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‘Shut up, George.’ Cressida spoke across him, and said nothing to Greville at all, serving him a dose of his own cold hauteur.

Then she allowed her gaze to travel from crewman to crewman, taking in first John O’Neill and then Oliver Tait.

The sight of O’Neill froze her to the bowels, and Oliver just met her sardonic gaze with the curt nod of a man who knew only too well that all of this was a bad idea, but had little choice about his part in it.

‘May I suggest you get your load overboard if you want to see the end of the week?’ Cressida asked. ‘If they still hold the assizes at Inverness on a Friday, most of you will be hanged on Saturday morning. MacGuigan is waiting by the mooring.’

Eight men stared at her in silence, most of them familiar faces from her girlhood summers. Greville was otherwise engaged in scanning the loch-side and priming his pistol.

John O’Neill glanced across the thwarts at Oliver. ‘I’d listen to her if I were you, Tait,’ O’Neill said.

She’d deal with O’Neill later, somehow, not that she could really blame him for Rosmoney’s machinations.

There was no such thing as a former rebel, after all, English, Irish or Scots.

She felt a quick, hot flash of anger at the way they had all relied on Lilias to keep Annis’s guests off the path and away from the loch.

Cressida sighed. They all watched her, moonstruck. ‘MacGuigan’s on the running mooring: I suggest you move.’

‘No, he isn’t,’ Greville said, peaceably, casting a quick glance over his shoulder at the glittering surface of the loch-head, beyond which the slate-roofed turrets of Drochcala rose up from behind a dark green sweep of Scots pine.

‘He’s over there.’ Sure enough, the preventives’ cutter sliced across the water with deadly speed, MacGuigan coxing his men with a series of hand-signals as they rowed.

‘Now!’ Oliver snapped, dragging one of the barrels from beneath a covering of burlap and heaving it overboard.

The barrels were all roped together like lobster pots, the dog-head screws liberally coated with pitch: Tait was taking great care to allow nothing to foul the contents, then.

Oliver thinks of everything, Annis always said.

Either he’d anticipated the need to drop his cargo at sea, or the barrels contained something that somebody really didn’t want to get wet.

The men heaved the barrels overboard one after the other.

They stepped around the snaking line with practised wariness.

No doubt they’d all heard of, if not seen, a man, woman or child dragged overboard and straight to the bottom of the loch with that seaweed-coated rope tangled hard around one ankle.

Then everyone moved in the same instant, and Cressida was dimly aware of strangled shouting across the water from MacGuigan’s cutter.

If he or any of his men had seen or heard the barrels go in, all this effort would have been for nothing.

MacGuigan certainly wouldn’t stop at sending a man to dive down after them.

Cold instinct forced her to duck at almost exactly the same moment as Greville boarded the launch in one quick, fluid movement.

All she was aware of was the salt-scented heat of his near presence and the faint, familiar aroma of his rosemary shaving water.

‘Get down.’ He spoke with quiet urgency, and now he was between her and MacGuigan’s cutter, shielding her with his body and both arms around her in a protective embrace, and what in Christ’s name did he think he was doing?

A pistol-shot rang out, the sharp report echoing from one side of the loch to the other even as familiar, sulphuric yellow-tinged smoke rolled across the water.

She felt the awareness in his body echoing the answering pulse of her own: battlefields and smoke and blood and dying men, and then the impact.

Greville swore quietly.

She turned around to face him, still in his arms; he’d closed his eyes now, thick dark lashes against sun-bronzed skin. ‘You’ve been hit, you fool.’

‘I know.’ Only then did he release her and stand up again, with one hand pressed hard against his upper left arm, crimson blood blooming on the fine white linen between his lean fingers.

He turned to address MacGuigan and his men in their rapidly approaching cutter with such a spray of soldierly invective that they stood silent and frozen to the last man.

It wasn’t MacGuigan holding the pistol but a younger lad, white-faced and shaking, his preventives’ uniform jacket too big across the shoulders.

MacGuigan’s cutter came up alongside the launch, which itself was alongside Oliver Tait’s yachtful of Scottish smugglers and O’Neill.

By now, they’d finished jettisoning their cargo and every one of them stood watching MacGuigan’s men with perfectly manufactured expressions of insolent horror.

Cressida watched as Greville let go of the wound and swung an oar into the cutter; this was no time to be a competent female: let Greville make use of what he was. Which he now did, to stunning effect.

‘What do you actually think you’re doing?’ he said to MacGuigan in frozen aristocratic accents, and for the first time Cressida had a real idea of how Greville’s men might perceive the indolent rakehell she’d married.

‘It’s what they’re doing that I’m interested in, forbye,’ MacGuigan said, squinting into the westering sun as he jabbed a finger at Tait and his men; O’Neill had retreated into the background, just as sullen, silent and salt-stained as the rest of Tait’s men, with no trace of the leader about him.

