Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Crow said. ‘Castlereagh will find reasons to keep hanging the innocent Cornish and English alike until he has satisfied whatever demon drives him, and considering he’s been given to stringing up supposed recusants since 1798 I doubt there’ll be an end to it soon. But with my life extinguished perhaps he’ll then be content long enough for the rest of the Cabinet to oust him.’

  ‘No,’ Hester said, furious tears springing to her eyes; she could not begin to imagine this insufferably proud man hooded on the scaffold, his lifeless body then hanging for all to see. ‘Kitto is so young – he might have been foolish and angry with you, but do you really wish him to have this on his conscience for the rest of his life?’

  ‘Well, we can’t have everything, can we?’ Crow said. ‘You and I both know that by now, my dear. Please don’t make a scene by trying to stop me.’ He gave her one of his twisted, most devastated smiles, and spoke then in Cornish, so that only she could understand: ‘Or worse, by not doing so, my dearest and only love.’ And he took Hester’s hand in both of his, and raised it to his lips, one last time. She called his name, but he only carried on walking to the door, past the silent footmen who had borne witness to all this, and then Hester was only conscious of Dorothea guiding her to a chaise, and Lieven’s voice raised into almost a shout, even though she could no longer understand anything that was said to her, or near her.

  59

  Two weeks after his arrest in the incongruous surroundings of Lord Castlereagh’s drawing-room, where he had noticed odd little details like the very ugly gilded porcelain shepherdess on the mantelpiece, and the oppressive green of the botanical wallpaper Emily had chosen in a fit of passion for Sir Joseph Banks, Crow was taken from his private cell at Newgate and escorted under heavy guard to a barge on the Thames, and from there to the Tower of London, watching the grey river and the gulls tossing above, and coal-smoke drifting against a blue sky. He walked across Tower Green flanked by two guards; they led him over dandelion-studded grass towards the timbered Queen’s House, late morning light striking off the multitude of mullioned windows in a way that reminded him acutely of Nansmornow at that same time of day. The light changed as they walked, and he was taken into an entrance hall plastered above and wainscoted below. This house had been built for Anne Boleyn in her early, triumphal days, he knew, but it was here also that she had been condemned to die on her scaffold, and Lady Jane Grey, too, who had been no older than his brother. He remembered sitting cross-legged on the Turkey rug in the schoolroom at Nansmornow listening to a tutor who had always smelled of pear drops and tobacco tell him that before Lady Jane went to her own beheading she stood at the window of her tower-prison, watching her nineteen-year-old husband go by cart to his execution and then return, his head wrapped separately in a cloth. Crow was conscious of being escorted upstairs, and of the mingled scents of beeswax polish rising from three-hundred-year-old oak and one of the gaolers, who released a particularly sharp underarm stink every time he moved. He was led into the Council Chamber where it was said Guido Fawkes and his co-conspirators had been interrogated, and light streamed in through the tall mullioned window at one end, illuminating a high-ceilinged timbered room: white plaster, oak beams, bare floorboards, flames hissing and spitting in a cavernous medieval fireplace. Sitting at a long table of scrubbed oak were most members of the Cabinet, last seen as guests in his own home: Castlereagh himself, fair-haired and handsome and well groomed as ever, contriving to look faintly amused, Sidmouth, old and worried, Nicholas Vansittart, Camden, Westmorland, Mulgrave; the fact that their faces were all so familiar from the earliest days of his youth only added to the dreamlike sense of unreality.

  ‘The duke is too busy to join you all in condemnation?’ Crow said, even as the noisome gaoler thrust him into a high-backed wooden chair at the table. His voice sounded queer and cracked; he hadn’t spoken to anyone since the start of his incarceration.

  Castlereagh replied without even bothering to conceal his hatred. ‘Now is hardly the moment for insolence, Lamorna. I’m sure you know quite well that Wellington is in Austria lying in wait for Napoleon’s retreating army – for which Britain and Russia both have you to thank, if we’re to take your word for it. Now, after some time to reflect, can you explain to us exactly why the whole of Petersburg is buzzing with gossip that you have sworn yourself to Napoleon? You were sent to Russia to bring us an heir, and yet you returned empty-handed, trailing nothing but unfortunate rumours that question your integrity, your loyalty to England. After the Cornish uprising, surely you can see how bad this all looks, how damaging the cost of your influence is and even your presence to the very fabric of society?’

