Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

Thérèse gave him no quarter. ‘But look about yourself, Lord Lamorna. English, French and Russian all gathered beneath one roof here at Anichkov, in the very heart of Petersburg. Tsar Alexander could not make his position clearer than if he shouted it from the rooftops. Never mind the skirmishing of last winter in which your young brother so covered himself with glory: in truth Russia has not chosen whom to support, not in the long term, regardless of what the British might assume. So don’t you think that someone had better find out what Napoleon’s plans are before it’s too late?’

  Such self-consequence was an impressive thing to retain for the unmarried sister of an executed French duke who had lived most of her life in exile. ‘And I suppose you’re going to tell me exactly how I ought to find Marshal Davout,’ Crow said carefully, ‘given that no one knows where he is.’

  Thérèse folded her fan with a muted snick of ivory. ‘Not here. Even I am not so much of a fool as to discuss such affairs in public. I am the last of your mother’s family: it would only be courteous to visit me at home one morning.’

  Crow watched her a moment. She looked straight back at him: her eyes were the same grey as his own and Kitto’s, as their mother’s had been. She didn’t look away, but merely let out her fan again, performing the rituals of a courtly language that hardly anyone spoke now, let alone understood. Crow knew it, though, because his mother had taught him, laughing in her bedchamber at Nansmornow long ago as he sat on the windowsill watching Mrs Gwyn dress her for dinner. If I hold the fan like this, petit, it means come closer. But if I hold it so, and look at you, it means seek a private room for us. Heaven knows you might need to know all this when you’re grown. Without even looking at Crow, Thérèse brought the fan down with a flat, sharp stroke, and he instantly recognised the signal: Listen. There are enemies everywhere.

  ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘I’ll call on you.’

  ‘I count myself honoured,’ Thérèse said, with an iron-grey stare that suggested she was anything but.

  28

  Crow escorted his great-aunt back to her seat by the fire, unable to shake off the certainty that Thérèse de la Sainte-Maure was not nearly as senile as she wished people to think, for all her grandiose promises to reveal Napoleon’s tactics to him. That surely counted among the most bizarre and incriminating conversations he’d had at a ball, and there had been many of them. Even if she were not just a deluded old woman, it made no sense. She was an emigrée – why should she have any sympathy with Napoleon, emperor of a republic born from the Terror that had seen most of her family beheaded? The night had deepened, and as the empress’s guests abandoned the torchlit gardens of the Anichkov Palace, leaving their furs with footmen, shoals of willowy Petersburg debutantes flooded the ballroom, all clad in varying shades of white, some with flowers pinned in their hair, others wearing the diadems so fashionable in Russia, candlelight from the chandeliers above setting alight the jewel-crusted branches of silver and gold against shining hair – fair and dark alike. He took a glass of cognac from a tray held by a liveried palace footman and drained it, then took another.

  ‘Oh, Lord Lamorna! What can you be thinking of to walk about with Thérèse de la Saint-Maure? Papa will be so angry!’

  He looked down to find Jane Cathcart perspiring through yet more unwisely chosen pink muslin, mouse-brown hair escaping from the unflattering confines of tong-singed ringlets.

  ‘Will he?’ Crow said, finishing the other glass of brandy. ‘And is it really your place to tell me so, Miss Cathcart?’

  She flushed again, and he immediately regretted the put-down, and held out his arm in invitation. Jane accepted it, with a look so pathetically grateful that he took two glasses from another footman. Champagne. He handed one to Jane and drained his own, beneath her shocked gaze. She was alone in a ballroom, exactly the type to be deposited by an exasperated mother with a crowd of far more fashionable girls who would then lose her at the first possible opportunity. Once, he’d been just exactly what her mother ought to fear, but how could he harm such a girl now? He was married, and one never publicly humiliated one’s wife, even though there might be indiscretions and opera girls. Either way, he’d never wanted another woman since the day he’d set eyes on Hester, soaked to her skin on the beach at Lamorna Cove. And the truth of his bastard child’s existence had wounded Hester just as surely as any affair: the blameless chronology of her conception wouldn’t matter to those who whispered about Hester wherever she went. But Hester was gone, in point of fact he wasn’t married any more, and he had hurt her by siring a child that would have been a thorn in her side, just because it had been so very easy to tup his own stepmother. He felt as though he were falling. Jane was talking to him; he forced himself to listen. It was so damnably hard to continue with the mechanical operation of living.

