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Greville could have done without it: God only knew he’d had no desire to come back to England at all and yet, courtesy of his extremely estranged wife and his oldest friend, here he was.

He sat at a table near a leaded window with a clear line to the door, his body thrumming with a soldier’s awareness even as he stretched out his long legs, crossing them at the ankle.

Bessy brought the gin and he dropped the coinage into her outstretched hand without even returning her smile, a rare lapse of courtesy.

Greville saw only Cressida in the ruins of a Spanish town, clad in a gown of spoiled silk, her face bloodied, her fingers and her lips black with gunpowder, tangled auburn curls loose around her shoulders, with that fire in her dark eyes he had never forgotten, not in all these years.

Greville drained his gin; he should have told Bessy just to bring the tin jug and have done with it.

Major Lord Arthur Lascelles of the Peninsular Corps of Guides walked into the Oxford then, all blue superfine and exquisitely polished top-boots.

Raconteur, childhood companion and devious expert in military intelligence, evidently Lascelles had at least found time to change since his ship docked, just hours before Greville’s.

His hair was arranged with a stylish element of en deshabille, the ironic tilt of his smile exactly the same as it had been in the overheated London salons of their youth.

With a swift glance around the gloomy reaches of the tavern, Lascelles lowered himself into the chair opposite Greville, letting out a small sigh.

By rights, Lascelles ought to have laid himself open to attention from cutpurses, but no Devil’s Acre thief would make the attempt on him.

Lascelles beckoned to Bessy for porter and she bustled across the room in her best gown of grubby glazed calico. Her eyes widened with alarm at the expression on Greville’s face; she refilled his glass without a word and retreated.

Lascelles sighed. ‘The court martial’s over, Grev. You could be on furlough in Lisbon with a girl on each arm.’

Greville smiled in such a way that even Lascelles flinched; after boarding the Sophie in the heat of a white-hot fury, he’d had two weeks at sea to consider the wisdom of pursuing his errant wife and Lascelles back to England.

‘Is that really all you summoned me here to say?’ Greville leaned back in his chair and allowed the glass of daffy to swing gently from his fingertips as he raised it in salute.

‘No,’ Lascelles said. ‘It’s not even the half of what I have to say to you.

You could literally have escorted Cressida out into the hills after catching her on the wrong side, given her a horse and never laid eyes upon the wretched hellcat again.

That siege and the aftermath was chaotic and hardly the British army’s finest hour; no one would have been any the wiser.

Instead you arrested Cressida and then beat the Guards officer who apprehended her, in territory we’d just recovered from the French, into a bloody pulp, earning yourself a court martial in the process.

He was a baronet’s son: you can’t thrash men like that into next week without consequence. Now your wife is my problem. Why?’

‘I don’t care who his father is. He would have forced her before he cut her throat and I would have done the same if he’d tried it on any woman.

’ As for the rest, Greville had asked himself the same question at sea, multiple times, and found no satisfactory answer.

He was also uncomfortably aware that his own rank in society was what had swung the court martial in his favour.

‘Don’t give me that look,’ Lascelles went on. ‘If it’s also because on some level, Greville, you couldn’t leave Cressida a second time, go back to Spain.’

‘Give me a good reason why I should not also beat you to a bloody pulp. Sir,’ Greville said.

Lascelles gave Greville his most disarming smile. ‘Because I pushed that ogre Arbuthnot down the stairs at Winchester when he questioned your mother’s virtue?’

Greville watched him. ‘Keep Sylvia’s name out of your mouth. You knew. ’ He measured out each word. ‘My wife has been following the army with no protection and no honour, living among the camp followers and surviving God knows how, for years, and you knew .’

She’d run away after a night Greville preferred to forget, disappearing from London society like campfire smoke on the wind.

‘What are you going to do with her?’ Greville spoke with a calm he wasn’t even close to feeling and drained the last of his gin.

Lascelles gave him a steady look across the table. ‘You captured Cressida in territory we’d taken from the French. She was on the wrong side, Greville. She was lucky not to be shot, hanged, or otherwise quietly disposed of, and that’s before we even consider her father.’

Greville stared back. ‘The less said about Rosmoney the better.’

‘I agree, but having a criminal for a father won’t help her now.’

‘Did it ever?’ Greville demanded.

Lascelles spoke with restrained calm. ‘The whole country is on the brink of revolution and the Prime Minister has just been murdered.

Lord Liverpool and the Committee of Secrecy have a long reach and your wife was just caught with our enemy.

You must understand that a whiff of treason is more dangerous than ever.

‘Believe me, blue blood or not, the only thing that will keep your wife out of either an extremely humiliating public trial for treason or, more likely, a very unfortunate accident is for her to become indispensable. If Cressida was in enough trouble before Perceval was shot, in all honesty I now think she’ll be luck to survive the next month. ’

‘Oh, spare me whatever devious sneaking bloody plot you have in mind,’ Greville said; he wanted no part in Lascelles’ intelligencing, and most particularly not if Lascelles had designs on involving his wife. ‘Where is she?’

‘Well.’ Lascelles leaned back in his chair. He’d never been afraid of Greville.

Greville stared at him, his eyes narrowed. Lascelles would sooner cut his own throat than admit fault: he’d been like this since they were eight years old. ‘She came back to England under your escort. You’ve lost her, haven’t you?’

‘Someone threw a grenade just as we were disembarking: it was a little chaotic. The Hellion lost a horse and sixteen crates of chambord. Your wife and her maid took the opportunity to lose themselves.’

‘My God, if you’ve got even half a plan you’d better start talking,’ Greville said.

Lascelles smiled, which had always meant trouble.