Every smile she bestowed on Fenshaw, every touch of her hand on his and every meeting of their eyes filled Arthur with such jealousy that he instinctively wished for divine intervention of the most fatal and instant kind. Then he felt shamed by the thought, and less of the man that he wanted to be. It did not take long for Arthur to realise that these moments of hatred for Fenshaw were due to his having precisely the personal qualities and social connections that Arthur felt himself to lack. That added a most bitter and distasteful edge to the baser sentiment of jealousy.

One day in July, the three of them took a carriage out to the hills south of Dublin at Dundrum. It was a fine summer’s day and thin skeins of white cloud drifted across a deep blue sky. They spread a blanket down in the shade of an ancient oak tree and began to unpack the basket.

‘A fine spread.’ Fenshaw smiled. ‘Fit for a king.’

‘While we still have one,’ Arthur added wryly.

The naval officer looked at Arthur curiously and Kitty chuckled. ‘You’ll have to excuse Arthur. He thinks that the French will be invading us at any moment, red in tooth and claw as they lay waste our cities and slaughter our people, though not without ravaging the womenfolk first.’

‘Oh, I doubt that will happen,’ Fenshaw replied, and helped himself to a chicken leg.

‘Not with the heroes of the Navy standing, or floating, between us and the enemy, I suppose,’ said Kitty, then glanced at Arthur. ‘And the heroes in the army as well.’

Fenshaw shook his head.‘That’s not what I meant. I just don’t think that the French can be as bad as our newspapers, and our government, would have us believe.’

‘Really?’ Arthur stared at him. ‘What makes you think that?’

Fenshaw delicately took a bite from his drumstick and chewed it for a while before he responded.‘It’s a question of what motivates the revolutionaries. From the outset their goal was to improve the condition of their people.The commoners had a far harder time of it than our people in England, with little hope of any reform at the hands of the aristocrats and those who ran the Catholic church. Given what they had to put up with I would say that there is some justification for responding to their condition as they did. If the common people are oppressed too severely then some day they will rise up and overthrow their rulers.’

‘So you would justify regicide?’ Arthur cut in.

‘No, I think they were wrong to execute their king. But it would be hard not to justify almost anything short of that.’

‘Including the abolition of the monarchy?’