Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’ one of them said, looking up – a tall, moustachioed officer in an unknown French regiment. The rapist just continued with his rapid, dog-like thrusting, letting out an animal grunt.

  ‘Nyet,’ Nadezhda said and Kitto realised that he was the only one to notice that she had drawn her pistol, holding it loose at her side, her hand shaking so much that she hadn’t a hope of hitting anyone. Thinking only of Roza hanging from the chestnut tree at Nansmornow, Kitto snatched the cutlass from his belt, but by that time Nadezhda had gathered her wits and fired at the rapist’s forehead in the very moment he looked up, blowing his brains out through the back of his skull. He dropped like a sack of wheat, with lifeless force, and the girl scrambled from beneath him, her mouth stretched wide in a silent shriek, blood-splattered.

  ‘What the fuck? You mad little fuckers.’ Snarling like a dog, the moustachioed officer stepped towards them, but Kitto just raised his own pistol and shot him between the eyes. The second dead man dropped into a motionless heap where he stood. The other French soldier raised both hands above his head and fled into the night, and the girl crawled as far from Kitto and Nadezhda as she could manage, tugging ragged woollen skirts back down to cover her pale, dirt-streaked legs.

  ‘Run,’ Nadezhda advised her, even as Kitto saw French soldiers closing ranks around them.

  Part 4

  THE ART OF WAR

  44

  Kitto and Nadezhda were dragged by silent and furious soldiers around the edge of a trampled rose parterre and a kitchen garden now containing only a single row of onions. Kitto knew there was a bruise forming along his jaw, and he ignored the pain with a dizzy sense of unreality: rapists or not, the men they’d shot had been as brothers to their captors and a camp girl was nothing to them. Shaking, Nadezhda whispered a quiet prayer in Russian, and Kitto saw a post jutting up before a crumbling garden wall; the old, worn bricks and the post itself were both marred with dark stains. They were going to be tied up and summarily shot here, their brains blown out – he’d seen it happen on more than one occasion, the white-faced forced march, the strangled shouting, the loud report of the guns followed by a silence that always seemed too short before the usual chatter and kettle-rattling of the camp rose up again. Now he was the wretched fellow marched to the post he could hardly breathe; he supposed it was better than being hanged.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Nadezhda said quietly, and he sensed her reach for his hand; he snatched his own away, much as it hurt him to do so, knowing how desperate she must have been for comfort: she was as leery of touch as a yearling broken harsh to the bridle, but what did she think these men would do, these disinterested soldiers milling about with tin mugs of gruel and flasks of wine, all moving away from the firing post? They were no different to English soldiers: so well acquainted with death that an execution was an unpleasant bore rather than an attraction. But two young men holding hands would warrant special punishment. Silent, Nadezhda cast a look up at him, and yet her expression was now resolute: she had more courage even than he.

  Kitto’s guard hissed into his ear, flecks of spittle speckling his cheek, the inside of the ear. ‘This way, you sneaking murderous little shits. Time for a taste of your own quack-cure.’

  Kitto stumbled as they were dragged to the post, and he breathed in the familiar stink of campfire smoke, and burning bacon, and stale wine, and the sweaty fug of so many gathered men, even as he felt the rough rope around his wrists, pulled so tight that he suppressed the urge to cry out. Soon it wouldn’t matter, anyway. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Nadezhda, unable to believe that this was actually happening, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s my fault.’

  ‘I’m the one who listened to Krakowski.’ They should have been halfway back to Petersburg by now, but he’d lost his temper over second-rate drawing-room gossip about his brother.

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if you hadn’t,’ Nadezhda said. ‘The French meant to have us, and now we’re here.’

  The French soldiers were arguing about a missing lot of ammunition, and Kitto saw them line up ready to fire, ramming shot and cartridge down the barrels of their Charlesvilles; in under a minute this would be over. But then, as he watched, all seven men stopped what they were doing to salute a pair of passing women with their long cloaks sweeping the muddy grass, and why in Christ’s name could this not just be done with?

