Page 29

Cleveland set down his fork, breaking the silence with cold precision. ‘You’re lucky I don’t call out unmannerly whelps, Nightingale. As ever, you stand in greater need of a whip than a duel.’ He regained control of his temper with unsettling speed; Cressida had never seen him lose it before.

‘Don’t let me stop you attempting either,’ Greville said, smiling easily.

Cleveland was a good shot, but she knew quite well that Greville could shoot the ace out of a playing card from twenty yards.

Greville, who had just deployed her past years of ruin, humiliation, penury and war to score points against an old rival.

She got to her feet, so lightheaded with anger that for the briefest moment the room spun around her in a blur of candlelit faces. ‘That’s quite enough from the two of you.’

The quiet was punctuated only by the crackling of the fire and the faint ticking of the bronze carriage clock that had always been on the mantelpiece.

Greville looked at her, those dark brows slightly lifted again.

Kitty sat very still with her lips pinched together in suppressed anger.

Bute picked at his napkin with fretful misery, suddenly looking every bit of his threescore years and ten.

Annis smiled, and Byron wore a pained expression, as though he had stepped in an open drain in his best top-boots.

This was going too far, even for him. Cressida fought a wild urge to laugh.

Then she pushed back her chair and walked out.

Closing the door behind her, Cressida leaned on it for a moment with her eyes closed, her breasts heaving against the emerald satin of her bodice: the clinging gown now felt ridiculous.

In the dark, she saw campfires flickering on a bald Spanish hillside, breathing in the stink of a four-day-old battlefield.

Get a hold on yourself. Then she turned and walked away at speed, her surroundings a muddle of lamplight, well-worn flagstones and familiar painted panelling.

Roberts waited as usual in the great entrance hall, tossing Cressida an undisguised glance of appraisal, as if to ask what else she expected, nasty, forward miss as she was.

Cressida walked on with purposeful speed but no clear notion of where she was going, led only by instinct as though fleeing a French ambush.

Past and present collided and if she stopped to help that woman wake her two young children, she’d end this night with her throat cut or left far behind.

Cressida knew she’d hear that woman calling for help, and so many others, till the end of her days, but the army moved on, always relentless, stopping for no one, not even waiting for a woman to deliver a new baby, let alone for a mother to rouse her sick, exhausted children.

There was not much place for honour on the march.

In the whitewashed back corridor Cressida stopped outside the estate office and went in, aware only of a coal fire spluttering in the grate and the cut-glass decanters of whisky and brandy still laid out on a sideboard of ancient carved oak, just as they had been when she was a child.

Whisky splashed her hand as she poured it into one of the small glasses filigreed with pewter, and she drank the whole measure.

She poured another, even in the half second that she became aware that she was not, in fact, alone.

She let the glass drop so that it bounced and rolled along the sideboard, inhaling whisky fumes even as she drew the knife.

‘Do you not want water with the next one?’

She looked up to find Oliver Tait standing in his shirtsleeves behind the desk his father had used before him.

Both hands rested on the battered green leather as he watched her.

He lifted his eyebrows slightly at the knife, which she held level.

Oliver raised both hands, his handsome features a portrait of concern.

A half-drunk glass of whisky sat on the desk beside him, next to the heavy leather-bound accounts book and a chaotic heap of correspondence.

It was just Drochcala. Only the familiar, pine-panelled estate office at Drochcala, here at this northernmost tip of the British Isles, with those watercolours of red grouse and the common rosefinch framed in chipped gilded oak.

‘Jesus bloody Christ, don’t surprise me like that, Oliver,’ Cressida said.

She was in Scotland, not in Spain or Portugal.

All the strength went out of her legs, her head spun and she had to look down at her own white hands resting on the sideboard as she fought rising nausea.

She was aware of Oliver coming closer, his hand on her arm.

She breathed in his scent of starched linen.

‘Here’s a chair. Sit down.’

She sank into it, grateful for the embroidered cushion at her back, embarrassed at drawing so much comfort from the steady warmth of his touch.

It was far too dangerous to let the past overtake her in this fashion.

Oliver waited at her side for a moment and then went back to his own seat on the other side of the desk, never taking his eyes from her, even as he drew small, intricate patterns in the margin of the accounts ledger with a moth-eaten quill pen.

‘Is something wrong? I heard raised voices.’ Oliver glanced down at the accounts book with a small frown. ‘I shouldn’t say it, but I don’t know what she was thinking, inviting your husband here as well as Cleveland. She’ll get her fingers burned before long.’

‘So will you. What the hell are you doing running black-market cargo down the loch? They’d hang you for that at worst, transport you at best, and hardly even bother with a trial.’ Cressida drank the whisky he set down before her, savouring the alcoholic heat.

He gave her a cold smile. ‘And now it’s at the bottom of the loch, thanks to you and your husband. I’m looking forward to explaining that to my associate – and he to his, I shouldn’t wonder. These aren’t nice people.’

