Ashworth Hall (31 page)

Charlotte was appalled. “No, it would be despicable! I should hate myself. I should never be able to meet his eyes.”

“Then that is one question answered,” Vespasia agreed.

“But what if … what if that is what he … wants?” Charlotte said desperately. “What if I lose part of him because I don’t … don’t need … that ….”

“Charlotte, my dear, nobody is everything to someone else, nor should they seek to be,” Vespasia said gently. “Moderate your demands at times, disguise some of your less-fortunate attributes, learn to keep your own counsel in certain matters, sometimes give more generous praise than is merited, but be true to the core of yourself. Silence does not hurt, at times, nor patience, but lies always do. Would you wish him to pretend for you?”

Charlotte closed her eyes. “I should hate it. It would be the end of everything real. How could I ever believe him again?”

“Then you have answered your own question, haven’t you?” Vespasia sat back a little. “Allow him to rescue others. That is part of his nature, perhaps the very best part. Don’t resent it. And don’t underestimate his strength to love you as you are.” The fire collapsed still further, and she ignored it. “Believe me, from time to time you will find in yourself enough weaknesses to satisfy him.” Her eyes flickered with amusement. “Do your best. Never be less than you are in the hope of earning someone else’s love. If he catches you in it he will hate you for what you have judged of him, and far worse than that, you will hate yourself. That is the most destructive of all things.”

Charlotte stared at her.

Vespasia reached for the bell to ask the maid to come to stoke the fire.

“Now we shall have luncheon,” she said, rising to her feet with the use of her silver-topped ebony cane, declining Charlotte’s arm. “I have poached salmon and a few vegetables, and then apple tart. I hope that will satisfy. And you can tell me about this wretched Irish business, and I shall tell you about the absurd divorce of Mrs. O’Shea. We can laugh about it together, and perhaps weep a little.”

“Is it sad?” Charlotte asked, walking beside her to the smaller, wood-floored breakfast room, where Vespasia more often ate when she was alone. It had a row of floral-curtained windows looking onto a paved comer of the garden. On two sides were glass-fronted cases of porcelain, crystal ornaments, vases and plates. A cherrywood gateleg table was set for two.

“Yes it is,” Vespasia answered when the butler had helped her to her seat and she had unfolded her linen napkin.

Charlotte was surprised. She had not thought Vespasia would grieve over such a thing. But then perhaps she did not know Vespasia as well as she had presumed. More than seventy years of her life had passed before Charlotte had even met her. It was an impertinence to imagine she could guess at most of it.

The butler served them a light consommé and withdrew.

Vespasia saw Charlotte’s face and laughed.

“Sad for Ireland, my dear,” she corrected. “The whole thing is so patently ridiculous!” She began her soup. “Parnell is a humorless devil at the best of times. He takes himself so terribly seriously. It is a Protestant failing. It is certainly not an Irish one. Love or hate them, you cannot accuse the Irish at large of a lack of wit. And yet Parnell has behaved like someone in a badly written farce. Even now he still does not believe that his audience will laugh at him and, of course, cease to take him seriously.”

Charlotte began her soup also. It was delicious.

“Will they?” she asked, thinking of Carson O’Day, his ambitions, and what his family would expect of him, his father, and the elder brother whose place he had to fill.

“My dear, would you?” Vespasia’s fine brows arched even higher. “Apparently when Captain and Mrs. O’Shea took a house in Brighton, within two or three days a Mr. Charles Stewart appeared, wearing a cloth cap over his eyes.” She kept her face straight with difficulty. “He called quite often, but almost always when Captain O’Shea was out. He always came up via the beach way and took Mrs. O’Shea out driving, never in daylight, always after dark.”

“In a cloth
cap,”
Charlotte said incredulously, forgetting her soup. “You said he had no sense of humor. Mrs. O’Shea cannot have had either!” Her voice rose in disbelief. “How could you possibly make love with a man who crept up to your door at night when your husband was out—disguised in a cloth cap, using a false name that would fool nobody? I should be hysterical with laughter.”

