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They stared at each other for a moment, Cressida unable to shake a sickening shifting sensation, as if the ground were moving beneath her feet.

She didn’t have time for the Nightingales: not here and not now.

On her deathbed, she’d relive that night in Annis’s ballroom, friend after friend turning their backs upon her.

The following morning, she’d sat in her old bed clutching the sheets to her chest, wishing for a letter.

And yet there had been a letter. Two of them, in fact.

Annis had just opted not to give them to her.

For a moment, Cressida was intensely aware of the scent of pine sap on the air.

Then she turned and walked away up the hill, leaving Kitty to pick her way back down the stony path to the house alone.

The sooner she and Ines left Drochcala, the better.

Let Lascelles do his worst; let the Committee of Secrecy do their worst. They’d have to catch her first.

Cressida climbed the steep hillside so fast that all she knew was the heat in her thighs and calves and the sweat in her hair, forcing herself to smile when she met Oliver on the path.

He stepped back to let her pass first where the path narrowed, and she caught the sharp, herbal scent of his shaving water.

‘This is a fair hill, but you make short work of it.’ Oliver spoke with forced civility: she’d have to get used to formality from him. They’d been on first-name terms in the days when his father was steward here, playing marbles in the laundry yard.

She smiled, still surprised at how much such familiarity hurt after so many years as a stranger to almost everyone she met. ‘I walked a lot in the Levant, when it was a great deal hotter than this. One gets used to it.’

Cressida glimpsed movement at the edge of her vision and with a Herculean effort managed not to draw her knife. Side by side, she and Oliver stood watching as an adder slid away into the heather.

‘Always better to let a small evil pass by unchallenged?’ Cressida said, lightly.

‘It’s only that they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.

What’s the point in taking a life for no reason?

’ Oliver did smile then as he had in their childhood: the frank, open smile in which it was hard not to see the ghost of Annis’s father, who had brought Oliver’s mother, Ann, to Scotland from Jamaica, long ago.

Reaching a cleft in the heather-fringed granite hillside rearing up on either side of them, they were rewarded with the vista ahead, a dramatic plunge of heathered fell tumbling down towards the loch far below.

Eilean nam Fiadh rose up from the middle of the loch, where against all odds vivid green woodland had taken hold above granite flanks streaked with heather.

A cutter emerged into view at speed, tacking into the wind, sails hauled in with expert precision as the boat turned.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Oliver said, letting his guard fall with disarming speed.

‘Are they preventives?’ Cressida said; the cutter was under sail now, but even from here she spotted space enough for eight oarsmen, which made ownership of such a vessel a hanging matter for anyone save the customs and excise men.

Oliver nodded, curt. ‘Your eyesight’s just as sharp as it ever was.

That’s Fraser MacGuigan and his boys – they’ve been all over the coast this summer and to be frank we could do without the disruption this evening.

It’s merry hell below stairs as I’m sure you can imagine, with Mrs Scudamore never knowing how many we’ll have to dine from one evening to the next.

’ He turned to smile at her again, the unwary flash of anger now subdued: she could hardly blame him for it.

‘I beg your pardon. There’s been a great deal of free-trading this year, ever since the ban on distilling.

The authorities in England don’t like unrest in Scotland and they like it even less now, as you can imagine.

Lord Perceval’s death hasn’t helped, to put it mildly.

They’re concerned about insurrection here just as they are about it happening everywhere else, and I suppose they’re afraid the free and fair consumption of whisky will set Highland blood to an unhealthy boil.

I must go back down to the house – I’d be a fool to leave his lordship to deal with Fraser MacGuigan. ’

‘Or Lady Bute, God forbid. Surely MacGuigan doesn’t bother you all at Drochcala?’

Oliver was silent for a moment as they headed downhill, falling into an easy, practised stride on the narrow, rock-littered path.

‘I’m afraid the Butes aid and abet free-traders whenever they get the opportunity: heaven forbid they should pay a penny of taxation to restock their own cellars.

’ He frowned. ‘It’s hardly as if they can’t afford the duty, but instead they just legitimise the criminality.

It wouldn’t have happened in my father’s day, but MacGuigan will want to search the outbuildings for any evidence of distilling or free-trading. ’

‘What an awful mess it all is.’

‘The assassination of the prime minister?’ Oliver spoke with a lilt of the sardonic humour she remembered from their youth. ‘You’re not wrong. MacGuigan’s wife is nearly at her confinement, too, so he’ll be in an even worse temper than usual. Please tell me about the Levant instead!’

They reached the second gate, and he held it open for her as they descended from the bare hillside into the plantation surrounding the white limewashed bulk of the house.

Cressida smiled at Oliver over her shoulder and spun him an effortless lie about a man selling pomegranates from a basket in the ancient city of Petra.

If only she really had lived such a life.