Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  ‘I stabbed him in the kidney.’ She got up, resheathing as though she’d done no more than gut a trout.

  Without another word, they ran low and hard back to the horses cropping the grass just paces away. ‘There’ll be more,’ Kitto said, ‘trust me, there are always more of them.’ It was only when Nadezhda stared at him in incomprehension that he realised he’d spoken in Cornish instead of French. He was losing control; he had to push away an intrusive memory of her naked back, her slim legs in breeches, those curls at the nape of her neck. Christ. Kitto grasped the gelding’s mane and leaped up into the saddle. Nadezhda, too, mounted like a Cossack, with a wild, nimble swing across the Turkoman mare’s back. Had either of them been a lesser horseman or in need of a mounting block, Kitto knew they’d both be dead or captured, and this was what you got for letting your guard down. Still in wordless agreement, moving as one, they leaned forwards over the necks of their horses, presenting as little of a silhouette as possible, and Kitto followed as Nadezhda spurred the mare into a gallop, peeling around the far reaches of the herd, past all the young stallions and the older mares who habitually protected the younger and more vulnerable horses, all gathered in the middle. The entire herd was moving now, four hundred horses, and all Kitto could feel was the smooth gait of the gelding beneath him building in speed and intensity until they became one, with the wind in his face, as they flew from death itself.

  They rode until dawn, the rising smoke of Chudovo’s chimneys now a blue blur on the horizon, the canopy of beech and ash alive with birdsong as they blinked away dust pounded from the steppe by hammering hooves. They dismounted, surrounded by hot, sweating horses, and lay down side by side in the grass; neither noticed, but they had long since begun to operate as one, to unwittingly mimic each other’s movements. Kitto closed his eyes, still sensing the warmth of Nadezhda’s silent presence at his side, still seeing the outline of cloud against the flesh-toned shadow of the darkness. He’d had a knife to his throat: he’d nearly died, leaving this girl beside him quite unprotected. The memory returned, as he had known it would, as it always did following moments of extreme helplessness, creeping forward like a little rill of shining seawater snaking up the beach as the tide rose. He surrendered to it, unable not to live that agonising half-hour again, all pressed into a series of images that flashed before his eyes: facing Crow in the black-and-white-tiled hall at Lamorna House in London, his own white-hot rage at Crow’s affair with their stepmother swiftly punctured by the hard-handed slap Crow had dealt him before all the servants. Some of them had nodded in approval, because he’d been quite ungovernable, because he’d been caught buying gunpowder and plotting rebellion against the French. But then the blows had fallen one after another and shame had brought tears to his eyes long before the pain became unbearable. Even now, lying beside Nadezhda, Kitto could feel the overpowering strength in Crow’s fingers taking his arm in a sickening grip, Crow hauling him up the stairs so fast that he tripped and his shins smashed into the steps with a burst of agony, brass stair-rods glimmering in the morning light. He remembered the taste of blood, too, lying face down on the carpet in his bedchamber, battling the relentless pain of a burst eardrum, and the tears that would not stop, and the shivering nausea at being afterwards locked in that room. He’d been a child then; he was not a child now. And he had told Nadezhda of it as they stood in the river as green, reed-streaked water rushed past their legs.

  ‘You needn’t torture yourself,’ she said now, still lying at his side in the grass, looking up at the scudding clouds, and Kitto jumped as though startled from sleep. She turned over to watch him, leaning on her elbow. ‘I know what you’re thinking: you wish you hadn’t told me about the time you were beaten and couldn’t bear to look afterwards. Well, doesn’t it feel just a little better to have spoken of it? Men are all the same – concealing grievances for decades and then doing something ridiculous and destructive, like fighting a duel.’

  Kitto stared up at the racing clouds once more, reaching in vain for a reply. She read his mind just as easily as his long-dead half-sister Roza had always done, as Hester did. He turned to face her, leaning on his elbow as she had done, and the wind-driven clouds above sent fleeting shadows across her sun-browned, high-boned features. ‘Why are girls so knowing? You would have given yourself away, had I still believed you were Rumyantsev.’

