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Four days before Christmas, Cressida climbed the snow-covered ramparts of the hill fort behind the dower house at Summercourt with a basket over her arm, now able to manage the climb without her walking stick.

She had come ready with a hip flask and a pair of secateurs to cut holly and ivy for Sylvia Crauford’s mantelpieces.

Eddying snow blew in her face as she stopped to look back down the valley at the grey bulk of the church and the village huddled along the old Roman road.

The road ran straight as a die through the landscape, flanked by cottages with lamp-lit windows glowing like strings of fair-folk lanterns.

In the village, they called this hill the old camp.

In Cressida’s view, these earthworks had been made or stolen by Roman soldiers.

Master tacticians, they knew how to use the ground, and sweeping views of valleys and plains reached out to all four points of the compass.

And yet what was the use in wasting her time thinking of armies and tactics and warfare here?

The most exciting conflict at Sylvia’s house took place in the servants’ hall, where Sylvia’s butler had a long-running feud with her housekeeper.

Cressida suspected the battle was fuelled by frustrated desire and had placed quite a substantial bet with Sylvia that war would continue to be waged over the state of the linen until Sheringham made an honourable woman of the widowed Mrs Reston.

She turned back to see that Kitty had caught up with her, striding up the hill armed with a stout stick.

Her children and the younger Crauford siblings had gone a little further west around the ramparts, calling out to one another as they collected mistletoe and holly, and for once since the eve of St Nicholas’s Day she and Kitty could be private – almost an impossibility in a house crammed with Nightingales in the weeks before Christmas.

‘Cressida, how long are you going to stay here with Mama?’ Kitty said, not unkindly.

‘What are you going to do when the rest of us have kept Christmas at Summercourt and flown the coop? By the end of January, it’ll just be you and Sylvia again and, say what you like, I’ll never believe that you’re content with her life in the country. ’

Cressida laughed. ‘It’s just as well that you, Chas, Alasdair and the boys and all the children are staying with us. At breakfast, Chas swore that he’d commit fratricide if he had to listen to Crauford’s moralising any longer than necessary.’

‘Sylvia makes a party of every evening,’ Kitty said, ‘and the truth is, Crauford and Marianne are quiet souls, aren’t they? Come on, you know they’re both happier at Summercourt without the rest of us, playing chess and discussing next year’s planting.’

‘I only hope their children are as retiring as they are, otherwise heaven help them all,’ Cressida said, watching pale clouds chase one another across a yellow-tinged winter sky pregnant with more snow.

‘Stop trying to alter the subject,’ Kitty said, with a sharp look.

‘How long will you stay out here in this backwater before you get bored enough to do something awful? Sylvia won’t be back in London until at least March, and you won’t convince me that you can stand another three months of gardening society meetings or musical recitals in stuffy drawing rooms.’ She looked away, then, obviously steeling herself. ‘Has anyone heard from Greville?’

‘Not for weeks.’ Cressida opened her hip flask and took a draught of sloe gin.

‘He can’t really communicate anything to us in case it’s intercepted by the French: you know all of the Allied troops in Spain have been in retreat.

Jamie and Oliver are doing well with Greville’s regiment, I hear, but all this time Greville and Lascelles will have been scouting ahead of the route into Portugal. No one knows where they are.’

‘And yet every drawing room in England is populated by experts,’ Kitty said, as a red kite wheeled above them.

‘Consider it: just last night, the vicar was adamant that we’d only lost a few hundred men in the last retreat, whereas Crauford maintains it’s in the tens of thousands. It’s incredibly tiresome.’

Cressida didn’t reply; spotting Kitty’s boys and the younger Nightingales pelting each other with snowballs on the ramparts of the hill fort, she wished she could still run and join them.

*

Later that evening, Sylvia’s drawing room was bright with candlelight.

Painted shutters were drawn closed across the tall windows, held fast with brass clasps, and the hearth was garlanded with ivy woven with dried oranges, so that the scent permeated the room along with the warmth of candlewax and pine sap.

Along with Kitty, Sylvia had gathered a court of local ladies around her to gossip and play bouts-rimés , as if there were nothing better to do with one’s life than swap scandal.

Kitty’s kindly husband, Alasdair, gamely led a discussion among the men about the possibilities locally for salmon fishing, and how they compared to his native Scotland, where he would much rather have been, although he was far too well mannered to betray that.

