Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  Two hundred miles from Dorothea Lieven’s white stucco Mayfair townhouse and thirty miles from the Cornish mainland, summer reigned over an archipelago of rocky, windswept islands with silvery beaches, stone houses and bounteous vegetable gardens all hidden from the north-easterly wind behind hedges of tangled broom and dog rose. Fishermen mended nets on the great stone quay at Hugh-town on St Mary’s, idly watching sun-browned children row kists of salted mackerel to aged relatives stubbornly crofting the off-islands. A mile and a half across open water, Catlin Rescorla was knee-deep in the monks’ herb bed at the Priory of St Nicholas on the holy island of Trescaw. It had been a dry summer, and leggy dandelions colonised the comfrey; beyond the reaches of the garden, the marram grass was blue with those exotic flowers one of the brothers had brought with him from foreign parts before taking the cloth. They’d gone wild since Catlin’s girlhood on Bryher across the water, those bright flowers, seeds blowing on the wind away from the grey bulk of the priory, so that now they grew in violet swathes right down to the wide white sands and the glittering sea beyond.

  ‘Cat, see!’

  ‘What is it, maid?’ Catlin winced as she straightened her back, idly passing her weeding fork to the child lining up pebbles in the dust at her feet. Brother Anselm was hurrying down one of the steep paths, looking for all the world like a purposeful rook in his dusty black Benedictine robes, even though he was a young lad of no more than twenty. It had been Anselm who’d found Catlin and the maid hiding in the watery cave at Piper’s Hole across the far side of the island. Till she lay on her deathbed, Catlin would never forget the sheer cold terror of seeing a man in dark robes approach across the distant heath, of scrambling down among the rocks with the child in her arms and white surf crashing below before they gained the cave. She’d crouched in the dark, clinging to the maid. But in the end it had been only Brother Anselm, stumbling and slipping on the black rocks in his long robes and salt-stained sandals, first of all just leaving cloth-wrapped parcels of bread and hard cheese and last year’s wrinkled apples.

  ‘Mistress Rescorla!’ Brother Anselm stopped now a few paces away from the herb garden, sweat fairly dripping down his great beak of a nose. ‘Father Thomas wants to see you.’

  Catlin stared at him. So this was it. They’d lured her in from Piper’s Hole with promises of safe harbour all that time ago, but in the end the monks were just as afraid of Lord Castlereagh as everyone else. She swooped on the maid, picking her up, holding her close.

  ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ Brother Anselm said, smiling but nervy. ‘There’s no English soldiers, nothing like that.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ Catlin said. The child waved the gardening fork with such wild abandon that she nearly crowned Brother Anselm with it, and Catlin had to prise it from her grasp. ‘Hush now, maid. Don’t fret.’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, Mistress Rescorla, but a message came across from St Mary’s when we were at morning prayers, and Father said you must see him without delay. I’ll finish this patch of weeding.’

  ‘Ansom!’ The maid reached out for him, and Brother Anselm popped his finger in his cheek at her; he’d left eight younger brothers and sisters behind in Essex, so he said. Morwenna was growing hale and heavy, and Catlin set her down gratefully, leaving her to run unsteadily to the young monk, her woollen skirts whisking through the dust. Hester had never seen her run. Leaving them both behind, Catlin hurried up the sandy, rock-strewn path to the priory with tears in her eyes, sure that she had done wrong in hiding for so long, but without the smallest notion of what she could have done instead. Lord Lamorna was like to be hanged, it was said: they’d heard that much out here on the islands. He’d go to the gallows thinking his child and wife had drowned on the Curlew, never knowing that Hester had fled Hugh-town all those months ago, or that his daughter was safe here on Scilly. He’d never know of Catlin’s own awful quarter-hour hell of indecision on the quayside as folk started to board the Curlew with all those English soldiers milling about, poking their noses into everything, sniffing around like so many dog foxes. And then Catlin had gone and done it, made this choice she’d never since been sure was right, even when news of the wreck came: she had marched straight up to the Curlew’s purser with Morwenna in her arms and signed her own name on the passenger manifest, alongside Lady Lamorna’s, and Lady Morwenna Helford’s (infant), before losing both herself and the maid in the crowd at the quayside, climbing straight down the granite steps at the far end of the quay, and rowing hard across the sound from St Mary’s to Trescaw in a dinghy that had belonged to Hester’s father, left on its mooring from affection to him. It hadn’t even been stealing.

