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‘Listen, Greville. There’s something else we need to discuss besides your wife.’ In the Oxford Arms, Lascelles signalled for more porter and more gin.

‘There really isn’t,’ Greville said, cursing his own irrationality.

Why should he give a damn where Cressida was?

Why should he care if her spymaster Lord Liverpool sent some hired blade to slip a knife between her ribs in some dark alley.

Briefly, Greville closed his eyes and saw the winning hand he’d been holding when she burned his world to ash at her cousin’s spring ball: two aces, a jack and a king.

It was the silence he remembered, a kind of hush rolling through Annis Bute’s card-room like a sea fog.

It had sent him reaching for a weapon he didn’t have, long before he’d learned the instincts of an army officer.

‘It’s a family matter, and it concerns your cousin,’ Lascelles went on, inexorable.

‘I haven’t laid eyes on a single member of my family in years, thank God.’ For Christ’s sake, was it not enough to have a dishonoured wife accused of treason?

Lascelles frowned, contemplating his port. ‘James Nightingale needs to take greater care in the friends he chooses.’

Jamie. Greville watched flames flickering in the grate, recalling a studious youth with a tangle of dark blond hair made constantly untidy by his habit of raking his fingers through it as he translated Greek satires.

Jamie Nightingale was the adopted son of Greville’s dissolute Uncle Tristan, and his gift for incisive wit smoothed a path dogged by rumours that Lord Tristan Nightingale had actually been his natural father.

‘What do you mean, Jamie needs to take more care in his friends?’ Greville chose his words with the last of his patience.

‘Tristan left him everything when he died: he’s as rich as Croesus, but I wouldn’t have had him tipped to get involved with fortune-hunters.

He’s not that green.’ Nothing about this added up.

‘I’m not talking about that kind of trouble,’ Lascelles said. ‘Last winter, Jamie and your brother Charles were part of a house party in Nottinghamshire, at Wyncham Court.’

‘Listen, come to the point, Arthur. Jamie’s affairs are nothing to do with me. If he accepts an invitation to some provincial house party, that’s his business.’

‘Wyncham Hall is four miles from Newstead Abbey,’ Lascelles went on.

The hairs on the back of Greville’s neck rose up.

He consoled himself with the knowledge that Lascelles was helplessly reliving the same unspeakable Newstead memories: Byron’s housekeeper’s niece, Meg, reclining on the dining room table wearing nothing but an arrangement of piped whipped cream and candied fruit around her quim; Byron arguing ferociously across the table with a newly married Cressida about the nature of morality and reality, even though all Greville could really recall was the fire in her fine dark eyes.

‘Well?’ Greville managed, at last.

Lascelles sighed. ‘Last winter, George Byron regularly rode across from Newstead to join the young Wyncham party. And Byron thinks he’s immortal, especially with all this attention about the poetry.

I don’t believe even he was prepared for how it would be received.

It amounts to hysteria. Byron has been fêting Jamie – inviting him to suppers and those intellectual soirées of his. ’

Greville cocked an eyebrow. ‘And the rest, I take it.’

‘Indeed. And people in my circle are starting to notice.’

‘I bloody hope you’ve been careful since Vere Street,’ Greville said, switching to Portuguese.

‘Of course I’ve been careful.’ Lascelles spoke in a low voice, as well he might – even in a language no one else in the tavern could likely understand.

The scandal showed no sign of abating: six men convicted of sodomy in the wake of a raid on a molly-house, and two lads hanged.

If the wrong people talked about Lascelles’ private life then he stood to lose everything, perhaps even to face the gallows himself.

‘Anyway, I didn’t summon you to the Devil’s Acre so that we could both indulge in an orgy of paranoia.

I’m afraid Jamie’s regard for Byron couldn’t be more obvious, even if they do rage at one another.

Jamie needs to hear a warning from someone he respects. ’

‘I’ll talk to Jamie and tell him to steer a wide berth, for all the good it’s likely to do. I’m little more than a stranger.’

