Page 19

Cressida and Oliver reached the house, coming down the steep path to the gate leading into a dank, mossy courtyard criss-crossed with empty washing lines, and Cressida laid a hand on Oliver’s arm, sensing his swift inhalation at her touch.

Please heaven she’d never need to use that weapon against him, of all people.

‘Shall I come in?’ she asked. ‘I’m very happy to. I always used to have the trick of soothing Mrs Scudamore’s nerves.’

Oliver’s smile was now a little tight. ‘You could certainly cosset her out of a fury – after you’d had your ears boxed for shaving slices off the sugar loaf with my pocket knife, as I recall.’

It was as much of an invitation as she was going to get; Oliver had already opened a door shedding peeling green paint, his well-sculpted jaw set firm.

Raised voices travelled along the stone-flagged corridor from the kitchens within.

He stepped aside to let her go first, and Cressida steeled herself for the body-blow of familiarity when she stepped inside the vast warm room.

There was a new range with the same copper pans hanging above it, the same scrubbed table still home to a bowl of costly lemons.

A thin grey shadow of the Mrs Scudamore from Cressida’s schoolroom years faced down the chief excise-man, MacGuigan, and two of his lads, one of whom had got a bootful coming ashore and was now dripping onto Mrs Scudamore’s well-swept flagstone floor.

‘Say that again, Fraser MacGuigan,’ Mrs Scudamore invited, still just as fearsome as she had ever been, even if age and work had taken their toll.

‘You might want to explain to Mr Tait and her ladyship here what you just saw fit to say to me.’ Her eyes narrowed as she moved in for the kill.

‘What was it again about the laundry room?’

MacGuigan was tall, with pale, sunburnt skin, prematurely thinning hair, a sour expression, and very much the air of a man at the end of his tether.

He turned to Oliver, with the briefest of nods in Cressida’s direction.

Like a bloody fool, she’d spent so long anticipating her reception in the ton that Fraser MacGuigan’s very ordinary embarrassment at the sight of her ignited a cold flash of anger.

‘Well, Fraser?’ Oliver said. ‘You can speak in front of Lady Greville: we all know one another. What can we do for you and your men? Lord and Lady Bute have guests still to come. If you don’t mind, we’re all busy.’

‘I’ve no doubt of that,’ MacGuigan said, his gaze sliding from the new range to the little door that led to the scullery and the laundry room. ‘We’ve had reports of whisky run up the loch-head in recent weeks, that’s all, and someone making it in these parts.’

‘Are you really suggesting that Drochcala has anything to do with such foolishness?’ Oliver sounded dangerously harassed, not like Greville, who would have just sounded dangerous, but she must put that sort of damn fool thought to the back of her mind.

‘He says there’s talk of using the big laundry copper here to make whisky mash.’ Mrs Scudamore glared at MacGuigan, who only shrugged.

‘I’m sure you’ll agree, mistress, that we’ve all got no choice but to do our jobs, and this is mine. If there’s talk, I must follow up the enquiries. And no one else in these parts has a vessel large enough for distilling, legal or otherwise.’

‘Mr MacGuigan,’ Cressida said, all sweetness. ‘May I ask what you and your men likely failed to notice as you tramped across the yard before making a mess in the corridor out there?’

She remembered him from a boy – a serious lad who had been sent up the loch every morning to get his learning from the curate at Sangobeg.

‘I don’t catch your ladyship’s meaning,’ MacGuigan said, averting his gaze from her own.

Cressida leaned against the whitewashed wall, folding her arms. ‘No, very likely you wouldn’t, although I’ve no doubt that Mrs MacGuigan would.

’ MacGuigan flinched at the sound of his wife’s name on her lips, but he could go to hell.

‘It’s simple, Fraser. There isn’t a single shift or sheet set to dry on the lines, and if you’ll care to come with us to the laundry room you’ll see why. ’

Cressida swept past them all, exchanging the briefest flickering glance with Mrs Scudamore, who maintained a card-player’s control over her features: according to Ines, that miserable crow of a woman Roberts had lost an entire thirty pence to Mrs Scudamore at gin rummy.

MacGuigan said nothing and gave no indication that he was about to take advice let alone orders from a woman, but he followed all the same; Cressida was well aware of the heat of his gaze upon her from behind. Let him look: he couldn’t touch.

A young scullery maid emerged from the laundry room just as they reached it, face flushed, linen cap askew as she dropped into a curtsey when she saw Cressida.

With hair that particular shade of flame-red and those peat-dark eyes, she was almost certain to be a Tait.

She went to Oliver’s side, and he let one protective hand rest upon her narrow shoulder.

A cousin, perhaps: Oliver’s mother had only presented Mr Tait senior with one child before her death.

He’d never married again, and had been far from the type to get bastards.

‘Well, and what is the state of affairs in the laundry room?’ Cressida asked the child. ‘Is it really the case that my cousin has a houseful of guests and we can’t wash anything ?’

The girl flushed, not quite managing to hide a flash of irritation at such interference into her mistress’s affairs.

‘The copper’s still not fit to be used, ma’am.

’ She explained as if to a very young child: ‘Mr MacGuigan, that means we can’t boil the water to wash, let alone make whisky mash.

The lid cracked sheer in two and so it needs riveting. Sir.’

Cressida stepped aside to let MacGuigan pass.

The laundry room was piled high to the narrow windows with heaps of yellowed, dirty linen.

Even silks, satins and woollens vomited forth from lidded baskets to a degree that would have engendered blood-deep panic in any woman, from the youngest scullery maid right up to her mistress.

MacGuigan frowned. ‘Very well.’ Ignoring Cressida, he turned to Mrs Scudamore, who stood with her arms folded. ‘I’ll be staying out of your hair for now then, mistress, Mr Tait. For now, mind you. I’m not a complete fool.’

Mrs Scudamore curtseyed, and Oliver substituted a curt nod for a bow.

‘I should think so too, Fraser,’ Cressida said. ‘Honestly, I know you’re only doing your duty, but have some common sense at least.’

It was Ines, a little later, who gave voice to the creeping sense of disquiet that Cressida could no longer ignore.

Cressida lay on her bed in the quiet time before dressing to dine, gazing out of the window at the shifting surface of Loch Iffrin, trying and failing to fit together the logic of what she had seen and heard.

Sitting in the low chair beneath the window, Ines looked up from the stocking she was darning with tiny, featherlight stitches.

‘I don’t even know if it’s free-trading that they should all be fretting about. This is a lonely coast and there’s a war. I would bet on my life that they’re smuggling more than black-market whisky and brandy: it will surely be information or worse.’

Cressida stared up at the embroidered bed canopy, uneasy: Ines was more likely to be right than not.