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An hour later, in the drawing room at Crauford House, Cressida let herself out of a side door set into the painted wainscoting.

In her mind’s eye, all she could see was Greville’s kindling, sardonic expression as he’d raised his glass to her before all of those people, and Sylvia’s irresistible smile – the very image of her son’s.

God only knew how she’d got through supper but she had, talking commonplaces to the men seated to her right and left, one a second son in the Cabinet Office who didn’t have the breeding to conceal the worried glances he kept casting towards his wife, and the other a civil old man sitting to her left who had either forgotten what she’d done or was too aged to care, having been a young man in wilder times than these.

She had endured the goose, the poached cod cheeks and boiled lamb studded with sweet jellies; she had endured retiring with a flock of women to drink orgeat for the first time in nearly half a decade.

She had submitted as Sylvia paraded her from one group of purse-lipped dowagers to another, pouring forth a stream of light inconsequential chatter about anything, from the new soloist at the Royal Opera House, who was thought to be dreadful, to the unflattering cut of sleeves this spring.

On the other hand, a little judicious prompting about current affairs had later provided Cressida with the information that several ladies of the ton were wicked enough to feel a flutter of relief at the assassination of the prime minister.

After all, Lord Perceval’s relentless pursuit of slave-traders and his hard-headed dealings with America had led to a collapse in trade certain to cause all sorts of inconvenience.

An expertly led conversation even revealed that the Duchess of Argyle suspected Luddites, Radicals and frame-breakers of having a hand in Perceval’s death, and that the Bellingham fellow had been hanged far too quickly to prove it, more was the pity.

Kitty, however, had met Cressida’s gaze from across the room and then looked away, so that she felt a plummeting sensation in her belly as if in the half moment after the hangman released the trapdoor.

Long ago, she and Kitty sat up all night playing hazard, talking of books, laughing until it hurt or railing against injustice, laying out their plans for a better world.

Now, Kitty couldn’t even bring herself to look at her.

What else did you expect, you bloody fool?

What did any of it matter if the whole charade got her closer to Drochcala?

Once she’d delivered Lascelles his precious gossip about Byron, she and Ines would be free to take Byron’s money, if she charmed it from him after all.

Cressida didn’t much care if the Committee of Secrecy sent a man with a garrotting wire after her one night, but she did care about leaving Ines unprotected: the girl had no one else.

No, she’d obey Lascelles one last time, make herself indispensable, and then leave this small, grey benighted island behind for good.

Now stepping into the neglected music room where the Nightingale girls used to practise their scales, Cressida leaned on the door with her eyes closed, still gripping the brass knob, cold to the touch beneath her fingertips.

‘Running away already?’ Byron leaned on the cherrywood pianoforte, watching her across the room.

‘I could say the same for you.’ Cressida swept past him, making for the window.

He’d promised to help: promised her money.

She could ask for it now and be gone from here by morning, out of Greville Nightingale’s life for ever.

Cressida shut her eyes and thought of Ines looking up at her in the ruins of a shelled nunnery, long ago, so trusting. What are we going to do next?

We. There was never meant to be a ‘we’.

Pushing up the sash window, she drank in the cold twilit air, with the faint London taste of coal-smoke and the distant green tang of the Thames.

Without discussion, she and Byron sat side by side on the chaise longue, his thigh warm against her own. Only a fool would be flattered.

‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand after-dinner chat once the women have gone.’

She smiled at him. ‘What, finally leaving you all with the opportunity to discuss topics beyond our intellectual capacity?’

‘The chance would be a fine thing in a room of Englishmen with the intellectual heft of chopped ham and completely unjustified self-confidence.’

‘Jamie Nightingale included?’ Cressida said.

‘Don’t look at me like that.’ Byron cast her an uncharacteristically stern look. ‘Jamie’s a liability. I’m not even going to ask why you’re here.’

Side by side once more, they leaned into one another, his presence still a comfort.