Greville remembered with exhaustion exactly why he hadn’t come on home leave in years and found his gaze drawn towards Thomas, who left the bar at a word from one of the pot-boys and went to the door, with a swift, tense glance over his shoulder at Greville and Lascelles.

Thomas came over holding the jug of porter, his face grim with concern. ‘There’s an individual to see you both in the top room, gents.’

Greville and Lascelles exchanged a glance: Thomas was a grizzled veteran of the American wars who had survived the first twenty years of his life enslaved on a plantation before taking the King’s shilling. If Thomas was wary, Greville would have preferred to send a grenade into the top room first.

‘Just mind out for the soft furnishings, all right?’ Thomas said. ‘Bess has enough to do on laundry day.’

With a nod of thanks to Thomas, Greville and Lascelles moved as one, Greville aware of Bessy’s concerned gaze on him from across the taproom as she wiped down one battered pewter tankard after another.

They went to the narrow door at the back of the taproom – Greville knew it led upstairs, to bedchambers with damp sheets and sad heaps of dust in dingy corners.

Lascelles stood back to let him pass first; the stairs were dark, and he reached into his pocket, curling his fingers around the holster of his pistol.

‘It’s the third door on the right,’ Lascelles said, behind him.

Greville counted the doors, the brass knob cool beneath his touch.

He stepped into the lamp-lit bedchamber where the twelfth Earl of Rosmoney sat very much at his ease at a cracked marble-topped table drawn close to the fire; it was raining outside, and the woman standing at the window had opened it, leaning on the sill as she breathed in the scent of London air washed temporarily clean.

She wore a gown of some pale stuff, impossible not to notice in this gloom, but then again, she’d always been impossible not to notice.

Her hair was piled high atop her head, not loose down her back as, no matter how hard he tried, he could not stop recalling it, those long, tangled curls slipping between his fingers.

Cressida turned to face him, expressionless as he felt the force of her hatred.

Cressida looked from her father to Greville and Lascelles and back again and let out a short burst of amazed laughter.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, no,’ she said, speaking right across him to Lascelles. ‘You can hang me outside Newgate before I’ll have anything to do with bloody Devil.’ She spat out his old nickname like a mouthful of pickled tripe alive with maggots.

Lascelles kept quiet.

‘You don’t mean that, child.’ Rosmoney subjected Greville to a cursory inspection. ‘A second son – you could have aimed higher, my dear.’

‘I wish I could say it pleased me to make your acquaintance at last, my lord,’ Greville said, forcing away a memory of how he used to hold Cressida at night when the worst of the dreams came. She would call for her father then, her voice cracking in the darkness.

‘I’m charmed,’ Rosmoney said, eyeing Greville with distaste.

‘There’s more of Sylvia about you than your father, which is something.

’ He turned to Lascelles, who concealed his anger well, but not from Greville.

‘And now to business. It was a sorry affair this afternoon, Major Lascelles. But we were all foolish and inexperienced once, and I’m always disposed to help the young. ’

Lascelles looked almost impressed. ‘How much do you want for her, Rosmoney?’

Greville happened to glance at Cressida then; she wouldn’t forgive him that, witnessing her swiftly concealed humiliation.

‘Five hundred pounds should suffice,’ Rosmoney went on.

He turned to Greville. ‘I hear you’re something of a hot-head, Nightingale.

Before you consider anything foolish, do bear in mind that I have a total of seventeen hungry, decommissioned soldiers surrounding this tavern.

It would be a great pity if anyone were hurt. ’

Greville walked out, smiling until he reached the street: there would be no witness to say that Lieutenant Colonel the Lord Greville Nightingale had left the Oxford Arms with a face like murder. He stepped to one side to avoid the thin young lad who lurched from the alleyway in a greasy shirt.

‘Penny for a fuck, sir? You look like you need it.’ The lad’s gap-toothed professional smile died as he took in the expression on Greville’s face.

Turning tail, the boy ran lopsided back into the shelter of the alleyway.

For a bare half moment, Greville toyed with the notion of taking the boy’s advice and finding a woman.

But when all was said and done, it was his cock that had got him into this mess in the first place, all those years ago: all roads led back to Cressida. They always did.