Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  Crow closed his eyes and in his mind’s eye he saw Hester standing by the window, looking out over the rolling acres of Boscobel parkland with the little maid in her arms, and knew that he was bound to Castlereagh like a mastiff on the end of a leash until they were both safe again, whatever damned fool course of action the man decreed he should follow.

  Part 2

  ST PETERSBURG

  20

  At two o’clock in the morning, the ballroom at Countess Tatyana Orlova’s St Petersburg townhouse thronged with women and girls in diaphanous silk gowns and men in regimentals – the Russians quite over the top, in Kitto’s opinion, the officers of elite and ancient Muscovy regiments older than the Romanov dynasty itself, all dripping with gilding, gorgets and tassels. In couples and knots of three or four, guests gathered near the large windows overlooking the Neva, wide waters glittering in the moonlight. Books with gold-filigree leather spines lined the walls, and between the bookshelves, enormous ornate mirrors reflected the crowd and silver vases of spring flowers breathed out their scent, intensified by the human warmth of so many guests. Tonight, Kitto wasn’t dancing but gaming, and he was either about to lose a small fortune, or to win one. Abbotsdale of the 62nd Wiltshires possessed only just enough social éclat to be honoured with an invitation to Countess Orlova’s soirée. Kitto sat before him at the card-table, his expression inscrutable, the pair of them observed in uneasy quiet by a knot of other fellows from Kitto’s regiment and others, as well as the ambassador’s son, George Cathcart. Fresh rumours of Crow’s supposed treason seemed to have reached Petersburg even before Kitto himself. Standing by the table, Percy Dangerfield and that officer from the Guards continued to studiously not meet one another’s eyes: it had been like this since the moment Kitto had stepped off the royal yacht at the English Embankment and taken a kalasha back to quarters only to find that the drawing-room fell completely silent when he walked in.

  ‘You’re crazy, Helford.’ George addressed Kitto with a sideways glance. ‘My father would have skinned me if I’d run up gaming debts like that before I was twenty-one. He’d have had me back in England and going over turnip yields at Orchardleigh before I knew which way was up.’

  ‘Fuck off, Cathcart. My father’s long dead, and who says I’m going to lose, anyhow?’ Kitto ignored George’s indulgent dismissal of his rudeness: he’d made a concerted effort to sound far more ill at ease than he actually felt, with just the right touch of nervous bravado. He had, after all, been taught by the best.

  ‘If Lord Lamorna were my guardian,’ George said calmly, ‘I’m not sure I’d be fool enough to antagonise him, in prison or not, even with several thousand miles between us. He’s just as devilish high in the instep as he is loose in the haft, is Crow.’

  A thick, awkward quiet descended at the mention of Crow’s name, and for God’s sake he must still be alive. Surely Dorothea Lieven had been telling the truth?

  ‘Are you going to show your hand or not?’ Abbotsdale demanded, with all the pink-cheeked, well-fed arrogance of the younger son of an insignificant baronet who had lorded it over the cricket lawn at Harrow and achieved little since. He had a certain air that reminded Kitto of Captain Wentworth, which made him want to crush the man’s throat with his own two hands. ‘What’s the matter, Helford, losing your nerve?’ Abbotsdale went on with a slight but unmistakable sneer. It was precisely that smirk that had got Kitto into this. He’d been longing to wipe it off Abbotsdale’s face all evening.

  ‘You can fuck off as well,’ Kitto advised him with an air of light unconcern.

  ‘Jesus,’ George muttered, trying to catch Kitto’s eye. ‘Helford, you bloody young fool, you’ll talk yourself into a duel at this rate.’

  Abbotsdale smirked again. ‘What’s the matter, Helford? Why all the bravado? Are you afraid to lose? Scared that Lord Lamorna will cut the purse strings? He’ll find that hard from his prison cell.’

  Was Kitto imagining it, or did those other officers from the 51st standing right over near the window now turn to stare? Countess Orlova herself certainly did – she had been talking to them, her small white hands moving so fast, her beringed fingers a blur of bright stones, candlelight from the candelabra finding threads of gold in her delicate sweep of curls. But now she turned to glance at Kitto, a small, inscrutable smile upon her lips, and he inclined his head before looking away as fast as decorum allowed.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ George was saying with apathetic and mocking despair. ‘Not a duel, anything but a duel. Be quiet, the pair of you. Do you want the tsar to hear of this?’

