Betrayal at Lisson Grove (20 page)

‘Are you enjoying the play?’ McDaid asked her. They drifted towards the bar counter, where Cormac O’Neil had a glass of whiskey in his hand.

Did McDaid know how little she had watched it? He might very well. She did not want either to lie to him, or to tell him the truth.

Now O’Neil was also waiting for her answer with curiosity.

‘I am enjoying the whole experience,’ she replied. ‘I am most grateful that you brought me. I could not have come alone, nor would I have found it half so pleasant.’

‘I am delighted you enjoy it,’ McDaid replied with a smile. ‘I was not sure that you would. The play ends with a superb climax, all very dark and dreadful. You won’t understand much of it at all.’

‘Is that the purpose of it?’ she asked, looking from McDaid to O’Neil and back again. ‘To puzzle us all so much that we will be obliged to spend weeks or months trying to work out what it really means? Perhaps we will come up with half a dozen different possibilities?’

For a moment there was surprise and admiration in McDaid’s eyes, then he masked it and the slightly bantering tone returned. ‘I think perhaps you overrate us, at least this time. I rather believe the playwright himself has no such subtle purpose in mind.’

‘What meanings did you suppose?’ O’Neil asked softly. He had said it as if it were mere conversation to amuse during the interval, but she thought he was probing to learn something deeper.

‘Oh, ask me in a month’s time, Mr O’Neil,’ she said casually. ‘There is anger in it, of course. Anyone can see that. There seems to me also to be a sense of predestination, as if we all have little choice, as if birth determines our reactions. I dislike that. I don’t wish to feel so . . . controlled by fate.’

‘You are English. You like to imagine you are the masters of history. In Ireland we have learned that history masters us,’ he responded, and the bitterness in his tone was laced with irony and laughter, but underneath the pain was plainly real.

It was on her tongue to contradict him, then she realised her opportunity. ‘Really? If I understand the play rightly, it is about a certain inevitability in love and betrayal that is quite universal – a sort of darker and older
Romeo and Juliet
.’

O’Neil’s face tightened and even in the lamplight of the crowded room Charlotte could see his colour pale. ‘Is that what you see?’ His voice was thick, almost choking on the words. ‘You romanticise, Mrs Pitt.’ Now the bitterness in him was clearly overwhelming.

‘Do I?’ she asked him, moving aside to allow a couple arm in arm to pass by them. In so doing, she deliberately stepped close to O’Neil, so he could not leave without pushing her aside. ‘What harder realities should I see? Rivalry between opposing sides, families divided, a love that cannot be fulfilled, betrayal and death? I don’t think I really find that romantic, except for us as we sit in the audience watching. For the people involved it must be anything but.’

He stared at her, his eyes hollow with a kind of black despair. She could believe very easily that Narraway was right, and O’Neil had nursed a hatred for twenty years, until fate had given him a way to avenge it. But what was it that had changed?

‘And what are you, Mrs Pitt?’ he asked, standing close to her and speaking so McDaid almost certainly would not hear him. ‘Audience or player? Are you here to watch the blood and tears of Ireland, or to meddle in them, like your friend Narraway?’

She was stunned. She had no idea how to answer. For a moment the rest of the crowd were just a babble of noise. They could as easily have been a field full of geese. Was there any point at all in pretence? Surely now to feign innocence would be ridiculous?

‘I would like to be a
Deus ex machina
,’ she replied. ‘But I imagine that’s impossible.’

‘God from a machine?’ he said with an angry shrug. ‘You want to descend at the last act and arrange an impossible ending that solves it all? How very English. And how absurd, and supremely arrogant. You are twenty years too late. Tell Victor that, when you see him. There’s nothing left to mend any more.’ He turned away before she could answer again, pushing past her and spilling what was left of his whiskey as he bumped into a broad man in a blue coat. The moment after, he was gone.

Charlotte was aware of McDaid next to her, and a certain air of discomfort about him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. There was no point in trying to explain. Reasons did not matter, and she did not know how much McDaid was aware of either Narraway’s present trouble, or his part in O’Neil’s past tragedies. ‘I allowed myself to express my opinions too freely.’

