Page 30

Cressida ignored the sound of voices drifting up from the drawing room: the time for playing at society guests had gone.

Both her bedchamber and dressing room were empty: Ines must be dining in the servants’ hall downstairs.

Standing before the mirror, Cressida drew the pearl-headed pins from her hair, allowing tangled curls to fall in disorder down her back.

In her evening gown, she raised the sash window and a sea breeze blew in from the loch, lifting her hair, cool fingers questing beneath her wrap as she listened to footfalls in the corridor outside, too heavy to belong to Ines.

She watched the brass door handle turn, tamping down white-hot anger as she waited to deal with Greville.

When the door opened, it wasn’t her husband who came in but Byron.

He’d shed his jacket and stood in the doorway in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, with the snow-white cravat at his throat.

Moving with swift, angry economy, he walked into the room without asking her leave.

Closing the door behind him, he walked over to her dressing table and let a roll of bank-notes drop, watching it land among the pearl hairpins and a necklace of gemstones that Ines had left out.

‘Well?’ Byron stood facing the mirror, leaning with both hands on the dressing table.

When he spoke again, it was without turning to look at her, so helplessly balanced between humour and despair.

‘How shall I restore your reputation? With a delicious fuck that everyone hears of? I’d be willing – it’d be worth handing my balls to Greville.

Or perhaps I really should just make you my muse.

That would probably do it. If you’re going to go, Cressida, you should go.

Take the money, take your maid or whoever she really is and leave.

Annis is playing a dangerous game here of some mad design all her own and you know it as well as I do. Have you got anything decent to drink?’

Without a word, Cressida went to the walnut chest of drawers where Ines had unpacked her things, including the flask of twenty-year-old cognac.

In a silence punctuated only by apple-logs crackling in the fire, she set out lead-glass tumblers on the silver filigreed tray and poured for them both.

Still facing himself in the mirror, Byron reached out and took his, draining it.

He turned to look at her at last with a bleakness in his expression she had seen before, in the early hours of the morning at Newstead but more often in soldiers walking away from battle.

Byron visibly gathered himself, with a humourless smile. ‘If the Butes must aid and abet handsome, horribly inhibited smugglers, they could at least run some decent brandy. That stuff in the dining room is just insulting.’

‘Leave Oliver alone,’ Cressida said. ‘The last thing he needs is that sort of rumour, and he doesn’t even have the type of connections who can get him out of hot water. It’s self-protection, not an excess of inhibition. We can’t all be the brightest star in society’s high firmament.’

‘Don’t be bitter, it doesn’t suit you,’ Byron said.

‘I know I’m not wrong about Mr Tait, but unless I’m much mistaken his heart belongs elsewhere.

And surely you have some idea of just how easily all that public regard for me might fall away?

I’d accepted Annis’s invitation before I knew you were coming to Drochcala. I had no choice.’

Cressida stared at him, but in her mind’s eye they were back in that frozen garden at Newstead, when she had just watched him leave an outbuilding white with hoar frost, shrugging himself back into his heavy twill jacket as his gardener’s lad walked away in the other direction.

‘Which servant were you careless with?’

‘Does it matter? Annis knows. She’s blackmailing me, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Why else would Cleveland be here?’ He turned away, pouring them both a second measure of cognac. ‘Oh to the devil with it, I suppose I’m drunk enough to bare my soul to you of all people.’

‘I’m hardly in a position to betray your confidences.’

He ignored that. ‘It wasn’t a servant, either.’

Cressida caught her breath, recalling that moment at the breakfast table when Annis had turned to Kitty with such smiling malice. Your cousin Jamie’s quite thick with Byron at the moment, I hear.

‘You never did do half measures. When did it start?’

He gifted her with the smile that had always been so difficult to resist. ‘Jamie’s father was a mentor of mine, of a sort.

I went to stay with Tristan at Carver when I was eighteen, just for a few weeks.

Jamie was a child then. He was precocious and indulged, as I’m sure you know, and I ignored him.

Last winter I met him for the first time as a man. My God, that mind of his, Cressida.’

‘And that arse,’ Cressida said, drily. ‘And that face. Let’s not hedge around the fact that all the Nightingales are shattering to look at.’

‘And ruthless. Jamie had the audacity to cut off the connection after that bloody awful night at the Craufords’.

He said I was a hypocrite, that I didn’t really want to change anything about our society.