  Kitto turned over his cards, and had the pleasure of seeing all smug satisfaction wiped clean from Abbotsdale’s face. Vengeful euphoria coursed through him, and he was scarcely aware of the ballroom clamour and heat – music and the babble of French and Russian, with the occasion burst of guttural English or Prussian, the smell of perspiration and costly hair pomade. Abbotsdale’s face was now white and pinched with fury; he was a thousand roubles down – far more than he could afford, Kitto was sure. In fact, he knew quite well that he ought never to have played Abbotsdale in the first place, he with the enormous acreage of the Lamorna fortune at his back, and Abbotsdale with his father’s penny-pinched estate in Wiltshire that must somehow be squeezed of dowries for his four sisters.

  ‘I’ll wait for your IOU, Abbotsdale,’ he said, and got up, pushing back his chair. He suddenly couldn’t bear it any longer, simply being here. Kitto could stand no more of this endless round of parties and balls: it felt like that bright and desperate season in Brussels before Waterloo, the damned and the fair dancing together and half the officers blown to smithereens before the month was out. Hardly aware of where he was going, Kitto forced his way through the crowd towards one of the large windows overlooking the river. Johnny and Ned would never have cut him as the others now did, but Johnny had been sliced completely in half by a cannonball fired from the ramparts at Novgorod, and Ned had survived Grezhny only to succumb to typhus on that interminable march back to Petersburg. In truth, one had no friends. Kitto passed Weston and Smyth-Jones, both in his own regiment, and they too each cut him as he approached, turning away as if they had never even heard his name, let alone toasted him with requisitioned champagne in the aftermath of Novgorod, all because he’d volunteered to climb the siege walls, and was the only one to end that particular mission with his life. Kitto had last attended a ball in Petersburg at the beginning of December, the Neva thick with blue-green ice and all the trees dusted with frost, and everywhere he’d looked he’d been met with smiling faces and outstretched hands. Now, because of Crow, men in his own regiment were turning their backs on him. How was it possible to be so entirely furious with Crow for getting himself arrested as a traitor and equally so paralysed with terror, wondering again if Dorothea had been wrong or lying. What if Crow were dead? What then?

  ‘Darling Captain Helford!’

  Kitto turned, bowing at the Russian society matron whose name he could not remember, all dark blue silk and ugly diamonds, allowing her to manoeuvre him into a position where he could do nothing but ask her pretty, dark-eyed daughter to dance, not that he cared, and God only knew how many times he went up and down the polonaise with girl after blushing girl, because what else could he do in this godforsaken fucking ballroom when no one save women would talk to him. Kitto was only grateful that he had inherited the Lamorna head for drink, and could take glass after glass of champagne without missing a single step or slurring his words, even as his thoughts became detached from one another and fluttered around his mind like so many moths, leaving him with nothing but an impression of candlelight and bright silk, and the warm, shaking hands of a girl lightly held in his own. At last, he relinquished a raven-haired beauty to her chaperone, with no idea of her name or who she was, not that he cared, and turned to face the widow Countess Tatyana Orlova, standing before him in that lily-fresh gown of silver satin, like a drink of cool water. Everyone said she had just refused an offer of marriage from Pr
ince Volkonsky, who had been her lover for years.

  ‘My dear young Captain,’ she said, in her perfect Parisian French, and Kitto glimpsed her pearlescent teeth. ‘I declare that Ekaterina Raevskaya’s mama is quite ready to scalp you – anyone can see that she is longing for you to favour Katya as you favoured the other girls. You are cruel, honestly.’

  ‘The devil take it,’ Kitto said, ‘I don’t care.’ Crow would have skinned him for speaking so to his hostess, or indeed to any woman at all, but Crow was not here, and maybe he was not even still alive, damn his fucking eyes. Countess Orlova was smiling at him. Kitto smiled back.

  ‘You devil,’ she said, ‘you’re far too drunk to be dancing with debutantes – a fact which is quite apparent to me, even if you’ve managed to conceal it from their mothers. Come and play cards with Alexei Pushkin and Prince Volkonsky before you commit some sort of terrible indiscretion.’

  ‘Volkonsky and Pushkin?’ Kitto said, now horribly short of breath.

