Page 24

Cressida left Lilias with her grandmother in the slate-roofed bothy and closed the door behind her, leaning on the painted wood for a moment with her eyes shut.

The elderly Mistress Tait had been stewing herbs for the Drochcala stillroom.

Immersed in fragrant clouds of steam, she was embarrassingly pleased to lay her eyes on Lady Cressida once more.

She didn’t believe a single word of all that nasty gossip no matter what anyone said.

Lord help the poor woman if she ever heard the worst of it.

Cressida reached the spot where she’d stopped to take Lilias to task earlier, suppressing anger as she eyed the tumble of fresh green ferns and lichen-covered rock.

Any preventive officer worth his salt would have seen through Lilias’s inept little ghost-tale just as easily as Cressida herself had done.

No doubt the reprisals for giving away such incriminating information would be as swift as they were brutal.

Cressida hitched up the damp and filthy skirts of her gown and stepped off the path – the incline was steep and sudden, and she had to climb to reach the exact position Lilias Tait hadn’t been able to help herself looking at: a cleft left by the tumble of rocks, mostly concealed by bracken and beech saplings.

Climbing higher, Cressida adjusted her skirts with an irritable sweep.

The flagstones downstairs at Drochcala were always freezing, so she wore jean boots instead of satin evening slippers.

Even so, her feet were now sodden, her heels rubbed raw.

She reached into the cleft with one hand, her fingers brushing against cold metal.

Clinging onto the tough grass, she peered at a faint bronze gleam.

So here was the lid of the laundry copper, and the very good reason why Annis had ordered the table to be laid with her second-best linen.

Big houses like Drochcala had substantial laundry rooms and large coppers for boiling linens.

A laundry copper was good for heating whisky mash, too.

They’d probably steeped the barley in it first and laid it out across the wide, flagstoned floor to sprout.

That must have been several weeks ago now, but with MacGuigan suspicious enough to search the house, all evidence had vanished.

The lid of the laundry copper had gone, too: even the most suspicious preventive couldn’t accuse Drochcala of making whisky mash now.

Cressida left the copper lid hidden, stepping backwards onto the path.

Lilias Tait had lied to Fraser MacGuigan, telling him to his head that the copper had gone away to be mended because it couldn’t be done at Drochcala.

Instinct told Cressida that the Butes knew about the practice of distilling duty-free whisky on their estate.

Very little escaped Annis where the potential for a profit was concerned, and especially not with dangerous secrets to hold over others into the bargain.

I know so much about you, after all. Annis had smiled when she said that.

To hell with it: she was here to get what she needed from Byron, no more and no less, not to meddle in what was best left alone.

Less than half an hour later, Cressida had almost reached the furthest extent of the gardens when the plantation of birch trees concealing the loch from the path thinned out, revealing glinting stretches of water.

She heard faint splashing and a male voice, quickly silenced.

At this time of the evening, anyone with lobster pots in the loch might well be out to haul in their catch and then to move the pots to a fresh trapping ground, but in that case why the need for hushed voices?

Go back to the house. Instead, Cressida stood and watched the tide pooling beyond the beech trees.

Something was definitely wrong. A familiar chill prickled all the way down her arms and across the backs of her hands, then down each fingertip.

Stepping off the path, slipping a little on the damp leaf mould in her jean boots, she held on to one of the silver birch trees, now with a much better view of the loch.

As usual, gulls hunted along the fringes of the water, graceful shapes tossed in the air like so many children’s paper cut-outs, pale against the dark green backdrop of the wooded hillside rearing up from the pebbled shore.

There was no sign at all of MacGuigan’s cutter.

In her mind’s eye, Cressida retraced her steps.

The loch-side path split only a few yards before it wound past the Taits’ waterside home if you were approaching from Drochcala and the loch-head.

Cressida hadn’t taken the other path for years – it veered off through the trees at a sharp left, a stony trail down to a deep cleft where Drochcala often kept a small wooden dinghy.

Out on the water, the inlet was concealed by outcrops of rock and trees unless you sailed directly alongside.

Staring out across the loch, listening to the lowered voices of men in hiding, Cressida’s past and present merged.

She breathed in the orange-flower warmth of Rosmoney’s cologne, expensively floral and just as redolent of the old century as his Jacobite rebel politics.

She felt his presence beside her, even as the years fell away and she was a child once more.

When the tide was too low to moor further up the loch near the house, Rosmoney would put in here instead and carry her upon his shoulders along the bracken-lined path back to the house, slate rooftops just visible beyond and between the spreading dark green canopy of Scots pine.

Do the smugglers come this way after dark, Papa?

They use this very mooring, but you need have no fear of them whilst I am here.

She recalled the timbre of his voice with painful intensity.

Like her, in Ireland Rosmoney was not Irish enough, and in England, too Irish by far.

When they were alone together he retained the lilt learned from his nurses and from the people at home.

