Treason at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [52]
He finished spreading his marmalade. “So you will understand that Fiachra is my friend in some things, but I will not be able to count on him if the answer should turn out to be different from the one I suppose.”
“There is one you suppose?”
“I told you: I think Cormac O’Neil has found the perfect way to take revenge on me, and has taken it.”
“For something that happened twenty years ago?” she questioned.
“The Irish have the longest memories in Europe.” He bit into the toast.
“And the greatest patience too?” she said with disbelief. “People take action because something, somewhere has changed. Crimes of state have that in common with ordinary, domestic murders. Something new has caused O’Neil, or whoever it is, to do this now. Perhaps it has only just become possible. Or it may be that for him, now is the right time.”
He ate the whole of his toast before replying. “Of course you are right. The trouble is that I don’t know which of those reasons it is. I’ve studied the situation in Ireland and I can’t see any reason at all for O’Neil to do this now.”
She ignored her tea. An unpleasant thought occurred to her, chilling and very immediate. “Wouldn’t O’Neil know that this would bring you here?” she asked.
Narraway stared at her. “You think O’Neil wants me here? I’m sure if killing me were his purpose, he would have come to London and done it. If I thought it was simply murder I wouldn’t have let you come with me, Charlotte, even if Pitt’s livelihood rests on my return to office. Please give me credit for thinking that far ahead.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought bringing someone that nobody would see as assisting you might be the best way of getting around that. You never suggested it would be comfortable, or easy. And you cannot prevent me from coming to Ireland if I want to. You could simply have let me do it alone, which would be inefficient, and unlike you.”
“It would have been awkward,” he conceded. “But not impossible. I had to tell you something of the situation, for Pitt’s sake. For your own, I cannot tell you everything. I don’t know any reason why O’Neil should choose now. But then I don’t know any reason why anyone should. It is unarguable that someone with strong connections in Dublin has chosen to steal the money I sent for Mulhare, so to bring about the poor man’s death. Then they made certain it was evident first to Austwick, and then to Croxdale, and so brought about my dismissal.”
He poured more tea for himself. “Perhaps it was not O’Neil who initiated it; he may simply have been willingly used. I’ve made many enemies. Knowledge and power both make that inevitable.”
“Then think of other enemies,” she urged. “Whose circumstances have changed? Is there anyone you were about to expose?”
“My dear, do you think I haven’t thought of that?”
“And you still believe it is O’Neil?”
“Perhaps it is a guilty conscience.” He gave a smile so brief it reached his eyes and was gone again. “ ‘The guilty flee where no man pursueth,’ ” he quoted. “But there is knowledge in this that only people familiar with the case could have.”
“Oh.” She poured herself fresh tea. “Then we had better learn more about O’Neil. He was mentioned yesterday evening. I told them that my grandmother was Christina O’Neil.”
He swallowed. “And who was she really?”
“Christine Owen,” she replied.
He started to laugh. She said nothing, but finished her toast and then the rest of her tea.
CHARLOTTE SPENT THE MORNING and most of the afternoon quietly reading as much as she could of Irish history, realizing the vast gap in her knowledge and becoming a little ashamed of it. Because Ireland was geographically so close to England, and because the English had occupied it one way or another for so many centuries, in their minds its individuality had been swallowed up in the general tide of British history. The empire covered a quarter of the world. Englishmen tended to think of Ireland as part of their own small piece of it, linked by a common language—disregarding the existence of the Irish tongue.