Read Christine Falls: A Novele for Free Online

the frightening ones, like that fellow Costigan. They were not the sort she would have expected Mal or his father to have for friends. But then, was there any other sort, here? The world in which they moved was small. It was not her world. She was in it, but not of it, that was what she told herself. She must not let anyone else know what she was thinking. Smile, she told herself, keep smiling!
    All at once she felt faint and had to stop for a moment, pressing her fingers down hard on the drinks table for support. Mal, watching from across the room, saw that she was having what Maggie the maid called, not without a touch of contempt, one of her turns. He felt a rush of something resembling grief, as if her unhappiness were an illness, one that would—he flinched to think it—kill her. He bowed his head and closed his eyes briefly, savoring for a moment the restful dark, then opened them again and turned to his father with an effort. “I haven’t congratulated you,” he said. “It’s a great thing, a papal knighthood.”
    The Judge, fiddling with his tobacco pipe, snorted. “You think so?” he said with scornful incredulousness, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose I have done the Church some service.”
    They were silent, each wishing to move away from the other but neither knowing how to manage it. Sarah, recovered, turned from the table and approached them, smiling tensely. “You two are looking very solemn,” she said.
    “I was congratulating him—” Mal began, but his father interrupted him with angry dismissiveness:
    “Arrah, he was trying to flatter me!”
    There was another awkward silence. Sarah could think of nothing to say. Mal cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and walked softly away.
    Sarah linked her arm through the old man’s and leaned against him fondly. She liked his staleish smell of tobacco and tweed and dry, aging flesh. Sometimes it seemed to her he was her only ally, but that thought made her feel guilty too, for why and against whom did she need an ally? But she knew the answer. She watched as Costigan put out a hand and took Mal by the arm and began to talk to him earnestly. Costigan was a thickset man with heavy black hair swept straight back from his forehead. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes.
    “I don’t like that man,” she said. “What does he do?”
    The Judge chuckled. “He’s in the export business, I believe. Not my favorite, either, I confess, among Malachy’s friends.”
    “I should go and rescue him,” she said.
    “No man more in need of it.”
    She gave him a smile of rueful reproof and unlinked her arm from his and set off across the room. Costigan had not noticed her approaching. He was saying something about Boston and our people over there. Everything that Costigan said sounded like a veiled threat, she had noticed that before now. She wondered again how Mal could be friends with such a man. When she touched Mal’s arm he started, as if her fingertips had communicated a tiny charge through the cloth of his sleeve, and Costigan smiled at her icily, baring his lower teeth, which were gray and clogged with plaque.
    When she had got Mal away she said to him, smiling to soften it: “Were you fighting with your father again?”
    “We don’t fight,” he said stiffly. “I lodge an appeal, he delivers a judgment.” Oh, Mal, she wanted to say, oh, my poor Mal! “Where’s Phoebe?” he asked.
    She hesitated. He had taken off his spectacles to polish them. “Not home yet,” she said.
    He halted. “What—!”
    With relief she heard, beyond the voices in the room, the sound of the front door opening. She walked away from him quickly, out to the hall. Phoebe was handing a man’s hat and coat to Maggie. “Where have you been?” Sarah hissed at the girl. “Your father is…” Then Quirke turned from the door, with an apologetic smile, and she stopped, feeling the blood surge up from her breast and burn in her cheeks.