Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  Kitto fired his pistol, throwing himself on the ground where tufts of longer grass sprouted from boggy earth. Behind him, Rumyantsev fired too, but the shot went just wide. Tatyana screamed. One of the Frenchmen tumbled away from his position and lay still; now Kitto had only one visible enemy, but there might be five more still hidden nearby: perhaps even ten, twenty. Never mind. In the very next breath, he heard the whining hiss of a ball, and then silence. Someone else had been hit – Rumyantsev or the countess, he couldn’t tell which. A bolt of pure, instinctive terror shot through him, and Kitto rolled rapidly to the right, splashing in frozen boggy water, avoiding another shot by inches, but failing to hold his pistol up out of the water. For a moment, he stared at the streaming barrel. Surging to his feet and drawing his sword, Kitto charged. The Frenchman was now cursing and fumbling with his rifle, struggling to reload; he glanced up, and Kitto just had time to register the man’s stunned realisation as he abandoned reloading and hurled himself into a two-man mêlée, armed with the bayonet mounted on his rifle, a full two feet of wicked steel. Kitto had not the reach to strike and so sidestepped, feinting almost as the Frenchman reached him, letting fly with a merciless sideswipe that met solid flesh. The soldier’s death-cry filled the air – the sword-blow had struck through his arm and into his belly, almost disembowelling him. And with the well-trained mercy of the hunter, Kitto crouched at the dying man’s side and cut his throat, looking away so that he did not have to think of the soldier’s wife, his child. Even so, a hot spray of blood splattered across his face. He wiped his sword on the grass and sheathed it before running back to meet the others. Rumyantsev, by some witchery, had managed to catch one of the horses already – not a wild one captured from the steppe but a large, docile gelding doubtless the treasured companion of some provincial farmer’s daughter before being requisitioned.

  ‘Mount up,’ Rumyantsev said over his shoulder as though Kitto had offered him a cigarillo, not just killed two French soldiers. ‘Take the countess with you, and I’ll follow.’

  Shivering in bloodstained muslin, it was a moment before Tatyana could speak. ‘He’s been injured,’ she gasped at Kitto. ‘Someone must help Lieutenant Rumyantsev.’

  ‘Not now,’ Rumyantsev said sharply. ‘Mount up, will you?’

  Breathless with the rush of a kill, Kitto went straight to the gelding’s head. ‘Good boy,’ he said in Cornish, patting his flank. ‘You’ll humour us a while, won’t you, boya?’ He felt the gelding’s hot breath on the back of his neck, and knew that he would tolerate him. Turning to Tatyana, he said, ‘Hold on to his mane, and I’ll hold on to you.’ Without waiting for an answer, he lifted the woman on to the horse, just as he had once seen Crow lift Hester, steadying her as she scrabbled at her skirts and clutched at the gelding’s coarse mane; thank Christ she seemed to know to sit forward and that she could ride bareback – evidence of a hoydenish girlhood on some far-distant country estate, perhaps. Glancing sideways, Kitto saw that Rumyantsev was now standing by a magnificent Turkoman mare, pale gold in the moonlight. He’d never be able to mount her. He’d get himself killed trying.

  ‘You fucking fool,’ Kitto shouted. ‘Hurry up!’ Was he going to be left to deal with four hundred horses and a terrified woman? With athletic desperation, he mounted the gelding behind Tatyana, reaching around her shivering, bare-shouldered form to grasp handfuls of mane, thanking Christ for his own misspent youth riding wild ponies bareback on the moor beyond Nansmornow. Kitto urged the gelding into a fast trot and then a gallop, squinting into the wind even as he willed every shred of flesh in his body to keep his seat. And out on the grasslands beyond even the boundaries of the Orlov estate, Kitto rode hard beneath the night with the wind in his hair and Tatyana Orlova all but lying face down on the gelding’s neck before him. The gelding cleared the fence, and Kitto was aware of many, many horses all around them, the world full of drumming hoofbeats. The horses were panicking, he knew, circling each other at thundering speed, swirling like a great school of mackerel, galloping across the path of his own gelding time after time so that he and the countess would be lucky to see morning. But then, at last, Kitto became aware that they were only galloping alongside other horses, not having to weave among them, and that the hot, rising panic of the herd had quite dissipated beneath a clear night all blanketed with stars. Glancing to his right, Kitto saw the Turkoman mare gaining upon them, the small, hunched figure of Rumyantsev clinging to her neck, low down. He passed within an arm’s length, small and wiry, with those dusty curls torn back from that pinched face, so alive with concentration, and as Kitto watched them surge ahead, the other horses fanned out around the Turkoman like courtiers stepping back and bowing as before a queen, and Kitto realised that this puny runt of an aristocratic litter whose papa had surely paid a fortune to see him enlisted in the Semenovsky now rode the matriarch of this entire herd of horses, all of them following him, all obeying blood, bone and nerve, accepting Rumyantsev and the Turkoman beauty as their undisputed leader.

