Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  And Hester heard a burst of unstifled laughter, just as Lady Cathcart reached her.

  *

  Stumbling towards the gilded double doors, almost tripping over the skirts of her gown, Tatyana knew there could now be no going back. Even as she had opened the invitation from Lady Cathcart for this afternoon’s soirée, she’d known it must have been sent before the rumours began to spread in earnest. How queer it was, she thought, that just like everyone else one might have affair after affair for decades, really, but then it took only a single night to end everything. Even Pushkin was not coming to help her now; all his attention was on Lord Lamorna’s Creole wife, who had not decorously fainted at learning of her child’s death at sea and her husband’s unorthodox manner of mourning, but rather vomited bile into her hands; one could not help but pity the woman. Even the footman would scarcely look at Tatyana and she had to ask him three times to fetch her wrap. These people had all been waiting for her downfall since those awful rumours about Petya began to spread, just like so many vultures out on the steppe, circling over a weak and stumbling horse.

  ‘Tanyushka!’ Pushkin caught up with her then, his familiar face bright with emotion. ‘You fool, darling – did I not tell you to go back to Yarkaya Polyana until the entire pack of scavengers had found something else to gossip about? Oh, why did you come here today?’

  ‘How could I not, you silly boy? How should I go to Yarkaya Polyana when the last time I was there, I barely escaped with my life?’ She forced herself to smile. They might say that Petya had died a coward at Grezhny, but she herself would face the darkness with such fortitude that perhaps those rumours might at last go away, and her only child could rest in peace, the shattered remains of the boy she had once cradled in her arms now rotting in some distant, unmarked battlefield grave that she could not even visit to mourn over.

  ‘At least let me walk you to your carriage,’ he said. ‘Good God, why is Volkonsky always somewhere else when one most needs him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t need Sasha,’ Tatyana said. ‘Not at all. Or anyone. I’ll just go home. Alexei, dear, you should go back inside. You do realise what will happen if you follow me, don’t you? You have your brother and sisters to think of, their reputations.’ She smiled at him. ‘Quick, before too many people remark on your absence, darling.’

  Without turning to look back at him, Tatyana walked alone to the head of the stairs.

  52

  Kitto counted out a handful of tarnished kopeks for the tattooed woman selling curd cheeses wrapped in leaves from a basket set out by her campfire. Night was falling over the Nogai trading camp, and the warm, lavender-like scent of flowering Russian sage rose from the grassy plains north of Petersburg, drifting across the sprawling temporary city of goatskin tents and scattered campfires, mingling with the warm fug of gathered people and animals, and the scents of woodsmoke, and of kasha boiled with chopped lamb, butter and spices. A trail of windblown children ran past, boys in wide trousers and the girls with bright jackets buttoned over their gowns, long braids flying out behind them. Campfires glowed across the plain like so many stars, but Kitto knew that even here among the Nogai traders he and Nadezhda wouldn’t be safe for long. She was too valuable a chess piece to be allowed to play her own game, and yet so many days after leaving Crow behind, there was no sign of him.

  Nadezhda sat alone by their own campfire, cross-legged in her usual way, head bent to the work of polishing the Charlesville’s stock with a cloth dipped in linseed. Kitto went and sat beside her; without looking at him, she passed the leather flask of kumiss. Steeling himself for the alcoholic fizz of mare’s milk against his tongue, Kitto drank, passing her one of the leaf-wrapped cheeses as he assessed their surroundings, and wondered if he’d ever shrug off this habit of waiting for attack, watching the landscape for a storm of starlings bursting up from the furze, or an unexplained knot of shadow. Bats flew low, and the children ran from one campfire to another. A youth in wide trousers and an embroidered jacket tossed a much younger boy on to the back of a yearling mare with no saddle, standing aside with watchful care as the mare tossed her head, soon brought under control by the young boy, who now had her cantering in a figure of eight between the nearest campfires. Kitto turned away, unable to look at them.

  He must think about anything other than Crow. ‘Nadia,’ he said, looking at her from the tail of his eye, ‘how did you really suppose you’d keep all this up once we got to Petersburg? Any one of a hundred Rumyantsevs could have disowned you. They’re such a well-known family.’ He suppressed a murderous urge to crush Ilya Rumyantsev’s rotting bones, if only they could be found.

