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An hour later saw Greville in Jamie’s bedchamber, splashing cold water from the basin onto his face, his bloodied shirt discarded on the waxed floorboards. The water swirled with hypnotic red as he took the fine linen shirt that Somers handed to him.

‘How is he now?’ Greville asked, rolling up the sleeves.

Cufflinks could wait; he couldn’t get the smell of burning flesh out of his nostrils.

If Chas lived, it would be the cauterisation that saved his life: Smythe had gone to pieces, more used to prescribing remedies for bored society matrons than dealing with gunshot wounds.

Cressida had talked him through the cauterisation step by step, and Greville could only hope that no one ever found out she’d learned the method on a battlefield.

‘Still alive, and he managed to pass water, sir, which was clear with no blood or ill humours in it. The laudanum has taken effect, which is a mercy.’ Somers picked up the shirt as though it were a discarded stocking.

‘Susan is assisting her ladyship in Lord Charles’s dressing room, but the girl’s in a bad way.

Young Mr Nightingale has gone to the library. ’

Greville thanked him and left, still rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as he walked into the oak-panelled library to find Jamie standing beside the leather-topped desk that overlooked the square, leaning on the tall window frame with his back to the door.

A heap of calf-bound Greek satires and Radical pamphlets lay on the desk, the topmost still open.

Jamie stood still, absorbed in staring out at the lamp-lit square below, so unaware of his presence that Greville fought a rising wave of exasperation: God help him in any London street after dark.

‘You are not downstairs with the poet?’ he said, keeping his tone light.

Jamie turned then, arms still folded. ‘No. Apparently not.’ Greville didn’t miss the flare of emotion in his eyes. Jamie sighed, looking suddenly younger than he was, pale with tension. ‘Will Chas be all right? Trust him to kick up a dust.’

‘It depends on the fever,’ Greville said, ruthless. ‘How did it come about?’

Jamie shrugged, his expression blank. ‘He says he was robbed. It could happen to anyone at the moment.’

‘How unfortunate.’ Greville went to the sideboard and poured them each a glass of brandy from the cut-glass decanter. ‘I felt for the Milbanke girl, having the misfortune to sit between you and George Byron this evening. You and he drew rather a lot of attention even as you talked across her.’

‘ He draws attention, you mean,’ Jamie said, accepting the brandy.

‘No one’s really that interested in me, thank Christ. Am I about to receive a homily about manners and propriety from you, of all people?

’ He smiled, all fierce intelligence and the patience of the young towards their elders.

He had the self-preservation if not the innate respect not to mention Cressida.

Greville raised his glass in a silent toast to King and country. God help him if he were to start lecturing greenhorns. ‘No, I’ll leave the moralising to my dear brother Crauford.’

Jamie shrugged. ‘He doesn’t need much encouragement.’

‘Consider it instead a warning from an expert in the field,’ Greville said, watching his cousin drink; Jamie’s eyes shone with the briefest glimpse of dissipation.

So, he was that brand of Nightingale after all.

‘Byron has unusual charisma, does he not? I’ve known him for years and that’s always been the case.

But you know how society works: what goes up must come down.

Reputations rise and then are destroyed.

Take it from me, once that’s happened, there’s nothing the ton loves more than gathering like so many spectators at a hanging.

Make sure you do remain a spectator, rather than the sport.

Jigging at the end of that particular rope is no way to live. ’

Jamie watched him, eyes narrowed. ‘A lecture, then. I thought better of you, of all people. You’re just as bad as the rest of them.’ He set down his glass with angry deliberation and Greville stepped back to let him walk past, watching as he closed the door.

He found Cressida in Chas’s dressing room, holding a huge measure of brandy.

‘Poor Susan. She was too overset to pin up the back of my gown,’ Cressida drawled, raising her glass to him as she adopted that cold, careless persona once more.

Greville poured the last of the brandy into the other glass and drank it like water.

‘Come here,’ Greville said; he had wondered for days what would happen when he reached the end of his rope.

Cressida got up, never taking her eyes from him. She crossed the silent room half undressed, her gown gathered in handfuls; he heard only the whisper of heavy folds of silk and told himself to get a damned grip.

‘Turn around,’ Greville said. A single chestnut curl clung to the back of her neck, trailing over one naked shoulder, her skin dusted with pale gold freckles.

With a workmanlike shrug, she pulled up the bodice, sliding her strong, slender arms into the short, pearl-studded sleeves of her gown, leaving the back of her bodice open, even as he inhaled her warm scent.

‘It’s a maid’s task,’ she said, without turning her head to look at him. ‘And you’re no such thing.’

‘Whether I like it or not, my family is now in debt to you. No one else could have done what you did for Chas tonight. Not just your insistence on the cauterisation but your nursing of him. I beg that you will allow me to be your servant for this moment.’

‘Very well,’ Cressida said, her shoulders rising and falling almost imperceptibly with every breath.

How often he had lain awake, wondering if she did in fact still breathe.

He’d helped many a girl back into her gown, but this was Cressida and for now there was nothing but blue silk and the fresh linen of her shift beneath his fingertips.

When it was done she let out a sigh, and he allowed his thumb to brush the bare skin at the nape of her neck.

She responded, turning to him, eyes dark in her white face.

They both reached for each other in the same moment, his hands in her hair, then running down her back as she responded to his touch, pulling him towards her with primal urgency.

