Betrayal at Lisson Grove (Treason at Lisson Grove)

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

“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.

“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, and 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. The bitterness in his tone was laced with irony and laughter, but the pain was real.

It was on her tongue to contradict him, until she realized 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 color pale. “Is that what you see?” His voice was thick, almost choking on the words. “You romanticize, Mrs. Pitt.” Now the bitterness in him was overwhelming. She was as aware of it as if he had touched her physically.

“Do I?” she asked him, moving aside to allow a couple arm in arm to pass by. 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. So he did know that she was linked to Narraway. The hushed anger with which he now confronted her seemed on the verge of boiling over at last. Surely to feign innocence would be ridiculous?

“I would like to be a deus ex machina,” she replied. “But I imagine that’s impossible.”

“God in the 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 anymore.” 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 said. There was no point in trying to explain. “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.”

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

“Of course,” McDaid replied flatly. “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.