  ‘Perhaps it would help,’ Crow said pleasantly, ‘if Englishmen and Cornishmen were treated like the free men they once were? If you had not suspended habeas corpus and the right of the weak not to be incarcerated without charge by the mighty, the population at large might be less inclined to riot, and perhaps then there would not be so much insurrection to actually crush?’

  The tension in the room rose palpably. No one could look at him: Vansittart, Sidmouth, not a single man. Westmorland and Harrowby, though both staunch Tories, had been friends with his father since they were all at Eton. Westmorland flicked an invisible fleck of dirt from the cuff of his blue jacket of superfine. Harrowby steepled his freckled fingers together, staring fixedly at a commemorative panel listing the participants in the Gunpowder Plot and their accusers. Crow ignored them all, facing Castlereagh across the table.

  ‘You sound very like a completely unrepentant revolutionary, Lamorna, you must own it,’ Castlereagh said.

  ‘Indeed, I’m just a landowner in need of a monarch, Lord Castlereagh. If we want things to go on as they were before the Occupation, we men must at least seem useful to those whose welfare we are responsible for. And it seems to me almost as if the search for an heir has been drawn out to a quite deliberate extent.’

  Vansittart nodded. ‘It’s gone on long enough, I agree, but you were the one meant to bring us an heir, Lamorna, and you failed.’

  ‘And yet the assassin I faced in Russia was no Russian set upon me by the tsar, and not even a Frenchman, but a damned fool of an English boy. How is that, my lord?’ Crow was drowned out by an uproar.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Camden called out. ‘I’ve never heard such a Banbury tale. You’re telling stories just to save yourself, Lamorna – do grow up. And God knows how we are to deal with the frankly appalling mess of your killing Cathcart’s son.’

  But Westmorland, Harrowby and Sidmouth were all watching Castlereagh, who was still smiling.

  ‘Indeed, my only witness is my wife, and you’re unlikely to believe her,’ Crow said, and he wished more than anything that there was a way he might secure Hester’s safety. No matter how much she had come to loathe him he owed her that, at least. It was surely too late for any other way out of this: he had always been a gambling man, and now it seemed he had gambled and lost.

  Castlereagh smiled. ‘But there is another mystery here, Lord Lamorna. Do you think we have no intelligence in St Petersburg at all? We know that the Russian chit was last seen with your own brother. So where is she now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Crow said, smiling back.

  ‘Then I think you must be persuaded to remember what happened in perhaps just a little more detail,’ Castlereagh said, and Crow saw that although Castlereagh was a dissembling liar who didn’t want Nadezhda on British soil at all, neither was he about to pass up an excuse to make Crow endure the extreme end of what a man might bear. Still smiling, Crow wondered what he had done to make this person abandon all reason just in order that he should suffer, and he prayed for the courage to endure what was to come.

  60

  The cell at the Tower of London they called Little Ease was pitch-dark and too cramped to sit or to lie in, and Crow could only crouch there even as time lost all meaning. Every limb now twitched with agonised convulsion while images of Morwenna’s drowned and ro
tting corpse chased memories of Catlin Rescorla’s steady, freckled hands as she poured tincture of opium into a cup of small-ale: he had failed in his most sacred duty, to protect those who depended on him, those who were the most helpless of all. He had a strategy, though: one must count to four hundred, counting through the agony of constricted limbs and twitching, tortured muscle, and only then might one give in and let out the beast-like roar of a man running into battle. At the back of Crow’s disordered and destroyed mind, he saw his father in the library at Nansmornow on the day he had come home on leave after the Battle of Vitoria. Papa sat at his desk, just watching Crow through the forest of tall white candles arrayed beside his scattered piles of letters and accounts. Never forget that your duty is to care for these people, to pass on this name, to steward this land. Let it all die on some battlefield with you if you must, but you will then have betrayed not only generations of your own family, but all those who depend on you.

