Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [54]
‘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. Actually she was beginning to be a little afraid. The rage in Talulla was like the touch on 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.’ He left the sentence hanging as if there were more to say.
Good manners might have dictated that Charlotte apologise 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 so 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 dare say she loved him. We can all be fools for love,’ he said wryly.
‘I dare say 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 with a smile. ‘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 was no more than a lapse in manners, and was easily forgotten as someone accidentally knocking your elbow and spilling your wine.
But she did not forget it. O’Conor’s sudden charm had been as much a desire to hide something he was ashamed to expose in front of a stranger, as his own clear love for the lyrical voice of his countrymen. She was certain that he would find Talulla afterwards, and when they were alone, berate her for allowing a foreigner, and an Englishwoman at that, to see a part of their history that should have been kept private. It was like a family airing soiled linen where any passer-by could see it, and read their secrets.
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