  The sky had begun to lighten by the time Rumyantsev brought the golden mare to a halt; they were on open grassland now, the forest a dim green shadow on the horizon away to the west, all gilded by the rising sun. As Kitto and Tatyana approached on the gelding, Rumyantsev slid sideways from the mare’s back, crashing to the dew-spangled grass. Kitto dismounted, barely stopping to assist Tatyana, who shook where she stood in her bloodstained gown, those satin slippers torn to rags.

  ‘I told you he was injured,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Someone must help him.’

  What did she expect, a carriage full of serfs to convey Rumyantsev to the nearest surgeon? There was no sign of human habitation. Exasperated, Kitto turned away, loping over to Rumyantsev’s prone form, no more than a dark and seemingly lifeless shape in the grass, and every muscle in his thighs and belly shrieked with agony after so many hours on horseback. The countess followed, halting, limping and shivering. The Turkoman mare bowed her head over the fallen Russian, nosing at him with her pale golden muzzle, stepping away as Kitto approached. Breathless and on his knees, Kitto turned Rumyantsev over – he was so light – and even before he pushed aside the jacket, he smelled hot blood; then he saw it spreading dark over the filthy white linen. Swearing in Cornish, he began unbuttoning Rumyantsev’s shirt. He’d either taken a musket-ball, or been grazed by one.

  Rumyantsev’s eyelashes fluttered, and his thin fingers twitched convulsively. ‘No,’ he said, pushing ineffectually at Kitto’s hand, ‘no—’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Tatyana said, crouching down at Kitto’s side even as he turned to stare at her in astonishment, but he had already peeled back the blood-soaked shirt and, beneath it, instead of naked skin he found the thick, bloodstained bulk of a padded linen corset.

  ‘Christ!’ Kitto let the shirt fall as though it were on fire.

  ‘Oh!’ the countess said, but Kitto ignored her. Now that he knew, it was so obvious. For a moment, they only stared at each other. Rumyantsev’s wide-opened eyes were very dark, with such thick lashes.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Kitto demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Nadezhda,’ the imposter said, and her eyes flashed with rebellion even in surrender. ‘So what will you do with me now, Captain Helford?’

  27

  Almost a fortnight later, at the Anichkov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt, Crow stood at a window in one of the state rooms overlooking the moonlit expanse of the Fontanka River, with the black armband for his wife and child tied below the elbow of his jacket. He was drunk: quietly but catastrophically so, as he had been for weeks, and to the point that he might appear sober to the uninitiated whilst committing the unforgivable. Lord Cathcart and the quiet, gentle Empress Elizaveta Alexeievna would both have readily excused him from this reception, but retribution was now the single force that drove him to move, to speak, to eat, to not put a bullet through his own skull as he so longed to do, and as he would when this was all over, and he had – somehow – punished Lord Castlereagh. />
  He caught the scent of warm milk, and the rose-infused oil Hester always rubbed into her own scalp and Morwenna’s, and when he turned, Hester herself was sitting in a gilded chair with the child on her lap beneath that large portrait of General Potemkin. She wasn’t dressed for a ball; instead, she wore the old muslin gown he knew so well. It was pale green, printed with sprigs of some sort of flower, but cut so low that she always wore a linen fichu tucked into the bodice that he couldn’t look at or even think about without wanting to remove the moment they were alone, twisting that fresh linen between his fingers and letting it fall to the floor, revealing the swell of her breasts. Hester watched him with that clear, steady gaze he had fallen in love with, but now there was a strand of rust-brown seaweed in her hair, which had come loose, and floated about her shoulders in that mass of light curls. Without taking her eyes from him, Hester pushed aside the fichu herself and lifted Morwenna so that she could suckle. The little maid grabbed a handful of her mother’s hair and Crow had to turn away, knowing that when he looked again, they would both be gone.