  ‘What on earth is going on here?’ The smaller of the two women’s voice rang out with imperious clarity.

  He heard muffled voices of explanation, and then the woman’s voice rising up again. ‘Well, then, for goodness’ sake, where are they from?’

  Whoever you are, shut up, he thought, and let this be over.

  ‘They’re not French, that much we’re pretty sure of, ma’am.’

  ‘Then take them to your emperor. What on earth can you be thinking – if they are spies, who knows how useful they might be?’

  ‘But they—’ The woman must have silenced the protestor with just a look, because he fell silent even as Kitto realised they were not to die, not quite yet, and he leaned back with his head against the post, listening to Nadezhda’s disordered, sobbing breathing as one of the soldiers advanced to unleash them.

  *

  The air was thick with smoke and the usual army-camp miasma of rum, bacon and the biscuity tang of burning gruel, overlaid by the piquant edge of Crow’s own cigarillo smoke. He hadn’t slept or eaten in far too long. His entire body was suffused with the nervous heat that always used to keep him awake the night before a battle; as a younger man, he’d always needed a woman at times like this. He would never lie with Hester again, and no one else would be enough, but he could not think about that. Not now. The black feathered hat was heavy, pressing into his forehead, but wearing it made him instantly identifiable as a French staff officer, marking him out as beyond reproach. Joséphine had briefed him closely on the regiments assembled here, and who in this guise he would have been commanding, and which regiment he was to say he had been drafted in from, should anyone ask. Castlereagh and the entire English government had been looking the wrong way all this time, down to Cornwall when they should have had their eyes on Russia. Never mind insurrection at home, Napoleon had made his move, and any question of an heir to the English throne was soon going to be irrelevant.

  Crow lit another cigarillo from the end of the one he had just finished, tossing the glowing stub of it away into the darkness. Having washed, shaved and changed his shirt and cravat after the final leg of their journey, he was due to rendezvous with Joséphine and Thérèse in the presence of Napoleon himself, but it was becoming increasingly hard to distinguish his own imaginings from the world of flesh and blood and consequences. The sky wheeled with tossing crows, starlings and gulls that he was certain no one else saw: such close proximity to gathered soldiers brought the carrion birds of Waterloo, and only the familiar operation of smoking pinned him to the world everyone else knew, where the past did not leak into the present. He could see the opulent field tent from here, and as he grew closer a staff officer leaving the tent stared at him with an insolent lack of curiosity. It wasn’t hard to summon up the brisk, harassed air of the aide-de-camp; he had, after all, been the Duke of Wellington’s. Crow stepped over Turkish carpets laid out on the bare turf, and he went into Napoleon Bonaparte’s field headquarters, little more than ten miles from Chudovo, and a hard day’s ride from Petersburg, knowing he was acting completely without permission or precedent, and that he could reasonably face either a French or an English firing squad for what he was about to do.