*

Cressida’s hand closed around the handle of the dagger sheathed at her ankle before she was even fully aware that the door had opened.

At her side, Byron lifted his head from her shoulder and sat watchful as she got to her feet with the blade out, polished steel catching the last of the light.

Greville came in holding a pewter branch of candles, bringing with him the honeyed warmth of beeswax and the faint scent that was all his own, chamomile laundry soap, rosemary shaving water and something else that she had never been quite able to articulate.

All the feline intensity he’d possessed as Devil Nightingale had crystallised into something far more dangerous.

His gaze travelled between her and Byron, and he smiled in such a way a chilly thread of awareness slid down Cressida’s spine, igniting a pulse of spreading heat between her legs that would soak through her silk chemise.

He smiled, in fact, as if he knew all about that.

Get up. ‘What can I do for you, Greville?’

‘Might I have five minutes of your time?’ Greville spoke to her as if Byron wasn’t even in the room.

Byron got up and walked out without a backward glance at either of them and closed the door behind him, candle-flames shivering in the breeze.

Cressida knew she must tread carefully to get the most out of him.

George Byron hadn’t changed: he would only be happy to indulge himself in a little obsession if he felt some competition but not so much that he risked rejection.

She ignored the small voice at the back of her mind: What have you become?

‘I suppose you’ve come to gloat.’ Cressida revelled in the brief flare of desire in Greville’s eyes.

‘But as a matter of fact, I didn’t need your mother’s help earlier this evening and I don’t need yours now.

I’ve already secured my invitation to Drochcala.

Go home to Summercourt and enjoy your furlough, and I’ll deal with George Byron for Lascelles without your interference. ’

Greville’s gaze travelled to the knife and then away from it, so dismissive, before looking up at her. He exuded reined-in distracted tension like a man bringing a message from the battlefield. ‘I’ve come to ask for your help, much as it pains me to do it.’

Cressida let out an airless laugh. ‘What?’

‘Lascelles told me you assisted the surgeons in the peninsula.’ He was close to her now, no more than a handspan away. Greville briefly closed his eyes in her presence, those gold-touched lashes so dark against his sun-bronzed skin. ‘Cressida, please.’

It was the first time in so very many years that she’d heard her given name upon his lips.

Greville moved in one stride to the servants’ door beside the piano; Cressida crushed indecision and followed him up the narrow whitewashed stairwell, going to the aid of a man who had betrayed her in so many different ways.

Having set down the pewter candle-branch on the windowsill, he went up the plain stairs of oiled oak at a swift pace, lighting their way with just one taper, his long, well-shaped legs clad in close-cut breeches of dark kerseymere.

Upon reaching a narrow landing, he stood back to let her pass.

She was aware of his gaze upon her as she gathered up her skirts, taking the next flight of stairs at a run, sensing they were nearing the shabbier bedrooms on the upper floors where the younger Craufords slept in starched linen sheets and had their fires kindled each morning by exhausted twelve-year-old maidservants.

He went ahead of her again before they reached his old bedchamber, a room that by rights she ought never to have set foot in.

Even as a clueless girl of nineteen, she should really have understood that to leave her in such a permanent state of despoiled need, Lord Greville Nightingale must have indulged in a considerable amount of practice.

She recalled how he’d laughed with gratification, looking down at her in his canopied bed, so adept with the touch of his fingertips and lips that she had never known such a shocking combination of pleasure and shame.

She remembered the rise and fall of his naked chest, the darned linen pillowcase.

You’d do well to bite something , he’d said, bringing her to merciless release with the touch of his fingertips. She had: his shoulder, and hard.

Their eyes met as they reached the door and she recalled the salty taste of his damp skin.

‘Ready?’ Greville asked, as if they were about to climb a siege tower together. ‘I doubt very much it will shock you, but my brother has been shot.’

He opened the door into his old bedchamber, where so many things were screamingly wrong that she had to steady herself.

