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The night Annis Bute died, everyone except Lord Bute and Cressida kept a vigil in the unaired drawing room, where all the candles in polished brass sconces upon the walls had been allowed to burn down to nothing.

It was a wake of sorts: Cleveland lay stretched out asleep on the chaise longue, still in his evening clothes save for his boots.

Not a soldier, Greville thought with a strange, detached sense of amusement.

Byron reclined in a wing-armchair, his legs crossed at the ankle.

He stared straight through Greville, the cut direct.

Jamie sat leaning against the log basket for most of the night, awake too, but only just, his hair thick with salt spray and arranged by the wind.

Kitty slept on Greville himself, curled up on the chaise with her head on a cushion in his lap.

Cressida, meanwhile, had returned to the house sometime after dark, offering no explanation for her absence.

Greville let Kitty give her the news, and it had been Kitty who left Cressida alone with Lord Bute, who that night refused to see anyone else except Mrs Scudamore.

Greville recalled the morning afterwards in only snatches of polite, forced conversation, and the summer light of the far north streaming in through the tall, unshuttered windows as if in defiance.

Annis’s death dwarfed Jamie’s appearance and Greville could only be grateful that no one except his sister was surprised at the ill-timed late arrival of another Nightingale.

Everyone fell into deathbed habits: Kitty and Cressida served tea to the priest and the kirkwarden from Leirinmore, all the while discussing when the mackerel would shoal and if the weather was likely to turn: the fishermen said there was a storm on the way from Cape Wrath.

An army surgeon home on leave was also fetched from Leirinmore and confirmed the cause of death to Greville and Cleveland in a low-voiced conversation that took place by a bright fire in the bedchamber where Annis had died.

A ruddy, capable surgeon in the Black Watch, Gunn looked very much as if he wished himself on the battlefield: anywhere rather than here.

Annis had been laid out on the bed and her jaw bound with a wide white strip of muslin, which was just as well considering how the dose of poison had contorted her face in a howling, unheard scream.

Pennies now closed eyes once alight with laughter, calculation and mockery: she was dead, actually dead, and this was no fever-dream, even if Greville was starting to feel distinctly below par, hot and cold every other moment, the wound in his arm throbbing with distracting regularity.

‘Strychnos nux-vomica is my best guess, I’m afraid, to judge by the effects – and an enormous dose at that.

’ Gunn showed them both a cracked glass found beneath the bed.

‘Lady Bute had a fondness for a dram of very fine cognac before retiring, according to her woman. The decanter and a glass was always kept here, on her dressing table. It looks very likely that Lady Bute consumed the poison in her cognac and was overcome before she even had the chance to ring for her woman to undress her. I suppose there’s no way of discovering who might have had the opportunity to slip into her bedchamber? ’

When Gunn had gone, Greville turned to Cleveland. ‘Whoever did this couldn’t have chosen a worse way for her to go. She must have been in unimaginable pain. The difficulty will be to find out who didn’t have reason to inflict it.’

Cleveland yawned and stretched, catlike.

‘Well, I couldn’t bear the woman, but I didn’t kill her.

That’s Lascelles’s style, not mine. Depending on what time of night she died, at the very least you, Byron, Bute and I can swear to each other’s presence in the drawing room.

And I think Bute’s the only one of us who didn’t actively dislike her.

Kitty’s easy to account for – both she and her maid can attest to each other’s presence.

Cressida, on the other hand, is a different story.

’ He turned to look at Greville then with unsettling perspicacity. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right,’ Greville lied. ‘Why did you come to Drochcala?’

Cleveland gave him a swift, searching look.

‘Rubbish. You and Lascelles were always cut from the same cloth – right down to wearing hair shirts, I see, although he’s by far a better liar than you are.

’ Cleveland spoke next without shifting his gaze from what had once been their hostess.

‘I came because there was an obligation,’ he said, shortly.

‘Annis took the opportunity to remind me of it when it suited her, which it did this summer.’

Greville ignored a wave of exhaustion, sleep having evaded him altogether. ‘What did she want? Money?’

‘That, and my presence here. If what I’m about to say is ever repeated beyond this room, I will find out, and I will ruin you: I’m here because of our sister. Mine and Lascelles’ sister.’

Greville said nothing, giving Cleveland all the rope he needed.

‘Georgiana is only sixteen years old, and she has spent much of her life at Kielder Castle.’ Cleveland allowed himself a tight smile.

‘Probably too much of her life, because I was so rarely there myself, and when I was I can’t say I exercised myself a great deal about her welfare beyond securing the very best in tuition and the most proper of companionship.

But Georgiana didn’t need an Italian governess: she needed a friend.

’ He paused, into an echoing silence. ‘She found that without my help, in the son of a local fisherman.

Beyond a certain mutual infatuation, I believe that the relationship between them was innocent, even as they grew older.

One night, Georgiana and Tom got into difficulties sailing on Kielder Water.

The mast broke, and although they managed to reach the shore, they were both soaked to the skin and Georgiana unwell with an attack of asthma.

They did manage to reach a posting-inn not far from Windermere.

