Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  Captain Wythenshawe looked up. ‘I think that’s for me to decide, not you, isn’t it? Leave us now if you can’t be useful. Put the pistol on my desk.’

  Hester swallowed, watching Milton walk out, casting a resentful glance at her: he’d brought her in expecting praise, and received only a reprimand for his trouble. Her throat felt tight; it was hard to breathe.

  Wythenshawe smiled, reassuring. ‘Come here, Miss – Miss? I’m afraid your name escapes me. Sit down.’ He gestured at a chair. Hester sank into it with half an eye on her pistol.

  ‘My name is Mrs Pengelly.’ Hester forced herself to sound confident, as though there was nothing at all unusual in an unchaperoned woman with brown skin travelling alone to St Petersburg in a private cabin secured with a roll of banknotes. At that moment, Captain Wythenshawe leaned back a little, steepling his fingertips on the desktop.

  ‘Mrs Pengelly?’

  And then Hester knew where she’d seen him before, steepling his fingertips together in precisely that way – sitting opposite her at the long table in the great hall at Castle Bryher, her childhood home. A guest of Papa’s, he’d played draughts with her when she was no more than fifteen. She’d won – or he’d let her win, little more than a child at the time; she’d never been sure which. Their eyes met across the table, and Hester couldn’t breathe. He knew who she was. He remembered, too. There was absolutely no point in continuing with the lie.

  ‘No,’ she heard herself say. ‘My name is Hester Helford.’

  ‘Countess of Lamorna and fugitive from justice?’ Captain Wythenshawe picked up his brass sextant, turning the instrument over with pale, freckled fingers. ‘You’ve been hunted all over Cornwall – it’s been in The Times, the Morning Post – everywhere. You realise, don’t you, that, rightfully speaking, I must apprehend you?’

  Hester said nothing and only looked at her pistol; it lay just inches from her grasp, but Captain Wythenshawe would never allow her to reach it. She couldn’t kill every man on the Wellington. Her only protection was now as good as a hundred miles distant. They were so very far from land: she wondered if this was why he had waited before confronting her – now, when they wouldn’t make landfall again until the Wellington docked in St Petersburg.

  ‘Goodness, my lady, you needn’t look so worried.’ Captain Wythenshawe smiled: she was entirely in his power. ‘Please, sit down. I’m not a monster. I’ve been concerned about you, hiding away in that cabin, all alone. Do listen – I have a proposition.’

  ‘A – proposition?’ Hester repeated, trying not to imagine exactly the expression on Crow’s face if he were ever to hear a man say such a thing to her.

  Wythenshawe smiled again. He’d been a friend of Papa’s: it would be all right. Papa had been necessarily cautious about whom he chose as his friends. He didn’t invite just anyone to Castle Bryher, and she’d played parlour games with this man as a young girl at the long, scrubbed table in the great hall, with her mother’s portrait looking down upon them. ‘I’d like to ask you to dine with me, Lady Lamorna. Your current habit of paying Nicholls to bring you mugfuls of slop from the galley would, I’m sure, be most unsatisfactory to your husband. And I hate to think of what Captain John Harewood would have thought if he’d known I’d had his daughter under my protection, and had allowed her to continue in such conditions of shocking penury.’

  Hester moulded her expression into one of obedient acquiescence – it was usually the fastest and surest way to divert a man’s attention to the sound of his own voice. Her gaze was drawn to Captain Wythenshawe’s desk, and the array of charts spread out. She saw St Petersburg marked on one at the mouth of a vast river, the Neva. Beside the charts an array of nautical instruments had been laid out – sextants, dividers, a telescope in a brass case. She closed her eyes and saw Papa’s tower-top library at Castle Bryher with a window at each point of the compass, those faded red curtains shifting in the breeze, and the acrid smell of the seaweed pits making potash for gunpowder. There, Papa had shown her how to use a sextant, how to read a compass and trace one’s progress on a chart. Knowledge was freedom, but she was not in charge of the Wellington, sailing her up the Neva and into harbour. Instead, she was entirely at the mercy of Captain Wythenshawe.

  ‘Lady Lamorna?’ he said with the barely disguised impatience of a man who had already repeated himself once. ‘Will you do me the honour of dining with me tonight?’