  ‘You’ve been standing here a long time, Lord Lamorna. I’m so sorry to hear of your indescribable loss.’ With a rustle of silk against fine linen petticoats, Countess Tatyana Orlova came to stand beside him, looking out across the river. She was formed with the marble flawlessness of a statue, her slim arms perfectly moulded, so pale against the dark blue silk of her evening gown. He had seen her suppressed rage when Lady Cathcart announced the child Jane’s engagement to Prince Volkonsky; he had also seen that her fury was concealed from everyone else, except perhaps Volkonsky himself. She turned and surveyed the ballroom with the impassive predatory gaze of a cat. ‘I suppose you will have heard about the attack at my late husband’s estate? Your young brother conducted himself with great heroism. He escorted me to a staging-inn – I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that I have him to thank for my life.’

  Crow couldn’t look at her. He would have to tell the boy about Hester, and the maid. He could not make Lord Castlereagh pay for the loss of his wife and daughter by drinking himself into a mess. But, in truth, he was not sure that he was able to stop.

  Countess Orlova went on lightly, her tone sympathetic: ‘I don’t know if it will be any consolation, but I believe you have another relation present this evening. Thérèse de la Saint-Maure is here – I collect she is a relative of your late mother’s? She was my companion when I was a girl. My family took her in after the revolution in France.’ She turned to him with that slow, easy smile. So now she had decided that he would take part in whatever game she was playing with Volkonsky. In times long past, it would have pleased him to exact an exquisite punishment upon such a woman with all the pleasure he knew how to deal out, and what to hold in reserve, and for how long. He had already seen enough of Tatyana Orlova to appreciate that she would do anything to avenge herself on Prince Volkonsky for his engagement to Jane Cathcart, and that she quite clearly understood just how badly Crow, still an officer in the British army, would be compromised by paying such public attention to a French great-aunt. Beneath the groundswell of numbing grief, he understood that both pieces of information must be used to advantage. At last, he heard himself reply, ‘Then I should be glad to meet Madame de la Saint-Maure.’

  And so Crow took the countess’s arm, allowing her to lead him back into the throng of the great marble hall, glittering with mirrors and windows, heaving with courtiers clad in silk and superfine, the women in long white gloves drawn up past their elbows, diadems glittering. Heads turned wherever they passed, the combination of his loss and her social standing in Petersburg drew a tide of attention. She kept up a stream of inconsequential one-sided conversation about the tsarina’s planting arrangements in the garden at Tsarkoe Selo, steering him to a small knot of elderly women playing hazard for chicken-stakes at a polished chestnut occasional table drawn up close to the marble fireplace. As one, clad in beaded gowns of black and maroon, they all looked up at Crow’s approach.

  ‘Well, Tanyushka, and what manner of game is this?’ A woman with sparse white hair and a mauve gown festooned with lace addressed Countess Orlova in the old-fashioned, courtly French of the Ancien Régime, in the way that one can at more than eighty, when one no longer cares what people think. ‘It is not often you bring pretty young men over to talk to us. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Dear Grandmama, I think Madame de la Saint-Maure is best placed to answer that question.’ Countess Orlova smiled, showing her small white teeth. ‘Dear Thérèse, this is Lieutenant Colonel Lord Lamorna.’

  Crow turned to the old woman, wondering how she could breathe with all that lace buttoned up close to her throat. Her hair was wrapped in a turban of pale grey silk, and she was as wreathed in wrinkles as she was with rather dirty diamonds in a setting fashionable half a century ago. Even now he saw the extraordinary shadows of his mother’s features arranged with less pleasing symmetry, and he had to fight the sensation that his chest was slowly being crushed by an enormous weight.

