Chapter 16
Cressida left Annis and Lord Bute on the south lawn, clad in newly tailored country clothes, interrogating their monosyllabic head gardener about the seedlings Bute had sent up by the mail coach. It was a hard climb for the first half hour, but she’d faced worse terrain many times over. She left the plantation behind and followed the heather-fringed stream in a winding path with a pleasurable heat in her thighs as her muscles worked; please God, clarity of thought would come with the long view of the sea-loch and the North Atlantic. Lascelles was hundreds of miles away, and there was no sign of Byron or Greville. It really was possible: she and Ines could leave with the scanty collection of coinage still in their possession and heaven only knew they ought to.
She rounded a bend and the skirts of her linen gown caught on the heather as she spotted a lone figure on the path ahead. June sunshine warmed the back of her neck, still a treat after the quiet gloom of Lascelles’ second-best guest-chamber, with that door bolted from the outside. Squinting into the sunlight, Cressida shielded her eyes with one hand and recognised even at this distance the familiar figure of the Butes’ young but extremely able estate manager. Oliver Tait had met Cressida, the Butes and Kitty Alasdair off the schooner, organising the vast heap of baggage on the dockside at Fraserburgh and stowing it in the Drochcala landau and the baggage cart with good-humoured competence. He was just as easy on the eye as ever, with smooth brown skin, curling black hair, and a reticent but sincere smile. He’d grown into his bulk, now filling out a well-cut jacket of plain green kerseymere to admirable effect.
Oliver was several hundred yards ahead of her now: he’d left the path, skilfully navigating tussocks of grass and heather not far from the ruined bothy where Lord Bute sometimes hosted stalking lunches. Rosmoney had only ever come to Drochcala for the stalking, silencing the drawing room with his politics: a free Ireland or death. In the end, of course, her father’s known views had ended in neither. Rosmoney hadn’t joined his fellow rebels, hanged on the ramparts of Dublin Castle as the British army swept from farmstead to village, dealing retribution. Cressida could almost see her father making his way catlike down the hill towards her, lean and roguish in ancient twill, the rifle cocked and leaning against his shoulder.
Think of the name, my dear.
It would be foolish to recall the way Greville had looked at Rosmoney in that gloomy bedchamber at the Oxford Arms, as if he would still kill for her.
Sensing a presence behind her before she even heard footfalls, Cressida turned to find Kitty labouring up the rocky hillside, pink in the face beneath a chip-straw bonnet, tied under her chin. Cressida turned back to the path, walking on. What did they have to say to one another, anyway?
They thought Chas was me.
The secret Jamie had shared with her at Crauford House was a revelation any woman of kindness or good sense would divulge to his people. She had neither and it was more than time to sever her ties with that family for good. Cressida recalled Greville looking down at her in Chas’s dressing room with that scalding expression. She’d had her share of lovers, both in pleasure and in desperation; it was truly ridiculous that none had been his match.
‘Cressida, wait!’ Kitty’s voice rang out, a fraction less self-assured than usual.
Walk away,Cressida told herself, furious. Ignore her and walk up the hill. Instead, she waited, looking down at the glittering surface of Loch Iffrin, just visible beyond the canopy of birch trees below. Kitty caught up, taking off her bonnet and fanning her scarlet face, and for what felt like a long time they stood side by side: the time for polite conversation was over.
Cressida gazed out across the loch, with a profound realisation that pretending to return to the bosom of the Nightingale family was almost as complicated as actually doing so. ‘Chas was in a bad way when we left. Have you heard anything from your mother?’
‘Well, his fever broke. I’d scarcely have come, otherwise,’ Kitty said. She looked uncharacteristically tired and unkempt and had left the house in her morning gown of sprigged muslin. ‘You know what Mama is like. She’s equal to almost anything else but always goes to pieces in a sickroom, and will do nothing but make dire pronouncements. I hate to think of how it would have turned out if Greville hadn’t been in England. Can you imagine leaving Crauford and Marianne to manage Chas and Jamie in that sort of mess?’ Kitty visibly shuddered. ‘If it hadn’t been for Susan, I wouldn’t have come at all.’ She shook her head a little as she spoke: a small motion that would have been easy to miss.
‘Susan has a steady head on her shoulders,’ Cressida said. ‘You’ve shaken off your husband and the children for a few weeks, at least.’