The boy is a firebrand, but he’ll learn, just as we all did.

’ He gave her a twisted smile. ‘He’s right, but only because it’s futile.

I know it’s a sin; by our rules it’s a sin. ’

‘Who am I to judge? I’ve committed just about every cardinal sin there is nearly every day of my life for years and years. If we’re going to hell, George, you and I, then at least we’re going together.’

He let out an airless laugh. ‘I’ve always suspected the company is likely to be better down there.

Either way, Annis found out that there was more between Jamie and me than political debate.

I always thought I cared about exposure because my mother was still alive, but it turns out I’m just as craven now that she’s dead.

At least when you fell you didn’t take anyone else down with you.

But most of the meaningful connections I’ve had in my life risk someone else just as much as they do me. ’

‘It’s not cowardice to be afraid of becoming an outcast,’ Cressida said. ‘I should know.’ At least in death there was nothing more to fear.

He turned to look at her then, with a swift, considering gaze. He saw too much and always had. ‘Chérie, you’re still so young.’

Cressida leaned against the bedpost. ‘Let’s pray Fraser MacGuigan’s at home asleep in bed. I wouldn’t put it past him to send a boy down after that cargo. I’m sure he knows we dropped something more than a few lobster pots.’

‘To hell with Fraser MacGuigan,’ Byron said, relentless.

‘Don’t change the subject. That’s two hundred in notes.

Take it. Tait is sailing me to Thurso tomorrow.

There’ll be a trading packet heading south before the end of the week.

Come with me: it’s no more complicated than that.

Whatever Annis is doing, bringing us all up here to play us off against one another, she’s gone too far. ’

Cressida looked out of the window, anywhere other than at him: the draw between them was animal and simple, and above all good humoured.

Beyond the Scots pines and the beech trees, dim light spread across the surface of the loch.

On the hillside above the house she’d inhaled her father’s cologne: orange-flower mingled with something masculine and indefinable, a scent from that old century when men had worn their hair fairy-white with powder and had lived and died for freedom in Ireland, in Scotland, and she had ridden her pony in the hills beyond Rosmoney itself with only O’Neill to attend her.

Byron let out a swift sigh, as if in defeat. ‘When are you going to tell Greville?’

‘Which bit?’ He’d always known her better than anyone, except perhaps Greville himself.

He subjected her to consideration that most people deemed him too frivolous to be capable of.

‘Don’t give me that. You’re not the sort to go running to him with reports of Jamie’s outrages.

You need to be truthful with Greville and with yourself about what’s between you, past and present, or the mess we’re all in is only going to get worse.

You and Greville have already brought your lives to ruin once. Are you going to do it again?’

Cressida closed her eyes, and in that moment she was back in Spain, at Byron’s side at the top of a church tower, sharing a bottle of purloined champagne as they looked out over the scattered lights of enemy-occupied Madrid.

The gown of plain linen and the respectable cap and the apron were rolled up in her pack, and she had worn silk once more, even if the hem was higher than it should be at the front and the narrow skirts accentuated a complication.

With Lord Byron at her side, long ago, she had breathed in the drifting smoke of a thousand campfires as her hand travelled across her belly, as if to protect the fatherless child that had been growing inside her for six months now.

A child that might have been the Duke of Cleveland’s son or daughter.

Or it might have been Greville’s: some boy or girl with dark curls touched gold by the sun, and that smile punctuated by a single dimple, and that louche, elegant manner of leaning against a door to talk to her.

In the bedchamber at Drochcala, Byron looked down at her then; she never cried about this because what was the use, it was all well in the past, and yet now her eyes burned.

Taking her silence for the answer that it was, he took her hands in his and then slipped one around her waist; she followed him in the steps of a waltz, dancing to a slow beat that Cressida felt in her heart but could not hear.

‘Come now,’ he said, speaking softly, ‘show me a merry face. Two hundred pounds, Cressy. Take the money and come away with me.’ He leaned down and kissed away the single tear that had escaped; despite it all she knew very well he would have enjoyed taking her now with all the skill in his possession, only to look at her afterwards and find a ruined, tear-stained woman and not the unattainable intrigue he saw now.

She turned away and rested her forehead on his shoulder as they moved through the steps of the dance, even as the door opened.

Greville stood in the doorway with the glow of the oil lamp in the corridor behind him, in a stillness and a silence that Cressida would remember afterwards as a moment preserved in amber. Then he closed the door and walked away.