by Katy Moran
‘Kitto, don’t,’ Nadezhda said quickly, but anger completely scorched away his relief at being led away from the firing squad, and he lunged forwards at his brother, breaking free of the guard, who froze in the presence of Napoleon, unable to move or act.
‘Don’t you know what everyone’s saying about you in Petersburg?’ Kitto heard his own voice rise up to the cloth-of-gold upper reaches of the tent, furiously uncontrolled. ‘That you’re a turncoat working for the French? The rumours have been spreading for months. Why are you here?’
‘Are you finished with your so-well-bred greeting, Christophe?’ Crow asked in ice-tinged French, and Kitto noticed with creeping horror that his brother’s eyes had that detached, lightless quality he remembered from the aftermath of Waterloo, as if he’d just witnessed cannon-fire at close quarters.
‘No!’ Kitto snapped. ‘No I am not! It’s bad enough that you dishonour the family name all over Petersburg, but how you can think you deserve Hester if you’re going to shame her by screwing diplomat’s daughters and bloody fucking Russian countesses right out in the open so that everyone knows – the gossip is all over Russia—’
‘That’s enough,’ Crow said with reined-in calm. ‘You will not mention her name again. Recover just a little breeding.’
‘How could you do it, even you?’ Kitto shoved him hard in the chest with a moment of breathless gratification because Crow had to take two quick steps backwards to regain his balance, a victory swiftly extinguished by the fact that he only smiled with an appalling air of self-control.
‘What’s the meaning of this absurd display?’ Napoleon turned to the younger of the two old women like a city merchant complaining to his wife about the quality of the beef vermicelli at supper. ‘Joséphine, what do your prisoners mean by brawling in my presence? Explain what has happened: who are they?’
‘Sergeant Villefranche was about to have them shot – not without reason, my love.’
‘Shot,’ Napoleon said. ‘Oh?’
Joséphine produced a brittle smile, and Kitto found himself feeling almost sorry for her – and even for Villefranche. ‘They have trespassed into the camp,’ she went on. ‘One seems to be English, one Russian. Further to that, they’ve shot and killed two of your own men. The tall and ill-bred one is Lord Lamorna’s brother. I thought it rather a shame they should be executed when they might be useful first, if Lord Lamorna should need any encouragement to seek more information about English intentions.’
‘They were rapists,’ Nadezhda said quietly, and Kitto shook his head. No one cared about that in here. So his life was to be used to abet Crow’s treachery. He thought of hanged bodies swaying beneath the chestnut tree at Nansmornow; he would find a way to kill himself before he was party to this.
Paying Kitto no heed at all, Crow executed a slight bow at Joséphine Bonaparte and her black-clad companion. ‘Oh, my compliments to you, mesdames. Aunt Thérèse, I must congratulate you most particularly. A most masterly and theatrical piece of manipulation. How extraordinary that these disastrously ill-mannered children just so happened to be here as I myself am here.’
‘Aunt Thérèse?’ Kitto demanded.
‘Be quiet,’ Crow said with such suppressed violence that for a moment no one spoke, not even Napoleon himself.
Joséphine shrugged. ‘Well, what did you expect, Jack, really? You’re here to help us, after all.’
Thérèse de la Saint-Maure just ignored them all, regal in black-beaded bombazine, which for a moment made Kitto almost admire her. He’d seen her in Petersburg, he realised, just some tedious and extremely elderly relation of a mother he’d never known, and after all one could hardly fraternise with the French, even if half the blood in one’s veins was French and everyone knew it. How did Crow dare to call her Aunt Thérèse, with such disgusting familiarity? He was a traitor to England, a puppet for this crimson-clad French emperor who sat observing them all as though a hound had got in and befouled the floor.
‘You can go to hell,’ Kitto told his brother with succinct fury.
‘A little more, and you’ll begin to make me really rather angry,’ Crow said.
‘You traitorous, lying bastard,’ Kitto shouted, completely unable to control himself. The guard at his side visibly winced.