Kitty looked pinched and pale now that her flush had faded, with a wild light in her eyes. Always a terrible liar, she hated being forced into an untruth. ‘I shouldn’t say it, but how nice to have some time away from them all.’
‘I’m sure. I could never bear domesticity.’ Kitty was transparent: if not mopping Chas’s brow and supporting Sylvia’s spirits, she’d much rather have been at Straloch for the summer with her husband and their four children. Which begged a question: why was she here?
‘You certainly didn’t give home and hearth much of a chance,’ Kitty said. Cressida ignored that, turning to glance back up the hill at Oliver, always a fast, efficient walker. It was odd he hadn’t passed them yet. He stood by a stand of wind-battered pine trees, looking fixedly out across the loch, and Cressida felt a trickling, chilly awareness of danger. ‘I wish Greville would show his face, or at least that I’d get a letter from Mama,’ Kitty went on. ‘I can’t help worrying that Chas has taken a turn for the worse, and that’s why he’s not here. He was expected only days after us.’
‘I’m afraid none of this is my affair, and I’m the last person you should be confiding in,’ Cressida said.
‘It is your affair,’ Kitty snapped. ‘You and Greville are still married.’ She let out a mirthless laugh. ‘You’re a Nightingale of Crauford, like it or not. And I’m afraid we can’t just be – you mustn’t just forget us at your own convenience.’ Her voice cracked with emotion. ‘Listen, our father was the only person who could ever really manage Greville. I’m not blind to how truly badly he behaved, in every possible way, especially towards you, racketing around with those girls when you were first married, never even troubled by the prospect of discretion. And how mortifying it must have been when everyone found out about you and Cleveland at Annis’s ball. But for you to have just walked away from the rest of us, Cressida – how could you? I viewed you as a sister. Mama accepted you as her own. She blamed herself for what happened and when you disappeared.’
‘A sister?’ White-hot rage flashed through Cressida. ‘That’s the first and only really disingenuous thing I’ve ever heard you say, Kitty Alasdair. You were very quick to dispel Annis’s gossip about Jamie’s parentage this morning, if I’m such a trusted sister.’
‘Oh, stop trying to push me away by being an absolute hell cat,’ Kitty shot back. ‘Why don’t you just listen for once? The scandal with you and Greville would have blown over if you’d let my stepmother handle it.’
Cressida stared at her, momentarily silenced. She relived the aftermath in a rush of intruding memories: sunshine on her back as she left Bute House in the early hours of the morning with only a bundle of clothing and a few shillings in pin money; the smiling young Irish soldier in a tavern on the Ratcliff Highway who had only just joined up; looking down to find the black pebble in her hand when the lots were drawn on the dockside at Plymouth – Mistress O’Malley is to go; the camaraderie and the stink of the troop ship; months later, facing a servant on the doorstep of the consulate in Lisbon, who had regarded her with roving eyes even as he lied to her face, under orders. There is no one by the name of Lord Rosmoney here.
‘Don’t look at me like that – you look as if you’ve seen the dead!’ Kitty said. ‘Annis may have turned you out of doors, although she always denied that, but I don’t know why on earth you fled. Greville and you might even have been happy had you only allowed us the chance to bang your heads together. You probably wouldn’t ever have been accepted by the highest sticklers, but when were either of you interested in their set? You were the only one who ever brought him contentment, if only he’d had the wit to admit that to himself at the time. Why did you have to make everything ten times worse by running away?’
‘And how was I supposed to know of this startling personal generosity?’ Cressida demanded. ‘Most people in your shoes or Sylvia’s would have washed their hands of me altogether. How on earth was I to know that you intended anything other than that?’
Kitty stared, her dark eyes alight with emotion. ‘We wrote to you on the night you were found with Cleveland, Cressida. Mama and me. I put the letters into Annis’s own hands myself. Mama and I both begged you to go to Crauford House even if you couldn’t face Greville.’
They stared at each other for a moment, Cressida unable to shake a sickening shifting sensation, as if the ground were moving beneath her feet. She didn’t have time for the Nightingales: not here and not now. On her deathbed, she’d relive that night in Annis’s ballroom, friend after friend turning their backs upon her. The following morning, she’d sat in her old bed clutching the sheets to her chest, wishing for a letter. And yet there had been a letter. Two of them, in fact. Annis had just opted not to give them to her. For a moment, Cressida was intensely aware of the scent of pine sap on the air. Then she turned and walked away up the hill, leaving Kitty to pick her way back down the stony path to the house alone. The sooner she and Ines left Drochcala, the better. Let Lascelles do his worst; let the Committee of Secrecy do their worst. They’d have to catch her first.