  Nadezhda held the flask of kumiss up to the light, and sparks danced above their campfire. ‘I supposed I’d have to transfer out of the Semenovksys to a less well-known regiment as soon as we’d reported to the commissariat with the horses. Look here, I’m sorry. You probably just think I’m the most appalling liar in Christendom, but you’re the only person I’ve actually cared about deceiving. For my sake, you’ve sold your own brother up the river and you’re absent without leave from your regiment – how will we get you out of this mess, Captain Helford?’

  ‘Perhaps I don’t wish to be anywhere other than here.’ They sat side by side, so close that their knees were touching, and she didn’t pull away: he wanted so much to kiss her as they had done beyond the gates of Chudovo, but here the risk was too great. He smiled, unable to help himself. ‘It’s hardly as if I could return to my regiment. We were absent without leave the moment we walked out of Krakowski’s front parlour.’ He did look at her then, hardly daring to give a voice to his fear. ‘Am I a coward not to go back and face up to my colonel?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool.’ Nadezhda took the flask of kumiss, drinking it without so much as a shudder, this tsar’s daughter who fought to kill, who preferred horses to people and who could drink fermented mare’s milk like any Nogai warrior. ‘You might get shot without being lily-livered about it, but surely the English would just use you against Lord Lamorna, wouldn’t they? It would have been so dishonourable if you’d refused Krakowski at Chudovo. We had no choice.’

  Kitto stood up, unable to sit for a moment longer and bear her rewriting of the past, which she seemed to do with alarming alacrity: the truth was, they had gone into the French camp because he’d been so angry about Crow’s treachery. His name hung between them, putting an end to all discussion.

  ‘You should eat something,’ Nadezhda said to him at last. Unwrapping the dock leaves, she bit into the cheese with her usual economy of movement. Kitto tossed a stick into the fire. She did look up, then, and for the first time in all their extraordinary weeks together he saw pale tracks left by tears coursing down her filthy face.

  He crouched down before her, with one hand on her knee – that was safe enough, surely, here among all these people? ‘Nadia,’ he said. ‘What is it? Listen, you’re safe. No one is going to compel you to do anything you don’t wish to. We can trade horses all the way to Persia, you and I.’

  She smiled up at him, tearstained. ‘It’s not that, but I only wish we’d not had to sell the Turkoman.’ She could kill a man without hesitation, but it was the loss of a golden mare that had made her cry like a child.

  ‘We had to sell her,’ he said, desperate. ‘Fugitives don’t get far with no money, and you got a good price for her. We just have to pray that everyone here doesn’t know exactly how much coin we’re carrying now. We need to leave at first light.’

  Nadezhda wiped a smear of oil from the barrel of the Charlesville and the silence between them beat like a drum as she glanced across at the stolid mare hobbled a few yards away. ‘It’s going to be like riding a barrel downstream,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s a good thing your brother wasn’t mounted when we left him.’

  She passed him the flask and Kitto swallowed another mouthful of kumiss, wincing at the taste, and he could no longer sit still; he got to his feet, pacing around the fire.

  ‘Where is he
? It’s been days, and there’s been no sign of him. Just nothing at all. It makes no sense.’

  Nadezhda shrugged, her expression shielded. ‘We were on horseback before long. We outpaced him: perhaps it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘If you knew him as I do you wouldn’t say so.’ The truth was, Crow had been tasked by Lord Castlereagh with bringing Nadezhda to England. What price would he pay for failure?