  Nothing I could do was ever enough for you, was it, Papa? Crow asked in the darkness of his cell, but now in the back of his mind he only saw his father as he had been on his deathbed, gaunt and emaciated, ravaged by the fever contracted as he searched the battlefield at Waterloo for Crow’s own remains. God knows it should have been I who died and you that lived, but here we find ourselves, regardless. Is this enough, Papa, is this enough? I have destroyed it all; how can I even pass on such a tarnished name to the boy?

  Crow’s father vanished from his imaginings, replaced by Hester, visible but turning from him in this relentless darkness; she was no more able to bear Morwenna’s loss than he was, but surely Hester would be better off without him, free to live alone as she’d wanted to when she’d been a young heiress with a mind of her own. He couldn’t stand the thought of her marrying again, of another man so much as taking her hand, ever, and he reached the count of four hundred and began to scream, again and again and again. But by the time the cell door at last opened with a grating crunch of heavy oak scraping across filthy wet gravel, Crow had long given up screaming. He heard muffled voices as he was manhandled from confinement, his limbs stretching with such unbelievable agony that he called out in a cracked and broken voice to the mother of God.

  *

  Ignoring the sweaty reek of stale linen last slept in by a dead man, Crow watched the grey chink of sky just visible through the narrow lancet window in his tower cell, anything to eclipse the darkness so recently left behind in Little Ease; so ruined was his flesh that they’d had to half carry him up the winding stone steps to his new quarters. He listened to the rhythm of footfalls outside, boots on damp, hard stone. A key scraped in the lock, and the heavy door swung open, but Crow didn’t look around, not even when Lord Vansittart came in with a jaundiced and balding priest.

  ‘You can send the padre away, sir,’ Crow said. Why should he confess his sins when God had already punished him with such an acute lack of mercy? He ignored the hurried conference behind him and waited for the spare-featured and balding peer to pull out one of the plain chairs set beneath the lancet. Grey light puddled on the desk; someone had left paper and ink there, a quill.

  ‘You’re drunk, Lamorna,’ Vansittart said, crossing one booted leg over the other. ‘I heard you had been refusing nourishment, but obviously the thirst for wine goes unabated.’

  ‘I count myself lucky to have been born with the sort of name that grants me terrible claret in the White Tower. I feel so distinguished – I must be the first Cornish rebel to be held here since Michael An Gof met his unfortunate fate in 1497. Or – forgive me – am I a French rebel, or just a common traitor? Has anyone actually decided yet?’ With all the care of a man nursing cracked sinews and cramped joints, Crow got up and took the seat opposite, pouring the last of the wine into two tin flagons.

  ‘At the moment, Lamorna, you’re all three,’ Vansittart said. ‘Your execution as a traitor and defector to Napoleon himself is exactly the sort of sideshow to quell serious uprising. Why don’t you simply give me an excuse to stop this happening?’

  ‘Well,’ Crow said, stretching out his legs, ‘why would you want to?’

  Vansittart sighed. ‘You’re not the first young man to adopt an attitude of contemptuous levity in the Tower, but I don’t doubt you’ll feel rather differently on the scaffold. I find Castlereagh so ubiquitous at the moment: what do we want, Castlereagh as another Cromwell? What would you wish, for some grubby Luddite to wrest control from him and put an end to all technological innovation, all industry, condemning us to the fate of an irrelevant island backwater? It might yet happen if we don’t play a well-thought-out hand. Your death would be a distraction, but an acceptable heir to the throne even better – at least a chance of getting the country back on to a remotely even keel. Where is Nadezhda Kurakina? Why did you fail?’

  ‘As I’ve explained to so many people so very many times: my brother found her first,’ Crow said, casting around the room for a way to hang or cut himself before he was committed once more to Little Ease. ‘What do you want me to say? No matter how long you confine me in that place, I can say no more.’

