Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [53]
She was introduced to the hostess, Bridget Tyrone, a handsome woman with very white teeth and the most magnificent auburn hair, which she had hardly bothered to dress. It seemed to have escaped her attempts like autumn leaves in a gust of wind.
‘Mrs Pitt has come to see Dublin,’ McDaid told her. ‘Where better to begin than here?’
‘Is it curiosity that brings you, then?’ John Tyrone asked, standing at his wife’s elbow, a dark man with bright blue eyes.
Sensing rebuke in the question, Charlotte seized the chance to begin her mission. ‘Interest,’ she corrected him with a smile she hoped was warmer than she felt it. ‘Some of my grandmother’s family were from this area, and spoke of it with such vividness I wanted to see it for myself. I regret it has taken me so long to do so.’
‘I should have known it!’ Bridget said instantly. ‘Look at her hair, John! That’s an Irish colour, if you like, now isn’t it? What were their names?’
Charlotte thought rapidly. She had to invent, but let it be as close to the truth as possible, so she wouldn’t forget what she had said, or contradict herself. And it must be useful. There was no point in any of this if she learned nothing of the past. Bridget Tyrone was waiting, eyes wide.
Charlotte’s mother’s mother had been Christine Owen. ‘Christina O’Neil,’ she said with the same sense of abandon she might have had were she jumping into a raging river.
There was a moment’s silence. She had an awful thought that there might really be such a person. How on earth would she get out of it, if there were?
‘O’Neil,’ Bridget repeated. ‘Sure enough there are O’Neils around here. Plenty of them.You’ll find someone who knew her, no doubt. Unless, of course, they left in the famine. Only God Himself knows how many that’d be. Come now, let me introduce you to our other guests, because you’ll not be knowing them.’
Charlotte accompanied her obediently and was presented to one couple after another. She struggled to remember unfamiliar names, trying hard to say something reasonably intelligent, and at the same time gain some sense of the gathering, and whom she should seek to know better. She must tell Narraway something more useful than that she had gained an entry to Dublin society. At that rate it could take half a year before she acquired any information that led to finding who had betrayed him into the wilderness.
She introduced her fictitious grandmother again.
‘Really?’ Talulla Lawless said with surprise, raising her thin, black eyebrows as soon as Charlotte mentioned the name, now as determined to be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. She would gain nothing by timidity, and time was short. ‘You sound fond of her,’ Talulla continued. She was a slender woman, almost bony, but with marvellous eyes, wide and bright, and of a shade neither blue nor green.
Charlotte thought of the only grandmother she knew, and found impossibly cantankerous. ‘She told me wonderful stories of Dublin society, of the intrigue,’ she lied confidently. ‘I dare say they were a little exaggerated, but there was a truth in them of the heart, even if events were a trifle inaccurate in the retelling.’
Talulla exchanged a brief glance with a fair-haired man called Phelim O’Conor, but it was so quick that Charlotte barely saw it.
‘Am I mistaken?’ Charlotte asked apologetically.
‘Oh, no,’ Talulla assured her. ‘That would be long ago, no doubt?’
Charlotte swallowed. ‘Yes, about twenty years, I think. There was a cousin she wrote to often, or it maybe it was her cousin’s wife. A very beautiful woman, so my grandmama said.’ She tried rapidly to calculate the age Kate O’Neil would be were she still alive. ‘Perhaps a second cousin,’ she amended. That would allow for a considerable variation.
‘Twenty years ago,’ Phelim O’Connor 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