  Inhabited by silent orderlies, the interior of the tent was thick with stale smoke and the fatty reek of boiled mutton, hung with swags of linen printed with a pattern of the imperial abeille: there was no sign of Joséphine or Thérèse, and in the distance, somewhere in the camp, Crow heard pistol shots ring out, followed by bursts of shouting. An ensign emerged from Napoleon’s curtained-off inner quarters bearing a covere
d tray. He glanced at Crow without interest; Crow guessed that, to him, he was just another ambitious aide-de-camp come to beg for the reinstatement of ancestral aristocratic titles stripped from his family in the revolution: it happened so often. He lit yet another cigarillo, savouring the harsh, raking smoke. The sentries murmured quietly about a bet they had on with a lancer, taking little notice of Crow, who could do nothing but wait. Just as he was about to light yet another cigarillo, in the absence of food, sleep, or any semblance of peace of mind, a sentry emerged, holding back a swag of fabric, and Crow ducked under the bolt of printed linen into Napoleon’s private quarters. Freezing sweat slid down his back. A man with the bilious complexion of a long-standing martyr to a liver complaint sat at the writing desk. He wore a padded vermilion dressing gown over a gold-braided blue jacket; his pen travelled effortlessly over several sheets of foolscap. So here was Napoleon, this architect of nations, this arch manipulator who had fooled everyone into thinking that he meant to hold ground in Austria, not attack Europe from her northern back door, just as a hunting dog might pounce on a hare to crush tender bones with her long teeth. He didn’t once look up and Crow thought how easy it would be to kill him, without even a guard to intervene. He had two loaded pistols; he could change everything. With Napoleon dead, France would be plunged into all the chaos of a messy succession, and Europe ripe for England’s plucking: England who longed above all else for mastery over trade – which indeed meant over everything. Crow need only reach into his greatcoat and pull out his cavalry pistol, and it would all be over. But he remembered the cell at Bodmin gaol, and Nathaniel Edwards’s hands shaking as Crow held them in his own, tears standing in the man’s eyes as he was led away to the gallows. England had drowned Hester and Morwenna. England deserved mastery over nothing.

  ‘What is it that you have to tell me, Lord Lamorna?’ Napoleon Bonaparte spoke, still without looking up, and Crow was surprised at the strength of his Italian accent – he hadn’t expected that. It was so strange to hear this man say his name, this man of all men. A plate of congealing mutton and potatoes lay on the desk beside him, almost untouched. ‘And, more to the point, why in God’s name do you have anything to tell me at all?’ Napoleon went on, with a dry, almost humorous edge to his voice. ‘In truth, you’re still a lieutenant colonel in an elite British regiment, Lord Lamorna – Wellington’s hero. Indeed, two years ago you snatched the man from my grasp, enabling him to defeat my brother’s forces in England. What possible proposition can you have for me? Surely we are the most bitter of sworn enemies, you and I?’

  Crow allowed his gaze to wander to the linen-slung tent doorway. Somewhere out there in this camp there would be a bloodstained post, six feet high. He imagined the feel of the bonds at his wrists, and wondered whether they would blindfold him before the shot was fired. He was never going to get away with this. ‘Castlereagh took me prisoner and massacred innocent people on my own lands, your excellency,’ he said. ‘Because of him, my wife and daughter fled Cornwall, and drowned. I’m a Cornishman; as I am quite sure you know, my mother was French. I once swore loyalty to England, and gave all I had to that country, and this is how I am repaid. Any loyalty I once had is entirely extinguished.’

  At last Napoleon looked up. His cheeks were hollow, the candlelight accentuating the sallow, dyspeptic tone of his complexion. ‘Well?’ He gestured at an ornately carved folding camp chair. ‘Tell me what it is you have come to say and let’s have done with it. I’ve made the mistake of underestimating Joséphine in the past, but swore I would not make that error again. In many ways, she is a little fool, but no one can deny she has perfected the art of eliciting important information from pretty young men. If she thinks you are worth my while, perhaps she’s right.’

  Crow obeyed and sat down, stretching out his legs. ‘Tsar Alexander has struck a deal with Lord Castlereagh and the Cabinet: in exchange for open trade routes across the Black Sea, Britain will assist the tsar in the expulsion of French troops from Russia. You’ll be cut off, your excellency. It’s now nearly the end of May. If you move now, Davout and his men can return safely to France long before winter sets in.’ Crow stared at Napoleon steadily. Everyone said he would never again return to Russia, the scene of his greatest and most shameful defeat. And yet here he was, in Russia. It was said that after Waterloo Napoleon had recovered his faith in manoeuvre, and not least a degree of confidence in his own ability as a war leader. England had been lost because of his brother Jérôme’s failings, not Napoleon’s own.

