Page 39

At Drochcala, Cressida awoke an hour before Greville into an unfamiliar sensation of calm, relishing the warmth of his presence beside her as the past faded away.

She was no longer a child left alone at Rosmoney as English soldiers scoured the countryside for rebels.

She was safe with Greville here in a way that she had not been for years.

He lay sprawled on his back, naked beneath the sheets, with one arm flung above his head, which was turned away from her to reveal the beautiful line of his unshaven jaw.

Unbidden, her mind drifted back to the way Rosmoney had smiled at her in the bothy and the sensation of safety ebbed away, leaving cold unease.

I’m sorry, darling, but you’re far more like me than your extremely proper Mama, God rest her soul.

In almost the next breath, Rosmoney had lied without shame – or rather he had omitted the truth about why he was here.

She’d been such a fool, indulging in that moment of real relief: shipping weapons across the Irish Sea, her father was still the true rebel hero she’d always wanted to believe in, not just a well-connected aristocrat who had run away from the brutal aftermath of a failed rising, leaving his fellow rebels to be hanged and shot in front of their terrified wives and children and their homes burned, and his own daughter left alone at Rosmoney for her only surviving relatives to deal with eventually.

In the bothy, Rosmoney had only said as much as he needed, letting her fill in the gaps by herself, just as she had allowed Annis and Bute to do at Bute House in London.

The most successful lie is a bedfellow to the truth.

Yes, Rosmoney was shipping weapons across the Irish Sea that were ultimately bound for English rebels in the weaving towns, aided by Jamie Nightingale.

But if Rosmoney were motivated by the same cause of bringing down the English government, why had he still been at Drochcala, hours and hours after sending the latest cache of weaponry down Loch Iffrin for Jamie to collect?

Why, in fact, had he not disappeared to fight another day, as any rebel would?

Cressida closed her eyes: she had been such a fool. It would hurt to leave Greville now, but with trust between them so impossibly out of reach, there was no choice. This was her mess to unravel, not his.

A quarter of an hour later, Cressida left the house through the scullery once more, with Lilias Tait staring after her, still holding the tankard she had been washing at the stone sink.

That wasn’t desirable, but there was little enough she could do about it now.

Climbing hard, running up the path where she could, Cressida wished for her old clothes – the skirt of heavy cotton, the shawl and her boots: the flimsy linen gown clung to her arms, offering scant protection against an angry grey mist that had settled on the peaks behind Drochcala.

When she reached the bothy, just over an hour later, there was no smoke coming from the chimney.

Inside, thin grey light slanted in through cracks in the single shuttered window.

A heap of dry wood and kindling lay stacked near the hearth and a rusty iron tinderbox sat on the crude stone mantelpiece; Oliver would have seen to that, ready for a stalking party that had never stopped here.

Rosmoney had a leather flask of small-ale, which he passed to her without a word; he accepted her arrival with no comment.

Thirst had already taken hold after the scrambling hike, so Cressida drank half her share of the flask, cool, sweet ale slipping down her throat.

She had to force away a memory of Greville’s smile as he lifted her in his arms, blaspheming under his breath as he registered the pain radiating from that gunshot wound.

‘Where is O’Neill?’ Cressida asked.

Rosmoney shrugged. ‘I sent him on ahead. All this is looking a little untidy.’ He waved one hand dismissively, as though he were talking about the prospect of a new arrangement in the shrubbery. ‘I do wish you hadn’t come.’

Side by side, they stood at the unglazed window, looking down the bracken-choked hillside to Loch Iffrin below.

The Kittiwake was out, her white sail a pale splash against a backdrop of dark water, and Cressida knew that Greville had gone to retrieve the weapons, with or without Jamie’s help.

From this height, Eilean nam Fiadh was a burst of vivid green against the waters of the loch, and Cressida thought of the deer moving quietly through the trees on their island, in their own place and perfectly at peace.

‘I don’t know why the deer stay on that island. Do you think they remember the stalking?’ Cressida spoke as if to herself. ‘There’s nowhere they can go to escape. It must seem safe but it’s a prison.’

‘It’s all for the good, all for the greater good at least,’ Rosmoney said, not looking at her, and she knew he wasn’t really talking about the deer any more but his own actions, always so excusable.

As they watched, the white sail of the Kittiwake moved at a dream-like pace across the loch, moving into the lee of Eilean nam Fiadh, between the island and the shore.

‘Queer they’re going back that way,’ Cressida said, when what she wanted to do was ask him what he had done. ‘They’ll never get through that channel on a single tack.’

At her side, Rosmoney went still, smiling a little.

Following his gaze, Cressida saw why: a naval cutter had sailed up the loch-head, slicing across the dark water.

She’d woken in Greville’s arms for the last time, drinking in that blissful half-waking moment in the knowledge no one could possibly harm her as she lay curled against his side.

She’d fallen asleep with her back to him, but in sleep they’d found one another once more, as if it were all so simple as holding one another in the night.

Side by side, she and Rosmoney watched the naval cutter go about, sailing with deadly purpose. For a long time, neither of them spoke. Someone, somewhere had sung a little tune, bringing the full might of the British government down upon Loch Iffrin and Drochcala.

‘It’s quite sharp of the British, really,’ Rosmoney said.

‘They’ve always been good at springing traps like this for those of a Radical persuasion: I should know, having been caught in one.

You see, what all this does is create the appearance of a wider rebellion in the wake of Lord Perceval’s murder. ’

‘Thank you for the explanation. I don’t think I could quite have grasped it otherwise,’ Cressida said, mildly.

Had he ever believed in anything at all except himself, even a free Ireland?

Perhaps that had been a game to him too, best left behind as soon as inconvenient consequences began to pile up, like burning villages and summary executions.

‘It’s a shame about my husband’s cousin, though, isn’t it? He’s so young. Barely even twenty.’

‘We’ll both be quite safe, of course,’ Rosmoney said, ignoring unpleasant truths just as he had always done, and Cressida knew he’d engineered this: that her father was an integral part of this trap, part of the machinery of the Committee of Secrecy.

‘I’ve a yawl anchored off Rhiconich. With a fair wind, we’ll be in Dublin by the end of the week. ’

We.

‘Before you were born,’ Rosmoney went on, ‘I always wanted to sail from Westport instead and go north, right up around Cape Wrath. I’d have sailed to the Arctic Circle if I could.’

Cressida fixed her gaze on the cutter, which was now hunting westward across the loch, aware of the pistol holstered at her waist and the knife sheathed at her garter, the leather scabbard cold against her stockinged thigh.

There was absolutely no chance of escape for Greville and whoever had gone with him to lift Jamie’s illicit cargo.

In that moment, the sudden, unmistakable call of a grouse rang out, just yards away from the bothy, wings beating the air with a sharp crack like wet laundry shaken out.

Rosmoney smiled, nodding. ‘They’ll have disembarked some of the men at Rhiconich – a wise move to send some of them overland. Marines, you know.’

‘They’ve got Drochcala surrounded by royal marines,’ Cressida spoke, battling a vivid sense of unreality. No soldier on a mission of this nature would pass by the bothy without further investigation: there was nowhere to hide.

‘Papa,’ she said, ‘can you explain to them who you are?’