Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  Sasha laid a hand on her shoulder, and she ignored the bolt of heat that shot down her arm as he leaned down to speak quietly into her ear. ‘Who is that?’

  The British soldier now talking to Lady Cathcart was tall and pale, with untidy black hair that made him appear almost en déshabille. He was surrounded by Ekaterina Raevsky, her rivals, and a crowd of English officers who all seemed to know him rather well. ‘It must be Lord Lamorna,’ Tatyana said. ‘Lady Cathcart sent me a note asking if she might bring him – his ship docked this afternoon. Although, interestingly, he’s half French, he rules some kind of irrelevant British principality, and is absolutely dogged by rumours of treachery to England – and on Tuesday you ruined his young brother at faro.’ If what Tatyana had heard was true, Sasha had been seeking buyers for all the Volkonsky estates, losses she knew would cause him both shame and pain he would never publicly admit. He made no reply to her confidences, only watching the approach of Lord Lamorna with his usual air of boredom. Tatyana herself was intrigued: rumours of Lamorna’s treachery had led to his young brother enduring several excruciating cuts direct here in this very house, but the man himself had attracted a crowd.

  Lady Cathcart bore down upon them. With the earl at her side, she held out one limp hand. ‘Darling Countess, you’re looking so well. And my dear Prince Volkonsky. My daughter Jane you already know, of course,’ Lady Cathcart said, ‘but do allow me to make Lieutenant Colonel Lord Lamorna known to you.’ The diplomat’s wife went through the motions of social intercourse with an air of faint exhaustion. Even so, Tatyana detected a hint of panic in her expression of well-worn amiability, and a flicker of interest stirred at the prospect of fresh scandal. Lord Lamorna’s mood was inscrutable, but it might well have been he who had induced Lady Cathcart’s panic: he really was excessively pretty, with finely sculpted cheekbones, and that black hair and the startling pale grey eyes so clearly handed down the Saint-Maure line. Lord Lamorna lacked his young brother’s deep-cut dimples and air of scarcely battened-down mischief which made such a fascinating combination with the watchfulness of a trained young killer, but he did emanate a suppressed animal fury so at odds with his calm exterior that Tatyana couldn’t deny a flicker of interest. At a quelling glance from her mother, Jane Cathcart executed a clumsy curtsey, which the entire gathering acknowledged with only cursory attention. Lamorna bowed, conveying the perfect measure of practised good breeding and ennui, together with that intriguing and very thinly veiled menace.

  ‘I don’t know if you will have heard the happy news, Countess?’ Lady Cathcart gave Tatyana a bland smile. Her daughter was now in extremis, the flush spreading from her face and down her neck to her décolletage. ‘Dear Prince Volkonsky and my daughter have announced their engagement.’

  Adept at concealing any emotion other than smooth congeniality, Tatyana was just able to smile, quite certain that no one – not even Sasha himself – would have detected the strength of her fury and mortification. So this was how he chose to punish her for refusing him: marriage to a squab of an English girl, just to prove that she didn’t matter in the least. ‘How absolutely charming, my dear Jane, I’m so happy for you. Such a triumph – not even one entire season and you’ve been snapped up!’ Tatyana clasped the idiot girl’s pale, slightly sweat-damp fingers, nodding at Sasha even though she wanted to rend her nails down his face.

  Abandoning his expression of well-bred boredom, Lord Lamorna gave Tatyana such a beddable smile that, observing it, Jane Cathcart actually flushed again. ‘Tell me, Countess Orlova,’ he said, ‘do you remain in Petersburg for the rest of the season?’

  ‘Actually, I have some business to attend at Yarkaya Polyana – my late husband’s estate.’ Tatyana stifled a burst of flirtatious fascination that exploded past her rage with the force of a cannonball, just as Dorothea Lieven had archly predicted in her latest letter. You may very well have some fun with Lord Lamorna, my dear friend. Tatyana smiled, lying with the smooth grace of long practice. ‘Oh, but I’ve only just realised the connection, Lord Lamorna – you are surely Captain Helford’s brother.’

  ‘Oh goodness,’ Jane Cathcart said, with feeling.

