She nodded, looking down at the small wooden bird, a plain thing carved by a great man who’d always taken pleasure in creating things with his own hands. ‘She’s telling me, I think, that I should seek to be none other than myself, and so fly always like the bird that I was born to be.’

‘Then,’ Gordon said, ‘you will fly very high, my dear. And very far.’ His blue gaze travelled up towards the sails of their small ship, and Anna looked where he was looking.

‘It has been a long time since I’ve been aboard a ship without you being at the helm,’ she said. ‘Will not you pilot us to Cronstadt?’

‘I had better not.’ His smile was slow. ‘I might be tempted not to come to shore.’

When their lines were cast away, he was still standing by the water on the broad exchange, as tall and dashing as he’d been the day she had first seen him, and the way she knew she always would remember him. They stood on deck, the three of them, and watched him till he’d passed from view. Then Moray’s arm came round her and, as he had done when she was very small and they had come across from Scotland into Flanders, he drew her back a safer distance from the rail and said, ‘The wind is cold. Come down below.’

The crew’s cabin was to the fore, but Moray led her aft to the captain’s cabin, swinging the door open so she could enter first. Inside, the curtains had been drawn across the window and the light was lost in shadow, so she did not see the man until he straightened from the place where he’d been sitting. Clothed in black, he looked himself a shadow as he stood.

Her father, all calm, took the packet of letters that he’d just been given by Gordon, and passing them over to Edmund O’Connor said, ‘These, I believe, would be yours. Whether she is, as well, is for her to decide.’

And his gaze briefly travelled between them before he went out again, closing the door.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

She did not move.

The ship rolled with the current and she somehow kept her balance, but it was not such an easy thing with Edmund standing suddenly in front of her, and her own father having done a thing she could not fathom.

Yet with all the things she did not understand, the one thing she could say with utter certainty was that her father never would betray the King. Which meant that her perception of his actions must be wrong; that she had somehow missed the movement of some small but vital piece upon the chessboard.

She cast her mind backwards, while Edmund stayed silent and watched her.

She had not acknowledged him, did not dare look at him. Everything round her – not only the timbers beneath her, but everything – felt at that moment as if it were moving and in the wrong place, and she feared if she let herself focus on Edmund she might lose whatever small hold she still had on the things that were real. Anna wanted him there and she wanted him gone and she wanted, above all, to know what was happening.

‘He gave you the letters,’ she said, well aware there was no need to actually say it, for it was self-evident, but she was working things through in her thoughts. Then she met Edmund’s eyes and her thoughts grew confused, and she simply asked, ‘Why?’

‘Because they are my burden. I’m the only one can carry them.’

She dimly saw the missing piece then, though she could not fully comprehend the purpose of its move. ‘You are no traitor.’

That he did not answer. But she knew.

She said, ‘Vice Admiral Gordon and Sir Harry – they want Deane to read those letters.’

Edmund smiled faintly in the shadows. ‘Christ, your mind is quick.’

‘But why?’ And even as she asked the question she believed she knew the answer. ‘They are trying to deceive him.’

‘He was sent here by the English as a spy, in search of secrets. We are giving him a secret. That it happens to be false,’ he said, ‘is more your fault than anyone’s.’

‘My fault?’

‘Aye. When you trapped me with your ruse upon the chessboard,’ he reminded her, ‘that evening at the general’s, and he told us of the crossing of the river at Poltava, it did set him thinking of a clever way to deal with Deane.’

She thought back to that evening, and the general’s reconstruction of the way the Russian army had convinced the Swedes they planned to cross the river in one place, while all unseen they made their crossing in another.

Edmund said, ‘The thing is, here in Russia, as in Spain, the English always have their eyes upon us, waiting to thwart any new attempt King James might make to claim his throne. And the general knew that when they learnt that Captain Hay had come here, and from Rome, they would not rest until they learnt the reason why.’

She did not ask what Captain Hay’s true business on behalf of King James might have been, for even had he known it she would not have asked him to share such a confidence. But she remembered what she’d heard from Charles, that painful day. ‘You said to Deane yourself, I’m told, that Captain Hay had come to give Sir Harry new instructions to buy ships here, with the backing of the Spanish and the Pope himself.’

‘I did.’

‘And that was all a lie.’

‘A lie the English would believe,’ he said, ‘because it was exactly what they thought we would be doing. Misdirection, Mistress Jamieson, can be a useful thing.’

She gave a nod towards the letters. ‘And so those are meant to misdirect Deane further?’

‘More to misdirect his masters in the government of England. When I meet Deane in Amsterdam and we do break the seals together of these letters, they will tell him most convincingly of how the Duke of Holstein and the Empress have conspired to send ships to Spain. I don’t doubt he’ll believe it, for in truth did he not see three ships himself, just heading out as he came in? So he’ll believe that there are surely more to follow. In those letters, there will also be a good account of how we plan to so alarm the Danes by our manoeuvres in the Baltic, that the Danes will beg the English to assist them. Deane will further learn that, once the English fleet has thus been lured to Denmark’s aid, King James will deal a blow from Spain with his new fleet of Russian ships, while Empress Catherine strikes them from behind, and Sweden from above.’ He gave a half-smile. ‘’Tis in truth a cunning plan.’