  Hester looked up. He was smiling, but she didn’t miss the sense of entitled impatience. She ought to be grateful. He was her protector, her saviour. She was not the mistress of this ship, or any other, and never would be. All the same, she wondered how long it would be before Captain Wythenshawe noticed if one of those dusty sextants disappeared from the varnished oak shelves above his desk, and how many charts of the Baltic approaches to Russia there actually were, and how obvious it would be if one went missing.

  Hester forced a smile. ‘I would be honoured, Captain.’

  ‘Good. I think you’ll find that the – distinction offered may protect you against unwanted attention in future. In the meantime, I’ll escort you back to your cabin.’

  Hester curtseyed to him, knowing that there was absolutely nothing else that she could do. Not yet, at any rate.

  39

  Tatyana woke to find Masha drawing back the bed-curtains. The maid’s professional smile froze as she set the lamp down on the bedside table.

  ‘Mistress, are you quite well?’

  The aching pulse of the bruising at Tatyana’s wrists told its own story: Masha wasn’t referring only to the fact that she had slept all day, and that a summer’s night was now drawing in again over Petersburg, late and slow, a vast pale grey sky that even so early in the year was never quite dark. Last night, Lord Lamorna had held her wrists above her head, pinning her down, giving to her what she had demanded of him with that merciless, devastated passion.

  ‘Quite well, thank you. You may bring some tea.’ Tatyana smiled as she spoke, her victory complete. Sasha would not now be marrying Jane Cathcart – how could he? – and aside from that, she had taught darling, spoiled Prince Volkonsky a long overdue lesson. He was not the only man to please her, and she could please herself elsewhere, wherever and whenever she chose.

  Masha stared, swallowing hard. ‘But your shoulder, mistress—’

  ‘Never mind that.’ Tatyana nursed a memory of Lord Lamorna grazing her skin with his teeth, with barely restrained animal fury; God, his rage at being so manipulated, combined with his clear and obvious need for relief. Her nightgown lay in ruins by the foot of the bed. Masha swallowed, smoothing down her starched white apron, and went to the armoire, bringing out a dressing gown of silver-shot Rajasthani muslin.

  ‘Is there any post today?’ Tatyana asked, carelessly, as Masha tied the wide ribbon across the front of the dressing gown. No, she had got what she wanted. For now, it was enough to know that Lord Lamorna had submitted to her power even as he had mastered her completely. What was wrong with Masha, standing there with her fingers clasped together as though praying? With the ball so soon, the silver tray in the hall ought to have been overflowing with acceptances: there was work to do.

  ‘Mistress, there is only this one letter.’ Masha turned to the tray she had carried in with her, passing Tatyana the cheap, folded paper.

  ‘You may go.’ Battling a rising and horribly fluttering sensation of panic, Tatyana was sure what she was going to see even before she broke the seal, but no one else must witness this, not even Masha. The maid withdrew; even with years of training she didn’t manage to disguise a frightened frown as she closed the door quietly behind her. Tatyana took a steadying breath, reaching for the half-empty glass of brandy that had sat on the table since Lord Lamorna’s arrival the night before. Dusty cognac seared her throat as she broke open the clumsy seal, unfolding thin, cheap paper that felt almost greasy to the touch. It was not a letter, but worse than that. She’d seen certificates like this before – printed and sold as a cruel joke to mock c
uckolds or simply to spread malicious rumours. She’d even deigned to smile at one, every now and then, if it was laughingly drawn from a beaded reticule and shown to her at a salon. Light-headed, she looked down at the one that had been sent to her, and read it. This certificate is presented to Countess Tatyana Orlova on the occasion of her being a Prize Slut. How can we also fail to credit her for being the Mother of a Coward?

  Tatyana folded the certificate and leaned back against her heaped up pillows. How many other people had received it?

  *

  Crow closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the upholstered cushions of the kibitka. Joséphine and Thérèse sat in the forward-facing seat, wrapped in Kashmiri blankets, reminiscing about Versailles before the Terror. He should have foreseen that they would know each other, that he couldn’t cross swords with Thérèse de la Saint-Maure in a Petersburg ballroom without Napoleon himself and his consort eventually hearing of it, and that they would find a way to use him. Beneath his shirt, he felt the scratches left by Tatyana’s nails, but there had been no sense of release when he took her as she had demanded, only of sickening betrayal, as though Hester were still alive, even though she was not, and he would never see her again, and she would never slap him as hard as he deserved for what he had done to insult her memory, and that of their daughter.

