Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [24]
One of the leaders of the Irish cause then had been a man called Cormac O’Neil. He had a dark, brooding nature, like an autumn landscape, full of sudden shadows, storms on the horizon. He loved history, especially that handed down by word of mouth, or immortalised in old songs. He knew half of it was probably invented, but he believed in the emotional truths, the remembered grief. He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have.
Narraway thought of that wryly, remembering still, with regret and guilt, Cormac’s brother, Sean, and more vividly, Kate. Beautiful Kate, so fiercely alive, so brave, so quick to see reason, so blind to the wounded and dangerous emotions of others.
In the silence of this comfortable London room, with its very English mementoes, Ireland seemed like the other side of the world. Kate was dead, so was Sean. Narraway had won and their planned uprising had failed without bloodshed on either side. There had been nothing spectacular, just a quiet fading, cold as a winter dusk. That was Narraway’s victory; nobody even knew it had happened.
Even Charles Stewart Parnell was dead now too, just three and a half years ago, October 1891, of a heart attack. But it was his wild, disastrous affair with Mrs O’Shea that had brought about his fall.
And Home Rule for Ireland was still only a dream, and the anger remained.
Narraway shivered here in his warm, familiar sitting room with the last of the embers still glowing, the pictures of trees on the wall, and the gaslamp shedding a golden light around him. The chill was inside, beyond the reach of any physical ease, perhaps of any words either, any thoughts or regrets now.
Was Cormac O’Neil still alive? There was no reason why he should not be. He would barely be sixty, perhaps less. If he were, he could be the one behind this. God knew, after the failed uprising, and Sean and Kate’s deaths, he had cause enough to hate Narraway, more than any other man on earth.
But why wait twenty years to do it? Narraway could have died of accident or natural causes any time between then and now, and robbed Cormac of his revenge.
Could something have prevented him in the meantime? A debilitating illness? Not twenty years long. Time in prison? Surely Narraway would have heard of anything serious enough for a term so long. And even from prison there was communication.
Perhaps this case had nothing to do with the past. Or could it be that Cormac really understood that Narraway was only fighting for his own country, his own beliefs, as they all were, and this vengeance was not personal so much as against England? Perhaps this was the time when Special Branch would be most vulnerable if Narraway were taken from it and his work discredited? The present stakes for Cormac might be incidental, only an exquisite touch that added to the flavour. Perhaps it had to do with the socialist revolution planned by the European anarchist reformers who would sweep away the old order, with its corruption and inequality, the only way they believed would work, with violence.
He closed the papers and put them back in the envelope Stoker had brought, then sat quietly in the dark and thought about it.
The old memories returned easily to his mind. He was walking again with Kate in the autumn stillness, fallen leaves, red and yellow, frozen and crunching under their feet. She had no gloves and he had lent her his. He could feel his hands ache with the cold at the memory. She had laughed at him for it, smiling, eyes bright, all the while making bitter jokes about warming the hands of Ireland with English wool.
When they had returned to the tavern Sean and Cormac had been there, and they had drunk rye whiskey by the fire. He could recall the smell of the peat, and Kate saying it was a good thing he didn’t want vodka because potatoes were too scarce to waste on making it. He had not replied. Even thirty years on, the ruin of the famine still scarred the land. Nothing he could say would heal it, or excuse it.
There were other memories