Betrayal at Lisson Grove (Treason at Lisson Grove)

“Twenty years ago,” Phelim O’Conor said slowly. “A lot of trouble then. But you wouldn’t be knowing that—in London. Might have seemed romantic, to your grandmother, Charles Stewart Parnell and all that. God rest his soul. Other people’s griefs can be like that.” His face was smooth, almost innocent, but there was a darkness in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said quietly. “I didn’t mean to touch on something painful. Do you think perhaps I shouldn’t ask?” She looked from Phelim to Talulla, and back again.

He gave a very slight shrug. “No doubt you’ll hear anyway. If your cousin’s wife was Kate O’Neil, she’s dead now, God forgive her …”

“How can you say that?” Talulla spat the words between her teeth, the muscles in her thin jaw clenched tight. “Twenty years is nothing! The blink of an eye in the history of Ireland’s sorrows.”

Charlotte tried to look totally puzzled, and guilty. But in truth she was beginning to feel a little afraid. Rage sparked in Talulla as if she’d touched an exposed nerve.

“Because there’s been new blood, and new tears since then,” Phelim answered, speaking to Talulla, not Charlotte. “And new issues to address.”

Good manners might have dictated that Charlotte apologize again and withdraw, leaving them to deal with the memories in their own way, but she thought of Pitt in France, alone, trusting in Narraway to back him up. She feared there were only Narraway’s enemies in Lisson Grove now, people who might easily be Pitt’s enemies too. Good manners were a luxury for another time.

“Is there some tragedy my grandmother knew nothing of?” she asked innocently. “I’m sorry if I have woken an old bereavement, or injustice. I certainly did not mean to. I’m so sorry.”

Talulla looked at her with undisguised harshness, a slight flush in her sallow cheeks. “If your grandmother’s cousin was Kate O’Neil, she trusted an Englishman, an agent of the queen’s government who courted her, flattered her into telling him her own people’s secrets, then betrayed her to be murdered by those whose trust she gave away.”

O’Conor winced. “I daresay she loved him. We can all be fools for love,” he said wryly.

“I daresay she did!” Talulla snarled. “But that son of a whore never loved her, and with half a drop of loyalty in her blood she’d have known that. She’d have won his secrets, then put a knife in his belly. He might have been able to charm the fish out of the sea, but he was her people’s enemy, and she knew that. She got what she deserved.” She turned and moved away sharply, her dark head high and stiff, her back ramrod-straight, and she made no attempt to offer even a glance backward.

“You’ll have to forgive Talulla,” O’Conor said ruefully. “Anyone would think she’d loved the man herself, and it was twenty years ago. I must remember never to flirt with her. If she fell for my charm I might wake up dead of it.” He shrugged. “Not that it’d be likely, God help me!” He did not add anything more, but his expression said all the rest.

Then with a sudden smile, like spring sun through the drifting rain, he told her about the place where he had been born and the little town to the north where he had grown up and his first visit to Dublin when he had been six.

“I thought it was the grandest place I’d ever seen,” he said. “Street after street of buildings, each one fit to be the palace of a king. And some so wide it was a journey just to cross from one side to another.”

Suddenly Talulla’s hatred seemed no more than a lapse in manners. But Charlotte did not forget it. O’Conor’s charm was clearly masking great shame. She was certain that he would find Talulla afterward and, when they were alone, berate her for allowing a foreigner—an Englishwoman at that—to see a part of their history that should have been kept private.

The party continued. The food was excellent, the wine flowed generously. There was laughter, sharp and poignant wit, even music as the evening approached midnight. But Charlotte did not forget the emotion she had seen, and the hatred.

She rode home in the carriage with Fiachra McDaid, and despite his gentle inquiries she said nothing except how much she had enjoyed the hospitality.

“And did anyone know your cousin?” he asked. “Dublin’s a small town, when it comes to it.”

“I don’t think so,” she answered easily. “But I may find trace of her later. O’Neil is not a rare name. And anyway, it doesn’t matter very much.”

“Now, there’s something I doubt our friend Victor would agree with,” he said candidly. “I had the notion it mattered to him rather a lot. Was I wrong, then, do you suppose?”

For the first time in the evening she spoke the absolute truth. “I think maybe you know him a great deal better than I do, Mr. McDaid. We have met only in one set of circumstances, and that does not give a very complete picture of a person, don’t you think?”

In the darkness inside the carriage she could not read his expression.