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He needed to root out the traitor and make him go away without a fuss. That was what they specialized in. Some might prefer trials, speeches, judges, evidence and all the reassuring machinery by which civilized governments made violence respectable. Baines had spent too many years in less respectable corners of Europe not to know that not every threat reached a courtroom.

A horse could throw a man. A carriage might meet a regrettable stretch of road and overturn. A packet ship might carry him somewhere from whence returning became exceedingly inconvenient.

The problem would disappear, and Blackthorn would resume quarrelling over fish and spaniels as though nothing had occurred. Peace, for a little while, would be resumed.

Baines looked through the window towards the hills beyond the village. Scotland lay not many miles north, invisible from where he sat but present nevertheless, in the shape of the country and in something older inside himself.

His mother possessed enough Scots blood to claim every victory and deny every defeat. He had spent his boyhood north of the border and knew men whose speech thickened until London ears surrendered entirely. He understood, far better than Sir George Wycliffe ever would, why a weaver working fourteen hours might object to being told that representation in Parliament was a privilege best entrusted to property.

Baines sympathized with them and therein lay the inconvenient truth.

A man ought to be able to feed his children. He ought to have some voice in the laws under which he lived. He ought not be dismissed as dangerous merely because starvation had made him angry.

Yet Baines had also seen war—not the romantic version discussed over port by gentlemen who had never stood in a village after artillery had passed through it. He had seen homes burnt because troops needed a clear field of fire, children crying beside dead mothers, and soldiers bleeding into mud whilst politicians, hundreds of miles away, described necessary sacrifices.

Another civil war would not feed Scottish children, it would bury them. He picked up the pen.

Whatever the merits of the grievances involved, the present circulation of military and magistrates’ intentions materially increases the chance of armed confrontation. I intend to identify the source before that occurs.

He sanded the page, folded it, sealed it and addressed it in the manner Renforth had prescribed. Then he sat for another moment, looking at the seal.

“I do hope you appreciate this,” he informed the absent Colonel. “I have been almost entirely serious for half an hour.”

Baines went downstairs, arranged for it to travel with considerably greater speed and discretion than an ordinary missive deserved, and set off towards Blackthorn.

The afternoon had changed while he was indoors. Clouds had drawn apart over the western hills, leaving great bars of sunlight across the green fields, and the wind carried the clean, damp smell of earth. Stone walls divided the rising ground into irregular parcels, while farther north the land roughened towards heather and moor.

Blackthorn rose behind those fields in an untidy congregation of grey stone: a medieval core with a square pele-tower still visible at the north end, Jacobean gables along the central range, and later Georgian windows imposed wherever some Finch ancestor had decided symmetry mattered more than history. Chimneys crowded the roofline at improbable intervals, giving the whole place the air of a house that had grown by argument rather than design.

Baines liked the country. He liked it rather more when Judith Finch was walking through it beside him, which was a thought he had no business having.

By the time he reached Blackthorn, his boots carried sufficient mud to offend servants and carpet alike.

The butler, Simmons, met him in the hall.

“Major Baines.”

“Simmons. You look grave. Has Mr. Pembroke broken the remainder of the porcelain?”

“Not yet, sir. The gentlemen are in the billiard room.”

Baines paused. “All of them?”

“Nearly, sir.”

That was interesting. “Has Miss Finch returned?”

Simmons’s expression remained perfectly correct.

“I believe Miss Finch is in the study, sir.”

Baines had not asked where Judith was.

The billiard room occupied the western side of the house and overlooked a broad sweep of parkland descending towards a distant belt of trees. Afternoon sunlight poured through the tall windows, turning the green baize almost luminous and revealing every particle of cigar smoke hanging above the assembled gentlemen.

Sir Lionel stood beside the fireplace with a glass in hand. Cranford sprawled in a chair near the windows. Sir George had possession of one cue and Edward another, while Thomas Finch leaned against the table, listening with the rapt attention of a young man who retained the privilege of finding military service glorious.

Pembroke stood against the wall near the billiards table.