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Greville went down the hill at a jolting run with Cressida in his arms, leaving Lascelles, Jamie and Oliver Tait to deal with the dead soldier stretched out on that blanket of rust-brown pine needles. Lascelles had turned to him on instinct in the half moment before he raised the pistol and fired.

Greville, don’t. Remember the court martial. You’re a better man than this—

No, I’m not. Greville squeezed the trigger as he spoke.

Now he cradled the dead weight of Cressida’s body.

Her face was sweat-streaked, turned into his chest in a gesture of trust that crushed the breath from his lungs.

The high arch of her brow was obscured by gunpowder, and he tried not to think of her executing a perfect pas de tout in his mother’s ballroom, long ago.

He could only be grateful she was unconscious because so many bones must have shattered in her right ankle.

If only he were not so afraid that she wouldn’t wake up: sometimes it happened like that, if wound-fever didn’t take hold.

Just the shock of a gunshot wound was sometimes enough to stop a heart, and carrying her like this he couldn’t check her pulse or brush the knotted auburn curls from her pale throat.

All he could do was pray in silence as he sometimes did before a battle.

Afterwards, Greville would remember that journey downhill in a blur of shattered images: vivid green beech leaves against the sky as they reached the edges of the wood, dark leaf mould at his feet and golden-yellow chanterelle mushrooms growing at the tree roots.

He gathered his wits when he reached the servants’ quarters at the back of the house, bearing her in his arms through an empty laundry yard and into the scullery, carrying her now when she needed him, as he should have done for years.

Mrs Scudamore came first, followed by the footman Tam MacCannell and Lilias, even Roberts, and Greville heard himself giving orders as if to his own men, as all other sound drained from the world.

He carried her through the great stone-flagged hall, where Cleveland stood quietly eviscerating a group of eight exhausted royal marines, who had come to the front door with Byron, who was still soaked to the skin and leaning against the wall watching the scene with an unusually martial light in his eyes.

Cleveland turned as Greville passed, with the briefest of nods.

Greville found that he didn’t care about any of it, or what might happen to them all once the gunpowder smoke had cleared; he just made for their own bedchamber, running up the stairs because Cressida was bleeding freely.

He knew she was still alive because he could hear her breathing now, fast and shallow, but that was no good, because men breathed like that when they bled out and died.

She was cold, too, and Greville knew too well what that meant.

Mrs Scudamore and Ines spread an old linen sheet across the bed before he laid her down at last.

‘Hold her hand!’ he said to Ines and Lilias.

‘Talk to her.’ He’d not let her think she was alone and friendless, not this time.

Greville had cut away what remained of Cressida’s jean boot by the time Lascelles came running up the stairs with Oliver and Jamie, and Greville was grateful for someone else who had seen a battlefield.

The next half hour passed like battles sometimes did, in a jumbled series of staccato moments: blood, bandages, hot water, until there was nothing to do but give her laudanum and wait to hear if Gunn had already returned to his regiment or if he was still on leave with his mother and wife at Leirinmore.

With Mrs Scudamore’s arm around her shoulders, Cressida turned her face away from the cup of laudanum tisane that Ines held to her lips, speaking to the girl in Portuguese that only Greville and Lascelles understood.

‘You know I can’t drink that stuff, menina, not now,’ she said.

‘You must, mistress, you’re feverish and it’s best you sleep it through,’ Ines said, with none of her usual pert manner.

Cressida closed her eyes, and Greville understood that of course the women of the baggage train kept their guard through the night, too: what other choice did they have?

He took the cup from Ines’s hands and spoke in Portuguese to his wife. ‘You’ve finished your watch. Rest now, meu querida.’

*

Cressida woke to find her bedchamber in darkness, alleviated only by moonlight shafting in between the curtains.

Dull, aching pain radiated from her ankle and moving her foot even just a little made her feel sick, so she lay still, unable to examine it for herself.

In that moment, she felt beyond reach of harm and only understood why when she turned her head and saw Greville sprawled in the armchair drawn close to her bed with his long legs stretched out beneath the window.

