Page 23

The cutter slid south towards the loch-head at a good lick and a damp sea breeze sliced across Greville’s left cheekbone as he sat in the thwarts with George Byron, who was leaning back against the shrouds with the breeze tearing the dark hair away from his forehead.

Somers sat some distance off, whey-faced as he repeated the Lord’s prayer between bouts of vomiting.

Greville spoke idly over his shoulder to one of the seamen tightening the sails; the man looked to be in his forties, with faded reddish hair.

He had the pinch-faced look of someone who endured regular bouts of hunger.

‘You’re making good time,’ Greville told him.

‘But is it not quicker to take the lobsters overland? It seems a fair risk to sail up around the Pentland Firth, even at this time of year.’

The seaman cleated off his line. ‘Aye, sir, it is, but overland it would take weeks, which is fine for wool but too long for rock-lobsters, sir, and the waters here are rich with them this year, whereas it’s slim pickings on the east coast. They fetch a better price at Fraserburgh, too.

’ He treated Greville to a disingenuous smile.

‘It’s not far to Drochcala now, sir. That’s the village you can see there. ’

He turned away to answer the call of the shorter seaman, who had a clay pipe clamped between yellowed teeth, leaving Greville alone with Byron once more.

‘I wonder what they’re actually doing here,’ Byron said, apparently untroubled by the prospect of finding himself at the bottom of the loch if they were overheard.

‘It’s probably free-traded whisky, isn’t it?

And if anyone asks why a trading-vessel bound for Fraserburgh and then Archangel is sailing the wrong way down Loch Iffrin, delivering us to Drochcala offers the perfect convenient excuse, does it not? ’

‘Only you could manage to fall in with free-traders on the way to a house party, George,’ Greville said. ‘But I wish you would shut up, unless you want a knife between your ribs.’

Byron grinned at him. ‘You realise I’m meant to fête your wife all summer and bring her back into society?

I might have her as well, you know. I’ve always fancied the prospect.

’ Byron glanced down at his beautiful long white fingers.

He had the hands of a true aristocrat, idle as hell.

‘It must be like taming a wild horse. Careful handling at all times but worth the effort.’

‘Much you’d know about that,’ Greville said. He’d chop those hands off, then his cock.

Did Byron even suspect how Lascelles and Cressida in her turn both meant to use him, or rather his fame? God, Greville hated lying, even as he wearily constructed a tale as close to the truth as he dared risk.

‘I have little enough desire to endure a house party with my wife, but the Cheltenham tragedy between us has gone on long enough. It simmered nicely while I was out in Spain, but now she’s come home and I can’t risk letting scandal-broth boil up in the face of my family.

The boys will weather it, but the sort of talk Cressida’s return is bound to generate will hurt my sisters unless she and I put up a united front.

Not that this is any of your affair. Haven’t you enough scandals, dealing with Caroline Lamb? ’

Stay away from my wife. The unspoken words hung between them.

Byron watched him. ‘For God’s sake, Grev, just arrange a formal separation if you want to silence the gossips. Why put yourselves through this charade? It’s absolutely bloody and I still don’t understand what you’re playing at.’

‘There’s nothing to understand and if you think a high society divorce would silence anyone, you’re a greater sapskull than I took you for.

’ Greville fixed his gaze on the bracken-cloaked fellside rearing up from the dark waters of the loch.

What sort of dissembling shit had he become, anyway?

This kind of manipulative carry-on was exactly what Greville had always liked least in Lascelles and in Cressida herself.

Dishing up such fairytales right in the face of a man who had endured the same schoolroom dancing lessons revolted him.

The fact was, Lascelles and Cressida were two of a kind.

If Greville had anything resembling a choice, he would have told Arthur Lascelles where to shove all these lies.

Instead, there had been no choice, not just because of Jamie, but because of his own decisions and that extremely civil court martial.

Instead of sunlight moving across the loch, all he could see was that rubble-strewn street in Badajoz, where dark blood had splattered across the cobblestones, and he couldn’t hear the people shouting at him to stop.

The fact he would do it again in a heartbeat was no consolation.

‘Although perhaps I have it all wrong,’ Byron went on, not looking at Greville but out across the water. Theirs was the only boat on the loch that night, and the quiet and sense of solitude was overwhelming. ‘Perhaps in truth you don’t actually want to be separated from Cressida?’

‘Shut up, George.’ Greville passed him the hip flask, stretching out the fingers of his right hand, even as he felt a ghost of an impact, driving that fist over and over again into the face of the guardsman who had dared lay hands on his wife in the streets of a Spanish town.