by Katy Moran
‘Young Captain Helford has been rather conspicuous on his latest mission,’ Thérèse said gently. ‘All those horses, and he’s with only one other soldier – a boy little older than he is. If you think that French scouts haven’t been tracking their every movement since they left Tatyana Orlova’s estate, you’re dearly mistaken. I understand that there have been one or two skirmishes already – your brother has become quite the expert young killer. But if he isn’t in French hands already, Lord Lamorna, he soon will be. What would you do to ensure his safety?’
‘I have some business to attend to this evening, but I’ll meet you on the Tsarkoe Selo road tomorrow morning,’ Crow said, sparing them both the details: everyone would know soon enough that he had ruined poor, innocent Jane Cathcart, but no one would ever learn that he’d done it to make Tatyana Orlova sing like a bird about the whereabouts of his quarry Nadezhda Kurakina. And for now, Thérèse de la Saint-Maure and Joséphine both thought they had won, that he was their instrument. He would act for France, or seem to: he had little choice. Smiling as she adjusted the shawl around her shoulders, Joséphine crossed the room to a small braided travelling chest resting on the end of a chaise longue beneath the window. She raised the lid, and Crow caught a glimpse of red wool and jet-black feathers. Joséphine lifted out the scarlet, gold-braided jacket of a French aide-de-camp. ‘I think I’ve a reasonable eye for what will fit you, Lord Lamorna. Or perhaps now we should just call you Duc de Montausier? You might even get your title back, after all.’
Crow walked over to the sideboard, raised the carafe of 1805 brandy to the light, and poured an ample dose into one of the crystal glasses resting on a japanned tray. He drank the entire measure.
37
Many hours later, Crow returned to the embassy in a kalasha hired in a respectable but unfashionable district of Petersburg, where fur merchants lived cheek by jowl with icon-painters and musicians in a confusing jumble of tall wooden houses, and the air smelled of woodsmoke, spices and cabbage simmering in vinegar, and the boiled gold used to paint the halos of saints. Speaking in rapid Italian, Crow told his nervous companion to wait, and stepped down from the kalasha into the evening quiet of the English Embankment, burning torchlight glittering across the moonlit waters of the Neva. Concealed beneath his jacket and greatcoat he wore two flintlock pistols, each ready loaded and primed. The dagger at his waist and the smaller knife sheathed in his boot didn’t lend him much more confidence. He was a dead man. It was only a question of when. Night had fallen, and the tall windows of the ambassadorial dining-room glowed candlelit yellow. He wondered who were the guests, and how Lord Cathcart had chosen to explain his absence: his own erratic reputation would doubtless have laid the foundations for all manner of fabrication. At any rate, he was about to exceed the wildest expectations of the many people who had devoted their time to gossiping about him since the day he’d joined the navy at the age of twelve, entirely without his father’s permission or knowledge.
Instead of allowing the butler to announce him midway through dinner, Crow ran down the cellar steps and crossed a succession of stable-mews and laundry-yards hung with wet sheets before letting himself into the house through a servants’ entrance. In an acerbic fug of lye soap, he passed a scullery and a laundry-room; all was quiet. The servants were dining in their hall next to the kitchen: this was as close as he would get to being unobserved. Running up two flights of stairs, he let himself into the ambassadorial family quarters, and polished parquet spread away into the warm glow of an amber lamp set on a marble-topped side-table. Most of the bedchamber doors were ajar, revealing darkness within, but there was a light still lit in Jane’s room. Crow let himself in without knocking and found Jane and her nervous Italian drawing mistress sharing the same velvet armchair beneath the window, embracing as they kissed.
‘Having no appetite for supper, you retired early with the headache?’ he asked.
Jane and Miss Paolozzi broke apart and stared, and then Jane let out a disbelieving burst of laughter. Crow reached for a gaberdine travelling cloak hanging over the chest at the end of the four-poster bed, tossing it towards them. ‘Do you want to go to Venice, Miss Cathcart, or not?’