  ‘It would have been confusing,’ she said lightly, ‘to have remained Rumyantsev in your presence for long.’

  Silence boomed between them, and it took every ounce of Kitto’s self-control not to kiss her. The Kurakins were one of the old families. One couldn’t simply kiss girls like that, regardless of whether or not they rode the steppe dressed as a boy.

  Nadezhda looked away first. ‘Just please don’t make me tell you why I did it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing anything so prying.’ Kitto knew quite well that he was stronger than her, more powerful, just as Crow had once been stronger than him, but he was not Crow. He would compel no one to give up their secrets in a shameful mess of blood and tears. ‘Look, I was in so much hot water when I left Petersburg that if I fail to get these horses to the cavalry commissariat my own honour is at stake. I don’t doubt your secret is an honourable one: keep it. I’m not about to force confidences.’

  Nadezhda’s voice trembled as she spoke again. ‘God knows what I’m to do if it can’t be kept.’ A note of panic crept into her voice. ‘If Countess Orlova gives me away, what then? She easily could. I can’t go back. I can’t go home. You do realise that I can’t be a girl again?’ She let out a short, humourless laugh. ‘I’ve ridden unchaperoned with eight Cossacks and four remarkably stupid Semenovsky Guards, until they were all killed by the French. I’m here with you now. My father was penniless when he died – the estate is mortgaged to the ends of creation. If Tatyana Orlova tells the world what I’ve done, there is only one way I might make my living—’ She broke off, sitting up, and Kitto saw that she was shaking just as he had shaken on the morning Crow had hit him until he could no longer stand and then ordered him to be locked in. Nadezhda hugged her knees to her chest.

  ‘The oldest profession in the world?’ he said, thinking of the concubines he himself had visited in Petersburg and in Paris: their scented limbs, their satin small-clothes, and the sheer lack of expression in their eyes. ‘It won’t come to that, I swear. We’ll think of something.’ Again, some animal urge warned him not to touch her – not even for reassurance; instead he sat at her side, staying with her as he breathed in her faint, fresh scent of green river water. In the same instant, they turned their heads to look at one another, her earth-brown eyes dark with emotion.

  ‘You know my given name, but you still haven’t given me yours in return. You know who I really am, but who are you?’

  He could do nothing but let her steer the conversation into safer waters. ‘My name is Christopher, but no one ever calls me that save my brother when he’s furious enough to talk to me in French.’ Even as Kitto spoke, he recalled a dim awareness of Crow’s constant presence at his bedside at Nansmornow after he’d been shot, when the fever had seemed never to end. Est-ce que ça te fait mal, Christophe?

  ‘Khristofyor,’ Nadezhda said, turning her head to smile at him. ‘It’s nice. But what do your friends call you?’

  Kitto pushed away a memory of dissolving into helpless laughter with Ned when Johnny threw a grenado into a cache of gunpowder, blowing it to the sky, even as they were all terrified of being hanged for it. ‘Helford,’ he said, at last. ‘But that won’t do for you. When I was a boy, just a child, I had friends who were girls. They called me Kitto, just as my family do now.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Kitto.’ They lay in silence for a long time, turned towards one another; their faces were less than a handspan apart as they sprawled in the scrubby grass and the dust. As he watched, her eyes grew shadowed, as if she had thought of something she would rather forget. Her lips parted as if she were about to speak, but then she looked awa
y, up at the vaulting sky, and he wondered if he would ever find out what she’d just decided not to tell him.

  ‘We’re too young,’ he said quickly. ‘You know that, don’t you? If we meet up with this cavalry detachment before we reach Chudovo, they’ll take all the credit for getting the horses from Yarkaya Polyana to Petersburg, however much of a nonsense that might be. You have your reasons for this deception but the countess was right: if you want to keep it alive, we go back to Petersburg without help or hindrance from anyone else.’

