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A little earlier, Greville, Lascelles, Byron and Jamie walked down the length of the lawn to the furthest reaches of the loch-head in grim silence, picking their way across salt-soaked grass and pebbles slippery with stark orange and ochre seaweed.

They left Cleveland and Kitty to fend off MacGuigan’s enquiries with Cleveland’s eleven generations of ducal scorn and Kitty’s Banbury tale about Mrs MacGuigan in childbed.

Greville ignored the discomfort as seawater soaked through his boots.

They boarded the Kittiwake with varying degrees of elegance, and Greville untied her painter from the iron ring mounted in the gravel, wading out a few steps before hauling himself on board: that would be the end of this pair of boots.

What an idiotic thought when they were unlikely to see the end of the month without at least one of them on the gallows, at best. What remained of his reputation would be up in smoke.

Greville was surprised how much he cared, surprised at how much he wanted, in truth, to take Cressida back to the Peninsula as his wife.

He wanted to go with her to balls in ancient walled Spanish cities and watch her ride out on the hunt in winter, and to lie with her in the darkest part of the night.

He wanted to give her the life she deserved, so that she could at last lay down her weapons.

Jamie had wordlessly taken the oars and started to row at a steady, angry rhythm.

Byron stood holding the shrouds as they put up the sails, looking out towards the open ocean, now actually enjoying all this with an irritating degree of relish.

Lascelles sat at the prow, staring out across the loch, and Jamie glanced at the luff of the sail, noting a series of wrinkles near the mast. Greville watched with cool amusement as Jamie trimmed the sails so that the yacht shot across the loch, close-hauled: the boy could sail, at least. The morning had worn on and sun burned through the mist, warming the back of his neck as they tacked across the loch, at last approaching the hidden inlet where they’d dropped the cargo.

Lascelles got up and stepped across the daggerboard, ducking beneath the boom as he came to sit beside Greville, who moved to make room for him.

‘Rosmoney is here – there’s more to this than we knew in London.’ Lascelles spoke to Greville in quiet Portuguese, just as they neared a shoreline of tumbled black rocks.

‘You do surprise me,’ Greville replied in the same tongue.

It would be a long time before he was able to forget Lord Bute looking up at him and Cleveland with tears streaming down his face, not because he’d paid a delusional merchant with a wife and children to kill the prime minister, but because it was all so embarrassing.

Lascelles hadn’t arrived at Drochcala this morning at all.

He’d been watching them all for days, living on the hillside like a guerrilla scout with the scent of woodsmoke in his hair, perhaps even inside the house, too.

‘I hate it when you’re sarcastic,’ Lascelles said. ‘If I’d have known we’d end up in a bind like this, I’d have hanged your wife in Spain. There’s far too much treason in this for my liking—’ He broke off at the expression on Greville’s face, raising both eyebrows. ‘It’s like that , is it?’

‘Never mind. What about her father? Is there any such thing as a retired rebel?’ Greville said.

Byron and Jamie were arguing about the exact location of the cargo drop, the frozen entente cordiale between them temporarily forgotten.

The Butes’ involvement in funding the murder of a prime minister and Rosmoney’s presence at Drochcala nagged at Greville like sections of a patchwork quilt that refused to tessellate.

No matter how many times he tried to match together the edges, they would never fit.

‘Very likely,’ Lascelles said. ‘But Rosmoney’s no rebel. He was under orders. It took me four days to get an audience with Lord Liverpool and even then it was involuntary on his part, shall we say. He was surprised to find me in his library.’

‘You got into the private library of the Secretary of State for War and then threatened him?’ Greville laughed and swore in the same breath.

‘It’s absurd, the lack of communication between my unit and the more official channels,’ Lascelles said, aggrieved.

‘I look after my men – which for the sake of argument in this case means you and Cressida, and I suppose him as well.’ He shot a look at Byron, who was still standing artistically by the mast, holding on to the shrouds.

‘Not that he knows, strictly speaking, that you were using him like a punch doll in your very own puppet theatre,’ Greville said.

Lascelles ignored that. ‘Listen, we know it made no sense to hang Bellingham so quickly, not unless somebody wanted to ensure he never discussed where the money he lived on came from before the murder: call it a double execution. And if it led a few Luddites and Radicals to the gallows, all those respectable pillars of society who paid Bellingham’s way in London could hardly complain. ’

‘The Butes were up to their necks in that,’ Greville said, watching Lascelles carefully. ‘But how does a consortium of avaricious mill-owners and aggrieved slave-owners paying a delusional merchant to shoot the prime minister get Radicals hanged?’

‘Come on, Greville,’ Lascelles said, squinting over his shoulder at the loch-head shrouded in mist. ‘Perceval had a lot of enemies in government, and they don’t like rebels any more than he did.

The movement of weapons is a trap, a fiction from start to finish.

It was designed to spark unrest and create the illusion of a Radical uprising in the wake of Perceval’s murder when there was no such thing.

And Annis Bute went too far, like a greedy little child eating a plate of sugar-plums as well as all the cake.