  ‘Well, that’s extremely interesting, if it’s true. It’s entirely believable, but you must understand that Alexander has, of course, made his own overtures to me. How can I be sure which of you is lying: you or he?’ Napoleon stared, unsmiling. ‘Castlereagh has always been an idiot, entirely unable to judge the mood of first the Irish people, and then the English. He really has eroded any loyalty you felt for England, Lord Lamorna, has he not?’

  ‘Yes, your excellency. I have no loyalty to England.’ And Crow looked back at him – at this ill-made and wholly unremarkable-looking man whose ambition had altered the very face of the world, bringing order out of the chaos of revolution, but always led by the need to conquer, never to simply rule those whose lives and wellbeing he had taken responsibility for.

  ‘No one can deny you’re the sort of man who makes things happen. Your loyalty, Lord Lamorna, is a prize indeed. Might it indeed really now lie with France?’ Napoleon asked with a curious lightness of tone.

  There was something so frank and so shockingly confiding in his expression now, in his slightly protuberant blue eyes, that Crow simply told him the truth. ‘Your excellency,’ he said, ‘in truth, I just want to die.’

  ‘That seems somewhat wasteful.’ Napoleon watched him carefully. ‘But in the meantime, I think we must test your loyalty, Lord Lamorna. You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust it. This news of Britain and Russia maintaining their alliance is alarming, to be sure, but I wish for more precise information. You must return to Petersburg and bring it to me.’

  Crow had envisaged such an outcome, but the devil if he knew yet what he must do about it. He longed for another cigarillo, and let his gaze slide towards the tent-flap. Outside, the damp trudge of footfalls grew louder, men tramping across trodden-down muddy grass, and a young ADC came in, ducking beneath a swag of gathered linen in his feathered hat. He glanced uneasily at Crow and saluted to Napoleon, bearing the look of a man who wasn’t at all sure if he was not about to talk himself before a firing squad.

  ‘Prisoners, your excellency. Madame says you’ll want to see them yourself.’

  ‘Very well. What madame wants, madame must have, is that not so?’ With frozen sarcasm, Napoleon leaned back in his camp chair, resting both hands on his rounded belly. ‘Do bring them in.’

  And, as Crow watched, his young brother Kitto came in with a Russian soldier no older than he, each guarded by two men. Joséphine and Thérèse swept in after them all, twitching their skirts away from the muddied grass. A shivering tingle spread from Crow’s fingertips throughout his entire body: this was just another trick played on him by his shattered mind.

  Tall, shambolic and disgracefully ill shaven, Kitto looked him up and down, taking in his French uniform with an expression of such kindling rage that Crew knew he was no illusion. ‘Che vastard,’ Kitto said in furious Cornish. ‘It’s really true what everyone says. You bastard fucking traitor.’

  He was there, clearly as real to everyone else as he was to Crow, but Kitto could wait to be cut down to size: his companion was the real prize. Entirely ignoring his brother, Crow turned his attention to the undersized Russian soldier at Kitto’s side, recalling the portrait Lord Castlereagh had shown him so long ago at Boscobel Castle, and he saw immediately that Tatyana Orlova had been telling him the truth: Kitto’s companion was no young soldier at all, but a thin, dishevelled hoyden of a girl with cropped curls and the liquid dark eyes of her mother, Princess Sophia of England. Kitto surged towards him, he
ld back by the guards, King George’s granddaughter scowled, and Napoleon looked on.

  ‘My word,’ Crow said to his brother in Cornish, ‘you do seem to find yourself in some compromising situations, don’t you?’

  45

  In a field tent rich with cloth-of-gold drapes and hangings, Kitto barely registered the presence of the escort guards and the two old women who had saved his life. He half noticed the man who could only be Napoleon Bonaparte, with his rich red cloak, gold-braided tricorn hat and liverish features, watching everything with a hard, agate-blue gaze. For Kitto, there was only Crow, tall and commanding as ever, and dressed in the red braided jacket of a French aide-de-camp, behind French lines, still daring to look as though Kitto was the one who had better swiftly find an explanation for all this the moment they were alone together.