  ‘I suppose by that you mean without the assistance of any ham-fisted cavalry officer who will doubtless scatter the entire herd?’ Nadezhda asked with a slow and entirely surprising smile.

  ‘I mean exactly that. I mean we do this without help. We’ve come this far. We can do it.’

  She smiled. ‘And what cause have you to rage and rail against the world in such a way? What have you to prove, Captain Helford?’

  ‘That no one can stop me.’ He closed his eyes. Crow would one day come never to forget that.

  As one, they turned to face one another again, each lying curled towards the other, their knees touching, and for a long time they said nothing, but were consoled by their closeness.

  ‘Why did he say, You’re coming with me, that Frenchman?’ Nadezhda asked at last.

  ‘I don’t even want to know.’ In truth, Kitto had no idea. What use was he to anyone, an English officer of the most insignificant breed?

  ‘Is there any reason,’ Nadezhda asked as their fingertips touched, ‘why the French might be hunting us not for the horses any more, but for you?’

  Part 3

  COUP DE GRCE

  35

  Hester stood at the end of the great hall at Nansmornow, cradling Morwenna. They were both cast into shadow by low evening light streaming in through the arched window behind her. She wore a light muslin gown that hung from her hips in loose, Grecian folds, and in her arms Morwenna held on to her necklace of coral beads. Crow longed to pull her towards him, Morwenna safe between them. He tried to walk to his wife and child but he couldn’t move; he called to Hester and she came closer, his desperation rising with her every step, but when she was close enough to emerge from the shadows, she turned her face to the light and he saw that it was no longer her own, but the bloated, ruined mask of a drowned corpse, a penny-sized crab crawling out of a dark fissure in her cheek.

  Several days before Kitto and Nadezhda neared Chudovo, Crow woke to a room ringing with the echo of his own scream, and a headache of sickening ferocity. Every day when he woke up, it was to the same unbending truth: he was never going to see Hester and Morwenna again. He closed his eyes and instead saw Tatyana’s face, her mocking smile as she spoke: I’m quite sure that even now you won’t allow Captain Helford to suffer for your own failings. In truth, he had indulged in such destructive grief that he’d squandered his brother’s future as well as his own. Only when he found this bastard Russian princess would his name be worth passing on to Kitto, only then could he hold a pistol to his own jaw and end this relentless nightmare. Coloured lights swam before his eyes, and there was no warm, perfumed body in the bed beside him, no scent of unfamiliar stale breath on his creased pillow, and so where was he? Somewhere, someone was knocking on a door. Leaning over the side of the bed, he reached for the chamber pot and spewed. Recognising the willow-leaf pattern on the top edge of the pot, he saw he was back at the embassy. Swearing quietly in Cornish, he lay back on the laundered pillows, breathing in the incongruous scents of starch and the ambassadorial lemon-balm barrel-soap. The door-knocking intensified.

  ‘What?’ he demanded, still in Cornish, and then switched to French. ‘Quoi?’

  Cathcart’s valet, Varley, edged his way into the room. ‘As your lordship doesn’t have your own man, my lord, Mr Brooks suggested that I might perhaps assist you with dressing for dinner. It’s six o’clock already, sir.’

  ‘Good luck, Varley,’ Crow said, and closed his eyes, missing Hoby, whose chief virtue had always been judging when to preserve a diplomatic silence. He had no way of knowing if his own valet was even still alive. How was it possible that he must dress for dinner, that such a thing could be considered of even the vaguest importance? He was still drunk, and there was very little anyone could do about it.

  At last rendered outwardly respectable with hot water, soap, clean linen and Varley’s steady hand with a razor, Crow went into the library to smoke and found both George and Jane Cathcart standing before the fireplace engaged in bitter argument, both speaking in rapid French so that the brace of bored liveried footmen were given no really detailed fodder for servant-hall gossip. He suppressed a moment’s hunger for Nansmornow: there, any person found enacting melodramas when one wanted a cigarillo could be summarily sent to the devil. He made for the door, but not quickly enough – both Jane and George had seen him.