Byron had adopted the same persona: he must have been helping with the barrels and now stood with Tait’s men, green strips of seaweed clinging to his forearms, and looking far more at ease here than he had done at the Craufords’ dining table in London.

‘I don’t give a damn what they’re doing.

What induced you to fire upon a potting boat?

’ Greville spoke with alarming calm; arms folded as scarlet blood bloomed on his sleeve.

Cressida tore a strip off the fine muslin hem of her gown and got up, balancing against the sway of the launch as she held the wad of frilled fabric to his wound, which needed pressure applying to it even if Greville was too busy asking difficult questions of MacGuigan.

Byron looked at her then with a warning writ clear across his face: where else did a woman learn how to manage a gunshot wound but in the train of an army?

Irritated, she knew he was right, but what other choice was there?

Inexorably, she recalled Greville’s last mocking warning to her in London: If everyone else finds out you whored your way across Portugal and Spain with half the British army, I’d imagine you’ll become more of a liability than an asset. It’s a risk, isn’t it?

Cressida pressed a little harder as she held the compress to the wound, but Greville didn’t flinch, even though it must have hurt like the devil.

This was what they were bred for, was it not?

Hard men who could deal out pain just as easily as they were able to shrug it off themselves.

A thick, unpleasant silence fell and for a moment all that could be heard was the tide lapping against three hulls.

‘If it’s a potting expedition then I’m sure Mr Tait will have no objection to my men taking a look at the yacht.’ MacGuigan dealt out a wintry smile. ‘Will your lordship be so good as to explain your part in it?’ His gaze travelled to Cressida, resting on her for one moment too long.

Cressida stared back with bald aggression that in the baggage train would have seen her slapped, punched or worse by a man of MacGuigan’s ilk, before retreating into unholy glee at the prospect of watching Greville deal with this.

He did so, directing MacGuigan to search the yacht if he so chose, with a sarcastic enquiry about how long this would take, given that Lady Bute and her guests were now waiting on MacGuigan’s pleasure before the household might dine.

MacGuigan and his men boarded the yacht, stepping through the launch on the way, so that Cressida clung to the thwarts as the small craft rocked; a good half of the men nodded at her as they passed, some with a mumbled apology, every last one averting his gaze from the ruined state of her evening gown.

Oliver spat over the side of the boat when the last man boarded, his face devoid of expression, and Cressida hoped to God that they really had jettisoned all incriminating evidence.

Hangings were wildly unpleasant at the best of times, especially if the victim of judicial execution was a man one had played knuckle-stones with as a small child.

Overhead, a gull keened and wheeled above the loch.

Apart from the sound of footfalls, everything was silent as MacGuigan’s men went over Oliver’s yacht like rats through a grain-store.

Finding nothing, MacGuigan retreated, with a curt warning to Greville about taking care who he chose to convey him down the loch next time, as there were some habitual lawbreakers in this part of Scotland who might see him before a magistrate if he wasn’t awake on every suit.

Greville paid as little attention to that as he had to MacGuigan’s insincere apology for the gunshot wound.

They all stood watching as MacGuigan’s cutter shot away across the loch, out towards the narrows and bound for the village of Droch Cala as it clung to the water’s edge in a scatter of whitewashed stone buildings with moss-edged slate rooftops.

‘What magistrate would even bother to hear a case against a Nightingale of Crauford?’ Cressida said, speaking into a potent, unpleasant quiet.

‘His lordship is immune from the effects of justice. In the meantime, the rest of you may all thank me at your leisure.’ She cast a look at Greville and then at Byron, who was now standing alone wearing a shuttered expression, leaning against the foremast, with the rest of Tait’s men having drifted away from him, O’Neill included.

And then all else was forgotten and there was no one but her and Greville on the loch, beneath the sky, both of them sitting in the launch, facing each other across the thwarts.

With absent-minded grace, he held the wad of bloodied fabric to his wound, doing the fallen angel act that she recalled only too well from all the dawns they had shared before sleeping – ball after rout party after masquerade.

Cressida looked away across the green, silver-tinged surface of the loch, aware that Greville had followed her gaze to the pebbled shore of Eilean nam Fiadh, driven by the same instinct.

As they watched, a young stag emerged silently from the tangle of birch trees, unnoticed by anyone else on the boat.

Cressida caught her breath, only too aware Greville was now watching her with a darkling expression.

An answering flare ignited within her at his presumption: how dared he judge anything she chose to do?

He of all people. He got to his feet and moved with catlike ease into the yacht.

Cressida shoved off with one of her oars and pushed the tiller away from her, turning back into the wind, which, thank God, had not died even if so much else had.