  Catlin found Father Thomas not in his cell, but in the little rose garden just outside the refectory where the brothers took their meals. He was a tall old man, broad-shouldered and with a shock of white hair – some sixth son of a nobleman who’d pledged his life more closely to God than his aristocratic family ever intended, giving up a rich living in Rutland for the quiet of this far-flung priory. He was deadheading the yellow roses with fingers thick and gnarled as oak, so absorbed in his task that he didn’t at first look up as Catlin approached. ‘Father?’ she said. ‘You sent for me.’

  He looked up and smiled, frowning a little. ‘Mistress Rescorla. Forgive me – I find it’s easier to speak to God in this garden than anywhere else, and I confess I was lost in thought. I hope you know that you and the child are welcome to sanctuary at the priory for as long as you so choose. I see no possible reason for a serving-woman and a child to be embroiled in accusations of aristocrats fomenting revolution, or of treachery, but I have this morning received news which may change your position.’

  Catlin couldn’t look away; she felt small and powerless in the face of his fierce blue eyes, and that ridged nose. ‘What is it, then, Father?’

  ‘You’ve been much troubled over Lord and Lady Lamorna believing that the child drowned in the wreck of the Curlew – as, I confess, have I. Lord Lamorna we know is certainly in prison in London; his wife’s whereabouts is still uncertain.’

  ‘I daren’t write to him, Father,’ Catlin said. ‘Even in Cornish – even in cipher. Surely every letter is read by his guards? There’s nothing to be done that I can see, wicked though it seems, not without putting the child at risk. Lord Castlereagh is that cruel, I’d put nothing past him.’

  Father Thomas snipped a withered rose, letting the head fall into the basket. ‘What if I were to tell you, Mrs Rescorla, that Captain Helford has been seen disembarking from the Brieuze in Fowey, in the company of a Russian soldier, and took the fast mail coach to the capital?’

  ‘I’d say he’s like to be arrested the moment he sets foot in London,’ Catlin said: she’d long ago learned that hope could be a very foolish indulgence.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s very likely he’s in town already,’ Father Thomas said. ‘This news must be close to a week old: we heard it by chance when the mail-boat came this morning.’

  ‘But if he’s not, and I write to him, there’s just a chance Lord Lamorna might hear the maid’s safe before they hang him?’ Catlin said. ‘And Captain Helford will never tell a soul save his brother where she is.’

  ‘It would be an act of mercy, my child, would it not?’ said Father Thomas, and even as Catlin knew there could be no doubt he was right, she couldn’t help but be afraid that the cost of easing the last days of one man’s life might be a heavy burden to his daughter, and to herself.

  62

  ‘Hester?’ Dorothea came into the morning-room trailing her shawl, her gown hanging in graceful folds down to her blue kid slippers, and although she was obviously full of news, her smile swiftly disappeared. ‘Why was Lord Castlereagh here?’ She stood at Hester’s chair, frowning at the unfinished painting, white canvas biting into the soft warmth of half-painted peach-gold rose petals. ‘I was quite distracted by the children – if I’d only known he planned to visit in such an unannounced and odd fashion, I should never have left you to face him
alone. What on earth did he want?’

  Hester drew in a long, shuddering breath. ‘I’m not at all sure. To gloat, perhaps? I think his senses are quite disordered. How are the children? Is Paul’s fever any better? I’m so sorry.’

  Dorothea shook her head, distracted. ‘He’s much better, I thank you. But that’s not it at all— Hester, there’s someone to see you – someone else – we’re only lucky that Lord Castlereagh left when he did.’

  ‘Dorothea, you’re not making any sense,’ Hester said. ‘Please, I can stand no more mysteries.’ She suppressed a wild flame of hope: had Crow been released?

  Dorothea shook her head. ‘Oh, but you’re quite right – indeed I hardly know what to do with myself.’ She turned to the footman waiting by the door. ‘James, perhaps it’s best if you just bring them in.’ Her lips twitched into a sudden smile that Hester wanted to slap off her face. ‘In fact, our visitor has come to see you in particular, Hester.’

  ‘I don’t at all comprehend—’ Hester began, but Dorothea’s butler came in, and before he even announced the callers, Hester saw a sharp-featured boy with curling hair and an expression of shielded hostility, accompanied by a tall, filthy and unshaven young officer, so travel-stained that his uniform of the Coldstream Regiment was almost unrecognisable. She got up, pushing back the chair with undisguised violence; she had to cling to the edge of the table.

