Sasha was quiet. Iris would almost have said contrite, except her husband was never really contrite, was he? She walked alongside him to make sure he didn’t say anything else, didn’t expose himself any more than he already had. Burgess kept up a merry conversation with Aunt Vivian and Major Davenport as they picked their way along the shingled beach, carrying the picnic basket between them.

“Buck up!” he called back to Sasha and Iris. “Nearly there! Can’t wait to see the look on old Abby’s face when we turn up at last.”

“Oh, he’ll be delighted,” said Aunt Vivian. “Everybody wants a gang of drunken louts to turn up at his home at two o’clock in the morning.”

Sasha said to Iris in a low voice, “I want her out of the house as soon as we get back.”

“Sasha, she’s my aunt. And the girls!”

“She goes or I go.”

“You’re hardly ever there to begin with.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and tore out a packet of cigarettes. He was down to the last two. He jiggled them a moment and took one out and lit it, and when he smoked it was as if he were sucking life into himself.

“She doesn’t mean what she says, you know. She just likes to stir people up.”

“She’s exactly what I’m fighting against. Don’t you see? That kind of ignorance and . . . and willful selfishness . . . that individualism that’s got no regard for the common good—”

“Not now, Sasha. For God’s sake.”

“Chambers is a rat, a goddamn rat. He’s going to get people killed. Innocent men killed, just for believing in something.”

“Please, Sasha—”

Burgess cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted a halloo. “There we are! Thank God. Abby! Abby, old boy!”

“He can’t hear you, you sod,” said Davenport.

Iris squinted into the distance and didn’t see much, just shadows next to the moon-speckled Solent. “I think everyone’s gone to bed.”

“Nonsense.” Burgess jogged heavily ahead. Davenport shrugged and followed him, then Sasha chased them both down the narrow, rocky strip of shore.

Iris ranged up next to Aunt Vivian. “Can you see anything?”

“There’s a house there, all right, but I don’t see a single light. This should be good.”

Iris squinted harder and discovered the outline of a large, rectangular, symmetrical building, maybe Palladian, right on the brink of the water. The moonlight glinted white on its edges and corners. There seemed to be a terrace of some kind. Already the men had reached it. Iris caught their movement up some steps—heard their drunken shouts for the owner.

“God help us,” she said.