  ‘You must understand that we do actually need to find a way of ousting Castlereagh.’ Vansittart leaned back in his chair, shaking his head, looking every one of his sixty years even as he failed to show the slightest sign of discomfiture at admitting to the torture of a man whose father he had played bridge with every third Thursday, even if his motives were at least rationally political, unlike Castlereagh with all his obscure hatred of anyone who bore the Lamorna name. ‘Why will you not cooperate?’

  ‘In truth,’ Crow said, ‘I no longer care about any of it. You can all go to the devil, and I’ve no more to say. My child drowned on the Curlew, all for Castlereagh’s suspicions, and my own very sorry reputation. She lived scarcely more than a year, and she died in utter terror: what have I to live for? Take me to your gallows whenever you please, I don’t care.’ Raising the cup, he drank the last of his wine.

  *

  It was easier to consider how morning light struck the curving silvery sides of the bowl, and how the dull silken peach-coloured petals seemed almost to absorb light, than it was to imagine Crow enduring the final weeks of his life, his final days, and yet still he would not see her. Hester was painting a pewter dish full of shade-loving roses when she heard Dorothea’s butler approaching at a hurried pace and the door swung open, bringing cold air.

  ‘Lord Castlereagh,’ said the manservant, and Hester froze in her chair, horrified to see that he had come in alone, tall and fair and well dressed as ever, and most decidedly without Dorothea.

  ‘Oh no, Lady Lamorna – don’t trouble yourself to get up.’ Castlereagh spoke with all his usual slow, lazy ease, quite as though he hadn’t ordered the slaughter of her innocent servants at Nansmornow, and her husband were not now awaiting execution at his command, and her child and her dearest Catlin not drowned as they fled the long reach of his vengeance. In her seat before the fire, Hester turned to look at him, still holding the brush. He smiled, crossing the rug towards her, and she stood, pushing back her chair so swiftly that it shrieked across the waxed floorboards.

  ‘Come now, my dear,’ Lord Castlereagh said, ‘is there really any need for you to look at me as though I were a monster? You have nothing to fear from me. In point of fact, I have a proposition for you. Well, perhaps more a reminder of a bargain I once suggested we make.’

  ‘A proposition?’ Hester said coldly. He might as well have killed Catlin and Morwenna with his own hands. He deserved to suffer; he deserved to die, and she began to notice odd details about the room – a childish watercolour of a boat at harbour propped on the mantelpiece, pale blue cornflowers drooping in a copper vase on the windowsill: anything not to look at him, this murderer.

  Lord Castlereagh advanced upon her and drew out one of the other Queen Anne chairs set near the table. Still smiling, he sat down, leaning closer to her, so close, in fact, that he laid one warm hand upon her leg, as though she were a servant, a sl
ave, a concubine, his for the taking. ‘I’m sure you must be so very concerned about your husband,’ he said.

  ‘Kindly remove your hand’ – Hester spoke with quiet, furious calm – ‘before I scream.’

  ‘I really would recommend you don’t do that.’ Castlereagh leaned closer still, sliding his hand further up her thigh towards her groin. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering how you might possibly aid Lord Lamorna. He’s in quite a terrible plight, isn’t he? I’m afraid he won’t escape justice for treason, but with a little forethought – a little consideration – you might ensure that his execution takes place in private, sparing him the humiliation of a public hanging. You know, I heard quite the most ridiculous little rumour that it was actually you who shot the French guards on the day that young Captain Helford escaped his own hanging, all those years ago now. You can be sure there will be no such opportunity this time.’ He smiled. ‘You know, I’m sure, the bodily effects of a hanging. So unsavoury.’

  Hester swallowed hot bile. ‘If you’ll receive me,’ she said, ‘I’ll call upon you at home.’ It didn’t matter what happened to her now, after all.

  Castlereagh smiled again. Tucking his forefinger beneath her chin, he turned her to face him. ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see that you begin to understand. No, no – don’t get up. Adieu then, Lady Lamorna.’ He patted her cheek, bowed and went out, as though they had just discussed no more than the arrangements for an excursion to Hyde Park, and Hester was left alone. It was a long time before she schooled herself into at least the appearance of calm, and her hands had stopped shaking so that she was able to pick up her paintbrush once more, but by that time the light had changed, and all colour had drained from the rose petals.

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