  ‘Hets?’ Kitto said, standing very still, staring at Hester as though she had risen from the grave. ‘Hets.’

  ‘You look an absolute disgrace,’ Hester said, battling tears. He was here, here at last. ‘Kitto, how could you?’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ The strange young man at Kitto’s side looked from Hester to Dorothea and back, quite undaunted. ‘Kitto only did what he thought was right.’ With the flickering intensity of a battle-seasoned soldier, the boy glanced around Dorothea’s drawing-room, assessing his distance from every door, every window.

  ‘Nadia, leave this to me,’ Kitto said quickly. He looked so sorry, and so exhausted, that Hester longed to cross the room and shake him.

  ‘Nadia?’ Hester said instead, his words only now sinking in. ‘Nadia?’

  Kitto and the boy looked at one another with equally unspoken meaning, and Dorothea stepped forwards, smoothing out her gown. ‘Lady Lamorna,’ she said, ‘might I introduce Nadezhda Sofia Kurakina? Your husband, I should imagine, will be so glad that she has chosen to visit London.’

  Hester summoned every ounce of composure she possessed, and held out her hand for the boy – this girl – to shake. ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Indeed I’m quite sure you’re not,’ the girl said quickly, and Hester could see how this child had passed for so long as a young soldier, with her spare features and narrow, boyish frame, but now she knew the truth it was immediately obvious: of course she was a girl, a wiry, tousled girl, but a girl all the same, and despite everything Hester felt a burst of shocking pity for her because she looked so frightened, so unhappy, and so young.

  Dorothea smiled as though she’d just been forced to introduce someone’s wife to his mistress. ‘Please be assured that my husband is already in possession of all the documents and correspondence pertaining to your parentage, Miss Kurakina. It’s fortunate that your parents wrote to each other frequently. Before your mother’s murder during the French Occupation of England, the tsar and Princess Sophia exchanged letters, portraits and sketches with your adoptive parents; we anticipate no challenge to your identity. We have papers legitimising your birth as a result of a secret marriage between Princess Sophia and one of Alexander’s deceased cousins. Captain Helford, you and Miss Kurakina will both reside here in the embassy until this matter is resolved. I think that seems best, no?’

  ‘We must go,’ Kitto said, desperate. ‘We must go to Jack at once.’

  The boy – the girl – gave only a curt nod.

  ‘I’m afraid Count Lieven has said exactly the same thing,’ Dorothea went on with all her usual smooth assurance. ‘Miss Kurakina, we can hardly present you to the Cabinet in your current condition. Pray come with me. I’m sure Lady Lamorna and Captain Helford have much to discuss.’

  Nadezhda exchanged another pregnant glance with Kitto, not displaying the slightest sign of enthusiasm at the prospect of hair tongs, ribbons, corsets or any amount of snowy muslin. Still without a word, she was first to look away, setting back her shoulders as she followed Dorothea to the door. Kitto took great interest in the window, and in the shifting green leaves of a beech tree that cast shade over the railed, oval garden in the middle of the square, and Hester realised with complete exasperation that they were both, in a quiet way, entirely broken-hearted at leaving one another. Only when Nadezhda had gone out with Dorothea did Kitto turn back to her, his face resolute.

  ‘Hester, indeed I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t blame Nadezhda. She never wanted to come to England or to have any part of this at all, but she told me that I couldn’t do this to Crow on her account. I was so—’

  ‘So desperately angry with him?’ Hester supplied, and she did not say the rest: So desperately angry with him, and so in love with her. Instead, she put out her arms, and Kitto held her so close that for a moment it was hard to breathe, the nearest he had to a mother, as she knew very well.

  ‘For the longest time I thought you were dead as well,’ he said, speaking into her hair, and she knew that he knew about Morwenna, that she was gone. ‘Hets, I’m sorry.’

  Hester could do nothing but hold him: soon, very soon, he would be all that remained. Crow was lost to her, and Morwenna, too, and she knew very well there would be no life beyond her assignation with Lord Castlereagh; even if she might buy a less hideous death for her husband, she had no intention of living with the shame of what she was about to do. She hoped that God would forgive her.

