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Cressida leaned on the wall outside the drawing room at Drochcala, closing her eyes as she listened to the jovial hum of voices and the clatter of Annis’s lead-glass champagne coupes.

Mrs Scudamore would still be spitting fire about the puddles of seawater Fraser MacGuigan and his men had left all over her clean flagstones; all the servants looked unusually harassed, and there was no footman to announce her.

Cressida tasted salt upon her lips; she could leave, she and Ines could light a fire and bivouac in the wild places, among the heather and fog.

In reality, she’d always be more at home out there.

The low hum of conversation stopped as she opened the door.

‘ Good heavens. ’ Lord Bute’s familiar voice rang out into a thick silence, and Cressida only just had time to register Annis and Kitty on the chaise longue nearest the grate, Kitty immaculate in bronze lace.

Annis was composed enough in a gown of pale grey silk, her coral beads bright in the firelight, but Kitty held onto her glass of champagne with both hands as though it were a life-raft. There was still no sign of Byron.

Bute rose arthritically from his armchair by the fire. His jacket was cut with an impeccable taste most people would have noticed before his increasing infirmity. ‘My dear girl, you do look a jewel.’ He took her outstretched hand in his own, kissing it.

‘Thank you, I’m sorry to be late down. I was so indecisive about my gown, I’ve put my woman quite out of charity with me.’

‘Well, you’ll permit me to say your woman has done a fine job regardless,’ Bute went on, waving one blue-veined hand in the direction of a fair-haired gentleman who stood examining the case of calf-bound miniature books. A little out of the way of the chandelier, he was half concealed by shadow.

Bute’s well-trained smile didn’t falter even for a moment as he turned to this new arrival. ‘His Grace the Duke of Cleveland – Lady Greville Nightingale. You may be acquainted already, of course – our dear Cressida has been travelling in the Levant for so many years.’

Cressida caught her breath, turning with composure towards the man who had ruined her.

If Bute hadn’t just announced his name, she might have mistaken Cleveland for Arthur Lascelles as he was now: lean and muscular rather than the lissom creature Arthur had been in their first Season.

As brothers, they were cut from the same cloth: unmistakable, and very expensive.

‘Oh, come on, Bute, let’s not beat around the bush,’ Cleveland said.

‘Everyone knows Lady Greville and I are already acquainted.’ Cleveland was angry, furiously angry.

No one else had noticed, smiling and chatting in the candlelight: they didn’t know him well enough.

Had he shared her ignorance about Annis’s guest list?

‘My dear boy, you must forgive my poor memory.’ Bute spoke with quelling good manners and Cleveland could do nothing but raise his glass in a lazy toast. Sitting by the fire with Annis, Kitty watched with her glass of champagne halfway to her lips.

Making an obvious effort to collect herself, she answered Bute’s enquiries about her youngest boy’s career at Eton with a grateful smile.

‘Delighted to see you, Cleveland.’ Cressida faced him with the frank smile that had served her everywhere from a campfire in a Portuguese downpour to the Queen’s drawing room. Annis must be relishing every minute of this.

‘You’re not,’ Cleveland said softly, just as irresistibly badly behaved as ever. ‘Not that I blame you.’

In Cressida’s experience, most men of the highest nobility had grey teeth and a complete lack of charm, but Dominic Lascelles was that rare creature: next to a prince in rank, yet more handsome and appallingly charismatic than a half-pay officer.

A man of medium height only, he was lean still and dressed with subdued good taste in a superbly cut jacket of charcoal superfine.

His honey-gold hair was cropped close, his eyes the peat-water dark of the north – unusual, for a man of his fair colouring.

In the drawing room at Drochcala, Cressida allowed the Duke of Cleveland to raise her hand to his lips and then lead her a little apart from the rest. His own hands were beautiful – well shaped and strong, with a musician’s sensitivity, as she recalled only too clearly.

There was no pianoforte at Drochcala, and Cleveland needed to play as other men must eat.

So why in hell’s name was he here, rather than playing his own part as lord and master over his acres south of the border?

He smiled, looking bored, which in Cleveland was always lethal.

He spoke in a low voice that only she could hear.

‘If you think about it, you were quite fortunate that those footmen didn’t interrupt us five minutes later, all those years ago, because otherwise I’d have been giving you the swiving you thoroughly deserved over your cousin’s chaise longue, and then it would have been your delectable naked arse presented to those footmen, instead of only your magnificent tits.

’ He smiled then, revealing wolfishly sharp canine teeth.

Cressida returned his gaze with level calm, refusing to give him satisfaction. ‘Goodness, I never expected you of all people to become one of those lewd old roués that girls are taught to avoid at parties, Dominic. Why aren’t you settled yet with a nice complaisant duchess?’

‘Still dagger-tongued, then,’ Cleveland said, idly.

‘Was a summer at Drochcala really your best offer? Why aren’t you at Kielder: surely you haven’t exhausted the Cleveland coffers?’

Cleveland’s eyes hardened, emotionless. ‘Do you really think I would, damn you?’ Cleveland had always been serious about his land, if nothing else.

‘No need to come the schoolmaster with me. It’s just that I don’t see why you even came here if you haven’t mortgaged your estates.’

‘Come on, Cressida, stop asking shrewish questions. To confound the gossips, we must be on the most easy terms with one another – almost cousinly, one might say. Annis knows what she’s doing.’ Cleveland raised his glass to her again; she longed to smack the smile off his face.