  Thérèse de la Saint-Maure surveyed him with dispassionate interest as though selecting a fowl for the pot, although he doubted she had ever in her life done anything half so useful. ‘My great-nephew, I collect?’ she said. ‘You won’t see too much of your mother in me, if that’s what you’ve come looking for. I suppose you know that Claire was tall as a weed and really quite devastatingly striking – not that it did her any good, in the end, dead in childbed, so I hear, bearing that young hotspur who was so fashionable last winter.’ She got to her feet with a surprising degree of agility. ‘I suppose you will walk me around this dreadful room – so much gilding! – for we cannot possibly converse here. Unless of course you should prefer to sit and drink tea, and talk commonplaces with my companions.’

  Crow had no desire to tell Thérèse de la Saint-Maure that, on the contrary, he saw a great deal of his mother in her. Quite unable to speak, he bowed in acceptance of her invitation, if you could call it that. It was more an order. He relinquished Countess Orlova’s arm and took his great-aunt’s fragile, lace-clad elbow in a light grasp, steering her away from the group gathered by the fire, well aware that Countess Orlova’s grandmother and her acquaintances were watching him with the merciless lack of deference that could only ever be managed by ancient women who had always moved in the first circles. Briefly, he closed his eyes, wishing that he might open them and find that it was his mother he walked with, and not this stranger of an aunt whose face so curiously recalled hers. Looking across the great hall, Thérèse de la Saint-Maure angled a glance over the top of her black lace fan to Lord Cathcart, who stood nearby talking to Kitto’s colonel in the Coldstream; both watched him walking with his French great-aunt wearing identical expressions of ill-concealed appalled astonishment. What in God’s name did any of it matter?

  Thérèse paused before an indifferent portrait of Tsar Alexander’s youngest sister, all plump arms and white embroidered linen. ‘You’re three parts disguised, aren’t you? Don’t think I haven’t realised, just because you appear reasonably adept at hiding it. Montausier was the same – your French grandfather. Drunk from the moment he got up in the morning, and for the most part, no one knew. But one doesn’t forget that sort of thing, and I see it quite clearly in you. Your Creole wife is dead and so is your child, they tell me, and to my mind you’re likely a spy, but I can’t imagine you’ll go on very well about any of it dead drunk.’ She flung a disparaging glance across the ballroom. ‘Isn’t it amusing how this nonsense continues when that Italian upstart’s Second Army are raiding from Little Russia and further east every day?’

  With all his concentration, Crow suppressed any visible sign of astonishment at her sudden mention of French military strategy, even as he realised that this woman had ruthlessly stripped bare the pointless self-indulgence of his own recent behaviour.

  ‘You think I know nothing about Napoleon or his intentions?’ Thérèse continued without looking at him. ‘You must know that I am
a stateless woman, Lord Lamorna, and have been so since I was forty-two years old. I have lived in Russia since 1790, since the dawn of the Revolution, but do you think any of these people consider me Russian, or will grant me their protection when war breaks out again, as it seems so likely to do? I had to have my manservant barricade the door to my house in 1812 when last the Russians turned against the French, and Moscow burned. Do you have the smallest notion of precisely how dangerous the outbreak of war will be for a woman like me? No? I have lived for a long time, and I don’t intend to die an ignoble death, stripped and beaten in the streets. I find it to my benefit to keep abreast of both the military and political situations as they develop.’

  Crow stopped walking, bringing her to a halt at his side. ‘Will you tell me the purpose of this conversation? I’m quite at a loss. If you’re in danger, let me tell you that association with me is more likely to harm you further than to protect you.’

  ‘Perhaps I over-estimate your standing,’ Thérèse said, ‘for all I’ve heard about your importance to the Duke of Wellington, and how you were his most treasured intelligence officer before Waterloo, even if your star has fallen now so that this young brother of yours was the hero of the moment one day and cut everywhere he went the next, although I notice that society seems to grant you considerably more leeway.’

  Briefly, Crow had to close his eyes.