  Lord Lamorna ignored her, watching Tatyana with that inscrutable expression. ‘Indeed. Which reminds me, Prince Volkonsky, it seems that I owe you twenty thousand roubles.’

  Lady Cathcart looked as though someone had just vomited at her feet. Sasha just appeared irritated, and Lord Lamorna continued to smile as though he’d simply remarked on the unseasonably chilly spring. ‘It was so good of you not to pursue the boy for payment before he was obliged to leave Petersburg,’ he said to Volkonsky. ‘I should like to point out that he did not deliberately renege on discharging his debt. Lord Cathcart told him it wasn’t eligible because he has not yet attained his majority. In England, you see, it would be quite impossible for a boy his age to be held liable.’

  Tatyana would have sworn with one hand on St Agatha’s bones that the temperature in the room had dropped by a factor of ten. Jane Cathcart flushed an even deeper shade of puce, casting a furtive but admiring glance at this enfant terrible of the English polite world. Tatyana was certain of her conviction that young Jane Cathcart was deep in the throes of a Sapphic affair with her Italian drawing mistress, so surely the girl was immune to Lord Lamorna’s fine grey eyes. Apparently, she had wit enough to admire such a devastatingly ill-advised put-down. All the same, Tatyana knew Sasha well enough to detect the briefest flash of shame – a glimpse of the boy he had been, the boy she had known, to whom honour had once mattered more than anything else. Lady Cathcart merely smiled – there was an exchange of curtseys and bows – and she swept the mortified Jane away into the crowd.

  ‘Twenty thousand roubles? I’ve scarcely given the matter a thought, Lord Lamorna,’ Sasha said; beyond the bow and kissing Jane’s fingertips, he hadn’t acknowledged the departure of his fiancée and her mother, and conversation swept on as if entirely uninterrupted.

  ‘Except, no doubt, to consider the wisdom of dicing with a boy young enough to be your own son,’ Lord Lamorna remarked, imparting no more weight to his words than if he were discussing the weather, and not courting a duel. It was another extraordinarily brazen insult and Tatyana froze where she stood, momentarily too shocked to move or to think; Lord Lamorna was really too young for Sasha to consider him a worthy opponent, but he still might very easily risk the tsar’s displeasure by demanding satisfaction.

  Sasha responded with a slight bow. ‘Since we appear to be serving up unasked-for advice in wholly inappropriate company, might I suggest that you cool your temper? Such displays are frowned upon here in Petersburg. Those who cannot pay ought not to play.’

  ‘Wise advice, sir,’ Lord Lamorna said, ‘if only half the world were able to follow it, so much human misery might be averted. You’ll have a draft upon my bank tomorrow morning. I should think that your need must have been urgent indeed to have done such a thing – you won’t suffer a wait for your funds, as I’m sure your young fiancée and her parents will be so pleased to hear.’ He bowed and walked away, moving with the quick, careless insouciance of a cat.

  And even though Tatyana wanted to do nothing but run from the room and weep with astonishing rage because Sasha was going to be married to an English debutante resembling a toad, she laughed, watching Lord Lamorna go.

  ‘Touché, Sasha,’ she said, liberating a glass of champagne from a servant and handing it to him, before taking one herself. ‘But really – of all the outrageous cheek.’

  Sasha had already turned away without even bothering to take his leave of her. How very enjoyable it would be to punish him for this. Lord Lamorna would be the perfect weapon. Oh, she’d summon that English lord with all his barely leashed temper. He would come. They always did.

  24

  The following morning, Crow sat opposite Lord Cathcart at his desk, watching the manservant pour two glasses of brandy. ‘My dear boy,’ Cathcart said, ‘it was good of you to join us at Countess Orlova’s – I
dare say it was the last thing you felt like doing after such a long voyage.’