‘My God, get them out of here,’ Joséphine said to the guards, placing both hands on Napoleon’s scarlet-clad shoulders. ‘Darling, they shan’t trouble you any longer.’
It was queer how it was Crow who held the room: how all eyes were on him, rather than Napoleon. Unmoving, he just gave a lazy and entirely humourless smile. ‘Christophe, at the risk of becoming a bore on the subject, I do think we can save what remains of this temper tantrum until we have the luxury of indulging without inflicting it on an unwilling audience.’ Turning aside, he bowed to the emperor. ‘I shall consider your offer, your excellency.’
‘The devil take his fucking offer,’ Kitto said, in Cornish, as the guards escorted Nadezhda towards the tent-flap. He couldn’t stand the sight of them touching her, but Crow at once took his arm, his long fingers digging right between muscle and bone.
‘I won’t tell you again,’ he said, sounding so bored that Kitto felt another surge of nauseous rage, at Crow and at himself for the mistake he’d so nearly made. He’d almost shouted at Napoleon’s men not to touch Nadezhda – the words get your hands off her actually on his lips – when by all appearances no one else had yet noticed she was even a girl. One could bet Crow knew it, though, just as he always knew everything. Kitto was so shocked at the sight of him and so angry that he now lost almost all sense of his own surroundings, which became nothing but a wild, scattered series of impressions: a blast of fresh air in his face as the guards escorted them outside, the scent of wet earth, the crushing pressure of Crow’s fingers on the spare flesh of his upper arm, Nadezhda’s silence, the musty smell of rice and bacon boiled in a camp kettle, the cool interior of a requisitioned farmhouse kitchen, a dark and cobwebbed flight of stairs and finally the metallic click of a key turning in a lock. They were in an upstairs parlour – he, Crow and Nadezhda – the windows shuttered and barred, the room lit by stinking tallow lamps arrayed upon a table laid with a grease-spotted cloth. Crow released him with a contemptuous jerk, and Kitto turned on him, but Crow moved as fast as ever and Kitto’s fist only glanced off his shoulder. Crow was now only a matter of a few scant inches taller, but he still had the advantages of weight and experience, and Kitto found himself slammed against the silk-papered wall with such force that the back of his skull cracked against it. Crow gripped his forearms with punitive force, those fingers digging in once more.
‘Good God, what a display.’ Crow’s eyes were hard and grey as knapped flint. ‘I can tell you now that I’ve seen quite enough of it.’
‘How dare you?’ Kitto battled to keep his voice level, determined not to show how much it hurt, both his head and Crow’s sickening, pinching grip, pinning his arms to his sides. The calm ferocity of Crow’s retaliation momentarily punctured Kitto’s anger, and his eyes burned with a wild urge to weep. ‘Everyone said you were a traitor, and I fought to clear your name, and got myself thrown out of Petersburg for it, and in the end it’s all true. I wish I’d died at Novgorod. I wish I’d died by that firing squad just now.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, spare me the melodrama,’ Crow said, releasing him, a good lot of his own anger now spent. ‘Be quiet. I’m not here to sell English or Russian secrets to the French, despite what it may look like. Did I ever do anything so obvious in my life?’
‘Why should I believe you?’ Kitto demanded.
‘Why indeed?’ Crow walked away across the room, drawing a cigarillo from the tin in his waistcoat pocket and lighting it at the stinking, roast-mutton tallow lamp. In that moment, he looked momentarily so much like his usual self that it was hard to breathe. ‘Incidentally, what in Christ’s name were you thinking, killing people on reconnaissance? If you’d undertaken this mission under my command I’d have had you both fl
ogged.’
‘If you dare so much as lay a finger on her,’ Kitto said, ‘I’ll kill you. I swear to God.’ Nadezhda stared at him in purest furious terror, and Kitto fought the urge to kick the table. ‘Oh, there’s no use pretending to him. He knows, sure as anything.’
