Page 35

In the kitchen at Drochcala, Cressida warmed herself at the great black range, unable to forget how Rosmoney had lied to her face just hours before and with her knife to his throat.

Even then, she still hadn’t seen it in his eyes: Jamie Nightingale was so unmistakably a Nightingale that there wasn’t a chance her father hadn’t known who he was.

Ines stood at the table with a long hot-pressed linen apron tied over her gown, carving a large ham and issuing scathing instructions to Jamie himself about how to butter the loaf of brown bread before cutting each slice.

Roberts had been given some tatting to do for her nerves, as Mrs Scudamore would have it, and sat like a black crow with the basket of rags in the battered armchair by the big kitchen window.

Jamie was making Mrs Scudamore and Ines laugh with a long, involved story about the pigs at Summercourt escaping into the walled garden last summer, but he stopped smiling the moment Greville came in, as well he might.

‘Set to work, James?’ Greville said, amiably. He spoke without a hint of malice, leaning on the doorframe, but Cressida had heard experienced officers use that tone before with recalcitrant younger staff, and Jamie’s eyes glittered.

Mrs Scudamore glared at Greville, accusing. ‘We’ll none of us be touching any cooked food for a day or so yet, not for all the carbolic soap between here and Edinburgh, so it’s just as well Mr Nightingale has shifted himself to help, unlike some people.’

Greville gave Mrs Scudamore a look that bordered on chagrin, tempered with a smile that made the colour rush to her cheeks.

‘A wise choice, mistress.’ His gaze flickered towards Cressida.

She nodded almost imperceptibly, and he added that they wouldn’t keep the boy long.

Greville held the door open, and Jamie had no choice but to follow him out: a masterful handling of the situation, Cressida had to admit, even if Greville did look pale, his lips a little compressed, whether by dint of the wound in his arm, a lost night’s sleep, or the sheer effort it must be taking not to howl at his cousin.

Walking in silence down the stone-flagged corridor, they met Kitty in the small, little-used parlour at the back of the house.

Kitty’s eyes were hollow with shocked exhaustion, and her morning gown of printed poplin had been haphazardly pressed.

Bute had missed his chance to impose fashionable good taste in here, and so Cressida watched Greville and Kitty take it in turns to quietly eviscerate Jamie against an incongruous backdrop of floral-patterned silk wall-hangings and tapestried Queen Anne chaises longues littered with overstuffed embroidered cushions.

‘Have you quite finished?’ Jamie asked, when Kitty paused for breath.

‘Don’t bloody talk to Kitty like that,’ Greville snapped.

Jamie made an obvious effort to control his temper.

‘Listen, I understand your views, but it’s clear you don’t respect my position at all.

Someone has to take action against the utter atrocious cruelty of this government and they listen to neither reason nor importunity.

’ He glared at Greville and Kitty, who was watching him with her arms folded, flushed with an angry, uneven patch of colour on each cheek.

‘I don’t know how either of you can stand there and talk such rubbish about change without revolution when Cressida’s father played his part and lost everything for his trouble.

I’ll take my leave now, if you don’t mind. ’

‘You will not,’ Cressida said, and Jamie stopped where he stood.

Kitty smiled.

‘I must lift that cargo. It’s expected—’ Jamie broke off, clearly opting for the position that none of them were to be trusted with Radical plans.

‘You three of all people I hoped would have some sympathy for the cause, but I might as well be explaining myself to bloody Crauford. I don’t understand you. ’

‘That much is obvious,’ Cressida replied, choosing her words with care, even as she was aware of Greville watching her.

‘Jamie, listen to me. You don’t need to tell me about the cruelty of our government: I grew up in a country where I saw evidence of it daily.

My family have been in Ireland since the Norman conquest, but when you look at the circumstances it’s not that difficult to understand why we were never really accepted by the Irish: we stole their lands and their way of life, we prayed in a different church.

Nevertheless, my father wanted change, for Ireland to be united as one, setting her own rules for her own people.

Rosmoney became the man he is today because the United Irishmen were infiltrated like every other rebel movement since the dawn of time.

You can bet your life that since Lord Perceval was shot, every single government mole in every single rebel group in England is waiting for the order to encourage his fellows into an atrocity that will only deliver them all to the gallows.

The same will be true of the Radicals you’re arming.

True rebellion is like a game of chess: don’t allow yourself or others to make a move that will end in checkmate.

If you can’t see that’s exactly what you’re enabling here, then I don’t know what to tell you. ’

Jamie had been listening in angry silence; now he looked at them each in turn, his gaze resting longest on Cressida, no doubt proud of himself for not telling them all that he knew exactly who had brought those weapons across the Irish Sea.

‘I feel sorry for you, I truly do.’ He turned to Kitty next.

