by Katy Moran
Who will you tell? Nadezhda had demanded on the night of the ambush, the night he learned her secret, bleeding into her corset on the open plain beyond Yarkaya Polyana, his only reply a blasphemous assurance that he didn’t care who she was.
I just need to get back to Petersburg with what’s left of my reputation intact. Which, I might add, has been thoroughly fucked up the arse by my brother. Captain Helford had broken off at the combined silent astonishment of Countess Orlova and Nadezhda, herself no stranger to soldiers’ invective. Oh, Christ, he’d said. I’m sorry.
The countess was kinder, if less socially catastrophic and handsome. I was once a young girl, too, she’d said, sponging Nadezhda’s fevered forehead with a frill torn from the hem of her gown and soaked in water. You have no idea how often and how sorely I regret not having the courage to flout my father’s wishes and live the life I chose for myself, with the man I really loved. And yet what did that mean, really? It was certainly no guarantee that Countess Orlova could keep a secret. The news that Lieutenant Ilya Rumyantsev was actually a young girl might easily be all over Petersburg, and Nadezhda watched the mare’s gold-dipped ears flick forwards: her own fear was infectious as she pushed away frozen memories of snow soaking through the back of her gown, and the meaty scent of Ilya Rumyantsev’s hot breath in her face. At any cost, the truth must be concealed.
At last, she saw Captain Helford approach from the west at a flat gallop, leaning hard over the neck of his own gelding, making free and expert of the whip. His horse had run with the rest of the herd as they fled Yarkaya Polyana, tack and saddlebags intact. He had a beautiful seat and rode as if he was part of the gelding’s back, but he was no different to anyone else, treating his horse no better than a slave. If he carried on like that, the gelding’s fear would spread like ripples chasing each other away from a pebble tossed into the river, and the horses would scatter. Nadezhda longed to snatch that whip from his grasp and serve him the same: how would he like a taste of it? Riding up close, Helford urged the gelding down to a witchy, nervous trot, circling Nadezhda and her mare as he grasped reins and whip one-handed.
‘There are other ways to make a horse do what you want, you know – especially one like that,’ Nadezhda snapped, her anger lent wings by a feverish ache rippling from the wound festering beneath those dirty wrappings, and she watched the gelding shift, his sensitive, fine-cut nostrils flaring. Long narrow welts glistened on his shoulder; his flank was dark and foaming with sweat. ‘They’ll scatter if they’re frightened,’ she went on, ‘and he trusted you. Have you never been betrayed and hurt by someone you looked upon as your protector? How would you like it?’
Captain Helford’s eyes widened, and an expression of sheer fury chased away a trace of shocked chagrin. His dusty hair was in disarray, his black lashes dark against the pale hollow of his eye socket, the rising cheekbone. The predatory awareness of his surroundings that had characterised his every move since the French attack at Yarkaya Polyana was momentarily stilled as he subjected her to a ruthless appraisal, just as he had ignored her question. ‘It’s got worse, has it not?’ he said. ‘You do realise you’re little use to this mission dead? For reasons known only to yourself, you’ve been riding around the country in breeches for Christ only knows how long. It’s not as if the proprieties could be any more outraged, is it? Let me see the wound.’
Nadezhda just looked at the horses, wishing herself one of them.
He failed to suppress his irritation. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, do hoydenish girls in disguise not fall victim to the mortal complaints of gangrene and infection? Do you ever plan to tell me at least why you did it? I suppose you realise what my reputation will be if anyone finds out you’re a girl – and a Kurakin, too.’
‘Oh, naturally all this concerns only yourself,’ Nadezhda snapped. ‘I see like all men you assume control, even when no one has invited your concern – if that’s what you can call it.’
‘Forgive me if I’d rather not fail to carry out my own corporal’s orders because of a stubborn fool of a headstrong girl,’ Helford said. ‘You’re sick and I’ll be damned if you continue to ride that mare bareback. You can bloody well dismount and take the gelding instead. Don’t think I won’t make you.’
‘You touch either of us and I’ll have a knife in your ribs.’ Furious, Nadezhda leaned forwards over the Turkoman’s neck and squeezed gently with her thighs, asking the great golden matriarch to canter. How could he not understand that she and the mare were one and the same, a single soul? The pain intensified at the mare’s rolling gait, the makeshift bandage beneath Nadezhda’s corset chafing the skin, and when she dismounted at the riverside, shaking and nauseous, she leaned her forehead on the mare’s gleaming gilded flank, praying for strength and for courage, and for Captain Helford to go to the devil.
