Treason at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [83]
“Nobody is with me,” she answered. “But I am perfectly all right—”
“Alone?” His voice shook. “You were out on the street alone, in the dark? For God’s sake, Charlotte, what’s the matter with you? Anything could have happened. I wouldn’t even have known!” He put out his hand and gripped her arm. She could feel the strength of him, as if he were quite unaware how tightly he held her.
“Nothing happened to me, Victor. I wasn’t very far away. And it isn’t late. There are plenty of people about,” she assured him.
“You could have been lost …”
“Then I would have asked for directions,” she said. “Please … there is no need to be concerned. If I’d had to walk a little out of my way to get here it wouldn’t have hurt me.”
“You could have …,” he began, then stopped, perhaps realizing that his fear was disproportionate. He let go of her. “I’m sorry. I …”
She looked at him. It was a mistake. For an instant his emotion was too plain in his eyes. She did not want to know that he cared so much. Now it would be impossible for either of them to pretend he did not love her, and she could not pretend she did not know.
She turned away, feeling the color burning on her skin. All words would be belittling the truth.
He stood still.
“I went to see Cormac O’Neil,” she said after a moment or two.
“What?”
“I was perfectly safe. I wanted to hear from him exactly what happened, or at least what he believes.”
“And what did he say?” he asked quickly, his voice cracking with tension.
She did not want to look at him, to intrude into old grief that was still obviously so sharp, but evasion was cowardly. She met his eyes and repeated to him what Cormac had said, including the fact that Talulla was Kate’s daughter.
“That’s probably how he sees it,” Narraway answered when she had finished. “I daresay he couldn’t live with the truth. Kate was beautiful.” He smiled briefly. In that moment she could imagine the man he had been twenty years earlier: younger, more virile, perhaps less wise.
“Few men could resist her,” he went on. “I didn’t try. I knew they were using her to trap me. She was brave, passionate …” He smiled wryly. “Perhaps a little short on humor, but far more intelligent than they realized. It sometimes happens when women are beautiful. People don’t see any further than that, especially men. It’s uncomfortable. We see what we want to see.”
Charlotte frowned, suddenly thinking of Kate, a pawn to others, an object of both schemes and desires. “Why do you say intelligent?” she asked.
“We talked,” he replied. “About the cause, what they planned to do. I persuaded her it would rebound against them, and it would have. The deaths would have been violent and widespread. Attacks like that don’t crush people and make them surrender. They have exactly the opposite effect. They would have united England against the rebels, who could have lost all sympathy from everyone in Europe, even from some of their own. Kate told me what they were going to do, the details, so I could have it stopped.”
Charlotte tried to imagine it, the grief, the cost.
“Who killed her?” she asked. She felt the loss touch her, as if she had known Kate more deeply than simply as a name, an imagined face.
“Sean,” he replied. “I don’t know whether it was for betraying Ireland, as he saw it, or betraying him.”
“With you?”
Narraway colored, but he did not look away from her. “Yes.”
“Do you know that, beyond doubt?”
“Yes.” His throat was so tight his voice sounded half strangled. “I found her body. I think he meant me to.”
She could not afford pity now. “Why are you sure it was Sean who killed her?” She had to be certain so she could get rid of the doubt forever. If Narraway himself had killed her it might, by some twisted logic of politics and terror, be what he had to do to save even greater bloodshed. She looked at him now with a mixture of new understanding of the weight he carried, and sorrow for what it had cost him: whether that was now shame, or a lack of it—which would be worse.
“Why are you sure it was Sean?” she