He bit his lip. ‘You couldn’t know it, but the subject of Irish freedom, and traitors to the cause, is painfully close to O’Neil. It was through his family that our great plan was betrayed twenty years ago.’ He winced. ‘We never knew for sure by whom. Sean O’Neil murdered his wife, Kate, and was hanged for it. Even though it was because she was the one who told the English our plans, some thought it was because Sean found her with another man. Either way, we failed again, and the bitterness still lasts.’

Murder, and then hanging. No wonder O’Neil was bitter and the grief had never died – and Narraway still felt the guilt weigh dark and heavy on him also.

‘It was an uprising that you intended?’ she asked quietly. She heard the chatter around her.

‘Of course,’ McDaid replied, his voice carefully ironed of all expression so it sounded unnaturally flat. ‘Home Rule was in the very air we breathed then. We could have been ourselves, without the weight of England around our necks.’

‘Is that how you see it?’ She turned as she spoke and looked at him, searching his face.

His expression softened. He smiled back at her, rueful and a little self-deprecating. ‘I did at the time. Seeing Cormac brings it back. But I’m cooler-headed now. There are better places to put one’s energy – causes less narrow.’ She was aware of the colour and whisper of fabric around them, silk against silk. They were surrounded by people in one of the most interesting capital cities in the world, come out to an evening at the theatre. Some of them, at least, were also men and women who saw themselves living under a foreign oppression in their own land, and some of them, at least, were willing to kill and to die to throw it off. She looked just like them – cast of feature, tone of skin and hair – and yet she was not, she was different in heart and mind.

‘What causes?’ she asked with interest.

His smile widened, as if to brush it aside. ‘Social injustices, old-fashioned laws to reform,’ he replied. ‘Greater equality. Exactly the same as, no doubt, you fight for at home. I hear there are some great women in London battling for all manner of things. Perhaps one day you will tell me about some of them?’ He made it a question, as if he were interested enough to require an answer.

‘Of course,’ she said lightly, trying to master facts in her mind so she could answer sensibly, if the necessity arose.

He took her arm as people milled around her, returning to their seats, courteous, hospitable, full of dry wit and a passion for life. How easy, and dangerous, it would be for her to forget that she did not belong here – she particularly, because her husband was in Special Branch, and his friend Victor Narraway could be the man who had used Kate O’Neil to betray her own people, and destroy her family.

 

Narraway was uncertain what Charlotte would learn at the theatre. As he walked along Arran Quay, on the north bank of the Liffey, his head down into the warm, damp breeze off the water, he was afraid that she would discover a few things about him that he would very much rather she did not know, but he knew no way to help that. He knew, from Fiachra McDaid, that she would meet Cormac O’Neil, and perhaps judge some depth of his hatred, and the reasons for it.

He smiled bitterly as he pictured her pursuing it, testing, pushing until she found the facts behind the pain. Would she be disillusioned to hear his part in it all? Or was that his vanity, his own feelings – that she cared enough for him that disillusion was even possible, let alone would wound her?

He would never forget the days after Kate’s death. Worst was the morning they hanged Sean. The brutality and the grief of that had cast a chill over all the years since. Why had he exposed himself to the hurt of Charlotte learning anything about it? Perhaps because he was afraid she would, and he would rather deal the blow himself than endure the waiting for someone else to do it.

He should know better. His years in Special Branch should have taught him both patience and control. Usually he was so good at it that people thought him a cold man. Charlotte thought it, he knew. Was that the real reason why he risked her discovering so terribly that he was not?

He did not want her affection, or her grief for him, if it were based on a misconception of who he was.

He laughed at himself; it was just a faint sound, almost drowned by his quick footsteps along the stones of the quayside. Why, at this time in his life, did he care so much for the opinion of another man’s wife?