  ‘Darling boy, I know quite well you’re used to moving in the first circles in England, so what difference does it make if you do so in Russia? Your papa was a close friend of the late prince regent, was he not? You can have nothing to fear from Prince Volkonsky.’ Countess Orlova held out her beautifully sculpted arm and Kitto took it, allowing her to lead him across the ballroom. No one dared cut him in her company: he wondered if this was why she had done it, and felt a sudden burst of shame that she had so easily identified him as an outcast.

  21

  Three hours later, at five o’clock in the morning and now more drunk than he had ever been in his life, Kitto tossed his cards on to the table. It would be all right. It would have to be, after all. He couldn’t exactly write to Crow and ask for an advance on the next quarter of his allowance. Dimly aware that someone was talking to him, he looked up at the blurred faces around the table. Count Gagarin was staring into the distance, obviously ineffably bored by Kitto’s presence. Pushkin exchanged flirtatious nothings with the Georgian princess who stood behind him to watch their play, and Prince Volkonsky himself sighed, with a confidential smile. A hero of Borodino and Austerlitz, the prince was at least forty, with dark, golden-brown skin, deep lines graven into striking features, and an untidy crop of curling autumnal-brown hair. It was said that the ancestor he shared with Pushkin had been an enslaved African prince adopted by Peter the Great. In Kitto’s opinion, he didn’t look like a man scorned by his lover: he didn’t even look drunk.

  ‘And so, remind me, Captain Helford,’ Volkonsky said, ‘how exactly does Cornwall relate to England and the rest of the United Kingdom? Is it some sort of principality?’

  ‘Yes, we’re our own country just as Wales and Scotland are, but no one’s allowed to say so.’

  ‘How interesting,’ Prince Volkonsky went on, calmly, as if rather than staking treasonous claims to Cornish sovereignty, Kitto had instead made an observation about the weather, or Russian folk customs, or whether it was better to sketch with charcoal or pen and ink. ‘Might I take leave to observe that I think your brother, Lord Lamorna, has been most ill used by his own government? And after he played such an important role in British emancipation from French rule – the rescue of Wellington, the sanguinary routing of French forces at Salisbury. Lord Castlereagh and the Cabinet might justly be accused of rank ingratitude.’

  Kitto glanced down at his cards and felt sick: he really was hellish in the suds, quite at sea. ‘Castlereagh doesn’t like my brother because he’s so insufferably rich, and the ordinary sort of people like him a deal too much. But actually, between you and me, Crow’s just pretty insufferable in general.’

  ‘One’s older relatives often do seem so – it’s one of life’s oddities that at some mysterious point the matter reverses, and one’s younger relations begin to seem insufferable,’ the prince said, glancing down at his own hand of cards with a reluctant air. ‘Oh dear. How unfortunate.’ He laid down his cards and Pushkin glanced over, wincing. Kitto felt as though he were falling at vast speed through the floor.

  Volkonsky smiled with an almost rueful air. ‘A sore loss for you tonight, I’m afraid, Captain Helford. But you know how perfidious is Lady Luck – perhaps next time she’ll dance with you.’ At his side, Pushkin shrugged and blew out his cheeks with an uneasy glance at Kitto. Perhaps they both thought he’d shy off settling the debt. Count Gagarin had already lost interest in Kitto’s disaster and gone to join the cotillion forming at the far end of the room, quite as though no one had just ruined themselves over a game of faro.

  Kitto heard himself reply as though someone else were speaking. There was a queer sort of rushing noise in his head, and the slow-moving dancers took on an odd, blurred quality as he reached for the necessary French phraseology, as though he were the only fixed point, and the ballroom itself was spinning. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to send you some vowels, Prince.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Volkonsky said, employing an amused hauteur that reminded Kitto of his brother with blighting force. ‘I would scarcely expect you to carry such a considerable sum about your person, Captain. Pray excuse me, I must have a word with the countess.’

  Kitto nodded as though his life were still worth living, watching as the prince got up and walked away across the ballroom, quite resplendent in the tasselled silver jacket of the Semenovksy Guards, soon disappearing into the crowd, and was it wrong to wish that by some childish magic Prince Volkonsky really had simply flickered out of existence, and that the last three hours had never occurred?

