Treason at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [22]
In the silence of this comfortable London room with its very English mementos, 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.
Even Charles Stewart Parnell was dead now, just three and a half years ago, October 1891, of a heart attack.
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 gas lamp 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’s 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 an accident or of natural causes anytime between then and now, and robbed the man 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 such a term. And even from prison there was communication.
Perhaps this case had nothing to do with the past. Or perhaps it was simply that this was the time when Special Branch would be most vulnerable if Narraway was taken from it and his work discredited?
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.
There were other memories as well, all sharp with emotion, torn loyalties, and regret. Wasn’t it Wellington who had said that there was nothing worse than a battle won—except a battle lost? Or something like that.
Was the record accurate, as far as he had told anyone? Sanitized, of course, robbed of its passion and its humanity, but the elements that mattered to Special Branch were correct and sufficient.
Then something occurred to him, maybe an anomaly. He stood up, turned the gaslight higher again, and took the papers back out of the envelope. He reread them from beginning to end, including the marginal notes from Buckleigh, his superior then.
Narraway found what he feared. Something had been added. It was only a word or two, and to anyone who did not know Buckleigh’s turn of phrase, his pedantic grammar, it would be undetectable. The hand looked exactly the same. But the new words added altered the meaning. Once it was only the addition of a question mark that had not been there originally, another time it was a few words that were not grammatically exact, a phrase ending with a preposition. Buckleigh would have included it in the main sentence.
Who had done that, and when? The why was not obscure to him at all: It was to raise the question of his role in this again, to cause the old ghosts to be awakened. Perhaps this was the deciding factor that had forced Croxdale to remove him from office.
He read through the papers