  63

  Kitto battled a vivid and dizzying sense of unreality as the carriage drew up outside the Byward Gate at the Tower of London, the Kentish ragstone walls pale and bright in late summer light that winked off the stinking, gull-blown waters of the Thames beyond. He fought a sickening broadside of dread and panic at the prospect of facing Crow as a condemned prisoner, glad only that Hester would remember her husband as proud and as insufferable as he’d always been. She’d scarcely looked at him as they left the Lievens’, almost as though she were afraid to, or she had wanted to conceal something from him in those agonising moments of farewell, when words had fallen like stones to the marble floor. Wouldn’t it be worse for her and Dorothea, with nothing to do but sit in that quiet drawing-room and wait? Nadezhda herself sat in silence, almost unrecognisable in a pale muslin gown, so vulnerable with her thin brown arms and a ribbon carefully threaded through her cropped curls, and still with the ever-alert posture of a partisan soldier. Count Lieven smiled at her, and spoke reassuringly in Russian, but she only nodded, looking as though she wanted to crawl out of the window and disappear into the Thames.

  You’re sacrificing yourself for my brother, he’d said to her as they lay beneath the night in the Nogai camp, only their fingertips touching. You hardly know him.

  I’m not doing it for him, Nadezhda had replied, giving him an odd look that would haunt him in all the years that came afterwards. I’m doing it for you. And I don’t care what anyone says, but that’s the truth.

  The carriage drew to a halt, and they all sat speechless. ‘Very well,’ Lieven said at last, nodding at Kitto, ‘I’m sure I need not tell you to leave this to me, Captain Helford.’

  ‘I betrayed him,’ Kitto said. ‘What else is there to say?’

  Lieven frowned and, without another word, climbed out of the carriage as his liveried postillion held open the door, helping Nadezhda out afterwards. She tripped on her gown, steadied by the ambassador’s gentle touch at her elbow. She stood frozen on the cobbles in the heat of the sun like a rat trapped by an adder making ready to strike, and Kitto knew that she felt as naked and vulnerable without a weapon as
he did. Goose pimples rose on her lean, muscled arms exposed to the wind by the short muslin sleeve of her dress as liveried guards crossed Tower Green to meet them, all tramping feet and creaking leather; it felt like a fevered dream.

  ‘This is grotesque,’ Nadezhda said quietly. ‘I feel grotesque. Oh God.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, unconvincing even to himself, ‘it’s going to be all right,’ and then they stepped from the light fresh morning into the Tudor gloom of the Queen’s House. There really were never any half-measures with Crow. Only you would end as a prisoner in the Tower of London, Kitto thought, incomprehensibly furious. With Lieven and the guards bringing up the rear, Kitto followed Nadezhda up a wide staircase; she clutched at the encumbering muslin skirts with her horsewoman’s fingers, so quick and deft, and what would they find in the Council Chamber, where the Cabinet had agreed to meet Lieven? Crow already sentenced to die? Kitto couldn’t fight a growing certainty that Nadezhda’s sacrifice wouldn’t make any difference when all was said and done, that she’d given up her freedom for nothing. By not immediately surrendering her into Crow’s jurisdiction, Kitto himself had given Castlereagh the ammunition he needed to ensure Crow’s downfall: this was about nothing so much as appearances, and now it was too late. Kitto heard an unfamiliar voice announce Lieven, and then his own name, but even as they were ushered forward into a high-ceilinged timbered hall, Nadezhda herself was not mentioned, as though she did not matter at all. Blinded by sudden light pouring in through a tall, mullioned window, Kitto’s eyes adjusted to the sight of a long table flanked on either side by powerful men in carefully tailored coats and cravats – Vansittart, Castlereagh himself, indeed half the Cabinet sat here, men who had been friends with Papa, who had slept night after night at Nansmornow, taking their meat and claret at Crow’s own table.

  Crow himself sat in the middle of them all, facing the fireplace, casting no more than a single disinterested glance in Kitto’s direction, and Kitto had to fight not to cry out, because he looked so much older. His dark hair was now even seamed with silver above one ear, although he was only twenty-eight. Kitto longed to demand what they had done to him, but knew he couldn’t, and he endured a rush of shame and sorrow so intense that for a moment it was hard to remain standing in that room. Hester is dead, Crow had said, there in the woods as they fled Chudovo, and Kitto had left him, he had walked away and left him, knowing. Nadezhda and Lieven were ushered to seats at the table; Lieven had unfolded his leather document case and on either side of him Lords Vansittart and Camden both frowned over a drift of unfolded letters yellowed with age.