*
Much later, in that liminal time close to dawn, Tatyana lay alone between sheets and eiderdown, a glass of brandy at her bedside. The room was lamplit, and a fire glowed behind the brass grate, but the brandy wasn’t helping. She closed her eyes and saw deep green lawn leading away from the orchard at Yarkaya Polyana and Petya running towards her barefoot, holding a branch of pear blossom, his face glistening with tears. Mama, Mama, but there won’t be any pears. She remembered his scent – the camomile soap they used in the nursery – and the softness of his fair hair as she gathered him close, just four summers old. It doesn’t matter, my darling love.
She heard the faint snick of the window-catch and opened her eyes; Petya was gone. A cold draught snaked through a gap in the damask bed-curtains, and she sat up, afraid. Was the window open? Was he trying to come in out of the cold, her Petya? A shadow loomed, the curtains were drawn abruptly back and a cry died in Tatyana’s throat as she saw Lord Lamorna, the shoulders of his greatcoat glistening with raindrops that clung in his black hair like so many tiny pearls.
‘Good God. Do you enjoy frightening women alone at night?’ Tatyana got out of bed without bothering to reach for her wrap; she had no reason not to allow him to appreciate the gossamer froth of silk she wore.
He shrugged, without taking his eyes off her. ‘I’ve done what you wanted. Jane Cathcart has departed for Venice with her Italians and, just to make it really difficult for Lord and Lady Cathcart to dress the affair in clean linen, quite a decent handful of servants saw me leave with her, in the end. So there you have your scandal and Volkonsky is yours for the taking, for what it’s worth.’
Tatyana crossed the room to her dressing-table; the carafe of brandy still stood there and she poured him a glass, holding it out. He shook his head. ‘I’m waiting, Countess. You have your own end of this bargain to keep. Where is Nadezhda Kurakina?’
And, in the back of her mind, Tatyana was standing once more at the shore of Lake Ilmen, barefoot in the mud, Sasha at her side, before she was married to a man she’d never loved, before she had lost everything, and then she thought of Nadezhda herself, riding that Turkoman mare as though they were one and the same creature. If she must sell the freedom and the future of a young girl just as hers had once been, Lord Lamorna would pay a fair price.
She turned to him, speaking before she had really fully considered the weight of what she had to say. ‘No.’
‘What?’ His fury crackled towards her; she felt the heat of it, like the invisible flames stirred up by a conjuror at a midsummer party at the Anichkov Palace.
The room spun around her, and nothing mattered any more. ‘I’ve just decided: there’s another price to pay,’ she said, laughing, and how could Lord Lamorna believe that there was any mirth behind that laughter? She was so tired.
He didn’t move, but the coiled strength of his rage frightened and aroused her in equal measure as he enunciated each word with cold fury: ‘And what price do you ask now?’
‘This.’ Tatyana stepped towards him and slid her fingers beneath the lapels of his greatcoat; he neither flinched nor looked away as she slid the coat from his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor: after all, he had little choice but to allow her to use him. His usual expression of suppressed grief and animal ferocity flared into something more vivid and frightening, and without taking his eyes from hers he stripped off his jacket. Stepping forwards, he cupped the back of her head in his hands and kissed her, tugging his fingers through the arrangement of her curls. Breathless, before Tatyana knew what he was about, both of his hard hands slid down her back, all the way down, and he tasted of salt, of brandy, of something sweet and wholly his own, with just a fine layer of silk between her naked skin and those hands. She let out a gasp.
‘What?’ he said, his voice
harsh with checked emotion. ‘Is this not what you wanted? Do you want me to stop?’
‘Don’t stop,’ she said, unbearable warmth spreading in her lower belly as she reached up to begin the work of unknotting his cravat: she wanted to strip him, but as she loosened the snow-white muslin from around his throat, drawing it free, letting it fall to the floor, he leaned closer again, whispering into her ear.