  ‘I’ll say no more, George,’ Jane said, ‘but I think you are grossly unfair to Miss Paolozzi – and to Signor Paolozzi – as well as vastly uncaring about the unhappiness of your own sister!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, that’s quite enough. Do you really think Lord Lamorna wishes to hear of your embarrassing schemes? For the last time, I haven’t the smallest intention of speaking to Papa on your behalf – as if I should do anything to encourage so foolish an idea.’

  Jane flushed and sat down, pretending to leaf through a book of watercolour plates even as her rounded young hand shook with suppressed emotion.

  George turned to Crow with that slightly supercilious edge to his smile that had always made one look straight through him wherever possible. ‘My lord. I trust you feel more rested?’

  Crow just looked at him; doubtless it was George who had known where to find him, which bordellos to search in. The better ones were always much closer to palaces and embassies than the uninitiated supposed. Out of all who could have survived Waterloo, why had it been George Cathcart? Crow pushed away a memory of long, convivial suppers in Brussels, faces that he would never see again. Hester had stepped into the chasm left by his long-dead friends, and now she too was gone. He found himself standing at the sideboard, his hand steady as he poured cognac from a decanter into one glass, then another. He drained his own, passing the other roughly to George so that brandy slopped over the idiot’s milk-white hands.

  ‘Run along, George,’ said Crow idly. ‘Your papa will be waiting to know that I’m coming in to dine – he’s had a good few days to prepare the reprimand, and I’m sure he’ll want an audience for it.’

  George opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing.

  ‘And don’t worry,’ Crow went on with malicious tenacity, ‘I’m in no condition to ravish your sister.’

  George walked out of the room past Crow, expressionless, still holding his untouched glass of brandy as though he did not know quite what to do with it. Crow poured himself another: he needed to maintain this queer sense of unreality; without it, he knew he couldn’t force himself not to walk straight into the Neva and drown.

  ‘Lord Lamorna, please don’t go.’ Jane spoke with a surprising degree of steady calm.

  He stopped where he stood. ‘Miss Cathcart?’

  ‘Please, just come and sit with me.’ Her voice shook now, and Crow gave in, not least because it was so hard to stand up. He sank on to the sofa opposite her, desperate for a cigarillo. He should have had fifteen years in which to brace himself for Morwenna to enact him the tragedies girls this age were so fond of, but Morwenna would never now have the chance. He pictured his child’s corpse washed up on a silent, pebbled beach, pitifully small. Crow had seen enough shipwreck victims to know that from far away she would look like no more than a bundle of cloth. Closer still, she would appear to be sleeping.

  ‘I suppose you know what’s happened.’ Jane’s chest heaved with passion and her eyes were bright with tears, and Crow fought the urge to simply walk out of here and down two flights of stairs to the gunroom.

  ‘You’re going to marry Prince V
olkonsky: a match to be congratulated upon.’ What did any of it matter?

  ‘I’m supposed to be grateful.’ Jane pressed a sodden handkerchief to her face. ‘And you loathe Volkonsky anyway – I know you do. He ruined your brother at cards. As if I was planning on spending my entire life as a lumping unmarried sister getting in the way of my parents’ social engagements. But everything I really wanted is just, just – ashes now.’

  He decided she was enough of a child still that he could smoke in her presence, and lit a cigarillo from the silver candelabrum on the sideboard. He’d failed to manage Kitto with the remotest degree of either kindness or compassion whenever the boy had got himself into a similarly foolish adolescent mess. Listening to her was small atonement. ‘Was there someone you preferred?’ He’d already compromised her reputation just a little – enough that people would believe a scandal more readily. But he was also experienced enough to sense that he would never have the pull over this plump, sensible young girl that was so easy to exert over Tatyana Orlova.

  ‘Oh, not in the sordid way you all think. My drawing mistress’s brother is a very respectable person. He’s just got a position as a court musician; he’s left the employ of Count Gagarin’s brother in Moscow and will be in Petersburg tomorrow—’