Page 6

A week later

Lascelles second-best guest chamber must once have been a nursery: the window was barred.

Cressida sat on the end of the bed, craving brandy.

The past was not a place in which she cared to dwell, even with George Byron, and yet the present had little to recommend it.

She shivered a little, the tell-tale prickling between her shoulder blades a sure sign that she was to be blessed with company at last, even before footfalls grew louder upon the staircase.

Greville came in first and stood by the door with the light from the stairway casement window behind him, the set of his shoulders so breathtakingly familiar as he stepped forward out of the shadows.

It was early and his gilded dark hair was a little damp from earthenware jug and basin, his face cast into shadow so that she could not read his expression.

‘And so to what do I owe this pleasure?’ Cressida said, looking past her husband to address Arthur Lascelles, who had come in after him, elegant and unruffled.

Greville and Lascelles shared the same ability to move quietly.

Greville, she noticed, retired this trait on civilian territory, making his presence felt with a firm light tread.

Lascelles did not, moving in complete silence, as though he were still tracking French troops across some deserted mountain pass.

‘You look a ruin, Cress,’ Lascelles said, with a perfunctory bow. ‘Don’t mind your husband: he’s been demonstrating to polite society that Devil Nightingale is back in London – he’s a little the worse for wear.’

Greville just stalked off to the window.

It cost Cressida something to ignore him, but she did, smiling at Lascelles. ‘My maid hasn’t been allowed to return to me, as you know very well, and I’ve worn the same gown since last week. Where is she?’ Alone in a strange land, even Ines would be afraid.

‘The chit is quite safe – she’s been driving Gerard to distraction in the kitchen all week.

She makes the most extraordinary custards and pastries, but has no notion of clearing up after herself.

’ Lascelles glanced at the clock above the mantelpiece, as if already wishing an unpleasant task to be over with.

‘I don’t know how in hell’s name you thought you’d get away with escaping. ’

‘I managed nicely until I made the mistake of trusting Lord Rosmoney,’ Cressida said.

‘You made the mistake of hoping he was in possession of anything resembling a guiding principle or enough funds not to trade his own daughter like a heifer.’

‘Shut up, Arthur.’ Greville spoke from his place by the window; he flexed the fingers of one hand, responding as though she had touched him.

He turned to address her then, Lascelles’ presence be damned, all social nicety stripped away.

‘How could you have done it, all this godforsaken time? Marching behind the bloody army with no protection—’ Greville bit off the end of his sentence and turned back to the window, directing his disgust out at a nursemaid leading two starched, goffered children to the fenced garden, armed with a wooden hoop and a ball.

That unspoken word was loudest of all: no protection, and no honour, either.

Of all the men to judge her. Sunlight streamed in past the open shutters.

At Badajoz, he’d refused even to speak to her, but his lordship had clearly decided that now was the moment.

She’d pictured this so many times, rehearsing it at odd moments, living through a reckoning with her estranged husband while climbing barefoot up an unforgiving hillside where the air was rich with the scent of wild juniper and thyme, or before drifting off into fitful sleep in some rain-soaked bivouac.

In all those imagined scenes, Lord Greville Nightingale had been his usual louche and scornful self.

Not once in all that time had she ever expected him to be angry.

She felt the force of his restrained emotion even across the room. Sunlight struck off his gilded epaulettes, picking out those dark curls bleached by the Spanish heat.

‘Must we really do this now?’ Lascelles said, leaning against the book-case with his arms folded.

‘Anything could have happened to you, and it damn nearly did at Badajoz,’ Greville went on, ignoring Lascelles completely and enunciating each word with a cold precision that sent a wild heat pooling in her belly. No.

Cressida chose her tone with great care. ‘Is survival thus far something I should be ashamed of, my lord?’

Greville moved then with sudden, shocking speed, leaving the window to step closer with predatory ease – he kept his distance, though, the space between them a reminder of all they’d thrown away.

‘You’re the best judge of that; did you enjoy your war?

’ His eyes darkened. ‘Was it a pleasant change from balls and rout parties, following the army with a man you had only just met, watching women and children die by the side of the road; did it make you really feel for the first time? I don’t know what in hell’s name you were thinking. ’

Cressida spoke with deliberate, manufactured ennui; he’d never really known her at all.

