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Half a mile away, Greville crossed Berkeley Square at an impatient pace.

The wind was in an unusual quarter, and so this evening Mayfair reeked of the same effluvia as the slums to the east: chimney-smoke and the rich green stink of London’s many rivers.

Greville heard the crowd that had gathered outside his family’s seat in London before he actually saw it: a mellifluous babble of feminine voices carried on the breeze.

Having cut across the garden in the middle of the square, Greville let himself out of the wrought iron gate, stepping back onto the wide, well-swept street: at least thirty assorted young women clad in a variety of inexpensive muslins had gathered on the walkway outside Crauford House.

Most of them were accompanied by maidservants: respectable if not fashionable.

‘Oh, for the love of God,’ Greville said, quietly, walking up to the front steps; the little crowd scattered at his approach.

As he passed, a girl with wax cherries fastened to her bonnet whispered to her companion. ‘Is that him? Doesn’t he look ferocious and so brooding?’

Greville didn’t wait to hear the reply, and thank God the front door opened before the knocker had even struck.

Crauford’s footman was almost as tall as Greville himself, redolent of carbolic soap, his well-scrubbed brown face expressionless as a hen’s egg.

Greville didn’t miss the exact sward-green shade of his eyes, though, or the faint crater left by some form of pox on the side of his nose.

Nor did Greville miss the swift head-to-toe appraisal that he himself received; one could hardly blame the man.

As a footman, he was trained to spot interlopers from a mile off; he exuded ambition and doubtless had half an eye on Crauford’s butler’s job.

Greville knew very well that he couldn’t have looked much more disreputable if he’d tried.

The interlude lasted no more than a moment, with Greville aware of the hum of voices drifting downstairs from his mother’s salon. ‘I’m here to see Lady Crauford. The Dowager Lady Crauford.’

The footman didn’t smile, of course, stepping back to allow Greville into the house. ‘I regret to say her ladyship is not at home, but do come this way, my lord.’

Greville stepped into the hall, instantly surrounded by the familiar and half-forgotten: a sun-bleached Turkey rug, peonies bursting from a blue-and-white Delftware vase, dark oil paintings in heavily gilded frames.

‘I see you’ve studied this lot,’ he said, with a terse nod at the family portraits lining the stairwell, which included his own. ‘What’s your name, and what is happening outside?’

‘My name is Somers, your honour. And yes, your lordship’s likeness is very exact, if I may be permitted to say so.

If I might also say, your lordship is the image of the Dowager Marchioness of Crauford: a strikingly clear resemblance, my lord, so that I should have immediately comprehended you are one of the family.

The females have come to see Lord Byron, my lord.

They are quite impossible to dissuade from their object; the more we cleared them away, the more they returned.

It is, if I may be permitted to remark, quite an extraordinary thing to observe in respectably bred women.

’ Somers swept up the stairs with such grace of movement that he seemed almost to be propelled by wheels up a ramp imperceptible to the human eye.

‘I perceive that your honour has only very recently arrived from Spain. Might I arrange hot water? Your baggage?’

‘You can see to it all apart from the hot water, thank you.’ Greville had no intention of remaining in his brother’s house long enough to put up with the consequences of offending the Craufords with his travel-stained state.

‘And your manservant, sir?’ Somers said, stepping smoothly onto the landing. ‘Will I have Mistress Houghton arrange for his accommodation?’

‘Thank you, no. I’m not staying here, and my batman is dead.

’ Greville was now only half listening to the hum of voices drifting down the corridor from the salon.

He’d already written to Jackson’s people; the letter would likely reach the sleepy Northamptonshire village tomorrow.

There was no justice when a man could survive Badajoz and succumb to a rotting wound a few days later.

‘Very good, sir.’ Somers dispensed a benevolent smile at a maidservant hurrying along the corridor bearing a pile of folded, bloodstained linen, her face grey and immobile with shock. Somers didn’t so much as flinch.

‘Where did you serve?’ Greville asked.

‘I was last in at Walcheren, sir.’

‘An unpleasant business. I take it you were invalided out?’

