Page 31

Greville reached the top of the stairs and set down his glass of brandy on the occasional table beneath the window. The wound in his arm pulsed with slow, agonising regularity, even as he relived the sight of his wife in Lord Byron’s arms, two lost souls dancing together in silence. Shit.

He couldn’t help recalling the way Byron had looked at Cressida on the boat as she held the compress to his bleeding arm: that steady, warning light in his eyes.

George Byron knew exactly where Cressida had been.

The realisation had hit Greville with the force of a blow, costing him something to conceal.

Cressida wasn’t really at Drochcala to draw Byron into a scandal, political or otherwise, or anything like it.

How could she, when he knew very well she’d spent her exile in the train of an army?

Greville didn’t know how Byron knew, or how in hell’s name this had escaped Lascelles, but know he did.

And Byron held that truth over Cressida’s head like the sword of Damocles, so what he had just witnessed between them was entirely sincere.

Take the money and come away with me.

Greville drank off his brandy in one. She’d looked after herself long enough.

Why was she really here at all? Whatever the reason, Byron offered her a route out of this mess.

Doubtless the attraction would pall when they needed more money.

In another world, in another time, Greville would have given her two hundred pounds as inconsequential pin money to buy gilded feathers for her hair and a scandalous nightgown that revealed more than it concealed. Anger was pursued by shame.

It was hard to escape the conclusion that Cressida had come to Drochcala so that she could equip herself to leave him behind for good.

Used and pursued in London, the far north of Scotland was a much easier place from which to disappear for ever: New York, St Petersburg, Gothenburg.

A thousand cities. Once she’d gone, there would be no more chances.

And he’d taken Cleveland’s bait and let his damn bloody temper run away with him once more. Had he learned nothing?

Greville flinched, leaning against the white-painted panelled wall as he recalled the swiftly concealed expression of betrayal on Cressida’s face when he’d dealt that childish coup de grace to Cleveland: You were always so good at entertaining young girls.

Drochcala was eerily quiet: it was a house party – the whole place ought to echo with laughter, music and a hundred different conversations.

Instead, they’d dined in silence punctuated by the subdued clatter of cutlery against porcelain.

Annis, Byron and Kitty had withdrawn before the dish of lemon syllabub and the heap of golden hot-house grapes brought up from London were even removed.

Leaving Bute to exchange pained conversation with Cleveland, honour had demanded he apologise to Cressida, even if it were too late. That would have to wait.

A cold slick of fear slid down Greville’s spine, the sort a man only felt when there was a threat to those he was honour-bound to protect.

A disastrous night at a fashionable house party by anyone’s reckoning, this, with the hostess and half of her guests already retired before ten o’clock.

This mismatched gathering made no sense, and the clue to it all lay with Annis.

Annis Fane had the social instincts of an eighty-year-old dowager.

She didn’t make mistakes. Greville’s lips twitched into a faint smile at the prospect of asking Annis why she was strong-arming her own estate manager into running black-market cargo up the loch.

Greville obeyed instinct and followed the corridor to the front of the house, stepping away from the bare waxed floorboards at the top of the stairs and onto deep Rajasthani carpet in the wide, well-lit hallway that led to the master bedrooms. The house was still unsettling in how quiet it was, but then again these houses always were if you ventured upstairs when all servants were finally sitting down to eat.

The Butes’ treatment of their staff was skinflint at best: according to Somers they had dined for two days now on the remains of a maggoty side of beef that must have made its first appearance at Annis’s own table in London almost a fortnight before.

Even Crauford ensured his staff ate well, even if he couldn’t help extolling the virtues of a plain diet for the lower orders.

Greville loped towards the large double doors at the end of the wood-panelled corridor lit by candles in brass wall sconces.

The walls here were a pale shade of cream that thickened to yellow where heat from the candles drew linseed oil out of the paint.

Greville stared at the flames, inhaling the unmistakable scent of death.

All he could hear was his own breathing, his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

You’re imagining it, you bloody fool. This happened from time to time, just as it must do for anyone who’d spent any amount of time in the vicinity of a battlefield. You’d smell it again: that meaty, rotten reek, with the hint of sweetness.