  ‘My goodness, thank you, Lord Lamorna,’ Jane was saying. ‘I was on the verge of being lost for good. Mama said that I ought to mix with Princess Dubretskaya and Alina Kutusova, but in truth they don’t like me at all, and they have so much influence amongst the girls of my own age, and their mamas are so fashionable, that their ignoring me in that horrid way would have put a sure end to every other invitation for the rest of the season.’

  Crow steered her towards the edge of the room where the crowd thinned as dancing began again. ‘Forgive me then, Miss Cathcart, for bringing you away. I’m not at all sure that you wouldn’t delight at being cast out into a social Siberia.’

  She looked up at him with a surprising and very warm smile. The girl might be blessed with luminous dark eyes, but she was not in Volkonsky’s style; that much was already clear. The betrothal made little sense: Volkonsky played for high stakes, true, but the Cathcarts couldn’t offer the sort of dowry required by an inveterate gamester. Why, then? Did Alexander want an ear to the ground within the embassy?

  Jane surveyed him with an edge of pity he could hardly bear. ‘Well, it can’t be helped – now I’ve been singled out by you, I’m the envy of half the room. You’re notorious, my lord.’

  ‘Take care, Miss Cathcart. I’m the very last person who ought to be advising others on their conduct, but unless I’m much mistaken, in time you’ll be welcomed by anyone who enjoys rational discussion. Only lose the affected arch manner – it doesn’t suit you. Now where would you like me to take you? To your mother?’

  Jane flushed again. ‘No, please take me to Miss Paolozzi. You know – my drawing mistress. I was quite happy with her until Mama insisted on leading me about the room like a prize sheep at the harvest fair. We were in one of those anterooms, having a beautifully quiet evening.’

  Jane let her arm rest upon Crow’s again as he steered her through the gathering; she spoke with sensitivity about the row of portraits and landscapes they passed, and he felt a flicker of honest pity for her. She would have flourished in bluestocking circles in London, or leading a country life with knowledgeable friends to write to and visit, but marriage to Volkonsky doomed to the girl to a lonely life in the Russian provinces. There was no way on God’s earth he’d keep her in Petersburg.

  ‘Just here, my lord,’ Jane said and, as Crow took her into the candlelit salon set off the main ballroom, she broke away from him, calling out, ‘Ana-Maria!’ He watched as she ran to Miss Paolozzi, a slight, dark-haired woman perching on the end of the crimson brocade chaise arranged beneath a vast window giving out to the darkness; Miss Paolozzi had been looking through a book of watercolour plates, but pushed this aside as though caught slipping silver spoons into her reticule. At the sight of Jane she half rose, abruptly sitting down again as she registered Crow’s appearance. Jane flew back to him, clasping his hand with hers in a childlike gesture that reminded him with disastrous force of Kitto as a young boy. He would never see Morwenna grow to be so; she would never now take him by the hands and enthusiastically bore him with intricate details of what the kittens in the barn had done. ‘Thank you, Lord Lamorna,’ Jane said. ‘I really am grateful to you, even though I expect I made an awful job o
f showing it.’

  ‘It was nothing at all.’ Crow bowed and turned for the open door; he had no desire to end this dreamlike hellscape of an evening making polite conversation with a drawing-mistress chaperone, even one with the intriguing habit of looking at the child of an English diplomat precisely how the third daughter of a provincial clergyman might eye a half-pay officer at a country ball, resplendent among so many farmers’ sons. He left, pausing on the threshold, watching the elite of Petersburg throng in the empress’s overheated ballroom, the chandeliers glittering with crystal and shivering candle-flame above it all. How was he to put one foot before the other? How was he to continue? He was so drunk, and very far from home, both of which lent an edge of vivid unreality to this limitless sense of loss. When all this was over, what was there then to do? He would go home to Nansmornow but find the morning-parlour empty; Hester would not be sitting before the fire, watching their infant daughter pulling shells and bright silk ribbons from a pasteboard box. And Hester would never again be waiting in his bed, that beautiful hair loose in a cloud of tiny spirals, the fine lawn nightgown slipping from her shoulder, ready for him to take such pleasure in giving pleasure to her, his heart’s delight. She was gone. He had to be alone; he’d been a fool to come here at all.

