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Cressida left Drochcala by means of the scullery, listening to the low hum of conversation from the servants’ hall as she passed, breathing in the starchy scent of boiled early potatoes.

With the roar and clash of battle in her ears, Cressida stood outside in the laundry yard as cool night air kissed her skin.

Closing her eyes, she listened to the tide lapping against the shoreline at the bottom of the garden.

Once Byron had walked out without looking back, leaving her alone in the bedchamber she was meant to share with Greville, Cressida had changed her clothes, slipping out of the emerald silk and fastening herself into the comfortable gown of pale blue linen, swapping embroidered silver leather evening slippers for the jean boots that were still damp.

Alone, she made her way to the plantation of fir trees behind the house, turning back on an instinct: a cold, intense prickle of awareness between her shoulder blades.

She looked up at the large first-floor window that presented a view from the landing outside the master bedroom.

Two big geranium plants on the windowsill inside partially concealed the shape and form of the observer, but even at this distance and in this Highland summer half-darkness Cressida knew that it was Roberts who was watching her, standing unnaturally still by the window.

There was nothing to be done about that now, and she was no longer a debutante escaping Annis’s strictures about masquerade balls that you had to buy a halfpenny ticket for and where the punch was laced with arrack.

Cressida let herself through the gate and out onto the path strewn with pine needles, now well on her way up the hillside.

What remained of the light filtered down through the trees, illuminating her path, but even without it Cressida knew where to tread, relishing the challenge of the climb, blood pumping through her body as her muscles worked.

Half an hour passed as she climbed, making her way methodically up the path she had last followed in Oliver’s company.

Far below, to the west, Loch Iffrin glinted in the last of the summer light.

To her right, the heather-jacketed hillside reared up against a clear night already pinpricked with stars.

The windows of the bothy glowed golden, lit from within, and with the ease of long practice Cressida moved more quietly the closer she got so that she stood outside the door with her jack-knife in one hand, listening to the low hum of undisturbed conversation within.

Reaching for the old iron doorknob in silence, she stood with her back to the wall in case they fired a shot straight out of the door: she wouldn’t have put it past either of them.

Cressida walked into the bothy to face her father, Rosmoney, and John O’Neill sitting at a small table, illuminated by a single lamp as they examined papers laid out before them. Her father was dressed in ancient dark twill but hadn’t overlooked his boots, which were polished to a shine as always.

Rosmoney directed a freezing glance at O’Neill. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘What did I tell you? Sheer bloody carelessness.’

O’Neill, of course, could say nothing, but Cressida did: ‘It was scarcely Mr O’Neill’s fault. I’m sure it was the last thing he expected, finding Greville and Byron on that free-trading run. My joining them wasn’t exactly planned, either.’

‘Don’t permit me to hear sarcasm from your lips again, my dear.’ In the flickering lamplight, Rosmoney spoke as though she were still the ten-year-old he had left behind all those years ago.

‘Very well. Tell me what you’re doing here, then, and why, before I alert the whole household to your presence, including my husband,’ Cressida said.

‘I do hope you enjoyed spending that five hundred pounds, Papa. Is it gone already? Was your Mrs Winters just another lie, or has she gone off to find herself a better marital prospect?’

Rosmoney got to his feet then, sinuous and sudden as a striking snake. He hadn’t noticed the jack-knife in her hand and Cressida moved quickly, backing her father up against the whitewashed wall with a strength and speed that took him by surprise, to judge by the flare of alarm in his eyes.

She held the blade close, so that he could feel the touch of cold steel against his throat even as she breathed in cologne mingled with sweat, a jarringly familiar scent that tugged her back to the stable-yard at home, where she would run out to greet him when he came in from the gallops.

Looking past her, Rosmoney glared at O’Neill. ‘Can’t you bloody do something?’

O’Neill sat frozen at the table. ‘But it’s Lady Cressida.’

‘It most undoubtedly is,’ Rosmoney shot back, now with a flash of humour.

‘Don’t look at me like that, my girl, like your mother when she was in one of her moralising moods.

’ He smiled at her then. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but you’re far more like me than your extremely proper Mama, the Lord rest her soul. ’

‘You know nothing about me, not really,’ Cressida said, so furious that her voice shook. ‘Tell me what you’re doing here before I put a little more pressure on this knife.’

Rosmoney sighed, as though she had just interrupted him poring over some important papers in the library. ‘What do you want to know? I’m hardly going to tell you everything, am I, so you may as well forget that. We’ll be here all night.’

‘Unless I gut you like the pig you are, my lord,’ Cressida said, smiling sweetly.

‘There’s a stinking mess at Drochcala that looks likely to lead a lot of good people to the gallows, so I knew you had to be involved somehow.

’ That hit, although the flash of wounded emotion in his eyes was so quick it would have been easy to miss.

He recovered fast; he was immune to shame and lived in a world of his own confection in which his every betrayal and excess was completely understandable – she understood that now.

He smiled, with that old irresistible light in his eyes. ‘Cut my throat if it pleases you, a linbh,’ he said. ‘I suppose it would be a fool’s errand to make the point that the more you know, the more danger you find yourself in. What do you want to know?’

‘Where the weapons are coming from, to start with.’

That actually silenced him for a moment, even as she held the knife to his throat. He shot another filthy look in O’Neill’s direction, who stared resolutely down at the table and looked as if he would rather be anywhere but here.

‘Don’t blame your servant,’ Cressida went on, conversationally.

‘And don’t bother trying to deny it. On the one hand it was foolish to take on Greville and Lord Byron as passengers, but on the other their presence was a useful cover.

I once went up the River Tagus with the men and the weapons, though, Papa – did you know that?

No one sealed the barrels of rum with pitch, only those holding gunpowder.

An excess of caution, one might say. One might do the same for weapons.

I’ll ask again: where did they come from and where are they going? ’

Rosmoney faced her with another glimmer of humour. ‘Annis always complained that you were not disciplined enough but I never could bear the thought of anyone taking a switch to you. I don’t like to admit it but on balance she was right.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Cressida said. ‘And if it’s any consolation, she found other ways.’

‘Clearly not effective enough, my dear.’

Cressida smiled. ‘Save yourself the trouble of wasting all that charm upon me, Papa.’ She allowed the blade to graze the shaven, suntanned skin at his throat.

Rosmoney sighed, as far as he was able without allowing the blade any closer to his neck.

‘It’s actually muskets and powder, straight from the magazine at Enniskillen.

I transfer it here to another agent. It all goes down to northern England.

The weaving towns have been ready to rise up since before Lord Perceval was shot. ’

Irresistibly, Cressida recalled Lascelles facing her and Greville across the guest bedchamber at Gordon Square.

No one knows if that gunshot was the first of a full-blown revolution.

Cressida paused. For a moment, her throat was so dry with fear and shock that she couldn’t speak. This wasn’t real: it couldn’t be. ‘And who takes them there?’

‘I haven’t the smallest notion who moves the weapons on from here, angel. How should I?’

‘ You’re shipping weaponry from Ireland?

’ Cressida stared at him. ‘You’ve been in the pay of the British government for more than a decade.

God, that’s absurdly dangerous. It’s actually just absurd.

What does the War Office and Lord Liverpool have to say to that?

Papa, you’re in the Committee of Secrecy’s pay – what are you playing at? They’ll hang you at Newgate for this.’

Rosmoney just smiled at her, with an incalculable expression in his laughing dark eyes. ‘I always say that what the man doesn’t know can’t hurt him, angel. Now just don’t put me back on that pedestal again, will you? I don’t do well there at all.’