  ‘Don’t take it as a personal affront, my boy,’ Pushkin said, even though he couldn’t have been so very much older than Kitto himself: nineteen or twenty at the most. He signalled to one of the countess’s liveried footmen, and Kitto watched as his glass was refilled. ‘I’ve known the man all my life, but I’d still as lief not game with him when he’s in this sort of mood. Volkonsky should have stopped play long ago – a boy your age – but he’s in a terrible temper tonight. It’s just a pity that you caught the raw end of it. Woman trouble. Tatyana is a darling but she can be a minx of the first order – she’s an unforgivable fool to have refused him. She might be our principal hostess now, but the knives are out for her already, mark my words – and who would want to risk dwindling into an irrelevant widow?’

  Kitto gave a mechanical nod, but all he wanted to do was get up and leave, run down the scarlet-carpeted gilded staircase, past the liveried footmen and butler and out of the front door; he wanted to keep running until he crossed the carriage drive running the length of the English Embankment and leap into the cold, unforgiving waters of the Neva where he would drown and be swept out into the Gulf of Finland, gone for ever. Twenty thousand roubles. There was no possible way he could repay it. He looked up to realise that Pushkin was still talking to him; on the one hand, Kitto was grateful for the young poet’s presence, but, perversely, in the midst of his loneliness, Kitto also wished very much to be alone, and hadn’t the smallest notion what he ought to do if Pushkin continued to bore on about whatever mawkish business had blighted the affairs of Countess Orlova and Prince Volkonsky, who were both even older than Crow, or even asked him about Lord Byron, which he might very easily do.

  ‘The trouble with Volkonsky,’ Pushkin was saying, turning an ugly Sèvres ornament over and over with his brown and swiftly mobile fingers, ‘the real, irrefutable trouble with Volkonsky is that he ought to have come up to scratch and proposed to the darling countess twenty-five years ago. Only he didn’t, and poor Tatyana was married off to Orlov, which was no opera picnic, I can assure you, or at least not while the man lived, and now she and Volkonsky loathe the universe and each other. Therein lies the difficulty. Do you see?’ He burst into a surprising peal of laughter. ‘Of course you don’t. You’re far too young to understand blighted love or to be weary of life. And too young to be gaming with the likes of Sasha Volkonsky, eh? My Tanyushka was a hellcat to have introduced you to him tonight, to be sure.’

  Kitto forced himself to stand,
managing a clumsy farewell which Pushkin received with an indulgent, throwaway wave before settling back in his chair. Kitto was only too well aware of people watching his unsteady progress towards the enormous gilded double doors. News of his ruin would doubtless spread before he even reached the footmen. Now Gillingham and Peters passed him without a second glance, when just months before Gillingham had been petitioning him with invitations to his quarters for supper and lightskirts. The crowd thickened as Kitto reached the doors, as though there were enemy French troops in formation blocking his way, but really there was just an enormous group of girls all fluttering muslin and long, glittering glances. They switched rapidly from court French into Russian as he passed, breaking out into bright peals of laughter, which was all they dared under the eyes of so many chaperones. There was one girl still in his path, small and plump, in an ill-advised gown of rose-pink crêpe; she turned, and Kitto recognised George’s unremarkable sister, Jane Cathcart. She smiled at him in desperation, clearly in the throes of being cut herself by this merciless gathering.

  ‘Oh, Captain Helford, how do you do? I’m sorry to say that we’ve still had no letter from Lady Lamorna at the embassy.’ Jane immediately flushed brick red, and Kitto bowed for want of something else to do other than vomiting on her satin slippers, and what could be taking Hester so long to write? She had boarded a ship bound to Brittany from St Mary’s, that’s what Dorothea Lieven had told him. Surely she could have written by now? He pushed away a memory of a drowned, wax-white face beneath a glasslike wave in Lamorna Cove: Hester couldn’t be drowned like that, not she and the child and Mrs Rescorla. Jane’s face crumpled with mortification, realising she had said exactly the wrong thing, and Kitto saw her tabby cat of a mother move in, steering her firmly away from him, their arms locked together. And as he finally drew near the doors, he heard familiar voices speaking in English above the hubbub of French, Russian and Prussian and looked up to find George standing warily at the side of Abbotsdale, who looked entirely castaway, his lips wine-stained, his thick brown hair in disarray – he’d always had an appalling head for claret.