‘And don’t think I’m not aware why you’re here, meddling away on Sylvia’s behalf.

Why can’t you just leave me to arrange my own affairs?

You could have at least asked me before playing into the hands of that absolute bitch upstairs on my behalf. I’m really not surprised she’s dead.’

Leaning against the mantelpiece, Greville turned to Kitty with a calm, enquiring expression that fooled nobody.

‘Oh, Lord ,’ Kitty said, exasperated. ‘Jamie, did you ever stop to consider that the reason I’m here has less to do with you and more to do with Sylvia?

Try to understand the notion that not everything is only about you.

’ Stalking over to the door, she opened it, looked down the deserted corridor and closed the door again, then rested against it for a moment with her eyes shut.

‘Go on!’ Jamie hissed. ‘Tell them. I’m not ashamed.’

‘Oh, do be quiet!’ Kitty said. ‘I’ve heard just about enough from you for one morning. Have you no care at all for Greville’s feelings?’

‘Don’t hold back on my account – Cressida knows all my faults,’ Greville said with infinite patience.

‘If it helps, I’ve already come to the conclusion that Jamie and I have the felicity to be brothers, rather than cousins.

I suppose our mother had an affair with Tristan: it would be exactly like both of them.

It explains a great deal, including why you’re here, Kitty, instead of at Straloch with Alasdair and the children.

Annis was blackmailing our mother, too, I suppose, and you came here in her stead when she wasn’t able to leave Chas? ’

Cold unease prickled between Cressida’s shoulder blades: the truth about Jamie’s parentage clicked into place like a jigsaw piece.

Now that she knew what to look for, his resemblance to Sylvia and to Greville himself was startling, and unsettling in how that likeness had been there all along, if only they had known what to look for.

‘You know what Annis is like – was like,’ Kitty said, before Cressida had the chance to walk out.

‘She adored watching people. If anyone was likely to ferret out the truth about you, Greville, purely by observation, it was going to be Annis. She didn’t get us all up here to blackmail us about Papa not really being your father, though.

Why should she? There can’t be many top ten thousand families without a cuckoo in the nest. As long as the heir has the right father, no one really cares much about the others.

Tristan was your father, yes, but Mama is Jamie’s mother, too.

She almost left Papa when Jamie was born. ’

All that could be heard was a log shifting in the grate, throwing out a shower of tiny sparks which Greville absent-mindedly trod out.

‘What an absurd farce,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t ended with Jamie enacting melodramas, it would be a straightforward comedy.’

‘You can hardly talk,’ Jamie retorted, white-faced with suppressed frustration. ‘You didn’t have to put up with twenty years of people whispering behind their hands about who your real mother and father were.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Greville said. He poured brandy from the decanter into four crystal glasses.

‘That part of it makes no sense to me, either. Sylvia had already presented my father with one bastard to pass off as his own; why on earth she couldn’t have just done it a second time like everyone else, I have no idea. ’

‘Because Papa wasn’t in England when Jamie was conceived.

’ Kitty took the glass he passed her. ‘He was on a diplomatic expedition to Russia. There was no covering it up. You’re too young to recall, but I’m not and neither is Crauford: Mama disappeared for almost a year.

It was put about that she’d gone to Austria to take the waters, but in reality she went to Tristan at Carver Hall and had the baby there.

Tristan’s circle at that time was so scandalous that there was no chance of her meeting anyone she knew, and there were enough secrets at Carver that Tristan’s friends never betrayed her, whether out of affection or self-protection. ’

‘It would have been affection,’ Jamie snapped. ‘You didn’t know them.’

‘In fact,’ Kitty went on, ignoring him, ‘Mama was in love with Tristan. When Papa came home from Russia, he went up to Northumbria and persuaded her to come home. You and Jamie are brothers: you share the same mother as well as the same father. Annis worked it out years ago in that way she has of ferreting out exactly what one least wants her to know. She used to say what a shame it would be if it ever came out, and how everyone understands about the odd bastard under one’s roof here and there, but if it had got out that Sylvia nearly left Papa and spent almost a year actually living at Carver Hall, she’d be ruined and so would the rest of us.

For a start, even George Byron’s circle has nothing on Tristan’s. ’

‘I didn’t kill Annis,’ Jamie said abruptly. ‘I would have liked to, but if I’d done it I wouldn’t have chosen poison: I’d have held her down and drowned her in the loch.’

‘Steady now,’ Greville said with such calm authority that Jamie fell silent.

‘Either way, let’s hope we can convince Lord MacCrae of that when he comes down from Inverness,’ Kitty said.

Greville did nothing but fix his gaze out of the window at the silver waters of Loch Iffrin, now lost in thought, and Cressida knew she had to walk away from this family, before their loves and their disasters drew her in for ever to a position among them that she did not deserve.