‘Indeed, sir. I was fortunate enough to recover from the Walcheren fever, but sadly my lungs are not what they were. I retired from the military life and returned to service, your honour.’

By this time, Greville and Somers had arrived at the double doors. Crauford must have been practising economies again, for there were no footmen stationed outside the salon and it was left to Somers to toss his name into the hubbub as though it were a grenade.

‘Lieutenant Colonel Lord Greville d’Eresby Nightingale.’

The shocked silence was palpable; the room heaved with massed humanity reeking of pomade, sweat, and coal-smoke from the grate.

Even after years in Spain, it was all so jarringly humdrum, despite the crowd and the chattering excitement.

Greville’s brother the Marquess of Crauford stood hemmed into a corner by a gathering of earnest-looking women, looking much like a peevish shadow of their father, and also much like a man who regretted not being at his club.

His wife, Marianne, who had engineered all this, was ensconced on a chaise longue beneath the window in bile-yellow dupion silk, her expression of triumph fading into one of dismay at the sight of Greville, who didn’t really blame her for returning his dislike, all things considered.

‘Why, Greville! What a wonderful surprise!’ Marianne was still as fragile and insincere as ever, with those blonde curls swept up like a seventeen-year-old debutante’s.

Hard pushed to spit out the niceties, Greville bowed in the direction of his brother and sister-in-law and went to the sofa where his half-sister Kitty held court.

‘Oh, do go away, darlings – I need to talk to my disgracefully rude brother.’ Kitty, Lady Alasdair watched her audience scatter with an air of tolerant boredom and Greville kissed her outstretched hand.

Ten years Greville’s senior, Kitty was married to a kindly but distant Scottish laird who shared her passion for word-games of fiendish complexity.

He was an offshoot of the more famous Fraser family; she was a child of her father’s first marriage in the last years of the old century.

Kitty’s mother had been the daughter of a Mughal noblewoman and the fourth son of an English viscount.

Brought to England as a six-year-old when her widowed father unexpectedly succeeded to the title, Kitty herself was slender and immaculate in white muslin, with long-lashed dark eyes and her heavy black hair swept up into a crown of braids.

She gave Greville a single, appraising look, as well as her hand to kiss, and then instantly sliced through all his defences.

‘Heavens, Greville, someone is in trouble – what has happened to you?’

‘Nothing at all.’ Greville smiled at her, releasing her hand; she was the first person in London he’d actually been glad to see.

‘You liar,’ Kitty said, unmoved. ‘But who am I to force confidences?’

‘I know you’d never do so. What the devil are you playing at, though, Kit, going along with this idiotic charade? It’s not like you to court fashion. Where’s my mother?’

‘Mama? She’s been out exchanging shots across the bows with Annis Fane.

’ Kitty dealt him a wry smile: her fond relationship with his mother had always flown in the faces of those who secretly hoped the elder Lady Crauford might make her stepdaughter’s life a misery.

‘And as if all this Byron nonsense is anything to do with me. Come on, Greville, do you suppose me to have altered that much?’

‘You haven’t altered at all,’ Greville said, truthfully, smiling at her and unable to help himself. ‘Although I fully expect your offspring not to know me.’

Kitty rolled her eyes. ‘Not with Johnny’s obsession – he’s been counting down the days until his father can be persuaded to buy him a commission and he’s been in alt ever since we found out you were coming home.

Anyway, our dear sister-in-law is being insufferable about Byron, as you can imagine.

It’s pretty unbearable to see Marianne have the satisfaction of snaring him for an evening when most people would sell their own dead grandmother to the resurrection men just to have him in the house.

But look at the man, isn’t it fascinating?

He was such an awkward boy, too, but you’d never believe it now, would you? ’

Greville stretched out his long legs, crossing one ankle over the other.

The morning room was crowded, the air thick with the scent of overheated bodies and stale breath; their brother’s wife had deliberately selected this smaller, more intimate chamber over the drawing room which would have easily swallowed the seventy or so members of the haut ton.

Even so, a young man stood alone by one of the long book-cases, absorbed in examining the spines, dark hair curling over his pale forehead.

‘No one will talk to him, is that your point?’ Greville accepted a glass of champagne from a footman he didn’t recognise.