  ‘It was nothing.’ The sea-crossing from London to St Petersburg had taken more than a month, a series of jumbled recollections: of the grey seas and the forested, mountainous shorelines of eastern Denmark, a jumble of wooden warehouses lining the waterfront in Copenhagen, and the heart-stopping exuberance of Petersburg itself as they left the Gulf of Finland and sailed down the mouth of the Neva – a shocking mirage of Italianate architecture and the domed majesty of the Smolny Cathedral rising above it all. How much would the little maid have altered in all that time? Did she even have names now for the dogs, for his horse, for that green malachite bowl of shells so precious to her? Crow had to force himself to forget his wife, and his daughter in her embroidered linen cap, and to think only of Cathcart sitting before him, and brandy early in the morning, and the still-incomprehensible calls of the barge-men on the great swathe of the Neva sweeping out before the English Embankment; he’d picked up a little Russian here and there, but not much.

  ‘You’ll have your work cut out, Jack,’ Cathcart was saying. ‘In theory we’re allies, but the Russians don’t trust us. Alexander admires what he calls our cunning but fears our influence; meanwhile, intelligence tells us that Napoleon’s sent Davout with eight regiments into Russia, and no one’s sure where any of them are, or where he is. At least Napoleon’s in Austria – his presence here would make twenty-five thousand men fight like fifty thousand.’

  ‘And so instead of doing something actually useful, such as searching out where Marshal Davout might actually be hiding his regiments, I’m to find this bastard Russian princess?’ Crow asked. ‘Do you imagine that her people will just allow the girl to ride away with me?’

  Cathcart sighed. ‘To our knowledge, Nadezhda Kurakina actually has no people – unless you count the tsar himself who has never publicly acknowledged the child, even although her existence is an open secret in Russian society. Both the Count and Countess Kurakin are dead, their sons were killed at Borodino, and the girl has been living at their estate in Kazan with servants and her adoptive grandmother, who died last winter. You’ll find that your own difficulties at home with Lord Castlereagh will dissolve if you manage to find us such a malleable young queen after all this time. I must add that I make no doubt you will not be furthering the acquaintance of your French relatives whilst in St Petersburg. I’m sure you understand how it would be viewed as bordering on treachery, if not outright treason – which would I’m sure be the furthest thing from your mind at the moment.’

  Crow paused in the act of leaning forwards to light a cigarillo at one of the silver candlesticks foresting Cathcart’s desk, fighting an odd, sliding sensation as if the carpeted floor had shot away from beneath his feet. ‘My French what? My mother was the only Saint-Maure to survive the Terror. I’ve no surviving connections in France.’

  ‘Your mother,’ Cathcart replied, ‘was extremely young when she fled France. No more than sixteen or seventeen, if I remember correctly. About the same age as your brother is now. Ask yourself, does Kitto concern himself with aged relatives on your father’s side of the family?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t, but there are scarcely any. A few elderly women – my father’s aunts – who were married off out of Cornwall long before our father was born, let alone Kitto or myself. I dare say he never even saw them more than a handful of times. It was my father and then myself who undertook the task of answering their letters.’

  ‘Consider that it might have been so for your mother,’ Cathcart said. ‘The aristocracy began leaving France in 1789. Your mother was rescued from her convent in Avignon by your father two years later, in 1791, the only one of her family to outlive the terror and confusion – so she thought. Thanks to your father, she survived the executions of her mother, father, brothers, cousins; I understand she herself only escaped imprisonment in the first place because she had been sent to Avignon, and the Republicans had so many others to exterminate that her existence was overlooked.’

  ‘With great respect, my father told me this himself.’ Crow exhaled a cloud of smoke, irritated at this recital of his own mother’s history. But even as he spoke, he knew quite well that Maman had not liked to think of the past. He’d heard all this from his father, and only then when she was dead, and Papa drunk enough to tell the whole story to a child of eleven: knowing his father, it was entirely possible that he had left out any details that did not immediately concern himself, such as the existence of an emigrée aunt living in Russia.

  ‘You understand, then, how a young girl such as your mother was might either forget or simply never speak of the existence of an elderly female relative?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Crow said, ‘but what are you saying? That such a woman exists – that she’s still alive, and in St Petersburg?’

  ‘That’s precisely what I’m saying,’ Cathcart replied evenly, ‘and I trust that you’ll make no attempt to visit her. I speak of this connection only so that you can make every effort not to cross paths with Thérèse de la Saint-Maure.’