  He stepped from the library out into the sweaty heat of the main ballroom and a chaos of fluttering silk, only to immediately take refuge in the salon next door. The room was surprisingly small for a palace of Anichkov’s proportions, and the walls were half clad in panels of vivid green malachite. Pale lace curtains draped the tall window, and landscapes in heavy gilded frames hung on the walls amongst oval portraits more than a hundred years old, from the years when Catherine the Great had ruled all Russia and loved Potemkin. Crow walked to a writing desk set beneath the window, leaning on it as he looked out at the dark, lamplit waters of the Fontanka, the marble cold beneath his touch, and he sensed Tatyana Orlova’s presence before she even spoke. If she knew what was good for her she would not stand so close.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lord Lamorna – I do believe I might have inadvertently caused a little awkwardness between you and Lord Cathcart. I tried to smooth it all over, but I’m afraid he wishes to speak to you.’

  Breathe. ‘You knew precisely what you were doing drawing so much public attention to my relationship with Thérèse de la Saint-Maure,’ Crow said, looking down at the pattern within the marble, swirls of palest grey against white. ‘I don’t in the slightest bit care why you chose to make such an example of me, but you will not do so again.’

  She moved closer still. The dark silk gown clung to her hips; her petticoats were of silk, too, not linen, rendering every wanton curve of her body entirely visible from the waist down. She smiled. ‘I merely wanted you to notice me, Lord Lamorna, and something told me you would be unable to resist the possibility of coming face to face with one of your mother’s relatives. There is something I particularly wish you to do.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. You mean to place me at a disadvantage, which I’ll admit you’ve done. Tell me why, Countess.’

  ‘Oh, do call me Tatyana. We need not be so formal with one another. Please – everyone knows you’re as much of a Saint-Maure as you are anything else, but as with so many things in life patriotic loyalty is all too often about appearances only. I do understand that such a public meeting with your great-aunt might have further eroded your superiors’ trust in you. Allow me to make reparation. Would it be idiotic of me to surmise that the British would like to learn the whereabouts of a particular royal bastard?’

  Crow knew his expression didn’t change at all. ‘If the British had any interest at all in such a person, what would induce you to tell me about it? Surely you must know that putting me in possession of any such information places the English at a likely advantage over Russia. Even having this conversation with me amounts to treason against your own tsar.’

  ‘That’s my affair,’ Tatyana said. ‘But I know how you might re-establish your credit. Just imagine if you were the one to find this royal offshoot.’

  ‘Imagine indeed,’ Crow said. ‘It’s almost as if you knew I am supposed to be looking for her. Are you going to enlighten me any further?’ Dorothea Lieven had warned him that Tatyana Orlova had links to the Green Lamp, who sought to undermine the tsar. He had no idea if her motives were political, or more personal, relating only to Prince Volkonsky, and neither did he care.

  ‘That depends,’ Tatyana said. ‘There is something I’d like you to do for me first: Jane Cathcart. As a guest in her parents’ home, you know the girl. A most unsuitable match for Sasha Volkonsky, as I’m sure you’ll agree. I’d like you to make sure that he doesn’t marry her.’

  Crow watched her. ‘Oh, believe me, there is one way I would very much like to do that, but I doubt my putting a bullet through your own Volkonsky would do much for Russo-British relations. What interest can you have in that affair? If you’re his mistress, why should his marriage stand in your way?’

  ‘Because I don’t wish him beholden to anyone else except me, that’s why. For God’s sake, anyone can tell that marriage into Petersburg society will be as much of a mortification to Jane Cathcart as it’s likely to be to her husband. You do realise people noticed when you rescued her from those mean-spirited debutantes? It would take very little more for you to go a step further, and to ruin her.’

  ‘It’s not the effort involved that prevents me from accepting your proposal,’ Crow said, yawning. ‘What if I find the notion abhorrent as well as extraordinary? You must consider this royal bastard very important indeed to think that finding her would be worth ruining a young girl of my own nation, of my own class.’

  Countess Orlova stepped closer; unbidden, he turned to face her. She reached up, gently brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead. ‘At least listen to my offer.’

  ‘And what is this offer, exactly?’

  ‘I will tell you the assumed name and the whereabouts of this bastard child. The British need her so very badly – even I can see that. There is not another heir in Europe untainted by alliance at some stage with Napoleon, and your Lord Castlereagh’s clumsy handling of the poor has brought Britain to the brink of revolution. You need a queen, and you shall have one. But when – and only when – you have so severely compromised Jane Cathcart that Prince Volkonsky will never marry her.’ Tatyana smiled. ‘I trust you know how to do it?’