‘Whore. But you know that, don’t you?’ He pulled her close and eased the nightgown up around her waist, and his touch snatched the breath from her lungs. ‘Were you so sure I would obey?’ he asked, mocking her quite obvious readiness, but his eyes put her in mind of a snow-blasted winter landscape, stunningly empty and cold, and just as she began to surrender to warm waves of pleasure at his fingertips, he kissed her neck and grazed her naked shoulder with his teeth, and then let her go. ‘Turn around,’ he said, and such was the note of command that she obeyed without question. ‘If I were you, I’d hold on to something.’ There was an edge of savage laughter in his voice and the room spun in a blur before her eyes. ‘Come now,’ he said, guiding her hands to the nearest bed-post as she leaned forwards, grasping smooth varnished walnut, so extraordinarily vulnerable and so aroused that she felt faint, her sight darkened and for a moment it was hard to breathe. Heat rushed to her cheeks as he slipped the nightgown up around her waist once more, easing her legs apart with his knee so that she was entirely revealed to him, and then, thank God, those long, hard fingers again, so firm and teasing and so relentless, with one hand on her narrow hip in a firm grasp, until she could do nothing but rise on to her tiptoes, letting out another involuntary cry as he ceased his attentions almost at the height of this incontinent pleasure.
‘You really are the most wanton little bitch,’ he said, ‘and God knows someone has to teach you a lesson.’
She writhed, looking over her shoulder, completely exposed to him, entirely bent to his will, which seemed to be to reduce her to an incoherent mess, and she saw that he was kneeling, his dark head bowed low, and then she felt the warm touch of his lips between her legs, his tongue, and it was all she could do to hold on to the bed-post. At first, she buried her face in the crook of her own arm: she would not have the servants smirking at her cries; but that intention was swiftly derailed. Only when she was quite inchoate did he turn her around, lifting her on to the tumbled sheets of the bed, where she lay as he stripped off his shirt, revealing those extraordinary Otaheitan tattoos all over the lean, smooth, muscled expanse of his chest and torso. She watched, too, as he unbuttoned his breeches; she wanted to take him in her hands, but there was clearly no need, and he was obviously in no temper to allow her to lead so much of a step of this dance. Holding both hands above her head, he filled her entirely, and she breathed in the warm scent of his hair as they moved together, she and this furious boy who would not kiss her again, but turned his face away from hers, just as she had seen concubines do. Even so, dawn light filled the room before he had finished with her, and for a few moments he lay at her side with his boots on, and his unbuttoned breeches, and as he sat up, she sat up beside him, tilting his face towards her with her cooling fingertips.
‘No,’ he said, and she could not be sure whether he was refusing another kiss or whether he simply didn’t want her to see the tears now coursing down his face. ‘I’ve betrayed her,’ he said, with simple and quite unexpected honesty.
‘No, my dear,’ Tatyana said, and now he submitted to her embrace, his dishevelled head against her breast as she smoothed his unruly hair. ‘I’m afraid it sounds as if your wife is quite gone where you cannot harm her in any way.’
Whispering now, Tatyana gave up Nadezhda Kurakina’s secret. She held him for a long time afterwards.
38
A week earlier, Hester stood on deck in the moonlight, adjusting her balance to the heaving swell as the Wellington traversed the darkness of the Kattegat, heading south for the rock-strewn Danish Passage and on to the Baltic. Beside her, the ship’s boat swung gently on its davits and she suppressed a flicker of memory – bare feet swaying, three figures hanging from the chestnut tree at Nansmornow, long ago. She was a wanted woman herself. She might yet meet that same fate – the noose around her neck. Forcing herself to forget the possibility, she leaned on the guardrail, listening to the rhythmic rolling of the mast stowed inside the little boat along with the oars, watching the sprinkled lights of Aarhus beyond the water. The shipboard scents of hot tar and rum peeled away the years like so many flakes of onion skin; as a little girl she would have climbed on to the poop and spent hours afterwards drawing Norsemen and porpoises, but those days were long gone – she was a woman alone, with no indulgent father in the captain’s cabin to protect her. She thought of Crow, too, as the young midshipman Papa had so often spoken of, but she’d never for a moment expected to marry. The immensity of sea and lost time and sky overwhelmed her; she pictured Morwenna safe with Catlin in some far-off Breton fisherman’s cottage, but Crow was lost in all the vastness of the world. He was not meant to come home. What if the English assassin had already reached him? What if the French had Kitto? She closed her fingers tight around the guardrail. Crow had served his country for more than ten years, offering up his life time and again at sea and on the battlefield, and he was repaid with treachery. Sometimes she thought that anger was all that pushed her onwards, away from her child in search of her husband. She sensed the sailor’s presence before she saw him – the harsh, irregular rhythm of his breathing – and stared with steadfast terror at the lights of Aarhus slipping past as the Wellington gathered way; coming up on deck had been a mistake.