  Crow heard himself say, ‘I didn’t even know her name. How can I avoid meeting this woman if I’m to go out in Petersburg society? The Russians still associate as freely with the French as they do with us. The entire court is a crucible of Prussians, Austrians and French, and that’s before you even start with the Persians and Turkish.’

  ‘Well, I’ll say this – I’m sure you have far too much respect for the Duke of Wellington to seek an introduction to your great-aunt, should you encounter one another.’

  ‘I would do nothing so likely to embarrass my commander,’ Crow said, lying with the elegant ease born of long practice as he remembered Wellington watching him across a map-table at the ambassador’s house in the Azores: Really, Jack? Marriage to such a one? You’ll permit me to say that you should have shown your own family name more respect. In truth, he was Wellington’s man no more. Crow got up to walk to the door. ‘Has there been no letter from my wife? I should like to think that she knows where I am, at least.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, no.’ Just as Cathcart’s silent footman reached for the polished brass doorknob, the ambassador spoke again, as if with nothing more than an afterthought. ‘There is one more thing, Jack.’

  There was a queer, light tone in his voice that stopped Crow where he stood.

  ‘I’m afraid there is some news of the Curlew, after all.’

  ‘The Curlew?’ Crow walked over to the tall window overlooking the Neva, watching the pall of wood-smoke rising from the chimneys on Vasilevsky Island, seagulls tossed in the air like cinders above a bonfire. He knew the Curlew: a three-masted frigate operating out of St Mary’s on Scilly. So Hester had sailed on her, or why else would Cathcart speak of it? Hester and the little maid had sailed aboard the Curlew, with bales of wool and barrels of Chambord. He felt poised on the threshold of another world, one he had no desire to enter, and he wished he had never found Hester alone and dripping wet on the beach at Lamorna, years ago now, and that he had never loved her as much as he did.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Lord Cathcart crossed the room, standing closer to Crow, near to the fireplace. He took up a Venetian glass paperweight from the mantelpiece and passed it from one hand to the other. ‘Jack, the Curlew was wrecked off Cézembre. She never reached Saint-Malo, where she was bound for. There were no survivors. According to the islanders, she went down in just fourteen minutes.’

  And Cathcart carried on talking, but Crow just remembered the day he had gone up to the nursery with Hester a little earlier than usual because the rector and his wife were coming to dinner, and his daughter had still been sitting in her tin bath before the nursery fire, droplets of water clinging to her fine, pale brown curls, Beatie kneeling at her side, looking up with a nervous smile, even though Crow had known the girl all her life. She likes the water, your little holy child from across the sea, Hester had said, sliding one arm around hi
s waist, referring to the old tale of the saint their daughter was named after, to St Morwenna, who had crossed the Irish Sea and come into Cornwall from Wales. Although I believe she was not very holy when it came to the rice pudding, was she, Beatie?

  And so the Curlew had sunk and there were no survivors, and in Crow’s mind he quite clearly saw Hester running down a streaming, tipping deck with their child in her arms all wrapped in a blanket; she would have tried to get to one of the tenders but, as he well knew, when a ship went down quickly, there was no time to lower any boat into the water. She would have jumped overboard, then, clinging to the guardrail one-handed before that final leap and knowing that to go down with the ship itself was certain death, pulled down into the deep by a roaring sea-maw awakened by the frigate sinking at speed. So she would have jumped, tried to leap free, but it would have all been for nothing, because although Hester, brought up on an island herself, was a strong swimmer, how could one possibly swim with a year-old child, in a storm that had driven a frigate off course, smashing her hull against the rocks that littered the approach to the Breton island of Cézembre? And Crow looked out of the window at the seagulls circling above the glittering Neva, and above the jumbled rooftops of Vasilevsky Island, but all he could see was Hester going down, down in the dark water, pale silver bubbles streaming from her mouth, her nose, those skirts in a billowing cloud around her as she held the bundled, blanketed child close, even as they drowned together, she and the baby. Now that the maid was dead, he could say her name. It no longer mattered if God heard him speak it and so understood how much he loved Morwenna, his daughter Morwenna, his child, because God saw everything, and God had taken her away forever, as punishment for his many sins.