  53

  When Crow reached Petersburg, the weather had changed, and the bright neoclassical buildings and gilded domes were stark against a drizzling sky. Rain pockmarked the Neva, but the English Embankment was as busy as it ever was: the promenading beau monde mingled with girls selling round loaves of black bread from baskets balanced on their heads, and sailors in wide white breeches walking in groups down to the more workmanlike end of the embankment where caravels, trading vessels and the tsar’s warships were moored. It was to the fashionable part of the embankment that Crow rode his stolen and exhausted horse at eleven o’clock in the morning, so hard and so fast that well-dressed pedestrians, English doctors, poets, opera dancers and Russian Guardsmen in feathered, gold-braided jackets all had to rush to the side of the embankment, and voices speaking in many languages rose up with a crackle and pop, threatening to call the tsar’s police and arguing with loud vehemence about who would get their neck broken first. Once outside the British Embassy, Crow swung himself out of the saddle, and an English naval engineer from Southampton stepped out of the way, turned to his outraged wife and said he was perfectly well ashamed of one’s own countrymen. Ignoring them all, Crow tossed the reins to a little Bokhari girl holding a basket of smoked eels packed in straw and sprinted up the wide front steps to the British Embassy. Ignoring the footmen, Crow ran inside and up the stairs. The Cathcarts’ butler approached wearing an expression of incredulous yet battened-down servant’s disapproval that Crow supposed was inevitable: he’d spirited Jane away from the care of her parents as well as an unwanted marriage. Without waiting to be challenged, he pushed immediately past the man.

  ‘How dare you set foot in this house?’

  Crow stopped then at the sound of a familiar voice and looked up to find George Cathcart standing at the far end of the corridor, fine as a pin as always, his thick, fair-brown hair brushed to a gleam; he was clad in a well-cut jacket that did not quite disguise the imperfections of his personality, and he stood with all the unsettling stillness of a wolf spider found behind the gun rack at Nansmornow. In all his filth and mud, Crow waited for George to approach, which he did, and the hubbub of many voices from the drawing-room behind him seemed somehow to fade away until Crow heard only the heels of George’s highly polished boots striking percussive tap after tap against parquet waxed to a honeyed shine.

  ‘Sir?’ The Cathcarts’ butler glanced nervously from George to Crow and then back again. ‘Will I show the gentleman out, sir?’

  ‘You need not.’ Crow replied in his limited Russian, never taking his eyes from George’s face. The pale skin at his temples glistened with sweat. ‘Mr Cathcart is just about to show me into the drawing-room, where I must urgently speak with his father.’

  George sneered. ‘You’ll be lucky not to be taken out and shot in the yard at the Coldstream barracks. Do you not realise you were seen leaving Petersburg with Thérèse de la Saint-Maure? That your connections with France are so widely known as to brand you a traitor, sir? And your brother, too, absent without leave, having completely failed in the task he was assigned, leaving both our own cavalry and the Russians’ without enough horses to mount them? In the end, it all comes down to bad blood, does it not?’

  ‘Oh, George, when will you ever learn to stop being so damnably irrelevant?’ Reining in his temper, Crow pushed past him and walked straight to the double doors leading into the drawing-room; he didn’t deign to look back as the two footmen let him in unannounced. As was usual at this hour, Lady Cathcart’s drawing-room thronged with the beau monde of the Polar Venice; as one, they all turned to look at Crow, familiar faces and strangers all united in assorted expressions of horror, amusement or shock, like so many Greek theatrical masks.

  A silence fell that was so profound for a moment Crow heard only his own breathing. For days, he hadn’t slept or eaten, only walked and then ridden hard until he reached the wet-mud and woodsmoke stink of Petersburg itself. Exhaustion rolled over him like the wheels of a fully laden ammunition cart. Cathcart stood very near the door, in close conversation with Kitto’s colonel, MacArthur – that was an encounter that would have to wait – and they both looked up and stared at Crow with disgusted shock.

  ‘A word, my lord, if you please,’ Crow said to Lord Cathcart. This was going to be no better than Waterloo.

  ‘I scarcely think so, Lamorna,’ Cathcart said. ‘Whatever you think you may have to discuss of such importance, I can assure you there are other matters which more swiftly merit your attendance.’

  ‘There are not,’ Crow said, in a low voice calculated not to alarm the women, ‘and if you won’t receive me officially then I take leave to tell you now that Davout’s regiments have amassed near Chudovo, with Napoleon himself in their company, only a few days’ march from this city.’

