Page 28

Downstairs, Annis and Bute waited outside the drawing room. Bute was as elegant and amenable as ever, in his impeccably cut evening dress. There was something especially chilly and dangerous about Annis tonight, though, clad in her gown of oyster-grey silk, shining like a forged weapon.

‘We all deserve to be horsewhipped,’ Greville said, kissing Annis’s proffered hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

Cressida forced herself into a polite smile as she fabricated an excuse to Lord Bute about changing her gown.

‘How unlike you to spill anything, my dear,’ Greville said, clearly enjoying himself. ‘I never knew you to be clumsy a day in my life.’ His gaze now lingered shamelessly on her breasts, more presented for inspection than confined by the green satin of her bodice.

‘You look ravishing either way, darling,’ Bute said, with an amused glance at Greville.

‘We should all get to the table,’ Annis snapped. ‘Goodness knows everyone has been waiting long enough.’

‘Shall we?’ Greville said to Cressida. He was going to lead her in to dine at Drochcala.

Afterwards, they would go to bed as husband and wife.

Briefly, she closed her eyes. He flashed her a disreputable smile for the benefit of the Butes and a bubble of fury rose within her: he’d better be content to sleep on the floorboards.

They were still arm in arm, and she was too aware of his hold on her.

He brushed her elbow with the edge of his thumb in a reassuring gesture and for a moment it was hard to breathe.

They stepped into a candlelit dining room, where oil paintings in heavy gilded frames hung from chains against panelled walls limewashed in palest green and glittering with more gilt.

Some of the paintings were Rosmoney’s work; he had loved painting horses and dogs and if he’d stuck to that as a pastime none of them would be in this bloody bind now.

The young footman, Tam, led Cressida to a Queen Anne chair between Cleveland and Byron, with Kitty to Byron’s left, which at least gave her the satisfaction of watching Greville’s face as he went to a seat opposite her, between Annis and Bute.

There was a kindling expression in his dark eyes in contrast to the calm good manners with which he held out Annis’s seat for her, laughingly brushing off her apologies to the table about the uneven number of men and women.

‘I’m afraid some of my guests lost their courage and cried off.’ Annis’s eyes bore a flat, calculating expression. ‘Don’t worry, Cressida. By winter, you’ll be all the rage again, I’m sure. Don’t you agree, Dominic?’

‘No,’ Cleveland said, with blunt finality. ‘A girl’s reputation is like her virginity.’

Annis smiled. ‘Once it’s gone, it’s gone, you mean? I hope not.’

A howling silence descended on the table for thirty seconds that felt like thirty years.

‘I’m sorry to make you so late,’ Greville addressed them all with his easy charm, as though the exchange between Annis and Cleveland had never happened. He turned to Lord Bute. ‘What on earth has got into Fraser MacGuigan, anyway?’

Bute frowned, pausing with a spoonful of saffron-scented bouillabaisse halfway to his mouth.

‘The sheriff from Inverness had the wit to ask if he was actually in league with the free-traders, considering he never catches anyone. Nothing was ever proven, of course, but you can see how such an accusation would be bound to stir up bad feeling. There’s been an enormous increase in smuggling traffic ever since Parliament banned all legal distilling early in the year, which was entirely predictable, in my view.

MacGuigan has been desperate for, ah, a kill ever since. ’

‘The whole country has been on the brink of chaos since poor Lord Perceval was shot,’ Cressida said. ‘One feels as if the world has been turned upon its head, to think that such a thing could happen in London, at the seat of our own government.’

‘Lord Perceval made some very ill-judged decisions about trade,’ Annis said. ‘We’re bound for war in America as a result: I suppose he had many enemies who are pleased that madman Bellingham went to his length.’

‘It’s monstrous,’ Lord Bute said, with an uncharacteristically quelling glance at Annis.

‘I’m afraid that a murder at Westminster will only have made the free trade more frequent and fiercer than ever.

Such people don’t stop at smuggling brandy and claret.