“That isn’t all,” Vespasia went on, her eyes light. “Five years ago—this affair has persisted for some very considerable time—he went to an auctioneer in Deptford who was acting as agent for a landlord in Kent.” She held up her hands as she spoke. “Parnell went calling himself Mr. Fox. He was told the house in question belonged to a Mr. Preston. Parnell then said he was Clement Preston. The agent replied that he had thought he said he was a Mr. Fox. Parnell then said he was staying with a Mr. Fox, but his own name was Preston, and he would take the house for twelve months, but refused to give any references”—her eyebrows rose—“on the grounds that a man who owned horses should not be required to do so.”

“Horses?” Charlotte nearly choked on her soup. “What have horses to do with it?” she demanded. “You can sell horses, or they can fall ill, or be injured, or even die.”

“Nothing whatever. The music halls are going to have a wonderful time with it,” Vespasia said with a smile. “Along with the cloth cap and the business of the fire escape. It is all so unbelievably grubby and incompetent.” Her face became serious again. “But it is sad for Ireland. Parnell may not have realized it yet, and his immediate supporters may give him a vote of confidence, out of loyalty and not to be seen to desert him, but the people at large will never follow him now.” She sighed and permitted the butler, who had returned, to remove the last of her soup and to serve the salmon and vegetables.

When he was gone she looked at Charlotte again, her eyes grave.

“Since Ainsley Greville is dead, I presume the political issues for which he worked are now sacrificed, which will have been the reason for his murder.”

“No, Jack has taken his place, at least temporarily,” Charlotte replied. “It was almost certainly to kill Jack that the dynamite was placed in the study this morning. Poor Emily is terrified, but Jack has no honorable choice but to continue in Greville’s place and do the best he can.”

“How very dreadful,” Vespasia said with considerable alarm. “You must all be most distressed. I wish there were some way in which I could help, but the Irish Problem is centuries old, and bedeviled by ignorance, myth and hatred on all sides. The tragedies it has caused are legion.”

“I know.” Charlotte looked down at her plate, thinking of the tale Gracie had told her. “We have Padraig Doyle and Carson O’Day with us.”

Vespasia shook her head and a flicker of anger crossed her face.

“That miserable business,” she said grimly. “That was one of the worst, typifying everything that is wrong with the whole sordid, treacherous affair.”

“But we betrayed them,” Charlotte pointed out. “Some soldier called Chinnery raped Neassa Doyle and then fled to England.” She did not try to keep the rage and disgust out of her voice. “And Drystan O’Day was his friend! No wonder the Irish don’t trust us. When I hear something like that, I’m ashamed to be English.”

Vespasia leaned back in her chair, her face weary, her salmon forgotten.

“Don’t be, Charlotte. We have certainly done some dreadful things in our history, things that sicken the heart and darken the soul, but this was not one of them.”

Charlotte waited. If Vespasia did not know the truth of the matter, perhaps she did not need to. She was an old lady. It would serve no purpose to harrow her with it.

“You have no need to be gentle with me,” Vespasia said with the ghost of a smile. “I have seen more to haunt one’s dreams than you have, my dear. Neassa Doyle was not raped. She was followed by her own brothers, and it was they who cut off her hair because they thought she was a whore, and with a Protestant man at that ….”

Charlotte was appalled. It was so horrible, so utterly unlike the story she had heard and accepted, instinctively she drew breath to deny it.

“It was they who killed her and left her for Drystan O’Day to find,” Vespasia went on. “In their eyes she had betrayed them, their family in front of its peers, and their faith before God. She deserved not only death but shame as well.”

“For falling in love?” Charlotte was confused, full of anger, darkness and quarreling emotions in this calmly elegant room with the sunlight slanting across the polished floor, the flowered curtains at the windows with their Georgian panes and the honeysuckle tangled beyond, and the white linen on the table, the silver and the trail of dark leaves in the cut glass vase.

“For being prepared to elope with a Protestant,” Vespasia answered. “She had let down her tribe, if you like. Love is no excuse when honor is at stake.”

“Whose honor?” Charlotte demanded. “Hasn’t she the right to choose for herself whom she will marry, and if she is prepared to pay the price of leaving her own people to do it? I know there is a cost, we all know that, but if you love someone enough, you pay it. Perhaps she didn’t believe their faith? Did they ever think of that?”

Vespasia smiled, but her eyes were tired, pale silver.

“Of course not, Charlotte. You know better than to ask. If you belong to a clan, you pay the price of that too. The freedom not to be answerable to your family, your tribe, is a very great loneliness.

