Page 4

An hour later, outside a tall, cadaverous house deep in the slums of St Giles, Cressida watched as O’Neill approached a doorman with a broken nose and gave him a code-word.

With O’Neill at her back and Ines sulkily climbing the torchlit stairs in front of her, Cressida went briskly up the stairway with her knife in one hand.

Making short work of a long corridor lit only by a pair of guttering oil lamps on a side table, Cressida stepped across creaking floorboards.

Disgraced Irish aristocrat, traitor, rebel and spy: the twelfth and last Earl of Rosmoney preferred to hear his visitors coming.

O’Neill gave word to the guard at the door and, with a directive to Ines in Portuguese, Cressida went into the room.

Pine sap and the faintest tang of orange-flower: the scent of Rosmoney’s cologne transported her back to the rose garden at home, when he had by means of magic made a gold sovereign disappear before her eyes.

Flames licked at a desultory heap of glowing coals behind the grate and weak moonlight lanced into a room through a gap between the shutters, revealing what she swiftly realised were framed paintings of all different shapes and sizes, wrapped in sack-cloth.

She paused with the knife in her hand, listening to lowered voices.

One was unknown: weak, but tutored and cultured.

The other voice was low and musical, last heard in the drawing room at Rosmoney among the moth-eaten tapestries, still with a hint of the brogue he’d always affected.

‘I’ll do my best for you, of course, dear boy. But you know how these things are, the market being what it is.’

Cressida waited in a shaft of moonlight, conscious of her wild, tousled hair and the crumpled, mud-streaked satin skirts of her gown.

A tall, lantern-jawed young buck wearing a tight jacket and high shirt points emerged at speed from behind a stack of paintings.

Startled and blushing, he muttered something about being her humble servant and pushed past on his way to the door.

A lissom aristocrat on the brink of his fifties stepped out into the moonlight, pocketing a roll of bank-notes tied with a thin strip of satin ribbon.

Of middle height only, Rosmoney was still arrestingly handsome, with those long dark eyes and that twitch of a smile.

The touch of grey in his dark coiffure snatched Cressida back through the years to her earliest childhood, when the fashion had still been for men to powder their hair.

‘Poor boy,’ Cressida’s father remarked, as though he had simply left her at the breakfast table that morning and gone to ride out on the gallops.

‘That was Duntisbourne’s lad, you know – not a chance of squeezing a bent halfpenny out of his trustees, with some very unsavoury creditors at the door.

But the Gainsborough is his to do with as he wishes.

Far better to sell it in America where at least he’ll be saved the embarrassment of some Nottingham mill-owner’s wife trying to pretend his grandmother is a relation of hers.

’ Rosmoney halted, eying Cressida with a pained expression at her dishevelled state, not troubling to explain how he had gone from a would-be Irish rebel on the run to a series of dealings with the British consulate in Portugal, arriving now at art dealership.

‘What a diamond you could have been, child. Let’s have a huge drink. ’

Without waiting for a response, Cressida’s father turned his back on her and liberated a bottle of champagne from the bucket of ice standing on a dilapidated desk.

He poured out two brimming glassfuls, treating Cressida to the negligent smile that had by all accounts done for her mother, otherwise a woman of good sense.

Without taking her eyes from his, Cressida drank all of her champagne at once, savouring the rush, and held out her glass for more.

Rosmoney filled it, raising his eyebrows as though she were a debutante who had gone too far at her first ball.

Cressida dashed the contents of her glass in his face, savouring the sight of champagne dripping from her father’s handsome, dissipated features as well as his brief expression of outraged astonishment that soon dissolved into laughter.

‘You can stop the bloody act,’ Cressida said, before he could speak. ‘What in God’s name are you doing on English soil? Surely it’s too dangerous after Ireland, even now.’

Rosmoney shook the champagne from his hair and poured her another glass, sipping his own.

‘Oh, tempers have cooled a little in fourteen years, and I’m here to raise funds, in fact.

The most wonderful woman, you know – I never thought I would meet your mother’s match, but my dear Mrs Winters holds a candle to Emilia. A very sensible woman, too.’

‘And a rich one, I don’t doubt. You’re getting married?’ Cressida stared at him. ‘Papa, you were lucky to get out of Dublin alive in ’98.’

Rosmoney made a dismissive gesture with his fingertips. ‘The Cabinet has bigger fish to fry just now than to worry about an old rebel and a failed rising.’

‘You turned spy for the British, didn’t you?

’ Cressida said. ‘A word here and a word there, and your aristocratic neck was saved, at a price. What a shame about all the others.’ She didn’t bother to keep the contempt out of her voice, having never forgotten the sight of so many less well-connected rebels swinging from the ramparts of Dublin Castle. ‘What do you want?’

‘Come now, shrewishness is inexcusable – I would have hoped my dear niece had taught you better. A well-brought-up girl ought to show an amiable face to the world.’