  ‘Darling Thérèse,’ Joséphine said lightly, ‘give your nephew something to drink; he looks as if he’s about to cast himself beneath the carriage wheels, and he’s all that stands between three armies. We can’t possibly waste him.’

  ‘I find this depression quite insupportable, Lord Lamorna,’ Thérèse said. ‘If you must conduct wild affairs in the public eye, you could at least not inflict a tragedy upon us about it afterwards. It shows a lamentable want of style, which your Saint-Maure grandfather would have looked upon with the most profound disgust.’ She dug into her bandbox, drawing out a flask smelling strongly of Benedictine, but Crow shook his head, addressing her with iced courtesy.

  ‘I thank you, madame, but I’m quite well and in need of nothing.’ He didn’t care if Napoleon positioned his troops for a dog-fight that would crush England and Russia together; he didn’t care if Petersburg burned to the ground or if George Cathcart put a bullet between his eyes for England. But he must have an heir of honourable reputation to safeguard his lands and his people. There was no choice but to spring Kitto from this French trap, and to find this Nadezhda Kurakina, so indecorously disguised as a boy, and in his own brother’s company.

  Joséphine smiled. ‘Darling Jack, but Thérèse is quite right: you mustn’t throw yourself into the blue megrims simply because Tatyana Orlova has worn you to death and you’ve ruined the reputation of a young English girl scarcely out of the schoolroom. No, don’t look like that – obviously the whole of Petersburg is talking about it already. You were hardly cautious. Your dear aunt is right: it only takes one servant with a loose tongue, darling.’

  ‘You need not lecture me,’ he said.

  Thérèse frowned. ‘I’m fond of Tatyana, but she really is a fool, especially if she thinks this little scandal is the worst that will ever happen to her. There is already a vast quantity of gossip about her son – there were so many unpleasant rumours of cowardice after he died it’s a wonder she survived another season in such an elevated position. The last thing she needed was a scandal of this magnitude. There is only so much one can get away with.’

  ‘Well, she and everyone in Petersburg can expect worse than complete social ruin if our little gambit here does not succeed,’ Joséphine said. ‘I know you don’t care about the fate of nations, Jack, but if you do as we ask there is still just a little time to save your brother.’

  Crow said nothing at all until long after the kibitka had pulled up outside a dacha reached along a winding carriage drive through woodland, pine branches and aspen leaves shivering in a twilit breeze. With a queer sense of disconnection, he considered the possibility that he might very easily be dead within the hour – that rather than accepting him as a double agent acting against England, Napoleon simply intended to have him shot – and that Joséphine had been despatched to bait a trap. Killing women was never easy, but there was the pistol. There was the knife. Joséphine’s lackeys might cut his throat as many times over as they chose, but not until he had run Kitto to earth; he would not leave the boy and generations of the Lamorna name to the tender mercies of French hostage-takers. Crow felt a queer sense of breathlessness, as if the still air within the upholstered interior of the kibitka were too thin, or not quite fresh. Thérèse had long since dozed off, quantities of black lace at her throat bobbing with the gentle, well-sprung movement of the carriage.

  Joséphine looked up from the book in her hands, smiling at him, lashes lowered. ‘You needn’t be so suspicious, you know. If my dear Bonaparte wanted you dead, my lord, you would scarcely be sitting here now, would you?’