Cressida climbed the steep hillside so fast that all she knew was the heat in her thighs and calves and the sweat in her hair, forcing herself to smile when she met Oliver on the path. He stepped back to let her pass first where the path narrowed, and she caught the sharp, herbal scent of his shaving water.
‘This is a fair hill, but you make short work of it.’ Oliver spoke with forced civility: she’d have to get used to formality from him. They’d been on first-name terms in the days when his father was steward here, playing marbles in the laundry yard.
She smiled, still surprised at how much such familiarity hurt after so many years as a stranger to almost everyone she met. ‘I walked a lot in the Levant, when it was a great deal hotter than this. One gets used to it.’
Cressida glimpsed movement at the edge of her vision and with a Herculean effort managed not to draw her knife. Side by side, she and Oliver stood watching as an adder slid away into the heather.
‘Always better to let a small evil pass by unchallenged?’ Cressida said, lightly.
‘It’s only that they’re more afraid of us than we are of them. What’s the point in taking a life for no reason?’ Oliver did smile then as he had in their childhood: the frank, open smile in which it was hard not to see the ghost of Annis’s father, who had brought Oliver’s mother, Ann, to Scotland from Jamaica, long ago.
Reaching a cleft in the heather-fringed granite hillside rearing up on either side of them, they were rewarded with the vista ahead, a dramatic plunge of heathered fell tumbling down towards the loch far below. Eilean nam Fiadh rose up from the middle of the loch, where against all odds vivid green woodland had taken hold above granite flanks streaked with heather. A cutter emerged into view at speed, tacking into the wind, sails hauled in with expert precision as the boat turned.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Oliver said, letting his guard fall with disarming speed.
‘Are they preventives?’ Cressida said; the cutter was under sail now, but even from here she spotted space enough for eight oarsmen, which made ownership of such a vessel a hanging matter for anyone save the customs and excise men.
Oliver nodded, curt. ‘Your eyesight’s just as sharp as it ever was. That’s Fraser MacGuigan and his boys – they’ve been all over the coast this summer and to be frank we could do without the disruption this evening. It’s merry hell below stairs as I’m sure you can imagine, with Mrs Scudamore never knowing how many we’ll have to dine from one evening to the next.’ He turned to smile at her again, the unwary flash of anger now subdued: she could hardly blame him for it. ‘I beg your pardon. There’s been a great deal of free-trading this year, ever since the ban on distilling. The authorities in England don’t like unrest in Scotland and they like it even less now, as you can imagine. Lord Perceval’s death hasn’t helped, to put it mildly. They’re concerned about insurrection here just as they are about it happening everywhere else, and I suppose they’re afraid the free and fair consumption of whisky will set Highland blood to an unhealthy boil. I must go back down to the house – I’d be a fool to leave his lordship to deal with Fraser MacGuigan.’
‘Or Lady Bute, God forbid. Surely MacGuigan doesn’t bother you all at Drochcala?’
Oliver was silent for a moment as they headed downhill, falling into an easy, practised stride on the narrow, rock-littered path. ‘I’m afraid the Butes aid and abet free-traders whenever they get the opportunity: heaven forbid they should pay a penny of taxation to restock their own cellars.’ He frowned. ‘It’s hardly as if they can’t afford the duty, but instead they just legitimise the criminality. It wouldn’t have happened in my father’s day, but MacGuigan will want to search the outbuildings for any evidence of distilling or free-trading.’
‘What an awful mess it all is.’
‘The assassination of the prime minister?’ Oliver spoke with a lilt of the sardonic humour she remembered from their youth. ‘You’re not wrong. MacGuigan’s wife is nearly at her confinement, too, so he’ll be in an even worse temper than usual. Please tell me about the Levant instead!’
They reached the second gate, and he held it open for her as they descended from the bare hillside into the plantation surrounding the white limewashed bulk of the house. Cressida smiled at Oliver over her shoulder and spun him an effortless lie about a man selling pomegranates from a basket in the ancient city of Petra. If only she really had lived such a life.