‘There,’ he said, pointing, his eyes trained on the rough cliffs opposite. A pine tree was growing out from the rocks at an extraordinary angle and it was several moments before she noticed the large, twiggy nest balanced in the crutch of the trunk and several large branches.

She squinted, peering closer. Her breath held . . . It couldn’t be.

The hairs on her arms stood up as she got lower, lying on the ground on her stomach, staring with an intensity that even the birds seemed to detect. She watched as the adult moved its head in their direction, twitching its wings. Its legs were long, the beak deeply hooked, dark brown wings flanking a white breast. A stripe at the eye made it look masked, and she was surprised by the size of it, almost as big as a goose.

For several seconds, neither she nor Felton stirred. Only when the parent bird began to fuss at the nest again did she dare to breathe.

‘Osprey?’ she whispered.

Felton just nodded.

‘But they went extinct here in ’16,’ she whispered.

He nodded again. ‘Until this summer.’

She watched as the juvenile sat on a branch, looking out to the distant sea. She could see the white spots on its back that distinguished it from the parent.

‘The mother left a few weeks ago. They’re getting ready to migrate. Any day now.’ He glanced at her. ‘It was why I had to bring you here, do you see?’

She nodded. ‘Thank you. I’m so grateful. I never thought I’d get to see one. How many eggs were there?’

‘Two. One failed,’ he murmured. She could feel the timbre of his voice vibrate through the ground to her.

‘Have you shown the earl?’ she asked quickly.

He shook his head.

‘But he loves—’

‘No. I don’t approve of what he does,’ he said quickly.

‘You mean, collecting eggs?’

‘Taking them just for display . . .’

She nodded. It chimed with the reticence she had felt back home, an instinct she couldn’t quite suppress as the earl had gathered egg after egg. Avaricious and covetous.

‘It’s one thing to capture and kill for survival; even for sport and profit if it provides jobs as well as a meal. But just to put it in a box to be able to say you have it . . .’ He looked at her. ‘Because that’s what they do, you know, that family; they have to own everything, possess anything that’s beautiful and wild and rare – they have to make it theirs, along with everything else.’

He stared at her intently and she had a feeling he wasn’t talking about birds anymore. Had he heard Henry’s gossip?

She looked back at the nest. ‘So no one else knows?’ she asked quietly. ‘Just us?’

‘Well . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Only Lord Sholto.’

Her head whipped round again.