Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [45]
But Charlotte knew that there must be more, the private man. Somewhere beneath the pragmatism there had been dreams; she had seen the knowledge of their loss in his eyes.
‘Thank you for the lesson on ancient Irish history,’ she began, feeling clumsy. ‘But I need to know far more than I do about the specific matter that we are going to investigate, otherwise I will not recognise something important if I hear it. I cannot possibly remember everything to report it accurately to you.’
‘Of course not.’ He was clearly trying to keep a straight face, and not entirely succeeding. ‘I will tell you as much as I can. You understand there are aspects of it that are still sensitive . . . I mean politically.’
She studied his face, and knew that he also meant they were personally painful to him. He was aware that she saw it in him and there was self-mockery in his smile.
‘Perhaps you could tell me something of the political situation?’ she suggested. ‘As much as is public knowledge – to those who were interested,’ she added, now it was her turn to mock herself very slightly. ‘I’m afraid I was more concerned with dresses and gossip at the time of the O’Neil case.’ She would have been about fifteen. ‘And thinking who I might marry, of course.’ ‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘A subject that engages most of us, from time to time. All you need to know of the political background is that Ireland, as always, was agitating for Home Rule. Various British prime ministers had attempted to put it through Parliament, and it proved their heartbreak and, for some, their downfall. This is the time of the spectacular rise of Charles Stewart Parnell. He was to become leader of the Home Rule Party in’seventy-seven.’
‘I remember that name,’ Charlotte agreed.
‘Naturally, but this was long before the scandal that ruined him.’
‘Did he have anything to do with what happened with the O’Neil family?’
‘Nothing at all, at least not directly. But the fire and hope of a new leader was in the air, and Irish independence at last, and everything was different because of it.’ He looked out of the window at the passing countryside, and she knew he was seeing another time and place.
‘But we had to prevent it?’ she assumed.
‘I suppose it came to that, yes. We saw it as the necessity to keep the peace. Things change all the time; it is how they do it that must be controlled. There is no point in leaving a trail of death behind you in order merely to exchange one form of tyranny for another.’
‘You don’t have to justify it to me,’ she told him. ‘I am aware enough of the feeling. I only wish to understand something of the O’Neil family, and why one of them should hate you personally so much that twenty years later you believe he would stoop to manufacturing evidence that you are guilty of a crime you did not commit. What sort of a man was he then? Why has he waited so long to do this?’
Narraway turned his head away from the sunlight coming through the carriage window. He spoke reluctantly. ‘Cormac? He was a good-looking man, very strong, quick to laugh, and quick to anger – but it was usually only on the surface, and gone before he would dwell on it. But he was intensely loyal, first to Ireland above all, then to his family. He and his brother, Sean, were very close.’ He smiled. ‘Quarrelled like Kilkenny cats, as they say, but let anyone else step in and they’d turn on them like furies.’
‘How old was he then?’ she asked, picturing them in her imagination.
‘Close to forty,’ he replied without hesitation.
She wondered if he knew that from records, or if he had been close enough to Cormac O’Neil that such things were open between them. She had the increasing feeling that this was far more than a Special Branch operation. There was deep, many-layered personal emotion