  Crow looked down at her. ‘Oh, I do know how to do that,’ he said, almost gently. ‘You’re forgetting one thing – the necessary consent of Miss Cathcart.’

  ‘I’m sure a man like you won’t have to work too hard to obtain her full capitulation, Lord Lamorna.’ Tatyana raised herself up on to her tiptoes and brushed his lips with her own, letting out a gasp of surrender when Crow kissed her back, hard. He took her by the hand and kissed the delicate skin at the inside of her wrist. Then, in his destructive misery, he pulled away and looked her in the eye, trailing the tip of one finger across the curve of her breast where it rose from the smooth confines of her short stays, running the edge of his thumb over the satin trim of her bodice, knowing that it would just graze her nipple. Her body melted against his, both lithe and smoothly curved, and with his other hand he cupped one of her rounded buttocks as though she had been one of the whores he had kept, long ago. If Tatyana Orlova wanted to play games with him, he would not stop her. She might be his opponent, but this was her weakness: he knew precisely how to leave her in his power and wanting more.

  29

  In the damp wilds of North Somerset, Hester stepped into the muddy courtyard of the inn, treading on cobbles strewn with cabbage leaves and stinking heaps of manure. Every shred of flesh in her body ached after so many weeks on foot, and she kept the rain-soaked woollen hood tugged low over her face: that postillion stepping down from his place on the London to Falmouth stagecoach might be the very one to whisper in a soldier’s ear: Wasn’t that Countess of Lamorna, the murderess they’re all looking for, the one wh
o sailed to France? She was quite sure that there were now more troops stationed throughout the countryside than during the Occupation, except that now they were English, not French. If she was caught, here and now, she would have a rope around her neck by morning. Leaving the sketchy safety of lane, field and woodland for a coaching inn was unsafe to say the least, but Hester knew she could go no further without replenishing her supply of small-beer. She’d tried to drink water drawn from village pumps as the oxen did, but one couldn’t walk twenty miles a day with a griping belly. Her breast milk had dried up on the long, painful journey north, and she was awash with the feverish grief left behind by her missing child, the absence of Morwenna’s warm, damp weight in her arms. What right did she have to even think of her baby, a mother who had abandoned her own child? Had it been a mistake to let Catlin and Morwenna set sail from St Mary’s without her? Would Morwenna not have been safer at her side? She had not dared even ask for news of the Curlew, and pushed away a memory of handing Morwenna to a silent Catlin on the quayside in all that rotten-seaweed and salt-air confusion of the harbour at Hugh-town: a sickeningly dangerous double bluff. Pray God they were now safe in France, in Brittany, where Catlin, with her Cornish, could at least speak the local Breton tongue.

  ‘What are you waiting for, bluey, the bloody footman?’ The ill-shaven driver climbed down from the box of the stagecoach, trailed by another grinning postillion. Each shoved past her, barging her with their shoulders so that she nearly stumbled. She stepped into a puddle, soaking the skirts of her gown, and felt the ghost of Crow’s presence with acute agony; old Mr Trewarthen had once told her that at night he was plagued by the need to scratch between the toes of his right foot, even though it had been close to sixty years since he’d lost that leg. She could only console herself with the fact that Crow was so notorious that his execution would surely have been all over the news-sheets, gossiped about in every marketplace between London and Truro, and yet she’d heard nothing. Squaring her shoulders and sweeping her stained and faded silk-velvet skirts out of the straw-splattered filth, Hester went into the inn. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom within. She breathed in the roast-mutton stink of insufficient tallow lamps, forcing herself not to instinctively reach for the weight of the pistol holstered in the makeshift ammunition belt around her waist, concealed between her petticoats and the skirt of her gown. She already clutched a penny in one hand, but the pouch resting against her other hip held a handful of coinage and the thick roll of banknotes Crow had insisted she take, still only slightly diminished. It was safer to sleep outside, curled up between the thick, cradling roots of a moss-covered oak than it was to risk being recognised for the sake of a louse-ridden bed in an inn, and damp sheets shared with a stranger. Every banknote was doubly precious – there was no possible way of replacing a single one. Without Crow it was impossible to withdraw funds from Coutts, even if doing so wouldn’t entirely give her away. One day at a time, one step at a time, she repeated to herself, investing each word with the weight of the Hail Mary. Each table in the gloomy inn was occupied. Respectable, starch-aproned farmers’ wives and their maids stared at her with insolent superiority, and now a group of sailors in filthy striped culottes and stained jackets leered at her from a table in the corner.