“You were more fortunate than most women. I think sometimes you don’t fully appreciate that. You chose to marry outside your class, and your family’s choice for you, but they did not blame you for it or cut you off. Your social ostracism was a natural result of your marriage, not the act of your family. They remained close to you, never criticizing your choice or seeking to change your mind.” Her expression was sad and tired, her eyes far away. “Neassa had the courage to make her choice too, but her family did not understand. To them, to her brothers, it was a shame they would not live with.”

“But what about Alexander Chinnery?” Charlotte had forgotten him for a moment. “What did he do? How did you know it was not he who killed her, as they said?”

“Because by June eighth, Alexander Chinnery was already dead,” Vespasia said softly. “He was drowned in Liverpool Harbour trying to save a boy who had caught his leg in a rope and been pulled into the water.”

“Then why did both the Catholics and the Protestants believe it was he who killed Neassa Doyle?” Charlotte pressed. “And why did they think she was raped if she wasn’t?”

“Why do stories grow around anything?” Vespasia picked up her fork and began to eat again, slowly. “Because someone leaps to a conclusion … a conclusion that suits the emotions they feel and wish to arouse in the others. After a while everyone believes it, and then even if the truth is known, it is too late to tell it. Everyone has too much invested in the myth, and the truth would destroy what they have built and make liars of them.”

“They aren’t lying, they really believe it.” Charlotte picked up her wineglass, full of clean, cold water. “I suppose it was thirty years ago, and there’s no one about now who was involved, at least not in present-day politics. And they aren’t going to tell people they lied then.”

“Nobody would believe them if they did,” Vespasia argued. “The powers of the legends which tell us who we are, and justify what we want to do, is far too great to take notice of a few inconvenient facts and dates.”

“You are sure?” Charlotte urged, her fork held up in one hand. “Couldn’t Chinnery have died later? Maybe the same date, but the following year? To think her own brothers murdered her like that, cutting off her hair first, and then his people let Drystan think it was the Doyles, so he attacked them and was shot! Or did they know it was the Doyles?” She found her hand clenching on her fork, and her stomach knotted.

“Yes, they told Drystan it was,” Vespasia answered. “With the obvious result that he went mad with rage and grief and attacked them.” Her voice was hard. “That way the Catholics could blame the Protestants for seducing one of their women and for allying with an English traitor, which resulted in her rape and murder; and the Protestants could blame the Catholics for roughly the same thing; and they could all blame us. And there was no one left alive to say otherwise.”

“Did they know Chinnery was dead?”

“No, I doubt that.” Vespasia shook her head. “But they knew his denial would convince no one, and after that he would be withdrawn from Ireland, which was all that mattered.”

“But what about Chinnery’s family?” Charlotte asked. “Don’t they want his name cleared? That’s a monstrous crime he is accused of.”

“It is cleared, as far as they are concerned. He died a hero’s death in Liverpool Harbour.”

“But no one knows that!” Charlotte protested angrily.

“Yes, they do. It was in the Liverpool newspapers at the time, and his family lived in Liverpool.”

“In the newspapers?” Charlotte let her fork drop. “Then it can be proved.”

“To whom?” Vespasia asked dryly. “The people who tell stories about Drystan and Neassa? The poets and harpists who sing songs by hearths and by moonlight to keep the myths alive? My dear, Macbeth was actually the last High King of Scotland, when Scotland extended as far south as Yorkshire, and he ruled for seventeen peaceful and prosperous years.” Her silver eyes were full of irony. “And when he died his people buried him in the sacred isle of the kings. He was succeeded by Lady Macbeth’s son Lulach, as the rightful heir through his mother’s line. She was a remarkable woman who instituted many reforms for the care of the widowed and orphaned.” She shrugged, then speared her fork into the salmon on her plate. “But to accept that would spoil one of Shakespeare’s best plays, so no one wishes to know.”

“Well, I am going to find that newspaper and show people that that particular story is a monstrous fabrication,” Charlotte said with total conviction. “Macbeth is academic now, but this is still real!”

Vespasia looked at her steadily. “Are you sure that is wise? Or even that it will make any difference? People get very angry when their dreams are shown to be false. The emotion is what matters, the force which sustained the dream. We believe what we need to believe.”