Treason at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [54]
She searched his face and saw nothing in it but good humor, interest, amusement, and a blank wall of guarded intelligence intended to give away nothing at all.
They were very early for the performance, but most of the audience were already present. While McDaid was talking she had an opportunity to look around and study faces. They were different from a London audience only in subtle ways. There were fewer fair heads, fewer blunt Anglo-Saxon features, a greater sense of tension and suppressed energy.
And of course she heard the music of a different accent, and now and then people speaking in a language utterly unrecognizable to her. There was in them nothing of the Latin or Norman-French about the words, or the German from which so much English was derived. She assumed it was the native tongue. She could only guess at what they said by the gestures, the laughter, and the expression in faces.
She noticed one man in particular. His hair was black with a loose, heavy wave streaked with gray. His head was narrow-boned, and it was not until he turned toward her that she saw how dark his eyes were. His nose was noticeably crooked, giving his whole aspect a lopsided look, a kind of wounded intensity. Then he turned away, as if he had not seen her, and she was relieved. She had been staring, and that was ill-mannered, no matter how interesting a person might seem.
“You saw him,” McDaid observed so quietly it was little more than a whisper.
She was taken aback. “Saw him? Who?”
“Cormac O’Neil,” he replied.
She was startled. Had she been so very obvious? “Was that … I mean the man with the …” Then she did not know how to finish the sentence.
“Haunted face,” he said for her.
“I wasn’t going to …” She saw in his eyes that she was denying it pointlessly. Either Narraway had told him, or he had pieced it together himself. It made her wonder how many others knew, indeed if all those involved might well know more than she, and her pretense was deceiving no one.
“Do you know him?” she asked.
“I?” McDaid raised his eyebrows. “I’ve met him, of course, but know him? Hardly at all.”
“I didn’t mean in any profound sense,” she parried. “Merely were you acquainted.”
“In the past, I thought so.” He was watching Cormac while seeming not to. “But tragedy changes people. Or then on the other hand, perhaps it only shows you what was always there, simply not yet uncovered. How much does one know anybody? Most of all oneself.”
“Very metaphysical,” she said drily. “And the answer is that you can make a guess, more or less educated, depending on your intelligence and your experience with that person.”
He looked at her steadily. “Victor said you were … direct.”
She found it odd to hear Narraway referred to by his given name, instead of the formality she was used to, the slight distance that leadership required.
Now she was not sure if she was on the brink of offending McDaid. On the other hand, if she was too timid even to approach what she really wanted, she would lose the chance.
She smiled at him. “What was O’Neil like, when you knew him?”
His eyes widened. “Victor didn’t tell you? How interesting.”
“Did you expect him to have?” she asked.
“Why is he asking, why now?” He sat absolutely still. All around him people were moving, adjusting position, smiling, waving, finding seats, nodding agreement to something or other, waving to friends.
“Perhaps you know him well enough to ask him that?” she suggested.
Again he countered. “Don’t you?”
She kept her smile warm, faintly amused. “Of course, but I would not repeat his answer. You must know him well enough to believe he would not confide in someone he could not trust.”
“So perhaps we both know, and neither will trust the other,” he mused. “How absurd, how vulnerable and incredibly human; indeed, the convention of many comic plays.”
“To judge by Cormac O’Neil’s face, he has seen tragedy,” she countered. “One of the casualties of war that you referred to.”
He looked at her steadily, and