She remembered Annis again, and her father raising both hands in the air before they shot him down; she was not safe at all, because any magistrate worth his salt would take one look at her chequered reputation and reach for the black cap, if they bothered with such gothic displays in Scotland before handing down a sentence of death.

Either way, she’d hang this time, one way or another, earl’s daughter or not: the news-sheets would enjoy that.

Greville stirred as she woke and took her hand, and the sense of loss crushed her chest and throat so that she wasn’t able to speak.

‘You wouldn’t hold my hand if you knew all the things I’ve done.’ She tried for a smile.

‘I’ll be the judge of that. Do you think I’ll just sit here and allow an opinionated, vexatious woman like yourself to tell me what to think?’

‘I can’t imagine a tyrant like yourself would allow anyone to tell you what to think, even if she were an amiable, well-disposed young woman of reputation.’

‘Which you have never been.’ The laughter went out of his expression. Greville rested his elbows on the edge of the mattress and raked both hands through his hair, looking up at her with his brows raised a little.

‘I’m going to assume you don’t know that we dropped the weapons in the sea and George Byron insisted on escorting their captain up to the house so he and Cleveland could personally excoriate the man for disturbing a household in mourning.’

‘It was neatly designed,’ Cressida said, and she told him how Rosmoney had sprung a trap for the poor and the starving on the orders of Lord Liverpool and the Committee of Secrecy.

‘The whole thing is a ruse, built to catch men like Jamie and whoever handled the guns and ammunition, let alone whoever received them at the other end and planned to use them.’

‘I know,’ Greville replied. ‘Lascelles got wind of it and came to warn us; I suppose it’s good to know there’s still some of the old Arthur left in there. You’re a little feverish, you know.’

Cressida closed her eyes. ‘How lowering to be so very dispensable.’

‘You’re not dispensable to me.’

She smiled then. ‘You can marry some woman of birth and sense and beauty, and in all likelihood we’ll never cross paths again, unless at one of those chaotic balls fuelled by brandy and hysteria like there was after Talavera,’ Cressida said.

‘To be honest, my blood runs cold at the thought of you at such a ball, if I knew I couldn’t have you afterwards,’ Greville said, sidestepping the rest of their history as though it were irrelevant.

‘And, my dear, you seem to forget that for me to marry again you’d have to die, which Gunn assures me you’re unlikely to do.

He says you’ve a constitution of iron, which I could have told him.

And if I hadn’t been so grateful to him for saving your foot, I would have. ’

She wanted to reply that it didn’t matter if she walked or danced again or not, because neither dukes nor respectable aristocratic women were charged with murder when she was available, the disgraced daughter of a rebel, informer and spy.

‘You do realise that I’m the most likely person here to be suspected of killing Annis,’ Cressida said. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘Of course, but to start with you’re my wife, and they don’t hang Nightingales.

Secondly, Lascelles killed Annis, and so her death will be recorded as misadventure.

The government doesn’t like it when men start shooting in the House of Commons, even if the people who organised and paid for it are really very respectable. ’

Cressida stared at him, and then let out a short crack of laughter.

‘You could divorce me, though,’ she said. ‘And you probably should, considering that I lied to you by omission I don’t know how many times.’

And because I bore a stillborn child in Portugal, and I don’t know whether you were the father or Cleveland.

‘What, and allow you to serve up your tender mercies to some other poor soul?’ Greville said, with a certain look. ‘I don’t think so. Now drink this, before you talk yourself into a real fever.’

Cressida took the cup of tisane that he held out, drinking it in easy stages.

‘You must be feeling low,’ Greville went on. ‘It’s quite unsettling to see you adhering to a simple sensible request.’

‘Don’t get too used to it,’ Cressida said, grateful that his hand found hers in that moment, so that he clasped his long, strong fingers around her own, and all she need think about was the warmth of his touch.

*

Greville woke in the armchair at Cressida’s bedside, aching all over, to find Kitty briskly drawing open the curtains in a way that reminded him of their old nurse.