  MacArthur stared at him and, having turned away, Cathcart looked at Crow once more, in the act of having his glass of wine filled by a footman. ‘What?’ Cathcart said. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me,’ Crow said, aware that he would have excoriated his brother for such a lack of address. ‘So tell Alexander, and let him decide whether to evacuate Petersburg before it burns, or afterwards.’

  MacArthur immediately turned and walked away, crossing the room towards a knot of generals from the Guards and a couple of the cavalry regiments, their heads all immediately bent together in hurried conference.

  ‘Jack—’ Cathcart began, and then just stopped talking, a diplomat of thirty years’ standing entirely lost for words, and Crow became aware of just how closely he was now observed by the Cathcarts’ usual slew of morning guests, fashionable Petersburg’s full complement of morning dress: muslins, silks, hessians, and he in all his unshaven filth, splattered in mud up to his shoulders, and the crowd parted before him to reveal Hester, sitting with rigid poise on a chair of pale gold brocade, just beneath the window, wearing a gown he recognised as belonging to Lady Cathcart’s personal maid, and he felt a rush of fury, because even in such a small way, someone had sought the means to insult his wife, who was still alive, who was actually here in this room.

  She couldn’t be. He had seen her so many times, as real as his own hand held out before him, but in truth no more than a trick played by his mind. Mirage or not, Hester simply sat watching him with that devastating calm which had destroyed his every defence since the first moment he’d laid eyes on her on the beach at Lamorna Cove, all those fine, light curls gathered in a topknot, some trailing down her shoulders, just watching him with those dark, discerning eyes. She was not real. She could not be alive; she could not be here, and yet this time the Cathcarts and all their guests were staring at her, too. She was alive. She was here now. What had they told her? Crow felt as though he were falling at great speed and could do nothing to stop himself.

  Hester gave no sign of noticing that every last one of the Cathcarts’ guests and all their assembled servants were watching her. Tall and straight as a queen she walked towards him, saying nothing. She wore a curiously distant expression, as though the greater part of her being were really somewhere else. Morwenna.

  She stood before him now, studying his face with the intensity of a scholar translating an ancient text; she would never believe how much he loved her. No one with any sense would believe that, not after all she must have heard, and after all he’d done. He sensed the heat of her body, so close after all this time, and she was real, she was here, she was alive. He longed to reach out and touch her but knew he had no right. He’d betrayed her, however unwillingly, but had done it all the same. And yet if Hester was really here, sta
nding before him, then where was the little maid: where was Morwenna?

  The first piece of communication between them was entirely unspoken, and Crow was rendered speechless because everything in Hester’s expression told him that even if she had not been on the Curlew, Morwenna had, and he realised that of course she would have sent the child with Catlin, to be safe away from her, because she herself was too easily identifiable as his wife. Without a word, she walked past him, twitching her skirts out of his way. He felt a sudden, uncontrollable spurt of anger curdling with relief that she still lived, and with such fresh, unbearable grief that tears sprang to his eyes. He was overpowered by a tidal wave of excoriating emotion as he followed her out of the room, and yet was unable to stop himself, despite knowing that the reason his own brother had betrayed him was because his greatest fault had been to show terrible, destructive anger when in fact he was afraid.

  54

  The moment they left the drawing-room, doors slamming unheeded behind them, Crow caught Hester by the arm, turning her to face him. ‘What in the name of Christ are you doing here?’ He was so furious, so unshaven and entirely covered with mud that he looked quite wild. How dared he be so angry with her? ‘Did you come here alone? Tell me!’

  ‘Don’t touch me.’ Hester walked away from him, fighting waves of building rage. If she let loose her anger in this house people here would say she was uncivilised, that she was a savage, and unlike him she had not the luxury of not caring what was said about her. Morwenna was dead, the Curlew wrecked, down in fourteen minutes, her child lost. Hester had seen too many shipwrecks to hold on to a scrap of hope. Morwenna and Catlin had both drowned without her, sucked down into a cold, unforgiving sea. Since arriving at the embassy, she’d had a day and a night to absorb the truth of it but could not, even pressing the corner of a pillow into her mouth in last night’s fourth-best guest-chamber and letting out an unending silent scream had not really made it seem true. She let out a gasp as Crow caught up, taking her arm again.