretense of attending to the shawl she had in her hands. “There’s terrible things ‘appenin’ ter all kinds o’ people, old women and children, not just men as can fight. Maybe them Fenians an’ the like is wrong, but they wouldn’t a bin there if’n it weren’t fer us bein’ in Ireland when we got no place there in the beginnin’.”

“There’s no point in going back to the beginning, Gracie,” Charlotte said levelly. “We probably shouldn’t be here either. Who should? The Normans, the Vikings, the Danes, the Romans? The Scots all came from Ireland in the first place.”

“No ma’am, the Scots is in Scotland,” Gracie corrected.

Charlotte shook her head. “I know they are now, but before that the Picts were. Then the Scots came across from Ireland and drove the Picts out.”

“Where’d they go to, then?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe they were almost all killed.”

“Well, if the Scots came from Ireland and took over Scotland”—Gracie was thinking hard—“who’s all in Ireland? Why don’t they get on wi’ each other, like we do?”

“Because some of the Scots went back again, and by this time they were Protestant and the rest were Catholic. They’d grown very different in the meantime.”

“Then they shouldn’t oughta gone back.”

“Possibly not, but it’s too late now. We can’t go forward from anywhere except where we are at the moment.”

Gracie thought about that for a long time before she conceded it as Charlotte was about to go out of the door.

Charlotte met Pitt at the bottom of the stairs and was caught by surprise at how pleased she was at the start of admiration in his eyes when he saw her. She felt a heat in her cheeks. He offered his arm, and she took it as she sailed into the withdrawing room.

Dinner was again uncomfortable, but eased in some part by the addition of Piers and Justine, which gave everyone something to talk about other than their own interests, or trivia, which were embarrassingly meaningless.

There were too few of them at the table to separate all those between whom there was friction. It was a hostess’s nightmare. There was order of precedence to consider. People might be insulted if one did not. If there was no title or office to dictate, then there was age. And yet one could not sit Fergal either next to or opposite Lorcan McGinley, nor could one sit him close to Iona, for reasons which were excruciatingly clear to some and quite unknown to others. Similarly, one could not sit Kezia near to her brother. The rage still simmered in her only just below the heat of explosion.

Carson O’Day was the savior of the situation. He seemed both able and willing to conduct agreeable conversations with everyone, finding subjects to discuss from areas as diverse and innocuous as designs of Georgian silver and the last eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Padraig Doyle told amusing anecdotes about an Irish tinker and a parish priest and made everyone laugh, except Kezia, a failure which he ignored.

Piers and Justine had real attention only for each other.

Eudora looked a trifle sad, as if she had just realized the loss of something she had thought she possessed, and Ainsley appeared bored. Every now and then Charlotte observed an expression of anxiety in his eyes, a difficulty swallowing, a moment to steady his hand. He would miss something someone had said to him, as if his mind were elsewhere, and have to ask to have it repeated. It must be an appalling responsibility to be in charge of such a conference as this. The burden of succeeding at the impossible had broken both greater and lesser men than he.

And if he was also afraid, he had good reason. There was still the threat of violence which perhaps only he and Pitt really understood.

No one had mentioned the Parnell-O’Shea divorce. If there had been anything of it in the newspapers, it was not referred to.

They were rather more than halfway through the removes—a shoulder of lamb, stuffed beef in pastry, or cold pickled eel with cucumber and onions—when the quarrel began. It was Kezia who started it. All evening she had been barely suppressing her anger. She spoke civilly enough to everyone else, and she ignored Iona as if she had not been there. Her rage was for her brother.