If she’d stuck at only aiming for a change of policy and making life easier for slave-owners by arranging Lord Perceval’s death like an opera breakfast, we’d probably still be blessed with her company.

But she was blackmailing all of us as well, which risked everything else.

To be honest, if I hadn’t killed Annis, I strongly suspect Rosmoney was under orders to do the same and would have gladly saved me the trouble.

From his point of view, and that of the War Office and the Committee of Secrecy, her greed and manoeuvring threatened the security of their entire operation. ’

Greville stared at him, tasting salt upon his lips. ‘Dear God, Arthur. When we get back to Spain, what are we actually fighting for?’

‘Money, as usual? And if Annis had stopped at siphoning money from her own estate to fund a murderer, I might have been able to let her live.’ Lascelles smiled then.

‘Probably not, though, considering what she tried to do to my sister. The thing is, if Annis didn’t want to be poisoned in her bed, she shouldn’t have threatened to ruin otherwise blameless young people guilty of one small mistake, or attempted to blackmail the family of a man with no discernible moral compass. ’

Greville stared at him, salt spray drenching his face as the wind picked up.

Cressida hadn’t trusted him enough to share the truth about her father; if she had, they could be working together now, not battling in separate futility: she should be here with him, safe with him no matter what ugly storm raged around them.

For a few sacred hours last night, all that mattered had been the warmth of her body beneath him, her strong, slender legs wrapped around his waist, and the scent of her skin, and the faint hint of chamomile and lavender in her hair, all before the cold hard intrusion of obligation and reality.

‘Is this the place or not?’ Jamie asked, with brisk hostility. ‘I don’t know if you and Lascelles have quite finished jabbering in Portuguese yet, but if you want to pull up that cargo, I’d as lief we did it before MacGuigan comes out to play again.’

Byron glanced at the shoreline, animated with the excitement of it all. ‘Not yet. Six feet or so closer to the rocks, and then go about. The prow was level with that spit where the small beech trees are growing.’

Jamie put the yacht head to wind and Lascelles uncleated the anchor, dropping it overboard, hand over hand.

Jamie stripped off his jacket and sat down in the thwarts to haul off his boots, stretching out one long leg and then the other.

They were alone on the loch save for a small potting boat in the far distance with a rust-red lateen sail that stood out against the grey sky, and Greville felt a pulse of cool relief.

It was now or never. Jamie slipped into the water with a quick, elegant vault over the bows that barely rocked the boat.

He came up for breath with the fine linen shirt plastered to his chest and then dived like a porpoise.

He emerged once, flicking back his hair and blowing out a spray of water; he shook his head, then dived again.

Greville, Byron and Lascelles watched the loch in silent tension and Greville felt the unmistakable slow prickle of danger between his shoulder blades; he couldn’t even be sure they were in the right place.

It would have been so easy to misjudge their distance from the shore as MacGuigan’s lad fired his shot.

He’d shielded Cressida with his body then, enveloping her in his arms so that he breathed in her familiar scent of rosewater and Marseille soap; he felt her loss now more than he had ever done before.

Jamie dived for a third time and emerged right at the prow, spitting out water and holding the end of a line tied in a monkey’s paw and black with pitch.

He swung a leg over the side of the boat and Byron grabbed a handful of his sodden shirt, heaving him on board.

Jamie flushed, disentangling his legs from the tiller, daggerboard and jib sheet, and immediately began hauling in the line, hand over hand.

A gull wheeled overhead, a splash of white against the grey sky, sending up a wild keening that bounced from one green-mantled loch-side to the other.

‘What about your arm?’ Jamie said to Greville, panting with effort.

‘What the devil about it? Just heave,’ Greville snapped.

Sunlight glanced from the surface of the loch, and out towards the loch-head the water went dark with flashes of the small waves that as children they had always called white horses; the mackerel were shoaling and moments later the black shining flank and fin of a porpoise emerged, then more: hunters and the hunted.

It was backbreaking work, and before long, they all began to breathe with harsh, urgent economy, sweating into their waistcoats; they had all long since stripped off their jackets, Greville with a suppressed, furious wince.

Crimson blood showed on his rolled-up sleeve, blossoming through layers of bandage and fine linen.

He glanced over his shoulder to see that the potting boat had hauled anchor and drifted off to the north, running before the wind; even at this distance he could make out that someone had propped the lateen sail out to one side to make the most of the wind.

At the very least, there was some. What if they lost the wind entirely and had to row back to the house with a single pair of oars?

Men had hanged for far less than this.

‘ Now! ’ Greville ordered, and the yacht leaped forward across the water as Byron took the tiller, steering her into the wind once more, even as Jamie edged past to haul up the last of the anchor-chain, coiling and cleating it, as well as the seaweed-coated line, the heap of barrels glistening in the weak sunlight.

‘I don’t like it,’ Byron said, hauling in the jib sheet a little to trim the smaller sail with surprising efficiency, his muscled forearms bare to the elbow. ‘I don’t bloody like the fact there’s no one out here. It’s too quiet.’

‘There’s little enough we can do about that. Anyone who is minded to had best just pray.’ Lascelles squinted into the sun as a skein of cloud slid away. There was nothing they could do but sail.