He forced his attention to where he was going, and why. If he did not learn who had diverted the money meant for Mulhare and placed it in his, Narraway’s, own account, knowing anything else about O’Neil was pointless. Someone in Lisson Grove had been involved. He blamed none of the Irish. They were fighting for their own cause, and at times he even sympathised with it. But the man in Special Branch who had done this had betrayed his own people, and that was different. He wanted to know who it was, and prove it. The damage this traitor could cause would have no boundary. If he hated England enough to plan and execute a way of disgracing Narraway, then what else might he do? Was his real purpose to replace him? This whole business of Mulhare might be no more than a means to that end. But was it simply ambition, or was there another, darker purpose behind it as well?

Without realising it he increased his pace, moving so swiftly he almost passed the alley he was looking for. He turned in and fumbled in the lightless construction of it and the uneven stones under his feet. He had to feel his way along one of the walls. Third door. He knocked sharply, a quick rhythm.

He had brought Charlotte to Ireland because he wanted to, but she had her own compelling reasons to be here. If he was right about the traitor in Lisson Grove then one of the first things that person would do would be to get rid of Pitt. If Pitt were fortunate, he would simply be dismissed.There were much worse possibilities. Some of them passed through Narraway’s mind as the door was opened. He was let into a small, extremely stuffy office piled high with ledgers, account books and sheaths of loose papers. A striped cat had claimed itself a space in front of the hearth and did not stir when he came in and took a seat on a chair opposite the cluttered desk.

O’Casey sat in the chair behind it, his bald head gleaming in the gaslight.

‘Well?’ Narraway asked, masking his eagerness as closely as he could.

O’Casey hesitated.

Narraway considered threatening him. He still had power, albeit illegal now. He drew in his breath. Then he looked at O’Casey’s face again, and changed his mind. He had few enough friends, he could not afford to alienate any of them.

‘So what is it you expect of me, then?’ O’Casey asked, cocking his head a little to one side. ‘I’ll not help you, not more than I owe. Only for old times’ sake, but that’s little enough.’

‘I know,’ Narraway agreed. There were wounds and debts between them, some still unpaid. ‘I need to know what’s changed for Cormac O’Neil.’

‘For God’s sake, leave the poor man alone! Have you not already taken all he has?’ O’Casey exclaimed. ‘You’ll not be after the child, will you?’

‘The child?’ For a moment Narraway was at a loss. Then memory flooded back. Kate’s daughter by Sean. She had been only an infant, six or seven years old, when her parents died. ‘Did Cormac raise her?’ he asked.

‘A little girl?’ O’Casey squinted at him contemptuously. ‘Of course he didn’t, you fool. And what would Cormac O’Neil do with a six-year-old girl, then? Some cousin of Kate’s took her – Maureen, I think her name was. She and her husband. Raised her as their own.’

Narraway felt a stab of pity for the child – Kate’s child. That should never have happened.

‘But she knows who she is?’ he said aloud.

‘Of course. Cormac would have told her, if no one else.’ O’Casey lifted one shoulder slightly. ‘Although, of course, it might not be the truth as you know it, poor child. There are things better left unsaid.’

Narraway felt chilled. He had not thought of Kate’s daughter. They had been so close to the violence erupting and spreading beyond control, he had thought only of preventing that. He had not expected Kate to die; it was never planned. He knew Sean.To deceive him in rebellion was one thing, to deceive him over Kate was another.

Looking back, even weeks afterwards, he knew that she had crossed sides because she believed it was a doomed uprising, and more Irishmen would die in it than English, far more. But she knew Sean as well. He had been willing enough to use her beauty to shame Narraway, even lead him to his death, but in his wildest imagination he had never considered that she might even give herself willingly to Narraway, or worse, care for him.

And when she did, it was beyond Sean’s mind or heart to forgive. He had said he killed her for Ireland, but Narraway knew it was for himself, just as, in the end, Sean knew it too.

And Cormac? He too had loved Kate. Did he feel an Irishman bested in deviousness by an Englishman, in a fight where no one was fair? Or a man betrayed by a woman he wanted and could never have: his brother’s wife, who had sided with the enemy – for her own reasons, good or bad, political or personal?

What had he told Talulla?

Could it possibly be anything new in the last few months? And if it were, how could she have moved the money from Mulhare’s account back to Narraway’s, using some traitor in Lisson Grove? Not by herself. Then with whom?