He looked down at her, running his hands over her backside: Cressida had always been beyond the common, but, if anything, the appalling way she’d lived had lent a lean, watchful air to her beauty.

He ducked to kiss her, to make her his once more, and her hands cupped the back of his head, her fingers in his hair, and at the familiar taste of her something within him unravelled.

‘I do actually want you just as much as I hate you,’ she said, speaking softly into his ear.

‘Is that so?’ Greville measured out each word and ran his hands down her back again with slow deliberation, relishing the warmth of her lithe form as she pushed herself against him in response.

He spread his long fingers across her rear with proprietorial ease, teasing through layers of disordered silk and fine linen until she writhed, liquescent.

She let out a controlled gasp and when he took her mouth again she bit his lip.

He’d waited so long to inhale her scent, which was the same as it always had been: only Cressida could spend years in the train of an army and return with a supply of the costliest attar of roses.

He pushed her back against the panelled wall, holding both hands above her head with just one of his own, kissing her again as he should have done in the ruins of Badajoz.

He abandoned her mouth and brushed his lips instead against the white skin of her neck.

She brought down her hands, cradling his face as she kissed him in return.

‘You truly are the worst of men,’ she said.

‘Do you think I don’t know it?’ Greville dealt with the fall of his breeches and Cressida’s skirts in short order.

Lifting her, holding her against the wall, he made her his own once more, and she him, with her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms loose around his neck, so that he held her and took her with all of his strength and will, and holy God she had better not remember the way he allowed his forehead to rest for a moment in the warm, smooth hollow of her clavicle.

Sometime later, they sat side by side on the floor, still in disarray and a little breathless, both leaning against the heavy chest of carved oak where Chas’s valet kept his spare riding breeches.

Cressida turned her head away. ‘That was an unforced error.’ Her voice was hard, even though she was still flushed. ‘It’s too late for this to make any difference, Greville. You do know that, don’t you? Only a fool allows a man to betray her more than once.’

Banked-down anger rose up: how dared she question his actions? ‘I served you no worse a turn than any other husband of our station.’

So they had finally arrived at this: an opera dancer with frightened eyes whose name he couldn’t remember, and a thoughtless decision to go to Vauxhall Gardens with a party of unmarried friends and an entourage of paid girls.

Cressida faced him again then, her eyes hot with scorn and a flicker of naked hurt that cut him to the quick.

‘Didn’t you think I’d care? I’ve never known humiliation like it: everywhere I went, to be in receipt of pitying glances and ill-meant advice about how it was not worth trying to hold Devil Nightingale. ’

‘You were reared to turn a blind eye, and to conduct your own affairs with discretion. You did neither,’ Greville snapped.

It was just the order of things: the way lives like theirs had been lived for centuries.

Hang the fact that she’d precisely echoed the soft, insistent voice that had plagued his rare moments of reflection over all the years since, arguing that perhaps Cressida had not been the only one at fault, embarking on an affair with the Duke of Cleveland which could not have been more public.

Perhaps he’d angered and humiliated a young girl who’d already known the sort of abandonment he could never hope to understand, provoking her beyond what she could bear.

He remembered the bitterest of the accusations she had thrown at him before frozen silence had descended on the marriage: Never mind how you humiliate me, what of those girls?

You may as well have pushed each one into the gutter yourself.

Cressida didn’t know it, but he’d stuck to bored society matrons ever since: women of his own class.

‘More fool me for ever believing that you were out of the ordinary,’ Cressida said, now in control once more and staring straight ahead. ‘Why are you even in England, Greville?’

Greville wanted to shake her, but never once had he allowed a woman or girl to witness the more volcanic extremes of a temper he’d been brought up to consider a fault.

‘Because you’re my wife and you bear my name, and I’d as lief you didn’t drag it through the mud again.’ Greville steadied himself. ‘And I don’t care what Arthur Lascelles says, but you will not do so at Drochcala, with Byron’s help or without it.’

She gifted him a mocking smile. ‘So even after all these years you still regard me as your property. Are you sure it’s not just too shaming to think of your own wife swiving George Byron, and for everyone to know about it?’

Silently, Greville counted to five, before turning to her with the insolent smile that had fetched her from right across a ballroom, years before.

‘He can have you over the billiard table at Drochcala before the whole household for all I care, but I’ve sisters still in the schoolroom and I won’t allow you to ruin their chances with another one of your scandals.

By the way, I take my hat off to Annis for that fairytale she spun about where exactly you’ve been.

Travelling with only servants throughout the Levant is eccentric, but reasonably unexceptionable.

If you toe the line, some of the not-so-high sticklers might even forget the past and receive you again.

So let’s just pray that no one except Lascelles and a very select few in the Cabinet know where you really have been.

And if everyone else finds out you whored your way across Portugal and Spain in the company of half the British army, I’d imagine you’ll become more of a liability than an asset.

It’s a risk, isn’t it? Disobey me if you please.

Just don’t imagine it will be without consequence. ’

Somehow, they were now on their feet, and standing just inches apart again.

Her mute anger scorched the air between them, as did his own not inconsiderable fury.

A smile teased Cressida’s lips. ‘If I see you at Drochcala, Nightingale, be very aware that I regard you as an obstacle. I leave it to you to consider whether that’s wise. ’