Stepping into the dappled shade, she passed the horses taking their turn to drink, breathing in their warm scent along with the dank, greenish smell of the trampled wet mud, taking comfort in their gentle awareness of her presence. Sitting on a lichen-covered fallen branch, she pulled off her boots, gasping aloud with the pain, setting one beside the other, and the rush of memories struck her like floodwater surging in the spring thaw: the baby wood pigeons Cook had let her rear in a straw-stuffed wooden crate by the old iron oven, the sharp smell of garlic and herbs mingled with the bloody scent of minced pork as the kitchen-girl rolled out dough to make pelmeni dumplings when snow fell outside, and how, as Grandmama lay dying, Nadezhda used to help old Grisha the head serf dig the virgin snow, ready to bury a cloth-wrapped bundle of pelmeni for winter. They would all be gone by now, long since rotted in the tall grass or eaten by foxes and rats. Nadezhda knew she must forget about home, and the taste of those hot meat dumplings with a spoonful of melted butter when the snow outside was neck-deep, and Ilya Rumyantsev’s familiar, arrogant smile as he had walked towards her across the snow-deep yard. What, no kiss for me, Tasha? She must close a door on the past. It hurt even to unbutton her shirt, her every move sent blood-stiffened fabric dragging across the shallow cut that French musket-ball had carved just beneath her ribcage. It could have been worse. She should be grateful it wasn’t. With a muttered, furious prayer, Nadezhda balled up her filthy shirt and threw it to the pebbled riverbank, reaching around to tug at the corset lacing. Pain pulsed with astonishing strength: she pictured the wound as a gaping mouth and felt sick again at the thought of it.
‘I’m sorry.’ Captain Helford was standing right behind her. Nadezhda stood in the river, completely exposed in only her breeches and blood-blackened corset. He moved so quietly, even for a soldier. What did he want? What might he do to her? She was unable to move or to run, just like that morning when Ilya Rumyantsev would not stop walking towards her, his gleaming new boots crunching in the new-fallen snow. But, unlike Ilya, Captain Helford didn’t touch her. She sensed precisely how close he was – more or less a foot behind her – and yet he remained there, and her terror fluttered wildly, like a bird in a trap.
‘I’m sorry that I’m even standing here when you’re without your – your shirt,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry that it hurts. I’m sorry for behaving like a godawful high-handed bastard, too. I won’t pry into your affairs, and if we’ve got this far I’m sure we’ll find a way to deliver these horses to the commissariat without anyone finding out who you really are, and if riding that mare bareback hasn’t killed you yet I should think it won’t now. God only knows I’ve been in some awkward fixes myself.’ He paused, leaving her free to walk away, and only continuing when she did not. ‘It’s just that it looks like you can’t take your clothes off. Or at least it’s taken you nearly half an hour to unlace your corset. And you can’t very well clean the wound like this.’
Nadezhda felt a rising breeze tease the curls at the nape of her neck, and folded both arms across her chest without turning to look at him. She was unarmed, but she must continue to breathe, to not panic.
‘Listen, I swear I know how horrifically improper thi
s is,’ he went on, ‘but if you want, I’ll help you undress. Without looking, as much as I can. Do you understand?’
Still facing away from him, Nadezhda didn’t know how to answer. She only knew that she had seen a kitchen-maid die just three days after suffering the smallest of cuts to the side of her thumb. More than anything she could not shake away the sensation that to Ilya Rumyantsev she had been no more than a wooden bucket, a leather saddle, or anything else one might use in the farmyard. If she didn’t clean this seeping wound, she’d be even less than that – indeed she would be nothing at all – and she couldn’t clean it alone.
‘A graze like that might easily kill you if it’s gone bad,’ Captain Helford said, still behind her, still not touching her. ‘I don’t want to frighten you, but it’s true.’