Unhappily, it was also where Lord and Lady Bute changed horses on their way up to Drochcala to keep Christmas.

‘I knew she wouldn’t hold her tongue for nothing,’ Cleveland went on.

‘I’m sure it’s no news to you that the Butes sank far too much into their Jamaican interests, or that Bute’s father gambled away most of the rest in the sixties.

I don’t know what Crauford was thinking: I’d allow no brother of mine to marry a girl associated with prospects like that, even if they were only her guardians.

And those interests in the Caribbean are much less profitable since Perceval championed Abolition, but the Butes’ desire to keep up appearances never wavered, did it?

Obviously, profiting from enslavement is far more genteel than becoming involved in trade or the City, and they have no son to marry into money.

When Jamaica no longer paid, Annis chose blackmail. ’

Greville digested the fact that Cleveland had a moral compass after all, and one that swung in much the same direction as his own.

‘Annis had us over a barrel, too – I daresay you can broadly guess why. Evidently someone has saved us all the trouble of dealing with her.’ He couldn’t ignore the growing certainty that Cressida, with her tattered reputation and her peculiar disappearance, was going to emerge from this as Annis’s most likely killer – perhaps even more so than Oliver Tait.

‘When Bute has recovered from the first shock of grief, he’s going to want this investigated,’ Cleveland went on. ‘You may as well know that I’ve no intention of dumping my obligations to Annis Fane on some provincial magistrate and I advise you not to do the same.’

Greville felt the old hot anger kindle. ‘I’m not going to allow a servant to swing for this: it’ll all have to be dealt with somehow. And this provincial magistrate of yours is actually Bute himself.’

Cleveland gave him a thin smile. ‘Of course he is. Unless we can find a satisfactory explanation for Annis’s death, it’ll surely go before the sheriff.

That’s Lord MacCrae. This is no case of petty theft or feuding peasants taking it in turns to burn each other’s thatch.

It would be reprehensible to persuade Bute that it will be in his own immediate best interests never to share all this information Annis had gathered with MacCrae, wouldn’t it?

An old man in his condition, after such a shock. ’

‘Beyond the pale,’ Greville agreed, and with no further discussion he and Cleveland moved as one and went through Annis’s dressing room where her bottles of strawberry leaf tincture and Gesso’s milk were still laid out on her dressing table.

At last they reached Bute’s oak-panelled bedchamber, where their host sat at a small escritoire by the window, dressed in his nightgown and an embroidered banyan that had probably cost him more than one of the enslaved men or women cropping sugar on his Jamaican estate.

Greville crushed a surge of hatred: better not to show that yet.

Bute didn’t look around when they walked into the room, absorbed in staring at the sheaf of papers spread out in disorder before him.

‘Awful how the numbers don’t tot up right the more you stare at them, isn’t it?’ Cleveland said.

Bute reached convulsively for his glass of brandy before turning to face them.

‘Oh, it’s not really figures, thank goodness.

It’s all such a dreadful affair,’ he said, as though they were discussing an act of God, like a child succumbing to the measles.

‘I’m afraid I never had any head for business, and my dear Annis always used to handle this sort of thing.

I must admit, I never did quite understand the purpose of this particular investment and now it’s all rather uncomfortable and embarrassing, to say the least. Now she’s gone I haven’t the least idea what to do about it. ’

‘I should turn it all over to Mr Tait, my lord,’ Greville said.

‘Oh no, that wouldn’t be at all appropriate.

Oliver is quite wonderfully intelligent – they are, you know – but this is nothing to do with estate management.

I’m afraid it’s a private affair rather beyond Mr Tait’s understanding.

’ Bute smiled ruefully even as Greville registered what he had just said: they are, you know , as if Oliver and Somers were both less than human. Did he believe the same of Kitty?

‘Perhaps we can help?’ Cleveland said, with the speed and precision of a striking adder.

Bute gave them both a vacant smile. ‘I should be very grateful for that, and I’m sure I can count on your discretion.

It’s really all so unfortunate – worse even than just being involved in trade.

I’m hopeless with correspondence and paperwork – Annis advised me to burn all this, but that feels grubby, as if we had something to hide.

She never knew I kept it all.’ He let out a burst of braying laughter.

‘Well, I could just never understand the worth of the investment: you see, it’s not as if the Bellingham fellow had a sound head for trade as far as I could ever make out.

He was actually thrown into prison in Russia, you know, over something to do with duties, which, as a merchant, really ought to have been his affair to understand.

Annis insisted the investment would be worthwhile.

She was quite clear about that: Bellingham’s next voyage was certain to be a great success that would benefit us all, that’s what she said to me.

It would be well worth the investment: she was sure of that.

We paid the Bellingham fellow an awful lot of money and then of course he shot the prime minister. ’

Even Cleveland had nothing to say.

‘I can see the difficulty,’ Greville said. ‘How awkward to have a business connection with the prime minister’s murderer.’

‘I mourn the man, but I can’t say that I mourn his policies,’ Bute said, inconsequentially. ‘I only pity Lady Perceval and the children, I must admit. I quite understand how they must be feeling.’ When he next looked up at Greville and Cleveland, his face was wet with tears.