‘Wake up, dadash,’ Kitty said, deploying the Persian term of endearment she used for none of her other brothers.

She wore a tartan wrap against the morning chill, the Alasdair colours bright against the pale linen of her gown.

Greville stretched and cursed as his sister stepped away, allowing Ines to set a cup of steaming coffee down on the bedside chest of drawers.

Cressida was already awake, damn them all, and likely had been for some time, because she was sitting up with a shawl tucked around her shoulders, and Ines had tidied her hair.

She should still be resting, but instead she watched as Cleveland came in with Lascelles, both of them equally well put together for the hour of the day, which was irritating until you remembered the cold-eyed termagant of a father that they had both bowed to at four o’clock every afternoon for the short duration of their childhoods.

The Lascelles were followed by Byron, en deshabille in his embroidered banyan, and Jamie, dressed with meticulous attention to detail.

Somers and Oliver came in, too, and Somers closed the door behind them all, impassive as ever.

As Oliver stepped past Jamie, the backs of their hands touched so briefly that anyone less sharp-eyed than Cressida would have surely missed it: so this was how the land lay, and may heaven keep them both.

‘Cressida, you damn well mustn’t scare us like that again,’ Jamie said, sounding for a moment like the young boy she had once nursed through a fever with melodramatic novels and too much ginger wine. ‘You must be so uncomfortable and bored. I’ll sit and read to you if you’d like it.’

Cressida smiled at him. ‘What a charming thought, a chroí.’

Jamie frowned at her. ‘You really are tired. Greville says you only ever speak in Irish when you’re exhausted.’

Cressida caught Greville’s eye and he smiled at her; they were the only two who knew when she lost herself and called out in that language.

Even so, he sensed a slight, sudden distance, as if she had just withdrawn into herself, but there was time enough to deal with that, or so he thought.

Later, and not for the first time, Greville would come to wish that he had granted his wife his full attention in that moment.

Kitty smiled with the sort of iron resolve that one only really saw in women who regularly managed young people not yet at their majority.

‘Of course Cressida is tired, my dear. I’m sure Lord Bute would be very pleased with your company, Jamie.

Mrs Scudamore thinks that he would be far better for the companionship of his girls, but as they are not here, I’m sure you’ll do your best to comfort him.

I always think that youth is the best tonic for tragedy. ’

Jamie looked up and noted the expression on Greville’s face.

He bowed, dropping a cousinly kiss on Cressida’s forehead before he went out.

Somers closed the door behind him and removed the cloth from a tray of ham sandwiches he had set down upon the table near the fire, beside the Delftware ewer and washbasin.

There was a jug of coffee, too, and a decanter of whisky which had already been liberally applied to Greville’s coffee, scalding down his throat.

‘It’s Annis’s death that frightens me,’ Kitty said, finishing off a sandwich and handing the plate to Lascelles.

‘Even if it’s passed off as a suicide, we all know that someone at Drochcala actually killed her.

Everyone here had reason to loathe her, but how on earth do we know they won’t do it again?

Surely that’s far more difficult to deal with even than being accused of smuggling weapons to rebels, which I need not remind you all amounts to treason, or the fact that Greville killed a British soldier in cold blood.

And we all had a reason to silence Annis. ’

Greville didn’t miss the look of extreme misgiving that Cleveland gave to his brother in the moment that Lascelles smiled and helped himself to a sandwich.

‘I can tell you now that no one in this room has any cause to fear Annis’s killer, now or ever.’ Lascelles consumed his sandwich in just two bites. ‘I stood and watched and made sure she was dead, which was remarkably unpleasant. But one has to be humane about these things.’

Cleveland stared at him. ‘As we’ve said, I’m sure Gunn will be pleased to record the death as misadventure.’

‘Whether he likes it or not. I sent a bird last night with the orders for Chas’ release,’ Lascelles went on. ‘We all have the Dowager Lady Crauford to thank for the fact that the entire mess was kept silent in London.’

When Byron spoke, his tone was measured and caustic. ‘Thank goodness for that.’