Nadezhda had so much to lose, as she knew to her cost, but there was something in his light, low voice that she could trust, something that convinced her he was not the same as Ilya, the boy she had known her entire life, that younger son of a great family who felt himself so entitled to take whatever he wanted from the world that he’d taken her. She heard the slight scrunching of pebbles beneath Captain Helford’s feet as he moved closer, the river now lazily enveloping their legs, and the breath caught in her throat as he tucked one of his long, sun-browned fingers into the infuriating lacing of her corset, pulling it free, loosening the ribbon through one eyelet at a time until the corset slipped down to her narrow hips; she had never been a very satisfactory girl, anyhow – small and scrawny and always nut-brown from the sun. She reached down to pull the corset up over her head, gasping at the pain as the wound yawned, not daring to look down at it to see how far the crimson swelling of infected tissue had spread –up towards her ribs, perhaps? Down her belly towards her groin?
‘I’ll do it,’ Helford said, and a wild heat grew deep in Nadezhda’s belly as he lifted the corset over her head, his fingertips grazing her naked skin chilled by the cool air rising from the water. ‘I’ve a spare shirt,’ he said. ‘You could wear that, if you want.’
‘Don’t go. Not yet.’ Nadezhda heard the words slip from between her lips, unbidden. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath and turned to face him, her thin arms crossed over the meagre rise of her breasts. He was taller by quite some way; the canopy of beech leaves cast shadows across his face. He’d thrown her corset on to the riverbank and stood with his hands loose at his sides, looking down at the wound, his lips forming a sympathetic moue, his black brows drawn together. He wasn’t at all disconcerted by her nakedness: she wondered how many concubines had smiled for him, although he was so young, and forced herself to speak. ‘The ridiculous thing is I can’t make myself look at it. It’s absurd, but I can’t.’
‘I know,’ Helford said, sympathetic. ‘I once crossed my – someone. All right, if we’re exposing all our deepest vulnerabilities, when I crossed my brother a few years ago he gave me the most godawful beating, and afterwards I felt sick whenever I looked at any of it. It wasn’t a whipping or anything like that but, Christ, he clouted me so hard that I bled everywhere. I wept like a waterspout. My ears rang for nearly a year afterwards. Sometimes they still do. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad it was.’ He half laughed. ‘In fact, I’ve never told anyone about that before. It makes me feel queerly ashamed even to think of it – to be put in my place just like a child or a servant when I thought I was grown. And see, if I can tell you that, then this isn’t so bad, is it, to be standing here in this fix we find ourselves in?’
‘You bled? Surely it was something worse than a punishment for a child.’ Nadezhda stood with the greenish river water swirling past her bare legs, looking up at him. ‘And anyway, that’s dreadful – a shocking thing to do to anyone. In Russia, such treatment is only for peasants and serfs.’
He frowned, but then he looked down. ‘Well, we are more egalitarian on that front in Britain. And I’m afraid I was that sort of child. Look. If you stand like that, with your arms across your, across there, then I’ll clean it for you.’ He drew a reasonably clean muslin cravat from the breast pocket of his jacket and let it hang into the cool green water. Then he wrung the cloth, folding it. She couldn’t look down, but that meant she could only look at him, in his filthy scarlet regimental jacket, with those dark lashes, and the bronze sheen of his skin. Sunlight caught the gold campaign medal pinned at his breast.
‘Where did you get that?’ she asked, just for something to say as the cool wet cloth touched the graze beneath her ribcage. With a light touch, he steadied her, just his fingertips grazing her naked skin once more, and again that queer heat pulsed through her. She gasped, and he looked up, his grey eyes suddenly dark with emotion. ‘One so rarely sees an English officer with a medal for gallantry,’ she went on. ‘They say Wellington is not generous with them.’
‘I got it at Novgorod,’ he said, looking down again, now kneeling in the river to get a better look at the wound, so that all she could see was the top of his dark head; he was soaked. ‘It sounds all right, except when you think that everyone else who went up those siege ladders is dead. One’s friends. Anyway, what do your orders say about Chudovo?’
She stifled another gasp at his touch, so gentle but somehow reassuringly deft and commanding at the same time, so different in every conceivable way to the manner in which Ilya had pawed at her in the farmyard at home with his thick, moist fingers. She steadied herself before speaking. ‘There’s a Polish cavalry unit stationed there with Cossacks, and the pastureland is rich. We’re to requisition the Cossacks as well as all the horses we can find. The farmers aren’t going to like having their horses taken at this time of year, so close to harvest, but we’ve no choice. We’re supposed to rendezvous with a lot of Polish cavalry on the way there.’
He looked up sharply at the mention of a rendezvous, of relinquishing control of this mission. ‘Rendezvous with the Poles? But I suppose you remember what Tatyana Orlova said?’