‘ Shrewishness? ’ Cressida repeated, incredulous. ‘You swore blind you’d send for me as soon as you were settled in Lisbon. That was fourteen years ago and I had to endure the best part of ten of those with Annis. And then when I came to you myself, you denied me.’

‘My existence was hardly the life for a child nor a young woman of any repute, and most particularly not a daughter of the FitzAlans.’ He took on a wounded expression that made Cressida’s palm itch with the unthinkable desire to slap him.

‘It hasn’t been a joyous existence, you know, living in the most appalling dingy rooms and passing on whatever gossip I could find to the Committee of Secrecy.

’ Rosmoney spoke with haughtiness that would have made her laugh in other circumstances.

In any case he was lying: he had always been able to find the joy in even the darkest of moments.

‘How do you think I felt all that time, hearing the most shocking reports of your marriage to that rackety boy of Crauford’s?

The less said about your conduct afterwards the better.

I know Annis’s company can be a little lowering at times – I can’t think how my dear sister managed to rear such a penny-pinching, mealy-mouthed child – but it would have been far more suitable for you to have returned to your cousin, rather than running away to the Peninsula with a common soldier.

I don’t know why you couldn’t just think of the name.

I suppose the rift in the marriage was irreparable? ’

‘Quite beyond mending, sir, not that it’s any concern of yours.

’ Cressida succumbed to a recollection of the Duke of Cleveland bending over to whisper in her ear, raising frothing skirts above her waist in her cousin Annis’s private salon, his fingers lingering between her legs so that she writhed with pleasure even as an entire ballroom of people danced the mazurka just yards away.

My wicked little slut. She recalled the expression of purest rage in Greville’s dark eyes less than twenty memorable minutes later, too.

Not long afterwards, knowing she was ruined, Cressida had crept out of Annis’s respectable townhouse alone and still in the ballgown she’d chosen for what it revealed: let Greville flaunt his light-skirts all over London.

No maid had come to undress her, though: she was already dead in that world, unmentionable.

Hours later, in the taproom of a tavern on the Ratcliff Highway, two private soldiers and an unshaven apprentice backed her into the corner.

You look ripe and ready. We’re gents, we’ll take turns.

Pure fear, and then a stranger’s voice bringing with it the sea mist and the gorse-scented air of home.

Lads, the girl’s not willing, is she? Leave her alone.

Cressida knew she’d hear that voice again on her deathbed: Michael, who had abandoned his game of hazard to rescue a girl in a muddy cloak and a too-revealing gown of creased satin.

He’d been so proud of his new uniform, the red and gold of the Connaught Rangers.

He held out his hand to her in that taproom, where the air reeked of unwashed bodies and stale small-beer, showing her an honest smile without a hint of expectation or contempt.

You look like you could do with some help.

They’d talked for hours at a table by the fire, speaking of white pudding and spiced goody in a bowl, and the particular scent of a peat-fire, and sunshine on the waters of Lough Carra, but never the people they’d known.

Both of an age to remember the Rebellion, by tacit agreement it was a subject best left alone.

If Michael guessed so soon that she was Lord Rosmoney’s daughter, he never said.

By nightfall, they were in agreement: they would travel on together.

Michael’s colonel was a good fellow, and in truth the regiment was in need of a few decent women on the strength to take care of the laundering.

Michael was so newly joined up that who was to know he wasn’t actually married?

In the end, she’d buried Michael herself, doing him that honour, shovelling the last of the rubble across his ruined face in the aftermath of Talavera.

He’d given her far more than protection, including his willing heart, and late-night dances around countless campfires, and his familiar touch at the end of a long day’s march.

But now Michael was dead, long gone, and she was here in St Giles with Rosmoney, who was watching her with impatient bemusement.

Cressida gathered her wits: she couldn’t afford to get lost in the past. ‘I don’t even want to know what you’re doing here, Papa, but since we both find ourselves in hostile territory, I suggest you stay out of my affairs, unless you want to pay for my maid and me to sail to New York – in the unlikely event that you’re solvent enough to be of any use whatsoever. ’

‘Ingratitude doesn’t become you,’ Rosmoney said, dismissive. ‘If it weren’t for my efforts, you’d still be in the custody of Arthur Lascelles and on your way to some unsavoury gaol.’

Cressida fought to maintain a blank expression. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he knew so much, selling French secrets to the government as he had been for over a decade. ‘I suppose you were responsible for that grenade when we were disembarking? What made you lift a finger to help me now?’

Rosmoney’s smile was a little pained. ‘Your escapades in Portugal and Spain were private, or at worst not known to anyone who matters. Without my intervention, this latest episode would have led to an unpleasant degree of publicity, and you’re a FitzAlan.

’ He shrugged, as if no further explanation could be necessary.

He was lying, or at the very least not telling the whole truth.

Cressida swallowed rising fury: any such emotion was wasted on him.

‘Actually, my dear,’ her father went on, finishing the last of his champagne, ‘I do have a scheme of sorts, which will all be to your benefit. All you have to do is trust me.’