Greville drew his pistol then, going like clockwork through the procedure of loading and priming, walking at a steady pace towards the double doors at the end of the hallway.

The smell intensified. It was the soldier in him who opened the door, standing back, taking a quick look into the room.

The housekeeper stood with her hands pressed to her mouth, her tartan sash skewed at an angle, her eyes wide with panic.

Greville laid a steadying hand on her arm, looking past her at the long, grey shape on the floor.

Annis had been wearing oyster-grey satin at dinner.

Stepping into the bedchamber, Greville was prepared for the stench of bodily fluids and walked over to the window, throwing up the sash.

Even so, he had to take in a few deep draughts of fresh, salt-scented air before he could turn back to face what had once been Annis Fane, Countess of Bute.

She lay contorted on the floor beside the bed, still in her evening gown.

The room reeked of blood, vomit and human effluent, with that sickly sweet hint of decay that must have been in his imagination because she couldn’t have been dead for more than an hour or so.

Greville went to Roberts, who stood shaking violently, her eyes wide and staring. ‘When did you find her like this?’

‘They’ll say I killed her,’ Roberts said.

‘They’ll hang me.’ Tears streamed down her face like sheeting rain in November, but it was all fear without a shred of grief for her mistress.

Quite understandable, all things considered.

‘They’ll all know I had a reason to wish she was dead, but I didn’t do it, I swear. ’

‘What reason?’ Greville said, focusing on Roberts for a moment instead of what remained of Annis Fane.

Roberts was panicking now, too distressed to dissemble.

Greville handed her his handkerchief, which she pressed to her mouth, her bone-white fingers still quivering.

Taking a deep breath, she gathered herself, words spilling forth in a rush: ‘It may not seem much to your lordship but I take pride in my work. It took me twenty years to become a lady’s maid, working my way up, and she has me up here waiting at table, fetching and carrying downstairs, even if it is all my own fault.

’ She drew in another long, shuddering breath, looking him dead in the eye now.

‘I’ve not been paid for six months. My old friend Roberts , she always says to me, promising they’ll look after me.

So it’s been bed and board with only a promise of my wages, and I put up with it until my sister Betsy’s girl was turned off without a character with her master’s brat in her belly—’ Roberts broke off, making a visible effort to compose herself.

‘And so I pawned Lady Bute’s earrings – just a small pair that she didn’t even like, and I never thought she’d miss. ’

‘But miss them she did?’ Greville said. It wasn’t going to be easy to single out one person who hated Annis enough to kill her. ‘It will be quite all right, just tell me when you found your mistress like this.’

‘No more than a quarter of an hour ago,’ Roberts said, clutching at the handkerchief. ‘We’d all that minute sat down to eat when Tam came in to say that her ladyship had gone upstairs early. She hadn’t rung, which was odd, but I knew I’d have to come up and undress her.’

‘And just as you’d at last taken the weight off your feet,’ Greville said, glancing at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece: it was a quarter to ten.

He was going to have to look at Annis now.

He must take a hold on himself and just do it.

She lay bent backwards like a mackerel, stretched out on the Turkey rug with her arms at odd angles he’d still see long after he’d left this room and all evidence of the manner of this death was quietly tidied away.

Poison: it was obviously poison. Clearly something that produced spasms and contortion rather than anything next door to opium.

Whoever had done this wanted Annis to die without a semblance of dignity.

Greville forced himself to turn and look at Roberts, who made an obvious attempt to steel herself.

‘Wait here – in the dressing room if you’d rather. I’ll fetch Oliver Tait – he’s got a sensible head on his shoulders. We can’t have this going through the servants’ hall like a dose of cholera before Lord Bute is told.’

Greville left her, closing the door behind him, leaning on the wall outside the master bedchamber for a moment.

Unless Roberts was a consummate actress, she wasn’t the killer.

Shock and fear rather than guilt were writ clear upon her face.

But someone had poisoned Annis, and Greville felt a horrifying sensation of relief: the stifling, wicked tension concocted by the dead woman had now evaporated, even if only to be replaced with the promise of the rope for someone almost certainly still within the walls of Drochcala itself.