A Suitable Vengeance

“In everyone’s eyes. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to measure up and I’ve chucked it. Do your hear? I’ve chucked it all and I’m bloody well glad of it. So leave me alone, will you? Go back to your nice little townhouse and your nice little life. Make yourself a nice little marriage with a nice little wife. Have some nice little babies to carry on your name and leave me alone! Just leave me alone!” His face was empurpled; his body shook.

“Yes. I can see that’s best.” Lynley stepped past his brother only to see that their mother, white-faced, had come to the doorway. How long she had been standing there, he couldn’t have said.



“My dear, my dear! It was simply divine.” The Reverend Mrs. Sweeney divided the final word into two, with a dramatic pause between the syllables, as if in the hope of building anticipation in her audience over how her sentence would end, be it with approbation or censure. Plorable, her tone implied, was as likely a conclusion as vine.

She was seated directly across from St. James, midway down the length of the linen-covered dining table at which were gathered a party of eighteen. They constituted an interesting assortment of Lynley relations, Cornish notables, and community members who had known the family for years. The Reverend Mr. Sweeney and his wife belonged to this latter group.

Mrs. Sweeney leaned forward. Candlelight glimmered across the astounding, wide field of her chest which was amply revealed by a remarkable décolletage. St. James wondered idly what excuse Mrs. Sweeney had concocted for wearing such a gown this evening. Its cut was certainly not what one generally expected from a minister’s wife and she wasn’t in the role of Beatrice now. Then he noticed the damp, longing, and agitated glances which Mr. Sweeney—three seats away and attempting to converse politely with the wife of the Plymouth MP—was casting in his wife’s direction. He put the question to rest.

Fork raised, a bit of salmon pastry caught on its tines, Mrs. Sweeney continued. “My dear, the entire cast was simply thrilled with your photographs. Dare we hope to make it a yearly event?” She was speaking to Deborah, who sat on Lynley’s right at the head of the table. “Just think of it. An annual collection of photographs with our own Lord Asherton. In a different costume every time.” She trilled a little laugh. “The actors, I mean. Of course. Not Lord Asherton.”

“But why not Tommy in costume as well?” Lady Helen said. “I think it’s high time he joined the Nanrunnel Players and stopped hiding his talent under a bushel.”

“Oh, we could hardly dare to hope or to think…” Mr. Sweeney tore his attention from his wife’s cleavage long enough to take up this thought.

“I can just see it,” Sidney laughed. “Tommy as Petruchio.”

“I’ve told him time and again it was a mistake to read history at Oxford,” Lady Helen said. “He’s always had a flair for the stage. Haven’t you, Tommy darling?”

“Might we really…” Mr. Sweeney faltered, caught between the obvious teasing of Lynley’s friends and his own unspoken hope that there might be a margin of reality behind Lady Helen’s words. He said, as if it were a possible inducement to Lynley’s becoming one of the local thespians, “We have so often asked Dr. Trenarrow to join us under the lights.”

“A pleasure I must avoid,” Trenarrow said.

“And those you don’t avoid?”

Peter Lynley asked the question, winking round the table in a manner that suggested skeletons were about to leap out of the cupboards while the dead came springing back to life. He poured more of the white burgundy into his wine glass and did the same for Sasha. Both of them drank. Sasha smiled down at her plate as if enjoying a secret joke. Neither of them had touched their salmon.

A brief hiatus came upon the conversation. Trenarrow broke it. “High blood pressure keeps me from many pleasures, I’m afraid. Such are the failings of middle age.”

“You don’t have the look of a man who has failings,” Justin Brooke said. He and Sidney had twined their hands on the table top. St. James wondered how either of them was managing to eat.

“We all have failings,” Trenarrow replied. “Some of us are fortunate in that we manage to keep them better hidden than others. But we all of us have them. It’s the way of the world.”

Hodge, assisted by two of the dailies who had been induced to stay into the evening, emerged from the warming room as Dr. Trenarrow spoke. The introduction of a second course arrested attention. If Peter Lynley had sought the embarrassment of others with his sly question, food proved to be eminently more interesting to the assembled group.