Betrayal at Lisson Grove (Treason at Lisson Grove)

Charlotte felt the blood hot in her face. “Of course not. I can’t take a maid, I don’t have one, or the money to pay her fare if I did. I am going to say I am Mr. Narraway’s sister—half sister. That will make it decent enough.”

A tiny smile touched the corners of Vespasia’s lips. “Then you had better stop calling him Mr. Narraway and learn to use his given name, or you will certainly raise eyebrows.” She hesitated. “Or perhaps you already do.”

Charlotte looked into Vespasia’s steady silver-gray eyes, and chose not to respond.

NARRAWAY CAME EARLY THE following morning in a hansom cab. When she answered the door he hesitated only momentarily. He did not ask her if she were certain of the decision. Perhaps he did not want to give her the chance to waver. He called the cabdriver to put her case on the luggage rack.

“Do you wish to go and say good-bye?” he asked her. His face looked bleak, with shadows under his eyes as if he had not slept in many nights. “There is time.”

“No thank you,” she answered. “I have already done so. And I hate long good-byes. I am quite ready to go.”

He nodded and walked behind her across the footpath. Then he helped her up onto the seat, going around to the other side to sit next to her. The cabbie apparently knew the destination.

She had already decided not to tell him that she had visited Vespasia. He might prefer to think Vespasia did not know of his dismissal. She also chose not to let him know of Mrs. Waterman’s suspicions. It could prove embarrassing, even as if she herself had considered the journey as something beyond business herself.

“Perhaps you would tell me something about Dublin,” she requested. “I have never been there, and I realize that beyond the fact that it is the capital of Ireland, I know very little.”

The idea seemed to amuse him. “We have a long train journey ahead of us, even on the fast train, and then a crossing of the Irish Sea. I hear that the weather will be pleasant. I hope so, because if it is rough, then it can be very violent indeed. There will be time for me to tell you all I know, from 7500 BC until the present day.”

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.