‘Haven’t seen much of you, darling,’ the sailor said, behind her. ‘Keep yourself to yourself, don’t you? Down below deck in that little cabin of yours. Everyone’s been talking about you, wondering who you are, what you’re doing, a bluey with cash to spend – a private cabin, like – and all on your own, too. Paying young Nicholls to bring you pudding from the galley. Is that all he gives you, we’re wondering?’
Hester ignored him and the insulting reference to the colour of her skin. She clung to the guardrail, wishing that she’d dared spare enough banknotes to hire a maid as chaperone, wishing she’d never stepped outside her cabin, because freedom from stale air and boredom wasn’t worth this. Speaking to a man would be seen as an invitation. The best she could hope for was that he would simply go away.
The sailor went on a conversational tone. ‘Most of the men are thinking you’re probably some high-class whore, but what none of us can make out is why you’re going to Russia. Seems curious, somehow, doesn’t it?’
Hester watched the lights of Aarhus disappearing aft, listening to the calling of the men as they let out more sail; there wasn’t much wind. He’d go away. Surely he would just go away. She’d issued no invitation of any kind; she hadn’t even looked at him. She sensed him lean closer, as if her disinterest only piqued his interest. She could smell his breath now, foetid, tobacco-tinged.
‘I’ve been afraid for you, lass. That’s it: afraid. You see, some of the lads have been thinking you’ve got something to hide. What you need is a protector. Someone to look after you.’
For a price, Hester thought, willing him to grow bored, to leave her alone.
‘So what’s your problem, whore?’ The wheedling tone had left his voice, hardened now with aggression. ‘Not very friendly, are you? Think you’re better than us, do you?’
And Hester saw that there was nothing she could do: to speak would be an invitation; to ignore him an insult. He laid his hands upon her hips, letting one hand drag down her thigh. Moving with slow deliberation, she drew the pistol from beneath her cloak and turned around; she held it to the sailor’s jaw, right beneath his chin; she was tall enough to look him in the eye. He might have been handsome once, his features marred by age and the regular consumption of liquor, his nose swollen and reddish.
‘I suggest,’ Hester said calmly, ‘that you don’t make the mistake of touching me again.’
He stepped away, his dissipated features twisting into the most extraordinary expression of simultaneous disgust and alarm. He called out, and in a moment Hester was surrounded by crewmen. She wondered if all this had been planned, they appeared so quickly. No one said a word. There were ten or fifteen men, at least, all stepping closer with unspoken, sickening menace.
‘What in the devil’s name is going on?’ An aristocratic midshipman elbowed his way through the mass of men, most of them twice his age at least. His mouth fell open as he saw Hester’s pistol. Her hands were shaking, and moonlight glinted off the filigreed silver stock.
Escorted by the young midshipman at her side, his face a mask of frozen indignation, Hester climbed down the stairs to the lower deck and she closed her eyes, longing to open them and find her father sitting in the captain’s cabin, charts and books littering the desk before him. Instead, it was only Captain Wythenshawe of the Wellington, examining a chart of the Denmark Passage. He had a narrow, intelligent face and a shock of fox-like reddish hair, and Hester ignored the odd sense of having seen him somewhere before she’d ever so much as set foot on the Wellington at the West India Dock in London. When he spoke, even the northern inflection to his voice was familiar.
‘What is it now, Milton?’ he said to the young midshipman. ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful and show me how you’d plot our course south?’
‘She’d pulled a pistol on the men.’ Milton’s Adam’s apple bobbed furiously. ‘She’s a danger, sir. What kind of madwoman pulls a loaded firearm out right on deck? Oughtn’t we to have her locked up?’
Terror lurched in Hester’s belly, but in the very next moment she wondered if she wouldn’t be safer imprisoned.