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A quarter of an hour before, Cressida counted in silence as she listened to the even rhythm of her own breathing.

Crouching at her side against the wall furthest from the door, Rosmoney gave her a quick smile and held up four fingers; he was actually enjoying this.

To judge by the soft footfalls she could now hear, they were surrounded by at least four men, perhaps more.

A thread of light streaked in between rotting shutters, strong sunlight burning away the mist.

‘Come out and show yourselves.’ The voice rang out strong and clear, echoing down the fellside, the voice of a well-bred Englishman.

‘Papa, you stay here,’ Cressida said. ‘I’ll go out first, and then you can explain you’re under orders.’

Rosmoney turned to look at her with a flash of the genuine anger she had so rarely seen. ‘Use the sense you were born with. It’s far too great a risk.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll go,’ Cressida said, telling him the truth that she had told no one else.

He was coward enough to let her do it, she knew that. But this time Rosmoney just watched her, as if he saw her then for the first time.

‘I think not: you’ve so much still left to live for,’ he said, and Cressida didn’t tell him that when she closed her eyes at night, she still saw the child wrapped in rags, perfectly formed but born too soon, with a cap of dark hair that might have been gifted by Greville.

It was common, though, for infants’ hair to rub away and grow fair, guinea-gold.

Rosmoney was already on his feet.

‘Papa—’ she said quietly, even as the soldiers outside called out again. We know you’re in there.

He relinquished her arm and she felt his hand grip her shoulder. ‘Do as I tell you,’ he said, ‘do you understand? It’ll be a simple matter to explain. Wait here.’

Rosmoney walked to the door then, and softly, quietly, Cressida sang for him as she had done long ago, a rebel song in the language she had learned from his servants, but with never the right to call her own.

As she watched, her father kicked open the door, admitting a savage burst of daylight, with his hands held high in the air as he walked into a hail of musket fire.

*

First of all, Cressida couldn’t move, couldn’t even draw breath in the clouds of thick sulphurous smoke.

Rosmoney died before he hit the flagstones.

Blinded by smoke and choking on the familiar stink of spent gunpowder, Cressida felt along the damp stone wall for the windowsill, and every moment stretched to an hour.

Her mind was clear as she placed her hands carefully on the sill and hauled herself up onto the ledge with strength she hadn’t been close to possessing in that world of gilded teacups, champagne, and open deceit.

Then, Cressida let herself fall out into the daylight, onto the wiry fellside grass.

Rummaging in her skirts, she drew the small pistol from the holster at her waist, loading and priming it ready to fire, half choking on the bitter taste of gunpowder as she bit off the end of her cartridge and rammed the ball down into the muzzle.

She ran, hard and fast, with tears streaming down her face for her father at last, after fourteen long years, but even before Cressida chanced a look over her shoulder, she saw that a young marine had spotted her and was now loping along in easy pursuit, just like a sighthound after a rabbit.

Cressida stopped and turned around to face him, breathing hard. Even starting to explain was next to impossible. He smiled at her, just the type of young man you might meet in a dowager’s drawing room at Christmas, seeming to see straight through every last scrap of linen she wore.

Cressida scanned the fellside behind him: there was no sign of the rest of the men, who must have gone into the bothy after her father.

She could run, but this boy soldier would be faster.

Cressida lowered her hands in the barest of half moments and shot him in the leg.

He went down with the shock, but not before firing at her.

Cressida felt a burst of sickening agony in her ankle, even as she breathed in the stink of gunpowder again, and all was lost in the smoke.

Alone on the fellside, she crawled hand over hand across tumbled grass and heather, traversing outcrops of scattered rock spotted with patches of grey and ochre lichen, even as black mist intruded all around the edges of her field of vision.

With her sight fading, she smelled the woodland before she was really aware of it, pine sap and leaf mould.

Stones pressed into her bleeding palms, digging into her knees, and it was as hard to draw breath as it was not to allow the skirts of her gown and petticoats to tangle around her legs.

Nausea surged through her, unstoppable, and she vomited up green bile, having nothing else left.

The marine had aimed his pistol at her right ankle: what was left of that would swell and rot.

Either that rot would poison her blood or she’d face the surgeon’s saw so that she lived to meet one of those men, like Rosmoney, who carried out the most secret wishes of the government with knives and garrotting wires in dark streets at night; men who had long since sold what was left of their honour.

She thought of Greville, and the way he would rest a hand on Kitty’s shoulder.

How must it feel to be Kitty, absolutely sure of another person in that way?

She needed Greville now, but he’d soon enough know that she wasn’t the woman he thought he’d married, that she had in fact been a mother too, for however short a time, and God only knew that woman was bad enough.

She’d as lief die under the sky, in a place of her choosing, that was all.

The marine was in pursuit. He staggered out from between a stand of young birch trees, his hands and face black with gunpowder.

Even with blood streaming from his thigh, blooming red on his pale grey breeches, he was quicker on foot than she could ever be now.

She had lost the pistol and now had only the knife sheathed at her thigh.

Cressida snatched up her skirts and drew it all the same, and he grinned at the sight of her bare stockinged legs.

Crawling to the nearest tree, Cressida hauled herself upright, clinging to the solid trunk even as the sharp scent of pine sap hit the back of her throat.

Clutching the knife, she blinked away that encroaching darkness, but it was little use.

She’d never set both feet to the ground again, let alone walk again or dance.

The marine approached, swaying like a man drunk.

‘I hate doing this,’ he said, raising the pistol, and Cressida wished he hadn’t smiled, even as the shot rang out and the air filled with choking sulphuric gunpowder smoke.

The last thing she saw before darkness closed her eyes was the perfect scarlet hole blooming in the centre of the boy’s forehead: and he was just a boy, really, after all.

The last thing she heard was Greville’s familiar voice in her ear – Don’t you dare leave me – just as she’d always imagined.