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They tacked down Loch Iffrin with the tide against them. Greville adjusted the mainsheet; he’d long since taken the tiller from Byron, who seemed to know that if Greville wasn’t steering the boat, he’d do something worse with his hands.

He kept a keen eye levelled down the loch, taking care not to look at Jamie, who sat watching the black waters of the kyle sweep past with a wooden expression.

Were Jamie and Oliver Tait lovers, in as much as men like Jamie and Lascelles and sometimes Byron ever could be together?

The irony didn’t escape him: Lascelles had dragged him up here to keep a weather eye on Byron, holding his interest in Jamie over Greville’s head.

Instead of making a fool of himself over a poet, Jamie had been swiving a strait-laced estate steward whose unwillingness to smuggle black-market cargo only matched his competence.

And that was when he wasn’t singlehandedly running cargo after cargo of stolen weapons across the Pentland Firth.

On balance, Greville thought, grimly, he’d have preferred to hush up a scandal with Byron.

Jamie’s relationship with Oliver meant more than a tumble in the stables, that much was clear.

Greville couldn’t help recalling Jamie’s fiery, protective expression when he’d surprised them both in the stables, and the way Jamie had stepped forward as if to shield Oliver from harm, as well as Oliver’s obvious exasperation at Jamie’s constitutional addiction to danger.

How they had parted, knowing this cargo would likely lead to ruinous scandal if not the gallows.

They sailed north-west until Loch Iffrin spread into the black, glittering waters of the North Atlantic. Another school of porpoise played along the bows of the yacht, Jamie watching them with a quick smile of pure unalloyed joy.

‘There’s a boat.’ Byron’s voice was sharp, nerves stretched to breaking point. Greville followed his gaze down the loch and saw the navy cutter slicing through the water from the direction of Sangobeg.

‘My word, someone has been busy,’ Lascelles said, with laconic fury, which Greville was glad of because until then he hadn’t been sure whose side Lascelles was actually on.

‘Drop the lot of it. Get it in the water, now,’ Greville heard himself say, and they all moved at once, jettisoning one barrel after the other, the wound in his arm throbbing in slow waves of pain all the while.

The naval cutter was a fair distance away; Christ alone knew where it had come from.

Now at least the barrels were all gone, rifles, pistols and ammunition from the magazine at Enniskillen all making their final slow journey to the bottom of this cold northern ocean, neighbour now only to spider crabs and graceful pods of white beluga whales.

Jamie crouched at the tiller now, turning her back into the wind as Lascelles watched the naval cutter, fingering the holster of the French pistol he’d raided after Talavera.

Greville caught a glimpse of blue jackets and a white sail.

Shit. They had the advantage of wind and tide, with the navy cutter having to beat against a wild wind that shifted and changed like a malignant spirit haunting Loch Iffrin.

Jamie caught the advantage of each change in the wind on every tack.

He seemed to feel no fear, even as he was white-faced with anger.

The naval cutter was much lower in the water and sailed with less expertise, but even so this would be a close-run thing.

Cloud thickened, descending so that all was cloaked in grey mist, and cold gobbets of rain fell even as they sailed so close to the wind that waves crested over the railings.

‘If we make it back to the loch-head, they’ll find us anyway,’ Byron said, with the rain in his face. ‘They’ll come to the house, and Lady Bute has been dead for less than twenty-four hours. It’s like playing choose your own route to the gallows: murder or smuggling.’

‘Cleveland will deal with it,’ Lascelles said, but for once even he looked rattled.

‘Ready about.’ Jamie yanked the tiller towards him as the boom swung around, the sail filling with wind once more, and Greville tightened the jib sheet.

The yacht shot down the loch, flying into the mist with the naval cutter in hard pursuit, the distance between them briefly shortening as the cutter made the best of a gust.

‘Eilean nam Fiadh,’ Jamie said, reading the loch and the precise angle of the wind against his cheekbone. The granite bulk of the island rose out of the water, capped green with young beech trees, heather and ferns – a chance, if nothing else.

‘You can’t be serious,’ Byron said. ‘We’d as good as besiege ourselves. All they’d have to do is hunt for half an hour and they’d have every last one of us.’

‘That’s not what Jamie means,’ Lascelles said. ‘Listen.’

‘It’s less than twenty feet from the island to the mainland,’ Jamie went on.

‘There’s a small natural harbour around the other side.

It’s not much more than a cleft in the rocks.

We anchor her there, where she’ll be clearly visible to that cutter, and then we swim ashore to the mainland.

It’s a sheer climb, but I know those woods.

We’ll come out not far above the track that leads back to the house.

If we can get back to the house before that cutter reaches it, we may at least have a chance. ’

‘In the absence of any better notion, it will have to do.’ Byron’s tone was acidic. ‘I didn’t have a trip to the gallows planned as part of my summer, strangely.’

Jamie shrugged, reading the wind and the pooling tide, and tacked again.

The mainsail and boom swung across the boat so that they all either ducked or moved their seats again, distributing their combined heft to trim the boat.

Against the mist-shrouded horizon, the naval cutter was now the size of Greville’s hand and growing slowly but inexorably larger with every moment.

They may not have been found with the incriminating evidence, but this was the smooth, slick operation of a well-oiled machine.

Greville allowed his mind to linger for a moment on Cressida, and the way she had cried out his name in the dark of the night, asking himself if that would be enough to save them now that she had gone.