Chas and his younger siblings and cousins clustered around the walnut table, engaged in a raucous game of fish with the vicar’s son and his formidable freckled cousin, who kept accusing them all of cheating, justifiably, in Cressida’s estimation.

‘Come on, Cressida,’ Chas called out, laughing. ‘Stop trying to pretend you’re interested in my mother’s word-games. We need you to defend us against outrageous charges.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be able to do that?’ Cressida retorted. ‘I don’t know what else they’re teaching you at university, if you can’t argue and debate – I pity the first Luddite you defend in court if you can’t put up a fight against poor Miss Beardsley.’

Miss Beardsley laughed, holding up her hands. ‘If you Nightingales don’t stop cheating, I swear I’ll go into hysterics.’

‘Don’t do that,’ Cressida advised. She drained her third glass of champagne, steadying herself as she got up, and yet certain in the knowledge that she couldn’t stay inside for one moment longer. She had to escape to breathe.

The stable-yard was cold and quiet, the cobbles slick with a thin layer of frost, so that Cressida was glad of the wooden pattens that she’d slipped on over her boots by the scullery door.

Leaning on the gate, Cressida tugged the shawl around her shoulders and gazed out across tumbling fields towards the moonlit church.

Sensing that she was not alone, a trickle of fear slid down her back.

At last. What else did one expect, uncovering corruption and betrayal in the heart of the establishment that went so deep it had even silenced Arthur Lascelles for five minutes?

Even as Cressida made the choice not to reach for her knife because it would be quicker that way, she understood that in fact she didn’t need to.

Instead, she turned to face Lord Greville Nightingale crossing the stable-yard towards her in his greatcoat.

She caught a glimpse of braiding: he was still in uniform, unusually gaunt, and the breath caught in her throat.

‘We must stop meeting like this,’ she said, with all the cold distance she could muster.

Greville’s reply to that was swift and uncompromising: he lifted her in his arms so that she sat on the gate wrapped in her shawl, and then he kissed her hard on the mouth, pushing away her tears with the edge of his thumb.

Finally, he pulled back and absent-mindedly kissed her on the forehead as though he had been out cutting wheat in the fields for a day, and not guarding a starving retreating army with his rifle.

‘If you’re going to attempt the cold, uncaring ice queen, you’d do better not to weep. Are you drunk?’ he said, conversationally. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you were. I always used to go wild with boredom here as well.’

She should pull away, she should tell him about the child and watch him walk off in disgust, but her face was now pressed against the front of his greatcoat and he teased a curl of her hair with his fingertip in such a way that heat pulsed at her core. ‘How in the devil did you get here?’

He held out one hand and she took it, allowing him to help her down from her undignified position on the gate; the ankle had healed well, but she dared not risk leaping down in the way she once would have done.

‘My mount threw a shoe about four miles away – I left him with Vaughan at the toll-house and walked. I’d as lief go on Shanks’s pony straight here than walk back another four miles and rouse the smithy.

’ He kissed her again, running both hands down her back to her rear, pulling her close.

‘Cressida, whatever it is you’re trying to save me from, can you please do me the honour of kindly not? ’

‘In that case, can you do me the honour of listening to what I have to say?’ Cressida said. ‘Greville, we didn’t have time to discuss anything at Drochcala, not really.’

‘No, you were too busy nearly dying, and terrifying me, and then absconding before we’d had the chance to talk properly,’ Greville said, calmly.

‘I’ve been sent home on leave. Do you think I never knew you at all?

Do you think I didn’t realise you were holding something at a distance, from yourself as much as from me?

’ He let out a breath, looking away. ‘My love, we were apart for years, and you lived in the train of an army, entirely on your wits. Do you think I don’t know what you must have had to do to survive? ’

‘You might want to walk away from me when I tell you the whole.’

‘You can tell me anything you please, but I promise I’ll never do that again.

’ Greville watched her for a moment. ‘Will you come inside with me? I mean, will you come away with me, because you were born to be an outrageous adventurer, and quite frankly the thought of you sitting here playing propriety for just long enough to ask for a respectable divorce is not something I’ll countenance.

But will you come inside first? Because there are things that I’ve been longing to do to you, and for you, since long before I boarded the ship. ’

Cressida’s answer was simple, even as she kissed his smile. ‘Yes, Greville.’