‘Which bit in particular? Why is there no serf to deal with this mess; how long do you expect me to ride with no saddle; or I have a ball to arrange, you know?’
‘When she told us that your best chance of getting away with this is to arrive in Petersburg with four hundred horses, as a resounding success,’ Helford said, rinsing out the cloth, cleaning the wound with surprisingly expert panache. ‘I think you ought to leave the corset off and wear my shirt. It looks as if it needs the air more than a bandage. But you’re lucky: it’s not gangrenous.’
‘Have you ever tried,’ Nadezhda asked as he stood once more, now soaked from the waist down, breeches clinging to the lean length of his legs, ‘to ride without wearing a corset? And anyway, that wasn’t what I asked you.’ She flushed again, knowing she wasn’t making any sense: his very nearness had rendered her incoherent.
‘Well, obviously, yes. But that wasn’t really my point,’ Helford said, and even though he was no longer touching her, they were standing much closer together, there in the river, just bare inches apart.
‘And your actual point was? We seem a little lost.’ Nadezhda turned towards the wide pebbled bank, battling an extraordinary combination of latent terror and the desire for him not to move away.
In unspoken acquiescence, they walked side by side to the water’s edge, her arms still folded across her chest, and Kitto tossed her a shirt of fine white lawn from his pack. ‘It’s clean,’ he said. ‘Well, I only wore it once. I thought we’d have time to wash our things at Yarkaya Polyana.’
He turned away as she struggled into it, breathing in a combination of fresh laundry soap and a faint and intoxicating warm salty scent which must be his own. At last, she dared glance down at the deep graze: an ugly, blackened line reaching from her navel to her lowest rib. Looking back at him, she saw him smile at her again, with that ever-present promise of rising devilry.
‘I’m going to piss.’ It was a strange relief just how often he seemed to disregard the fact that she was a girl, and spoke to her as though she were truly another sold
ier, his comrade in arms: she had never been more sorry about all the things she had not told him, and must never tell him. And in that same moment Nadezhda saw that queer air of resty stillness transform him, even as she herself realised that they were not alone.
34
On the riverbank, Kitto turned, knowing he wasn’t going to be quick enough, and heard the whine of a shot passing within a quarter of an inch of his left cheekbone. ‘Down!’ he yelled, but Nadezhda had already flattened herself behind a tall hazel, her cutlass drawn. He dropped into a crouch and loaded his pistol, but when he aimed at the advancing figure, the trigger jammed. Alive with panic, Kitto squinted through the darkness. He was going to die, here and now, out in the godforsaken Russian wasteland, with this odd, half-silent Russian girl who obviously preferred horses to people, with her head full of lies, and whose bare dusty neck he longed to kiss. In a succession of flashing, dreamlike images, he watched the French assassin emerge from the shadows and move to reload his own pistol. Head down, Kitto charged him, slamming his bowed head and shoulders into the Frenchman’s solar plexus so fast that his opponent dropped to his knees, winded. Not trusting the pistol, Kitto drew his Mameluk cutlass but the Frenchman snatched him around the knees with one crooked arm, and he crashed to the ground. Dodging a punishing close-fisted blow, he found himself in a choke-hold, the cutlass bouncing away through muddy, trampled grass.
‘Come on, you little bastard,’ the Frenchman hissed, flecking Kitto’s earlobe with hot spittle. ‘You’re coming with me. You’re going to be sorry you were ever born, quoi?’
Kitto hung his head as if defeated, alive with panic because he couldn’t see Nadezhda: she had simply vanished into the night. Moonlight glanced off the polished steel at his throat. You’re coming with me. So he wasn’t meant to die here, not yet. He was meant to be a prisoner. Why? With one swift, entirely reckless movement, he reached for the dagger at his belt and forced it hard into the Frenchman’s upper thigh. Hit a big vein if you can, Crow always said. He’d had to guess at the site of the femoral artery, but blood spurted through his fingers even as the Frenchman let out a shriek, cut off with startling immediacy. Kitto felt a line of heat draw across the fine skin at the base of his throat, and knew he’d been cut, and then wet warmth spread over his lower back as the Frenchman died pissing all over him and crashed to the grass, arms sliding limp from around his neck. Kitto spun around to face the corpse, and Nadezhda crouching as she casually wiped her own knife on the grass.