There was too much blood, for a start. By the window, a middle-aged society doctor still dressed for dinner stood arguing in a repressed, furious whisper with a tall footman.

Chas was in the bed, motionless with pain – Cressida had seen many of them like this on the battlefield.

Boys in field hospitals often went very still, tutored never to betray their pain by either privation or sadistic boarding schools, and then they died.

‘The gentleman insists there’s nothing for it but to have the leg off entirely, sir,’ the footman said.

‘With the ball lodged so close to the femoral artery he says there’s no other option.

I explained about cauterising, we’ve all seen the surgeons do it on the field, but he says it’s not possible. Sir.’

‘Thank you, Somers.’ Greville turned to the doctor, who to his credit had come out in the middle of dinner, with a napkin still tucked into the front of his waistcoat. ‘You may leave us now, if you can do nothing.’

‘No, don’t let him leave, not yet,’ Cressida said, and they all turned to look at her: the serving-girl, the doctor, even Chas on the bed, turning his head from side to side as the fever mounted.

If the wound didn’t kill him, the fever would.

‘We’ll need all the hands we can get, as long as he can keep his mouth shut and not interfere.

’ She crossed the room to the bed, Greville at her side.

They had cut off Chas’s breeches, and only a darned linen sheet covered him. ‘May I?’ she said.

Chas managed to smile through the agony. ‘Who am I to say no, ma’am?’

Did he recognise her or not? There was little time to wonder.

She lifted the sheet and, with iron self-control, refused to let the dismay show in her face as she removed the thick wadding of bloodied cloth.

The ball had gone in close to Chas’s hip joint.

She’d seen this before, tearing bandages for the surgeons, lending a hand when they called for it.

If they didn’t get the ball out, Chas really would be lucky to only lose his leg.

If they tried to get the ball out and failed, he’d bleed to death in minutes. Which at the very least would be quick.

The doctor loomed behind her, stinking of smoked trout and champagne, breathing down her neck as he spoke to Greville. ‘This is no place for hedge-witch potions and hysteria, my lord.’

‘Does she look hysterical?’ Greville said, and she heard the grim smile in his voice.

Cressida smoothed down the silk skirts of her evening gown. ‘Someone get this thing off me and I’ll tell you what to do. Quickly. I’m damned if I’ll sacrifice my second-best gown for a Nightingale.’

The servant girl was the first to understand, her deft fingers dealing with the fastening at the back of Cressida’s bodice.

The doctor looked away, but for a moment Greville caught her gaze, an unfathomable expression in his dark eyes as she stepped out of a puddle of peacock-blue silk and stripped off her long gloves.

‘I beg that you will forgive me if I take my leave.’ The doctor sounded as if he were about to choke.

‘The devil you will go anywhere,’ Greville said, emotionless. ‘We might need you yet. Susan, assist my lady.’

The girl stepped forward, grey with shock but still functioning.

Cressida waved away the girl’s own proffered apron, which would barely have covered her petticoat-skirts, and between them they pinned a hastily folded sheet to the front of her stays, securing it around her waist with a strip torn from one edge.

There was already warm water set by the fire, so Cressida scrubbed her hands, working up a lather with the yellowed rock of lavender soap by the wash basin.

Behind her back, she overheard the doctor’s querulous demand to know what in heaven’s name she was doing.

‘Have you ever wondered why babies delivered by laundrywomen die less often than babies delivered by your unwashed self?’ Cressida said, not looking at him but at the damage as Chas sucked in a long, shuddering breath, pearls of sweat all over his forehead.

The skin around the bleeding entry wound was black with gunpowder, already beginning to bruise.

He was a brave lad as well as a pretty one, and it would be a shame if he died. It generally was, when they did.

Greville turned to Smythe with a pleasant smile that made the man stop gaping and take two swift steps backwards. ‘I don’t give a flying damn about propriety. Follow every last instruction that she gives.’

Smythe opened his mouth and then closed it again, wisely.