The old, cold fear seeped through her at his absence.

In truth, that secret, hidden part of her had been terrified ever since the moment Rosmoney had walked out of that dark room in a Dublin tavern with a careless smile over his shoulder as he left her.

I’ll come back for you, a linbh. My child.

Get a bloody hold on yourself. Cressida forced away the memory, gripping the tree trunk as she gazed out across the loch, listening to the men in hiding at the running mooring. It was a fine place of concealment for anyone lying in wait on the water. Who were they hiding from?

Crouching in damp undergrowth, Cressida watched the loch from her vantage point near the cliff-side path, inhaling the sulphuric reek of seaweed exposed by the retreating tide far below.

And then, even as she watched, a small yacht cleared the narrows, tacking across the approach to the loch-head.

Cressida’s thighs ached and she shifted her position with practised care.

Her gown was in a hell of a state, but Ines was perfectly capable of kindling a fire on the lawn and scrubbing a gown in an old cook-pot with her own supply of Marseille soap, even if she would spit pins about it.

Cressida watched as the yacht tacked, making a neat turn in the water as she caught a glimpse of starched white. A man in his shirtsleeves stood up at the bow, holding on to the shrouds; several others sat in the stern.

As the yacht sailed on, Cressida caught a clearer glimpse of the three figures who sat next to each other on the port side.

She knew the casual set of one man’s broad shoulders immediately, the graceful, arrogant tilt of his chin as he turned his attention to the mainsail, even though he wasn’t sailing the boat himself.

Cressida looked away and fixed her gaze on the green bulk of the mountainside on the far side of the loch.

Greville had come.

Quick heat pulsed at her core and she felt a sudden awareness of her own body, a wicked need to be touched, like a country girl with her first sight of a handsome officer at an assembly ball.

She had to look away from the loch and the boat and the bloody man and concentrate on her breathing.

How dared he actually come here? When she could bear to look again, the yacht was now concealed behind the bulk of the headland and a dark mass of trees overhanging the water, even as Cressida realised that she could no longer hear the sound of voices from the inlet, or indeed any sound at all that would betray the presence of a boat so nearby: MacGuigan was lying in wait with a full crew of preventives.

Oh, Greville, use your head for once. As if guided by an invisible hand, Cressida picked her way down through the trees towards the loch, failing to crush overwhelming exasperation.

Snatching up her skirts in one hand, Cressida removed her boots one by one in order to pick her way down the slope towards the pebbled beach in silence.

So that was a pair of good stockings ruined as well as this gown.

Breathing hard, she reached the small wooden boathouse, heart racing despite the fact that she couldn’t be seen from the mooring.

MacGuigan and his men would spot her, though, when she got that launch out onto the water, but it was a risk she had to take.

He’d recognise the boat, all right, with the distinctive small brown lateen sail, but taking it out at this time was not a criminal act: someone from Drochcala would check the lobster pots most evenings around dusk before moving them to a new location and, as yet, no one had been out tonight.

She unlatched the boathouse door and strode over to the launch, hauling it across the floorboards with a rush of wooden hull grating against floorboard, so loud that she stopped to take a deep breath, steadying herself.

You couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and even at this moment, MacGuigan and his men might be rowing out towards that yacht with Lord Greville Nightingale in it.

Against Cressida’s better judgement, she hauled the launch out onto the pebbles with a spray of muttered curses, almost up to her ankles in cold water before she had taken more than a handful of steps, even as she thanked providence for a high tide.

Climbing aboard, Cressida shipped the oars and rowed away from the shore.

She put down the rudder before stepping the mast and hauling up the little brown sail.

It was odd how even after all these years every movement felt as natural as riding a horse.

She’d spent hours out on the loch with Oliver in those girlhood summers, but this was not the moment for reminiscence.

The wind changed, and Cressida altered her course with another quiet volley of blasphemy.

She would now have to tack away from the yacht, even as MacGuigan and his men waited, hidden on the mooring but ready and waiting for this to happen, MacGuigan with that fanatical light in his eyes once more.

How had he known that there were free-traders expected?

Cressida glanced over her shoulder. Pearlescent violet jellyfish bloomed close to the surface like a flock of otherworldly creatures as she sailed past the inlet leading to the mooring.

She caught a glimpse of MacGuigan’s cutter, low to the water.

He had a lot of men with him, which was an evil sign, but that at least would slow him down.

The yacht tacked away from her, keen to avoid contact, but Cressida had foreseen that and gybed with a swift yank of the tiller, coming up alongside her instead.

Her husband, Greville, leaned on the gunnels with his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal lean, sun-browned forearms, eyebrows slightly lifted in a sardonic question he didn’t bother to voice.

Byron lounged at his side, drinking from a hip flask bound in waxed string, glancing from her to Greville and back again with ill-disguised mirth.

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘This is going to be exquisite.’