They carry information, too, I’m afraid, my dear, and you can be sure that the death of our prime minister will have every French pursuivant grubbing around like a pig after truffles. ’

‘How awful, my lord,’ Cressida said, all innocence.

Greville watched her over the dish of steamed cockles in herbed butter, looking seconds away from laughter.

She vowed to school him for that later: he’d get himself killed at this rate.

Either Bute knew nothing of the fact that his own steward was just as efficient at organising the free trade as he was at arranging stalking parties, or he was a far better liar than she’d yet given him credit for.

‘Your dear cousin has chosen to serve Eris this summer, I see.’ Byron spoke very softly at her side, his breath warm against her neck. She inhaled the reassuring scent of his shaving water, cloves and something warm and sweet: cinnamon? ‘Look at the state of Greville.’

‘I’d rather not. I had to do needlework instead of Greek mythology,’ Cressida said, only half aware of Kitty and Bute doing their level best to establish a conversation about weather phenomena in the far north of Scotland.

‘My father’s revolutionary tendencies didn’t extend as far as allowing me to study the classics. What was Eris the god of?’

‘Goddess, actually – of chaos, strife and discord.’ Byron glanced at Cleveland, whom Kitty was now managing with such an inexhaustible flow of polite enquiries about his estates that he had no choice but to answer her.

‘Eris took great offence at not being invited to Helen of Troy’s wedding, and consider what mess arose from that.

What was Annis thinking, asking Dominic Lascelles to make up the party?

’ He smiled at her then, as if she were playing her unwitting part in a joke only he understood.

‘Supposedly, we get the scandalous meeting over with here before I go back into society in the Little Season,’ Cressida said, sitting back to allow Tam to place a rock-lobster on her plate with a pair of silver tongs. ‘Anyway, what are you writing this year, George? More sex and rebellion?’

Byron raised a single eyebrow, cracking one of his rock-lobster’s claws with the silver hammer. ‘Please don’t tell me how much you admired Childe Harold , even if you’ve read it.’

Cressida reined in the urge to tell him that she’d read both cantos of the epic published so far and that she’d found it both mannered and boring in equal measure.

‘In truth, I think the best thing you’ve written this year was your speech in the Lords.

But while the exalted offender can find means to baffle the law, new capital punishments must be devised, new snares of death must be spread for the wretched mechanic, who is famished into guilt.

It’s disgusting to introduce a capital penalty for men who smash the machines that cause their starvation. ’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ Byron said. ‘The months I spent in Nottinghamshire this winter were hellish because of it – whole families starving, and for what? The faster production of second-rate cloth so fragile they call it spider-work?’

‘So you do have a sincere bone in your body after all.’

Byron let out a quick laugh just as conversation fell into a lull elsewhere, so that everyone else looked up, even Cleveland.

‘Oh yes, quite the rabble-rouser, weren’t you, George?’ Cleveland said.

Byron raised his wine glass in a mocking salute, but a slight rush of colour spread across his cheekbones; they would have laughed and jeered as he delivered the speech. He would have hated that, she knew.

‘But doesn’t it pay to consider the grievances of the poor a little more seriously?

’ Cressida asked. ‘On the day we left London, our carriage took four hours to navigate Pall Mall because of the riots. Wouldn’t it actually serve us all rather well to consider why Lord Perceval’s murder was greeted with such delight that it lit a bonfire of unrest?

London is completely unsafe. He was the prime minister: we’re not talking of some back-alley garrotting over a grievance between criminals. ’

Greville ignored this, quietly conversing with Bute.

Cleveland shrugged with an elegance that reminded her of Lascelles.

‘When have the poor ever been happy with their lot? And Perceval was killed by a failed merchant with delusions of grandeur. It’s human to seek patterns in nature, but nature is both chaotic and unfair.

There’s nothing to discern. The killer is dead and justice has been served, of a sort. ’

‘So do you think it equitable or fair that the weavers who can’t work now or feed their children must face the gallows for destroying the machines that replaced them, Cleveland?

’ Kitty asked, sharply, with the air of a woman who had held up her end of a soothing conversation for long enough.