‘Oh yes, one feels changed, you know. As if one for the first time understands what really matters in terms of human experience. I shall have so much to talk about when I start going to parties again – people here don’t really understand, do they? Living in their comfortable bubble.’

‘No one you know will so much as look at you in the street if you get out of this house alive, and well you know it.’

Sitting apart from them both at the table, Lascelles raised one well-shaped brow. ‘If we might turn to the matter in hand?’

Greville shrugged at that and walked over to the window again without looking at her this time. He was reading through a sheaf of papers now with complete absorption, as though making the best use of his time before sending some hapless private soldier to be flogged.

Lascelles glanced up at her then, tracing the tiled tabletop with the tip of one gloved finger.

‘Listen, don’t mind Nightingale.’ His smile was gentle even as he moved in for the kill.

‘We’ve been through this before, but you realise that on paper what you did is treason.

A capital offence. All rather a mess, liaising, shall we say, for months with a French commandant. ’

Pierre. He was so charming, so vividly alive in everything he did, from the way he savoured his coffee in the morning to his manner of ensuring her pleasure, that Cressida wouldn’t have believed he was dead had she not seen what was left of his head. But he’d died at Badajoz like so many others.

At the window, Greville continued to leaf through his briefing with no more interest than if they were discussing the best way to jug a hare.

‘Need we go over this again, Major Lascelles?’ she said, calmly, using his title as a reminder of the professional distance that now yawned between them.

‘And yes, as you’re more than aware, I had been living under the protection of Commandant Pierre Moreau for several months when Badajoz fell to our own side, because you ordered it.

Is it really treason when the information I provided at considerable risk allowed you to attack the city before Marshal Soult arrived with reinforcements? ’

‘You? Don’t you mean us?’ Lascelles asked, lightly.

Greville turned around to face them both then with something akin to murder in his eyes, which, despite Cressida’s better judgement, her body responded to with sudden, violent arousal.

Lascelles glanced at her with his I’ll manage this expression and Greville turned his attention back to his papers.

‘Greville, a little while after Cressida’s love died at Talavera, Cressida was captured with some of our other camp followers.

’ Lascelles met Cressida’s eyes. She stared back.

‘After some time, they made their way back to us. They all passed on as much information as they could: stores, morale, even supplies of ammunition, but being fluent in French, Cressida was able to be even more precise.’

Cressida recalled warm air against her naked skin, the jeers and laughter as she and the seven other women, aged between fifteen and sixty-three, were released to make their own way back to the English camp, albeit without a stitch of clothing.

A muscle twitched in Greville’s jaw as he leafed through his papers.

‘A while after that,’ Lascelles said, carefully, ‘Cressida was in a position to help us further. She returned to the French camp and fell into the protection of a French officer.’

Greville did look up then. ‘Oh, this is all it needed.’ The vicious humour in his voice was interwoven with that very apparent restrained anger, but it was genuine. He’d always been just as quick to laugh at his own absurdities as he would at anyone else’s.

‘So we’ve established to everyone’s satisfaction including Lord Greville’s that while it might have looked as though I were guilty of treason and consorting with the enemy, I’m in fact not.

Can I suggest that you tell me what you actually want, Lascelles?

’ Cressida spoke with even calm: he’d be just as quick as any other man to accuse her of hysteria if she so much as raised her voice.

He shrugged. ‘Any ordinary woman of the baggage train would have swung already. Not for consorting with a French officer but for getting caught, Cress. I have no use for incompetence.’

‘Arthur, without Rosmoney’s help, I wouldn’t be here now.’

‘You’re a fool,’ Lascelles said. ‘For now, you’re not a dead fool. I need your assistance, or more accurately the War Office and the Committee of Secrecy do.’

Greville leaned against the window frame, watching them both with renewed focus.

‘You’re in the Corps of Guides, Arthur. What are you doing, mixing yourself up with the War Office?

Military intelligence is one thing, but you want a very long damn spoon if you’re dining with Cressida’s spymasters.

Livepool and the Committee of Secrecy are ruthless. ’

‘Use your brains,’ Cressida snapped. ‘Your love affairs might be described as a series of bad decisions. Arthur’s might take him to the gallows or the stocks.’

‘Some of us need to make ourselves indispensable,’ Lascelles said, dispassionate.

Cressida stared at him. ‘Very well. What do you want me to do?’