‘Please. Anyone would think you were actually sorry that I suffered all the consequences for our indiscretions whereas you got off like a lucky little pickpocket fast enough to outrun the law.’

Cleveland smiled again. ‘I didn’t escape consequence: I just knew from the start of our liaison that I’d be vanishingly unlikely to experience it.

Whereas you can’t say the same for yourself, can you?

’ He shrugged. ‘You’re no fool. You understood the risks.

Here you are back in society once more – at Annis Bute’s house party, no less. Was it really all so bad?’

Cressida ignored a series of rapid-fire memories: dodging grapeshot to raid the pockets of dead French infantrymen, cutting off a dead man’s fingers to get at his rings, squatting in the mud at the side of the road to deliver the child of a Spanish woman in a slither of blood and birth-fluid, holding the damp solid bundle as the new mother forced herself to her feet because if she stopped marching, she’d die.

Luckily for Cleveland, Annis’s youngest footman, Tam MacCannell, chose that moment to appear at Cressida’s shoulder with his gilt tray and she selected one of the ice-cold glasses, bubbles drifting within the straw-gold champagne.

Cressida remembered him as a sturdy little boy turning somersaults in the laundry yard outside, invariably cheerful.

Now, Tam wore a pinched expression, with dark circles beneath his eyes.

All at once the atmosphere at Drochcala felt overwhelmingly malignant, and Cressida left Cleveland standing at the fireplace, just as he had once left her.

There was, after all, nothing more to say.

The room was too hot, airless like a sun-scorched bivouac in Spain.

She had to get outside before the worst of the memories caught up.

The champagne was cool and dry against her lips. Breathe: just breathe.

Her voice rang out like a bell: ‘I think there’ll be a fine display of St Elmo’s fire over the loch tonight.

’ She stepped out of the drawing room and into the warm gloom of the lamp-lit corridor: breathe .

The hallway faced west and evening summer light cast long shadows across a rough-hewn stone floor.

Instinct forced her to turn as she reached the foyer and Annis emerged out of the shadows.

It was so quiet, the faint susurration of Annis’s silk gown all she could hear.

Annis brought with her a refined signature scent, wisteria on a warm day in May.

‘I hope you enjoyed that little scenario with Cleveland,’ Cressida said.

Annis took a quick step backwards. In the Peninsula Cressida would have taught her cousin better manners by now, but the rules were different here.

‘I was squirming like a worm on a fish-hook. You must have looked forward to it for years.’

Annis leaned mannishly on the doorframe, folding her slender arms. ‘Who on earth would say you didn’t deserve it?

If you want to return to society, you need to get this encounter with Cleveland over and done with.

You know as I well as I do that you’d have argued me out of it.

Listen, Cleveland and Lascelles’s sister is soon to be out, and I know Cleveland means to bring her to their aunt in London for the Little Season.

She’s a shy girl, and it’s thought best for her not to be overwhelmed in the spring.

If you behave yourself now, by November your reputation might recover enough for people to accept you during the Little Season, too.

Would you prefer this meeting had taken place then, under much greater scrutiny?

Do you want this revenge of yours on Greville or not?

Yes, a house party with Cleveland now might be unpleasant for you and, yes, it might be a little mortifying, but we won’t go into all the spadework I had to do to restore the reputation of my own household after you absconded from it with everyone knowing you’d graced Cleveland’s bed. ’

‘It was more usually his desk, to be honest – I used to think he was saving his bed for whichever poor soul becomes his wife,’ Cressida said, recalling the movement of Cleveland’s lean torso as he pushed gilded muslin skirts up to her waist in the candlelit library, and the taste of his best port upon her lips which, at nineteen, she had insisted on wanting.

She remembered, too, how she used to hold on to the edge of the desk as Cleveland kissed further and further up her exposed bare thigh, wishing that she might open her eyes to look down upon Greville’s dark curls.

Annis stepped forward and slapped her face, a burst of bright pain that was still so inconsequential that Cressida could have laughed, dimly aware of Tam stepping back into the shadows with his tray, his lips parted in shock.

‘This isn’t a game.’ Annis spoke in a savage undertone. ‘This is our lives.’

‘I’m sorry, Annis.’ Cressida fought the urge to press one hand to her burning cheek.

‘Cleveland knew damn well he should never have taken advantage of my situation and I was a fool to let him. It’s so interesting talking to Kitty after all this time: I’m surprised you allowed that to happen.

What did you do with the letters that she and Sylvia wrote to me after I was caught with Cleveland?

You must really have hated me. You could have just let the Nightingales manage the entire mess for you.

Did you hope I’d be so ruined we’d never lay eyes on one another again? I’m so sorry to disappoint.’

‘How dare you?’ Annis spoke with precise enunciation. Two bright spots of colour appeared on her cheeks. ‘I’ve always acted in your best interests, Cressida.’

Cressida smiled. ‘Have you, though?’

‘Take care with that sort of accusation,’ Annis said, sweet as honey. ‘We know so much about each other, after all.’

Cressida executed a measured curtsey before turning her back on her cousin, walking out into the vestibule, where she breathed in the suffocating wet-dog scent of boiling langoustine shells emanating from the kitchen.

She’d be sorry for goading Annis before she was much older, but it was too late now.

By God she must control herself by the time they all sat at table for the bouillabaisse and creamed spinach tart.

She leaned against the wall, closing her eyes.

What hold had Annis got over Dominic Lascelles, Duke of Cleveland?