‘I wonder: what would you have done in their shoes? I know exactly what you did do in Lord Byron’s boots: either you hadn’t bothered to take your seat that day or you didn’t speak at all. ’

Cleveland grinned at Kitty across the table. ‘Happily, I’m not in anyone else’s shoes but my own.’ He signalled for more wine and Tam obeyed as he was bound to do, pouring a thin stream of Rhenish into Cleveland’s glass.

Annis smiled up and down the table. ‘Oh dear! Far better, I think, dear Kitty, not to exhaust ourselves with the sort of questions better left for the consideration of our menfolk.’

‘But isn’t that part of the difficulty?’ Cressida persisted.

‘How will we go on if men with the privilege to sit in Parliament don’t bother?

No decisions will ever be taken.’ She allowed herself the briefest of glances at Greville, who was watching over his wine glass with his dark, arching eyebrows slightly lifted.

Beside her, Byron raised his glass. ‘You have the wisdom of the ages, Cressida. But even if all were emancipated – Catholics, working men, Black men, even women – I can tell you now that one solitary voice speaks in the House of Lords and that belongs to Mammon. Truth or justice play no part in any of it: only money. Most speeches can scarcely be heard against a backdrop of jeering and derision, and a more criminally corrupt nest of hoarding vipers I never saw.’

Cressida sipped her wine and relaxed into a warm alcoholic glow, even as she forced herself to resist the temptation to signal for more.

On Cressida’s other side, Cleveland cracked open the claw of his lobster.

‘You do look grim, Nightingale,’ he said.

‘What is it that irks you so much – is it women discussing politics or the sight of the mist and the loch that you find so insupportable? I remember so clearly that you, Byron and my young fool of a brother had a great deal to say about burning our tedious social mores to the ground and building all anew.’

Greville cracked open the head of his rock-lobster and ate the coral. ‘I find a well-informed woman speaking of politics more edifying than a grown man of your stature fishing for an argument, Cleveland.’

Everyone stopped talking, and Annis frowned at Cleveland, as though he were a paid piper playing the wrong tune.

‘Some do find the weather oppressive in this part of Scotland: it does incline to fog,’ Lord Bute said, placidly.

Greville smiled. ‘Cleveland does right to call me to order: I’ll admit to being preoccupied. How does the chance of wind look tomorrow, my lord, in as much as we can ever be sure of it? Shall we get a sail in, do you think?’

‘It’s high tide at eleven o’clock tomorrow and Flora is already in the water – we can certainly try her,’ Bute said, clearly relieved that Greville at least was inclined to play the same conversational game as he was.

‘What about you, Cleveland?’ Annis said, with a flinty smile. ‘Do you sail? I seem to recall that your lovely sister has an interest in boats.’

For the briefest moment, open and obvious dislike pulsed between Cleveland and his hostess.

Really, why was he not at one of his own estates?

Or if not attending his young sister, why was he not at a house party of similarly unattached young aristocratic men and women from the demi-monde with gilded toenails and wide experience?

Cleveland let the moment draw out; tension hummed in the air.

Greville picked up a claw and cracked it open with a soldier’s swift expertise.

‘Georgiana likes it when I take her out on the water, Lady Bute.’ Cleveland spoke with a cold edge, so experienced at withering pretension that he did it without even thinking. ‘I oblige her as often as I can. Goodness only knows I’m a poor enough guardian as it is.’

Greville and Cleveland finally met each other’s gaze across the table.

In the candlelight Greville’s liquid dark eyes were very still, signalling the complete dissolution of any adherence to conventional good manners.

Cleveland stared back with a bland, polite smile.

Stillness crept over Greville, his attitude of louche arrogance now gone: Cressida had seen men like this before, before battles, before hangings.

Except that they were here at Drochcala, dining on bouillabaisse and rock-lobsters and steamed cockles and dishes of spiced green beans.

‘Are you, though, Cleveland?’ Greville said. ‘You were always so good at entertaining –’ he dipped his long fingers into a bowl of rosewater ‘– young girls.’