‘Better your bloody cargo at the bottom of the loch than you at the bottom of the charnel-heap at Loch Lutharn gaol,’ Cressida snapped, brutal. ‘What a cesspool my family is. We seem to have quite the facility for destroying other people’s lives. It’s weaponry, isn’t it?’

Oliver made a visible attempt at nonchalance. ‘Whatever it is, it makes no difference to me either way. I have my orders. I obey them and that’s it.’

‘It’s the difference between being definitely hanged for treason or transported for free-trading,’ Cressida said. ‘Why don’t you just resign your position and leave? You’re educated and personable and you could bribe them into giving you a golden character. What possible reason have you to stay?’

Oliver watched her across the desk, unsmiling.

‘Apart from the fact I have cousins employed at the same house and an infirm great-aunt living halfway down the loch?’ His eyes narrowed with unvarnished hatred.

‘Your cousin even gives orders for Lilias to warn people away from the loch at night. How do you think the law will view that? She’ll be strung up with the rest of us, or find herself alone in Van Diemen’s Land at best if she survives the convict ship.

She’s only just thirteen years old—’ Oliver broke off, flushed with angry shame.

‘And even if I left and took just Lilias with me, I’ve no way of supporting us.

No one at the estate has been paid since well before the last quarter.

The Butes are being dunned, too.’ Oliver gestured at the heap of letters on the desk.

‘These are just from Inverness and Edinburgh – wine-merchants, drapers, milliners: the lot. I can only imagine it’s the same story in London. ’

‘It’s Jamaica, isn’t it?’ Cressida said. ‘Annis and Bute were starting to feel the pinch when I left in ’09 but it’s been five years since Abolition now. Four Winds isn’t the licence to print money that it once was.’

Oliver stared at her; his mother had come from Four Winds, the Butes’ Jamaican plantation.

‘Odd how that happens when you have to pay people instead of buying them like cattle, and they’re harder to come by in the first place.

I don’t know which I hate more, the slave-traders or the more patronising Abolitionists, who are always so surprised that I speak two languages and understand double-entry book-keeping.

The ones who like to take all the credit for what freedom we’ve won are the worst.’ Oliver’s eyes flashed with banked-down fury, and although he was right, Cressida tried to snatch at another truth that she could only brush with her fingertips, like a ball of polished steel suspended in thin air, just out of reach.

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ Cressida said. ‘You’ve been like a cat on a frying pan ever since I got to Drochcala.’

Oliver flinched, his jaw tightening. ‘Your cousin has me over a barrel.’ He spoke then in a rush, words tumbling out like water trapped behind a dam and finally released: ‘There’s been discrepancy after discrepancy in the estate accounts since January.

Missing money, mostly from the rents. It’s not vast amounts but it’s enough to be noticeable. ’

‘And Annis knows?’

‘Of course she knows. I’m responsible for receiving all the rent payments.

I count it all down to the last halfpenny before it’s all shipped off to the bank at Inverness with three armed men to guard it.

’ He flushed. ‘When the first lot of rent went missing, I couldn’t see how it had happened, not once I was certain I hadn’t miscounted.

I only knew someone was stealing after the rents had been collected, like skimming off the cream, and I’d probably be blamed.

’ Oliver looked her straight in the eye.

‘I panicked and replenished the money from my own savings. I know it was foolish but I felt I had no choice. It kept happening, though, and then I had to tell her—’ Oliver broke off abruptly.

‘What are you going to do?’

He gave a quick, tight smile. ‘I don’t know.

I’d leave if I could, but Lady Bute has made herself clear enough: she’ll cry rope if I go.

Even if I’m cleared of theft, at best I’ll just appear incompetent.

Who’d employ me? I’ve been through the account books and the cash itself as well as the bills and receipts more times than I can count, but they don’t reconcile. The money’s gone.’

‘Have you tried to discover who the thief actually is?’ Cressida asked, carefully.

Oliver stared at her. ‘This isn’t a case of some overexcited debutante stealing trinkets from her friends’ mothers at house parties.

People of my class and most especially of my colour are hanged or transported for theft.

Lady Bute would make sure of that. Anyway, no one here has coin to spend, and servants aren’t exactly blessed with many hiding places.

We’re talking of bags of coinage that weigh almost as much as a side of ham – far too much to fit into a small box beneath a servant’s bed.

’ Oliver picked up one of the letters and let it fall onto the desk.

‘When I confessed to Lady Bute that the money was going missing, she didn’t look surprised.

I think she’s the one who has been taking it.

’ He shrugged. ‘She’s definitely not paying her creditors.

It’s probably some idiotic gambling debt she daren’t confess to her husband. ’

Cressida sipped her whisky, looking at the heap of bills on the desk beside the ledger.

Annis had many faults, but a passion for games of chance had never been one of them.