  Crow could find no words to answer her, but every time he closed his eyes he saw Tatyana’s powdered curves, which only made the lack of Hester more acute, and he felt yet more breathless, and that now familiar sensation of his chest being slowly crushed. As if prompted by an unseen puppeteer, he was first to alight from the kibitka when at last it drew to a halt outside a house, taking in scattered impressions of white stucco, long windows alight with spreading sunset, the metallic curve of a stream overhung with willows. A silent groom appeared at Crow’s side, and Crow handed first Thérèse and then Joséphine down from the carriage and walked into the house, conscious only of odd details: evening sunlight slanting across dark floorboards waxed to a gleam, the smooth dark hair of a Kalmyk maidservant, the rounded, creamy dull-silk heads of half-opened peonies in a blue and white china vase on a sideboard. Mechanically following a liveried manservant up a flight of stairs, Crow began to smell gunpowder smoke where he knew there was none, that cloying, so-familiar scent that caught in one’s hair, in the very fabric of one’s clothes. The shape of the shadow cast by an occasional table sent him reaching for the pistol holstered at his belt; he was quite unable to breathe until he had closed his fingers around it, but even that would not be enough; he knew it would not, because he could already see blood spreading across the floor, and although he could hear Joséphine and Thérèse in conversation beside him, and in fact Joséphine’s fingers rested lightly upon his arm, it sounded as though they were underwater, or that he could only hear them from some far-distant part of the house. The young Belgian soldier slumped in a far corner of the long, galleried room, sitting in a pool of his own blood. The gold lacing on his blue jacket caught the light, and even from this distance it was clear that the boy was dead, because Crow himself had cut his throat at Waterloo, but also that his clear grey eyes were quite open. Crow looked down: Joséphine had tightened her grip on his arm.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she was saying, ‘of course all the servants here are very discreet. We remain overnight and will be near Chudovo by late afternoon tomorrow. But with Thérèse and me in your train I’m afraid you must travel in more civilised order than I expect you’re used to, darling. There can be no riding all night, I’m afraid! We’ll have a new team of horses, too. Jack? You do look tired. Are you quite well?’

  He made some reply; he couldn’t look away from the young Belgian. When the boy spoke, his voice was thin and rattling, the thin edges of the wide wound at his throat fluttering as he spoke: Maman, Maman, Maman— The choking smell of musket-smoke now filled the room with yellowish, sulphuric clouds that Crow could actually see, clear as day, and he reached to take Thérèse’s thin elbow, because how could she tell where she was going with all that smoke? And how could Joséphine not notice that her buttoned-up jean boots were now splashed with blood as they walked through dark, glossy puddles of it? The butcher’s-shop reek of it turned his stomach and made him want to puke, even as he was dimly aware that they had all stopped walking, and that someone was talking to him.

  ‘Sir?’ The manservant spoke in Russian, gesturing at the panell
ed door they had halted at, and Crow had enough of the language to understand most of what he said. ‘Sir, your chamber?’ The man was staring as though one had just pissed all over the floor, and with every shred of self-control Crow managed not to drive a fist into his face. ‘Sir, the madame?’

  Crow turned his head and saw that Joséphine and Thérèse were staring up at him, horrified, Thérèse’s one lace-gloved hand over his as he gripped her old, thin arm, those fragile bones held far too tight in his grasp. ‘When you have quite finished?’ She spoke with her usual hauteur, but this time with an undeniable edge of alarm: his grip was hard enough to bruise. He released her as though she were composed of fire, and indeed he’d left long red marks around her forearm, just visible beneath the lace sleeve of her gown, and she said nothing, only turning to study a still life of a bowl of fruit, which was worse than if she had descended into hysterics, and Joséphine was still openly staring at him, her lips slightly parted.

  Crow turned to the lackey, speaking again in Russian; it was this facility with languages that had led him to such a life – the ease with which he absorbed foreign tongues had paved a road to damnation. ‘Bring me some brandy. Madame, Aunt – I bid you goodnight.’

  ‘Jack?’ Joséphine said; then she turned to Thérèse. ‘Whatever—’

  But Crow could not reply to her; it was all he could do to walk into the bedchamber and close the door behind him, and why were they taking so long with the brandy when the floor was awash with blood? He leaned on the door, fighting for breath; the candles were already lit, and white linen arrayed the bed, embroidered with red flowers, and dark wood panelled the walls, which seemed to push closer with every moment. There must be relief, or he would start screaming and not be able to stop. They must bring brandy, port, anything. Forcing one foot before the other, Crow made himself walk across a faded carpet to the bed, but before he reached it, his foot struck a yielding object, and he looked down to see his brother on the floor, curled up on his side in a filthy shirt and breeches, both hands held to his bloodied face. Crow knelt at once at Kitto’s side.