‘Quite,’ Crow said. ‘This really wouldn’t be Shakespearean enough without girls dressed as boys. Now, how are we going to get you out of this ridiculous mess?’
Nadezhda waited with her arms folded across her stained blue jacket, the silver at her epaulettes a little afire in the candlelight. ‘I beg your pardon, but you don’t know anything at all about it,’ she said rapidly, looking Crow up and down. ‘I haven’t the honour of being formally acquainted with you, sir, but it’s clear enough who you are, and although you might claim jurisdiction over Captain Helford, you have none whatsoever over me, and so I take leave to beg you to keep your opinions to yourself, whatever you’re doing here.’
‘He has no jurisdiction over me, either,’ Kitto snapped.
‘Don’t I?’ Crow said gently, tapping ash into the fireplace. He ignored Nadezhda, who was watching them both in wary, hostile silence. ‘Has she told you who she really is yet? Show me that look again and you’ll regret it. I find your manners despicable.’
‘As I find your conduct, sir,’ Kitto spat each word.
Crow stepped closer again, but Kitto didn’t move; blood pounded in his ears.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, do stop it,’ Nadezhda said, turning to Crow. ‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with you, or why you’re here. Unless of course you really have sold yourself to the French as an informer – which does seem the most likely probability from where we stand, I can assure you.’
Crow spoke as if he hadn’t heard her; they had not, after all, been introduced. ‘I said, has she told you who she really is?’
Kitto suppressed the urge to throw the bowl of wizened apples on the table hard across the room. ‘Lord Lamorna,’ he said, ‘might I introduce Nadezhda Sofia Kurakina, late of Kazan.’
Lord Lamorna only smiled.
*
Nadezhda stared at them both; being caught in an argument between her own Captain Helford and his alarming brother was akin to imprisonment in a carriage behind a pair of bolting horses. She now felt as if she’d been hurled from the carriage into a breathless heap, certain that in the space of less than half an hour’s acquaintance, Lord Lamorna had seen through every last layer of her deception with the expertise of one who could only be as accomplished a liar as she was herself. Clearly furious, Kitto took a step closer to him, which seemed to her extremely unwise.
‘My dear child,’ Lord Lamorna said with that chilling lack of emotion. ‘My very dear boy, I’m sorry, but she’s no more a Kurakin than you are.’
‘Jack, what are you talking about?’ Kitto demanded, and was met with only a laconic shrug. Rising bile scorched up Nadezhda’s throat; he didn’t know anything about her, this Lord Lamorna – how could he? And yet she was sure he did: she could see it in his wry, almost amused appraisal of her. Unlike Kitto, he knew everything. Kitto was now standing at his side, watching her with a queer, hostile expression she hadn’t seen since the night he’d discovered her secret at Yarkaya Polyana. Lord Lamorna merely looked empty, and unsmiling. How could brothers be any more different? In his presence, Kitto had quite lost his usual air of suppressed laughter, which made him appear almost forbidding.
‘What’s he talking about, Nadezhda?’ Kitto said crisply.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I really don’t.’
Lord Lamorna smiled again. ‘Oh, come now.’
Nadezhda walked right up to him. He had no right to demand answers, but she couldn’t bear the way Kitto was looking at her. Lord Lamorna just watched with an air of grim amusement she found infuriating.
‘All right then, I haven’t the smallest notion what my history has to do with you, but if you must know I had always wondered if Mama and Papa weren’t my real parents. I looked nothing like either of them, and my brothers were so much older, even though they died at Borodino so that now I have no one but myself to rely on—’ She took a long, shuddering breath. There were ways to give away as little of the truth as she possibly could. Hadn’t she always meant to tell Kitto who she really was, one day? It was frighteningly easy to convince herself.
‘Nadia—’ Kitto said with such gentleness of manner that tears came to her eyes. No one had used the pet form of her name since the day Grandmama had died in that narrow bed, clutching her hand, leaving her quite alone in the world.
‘Do go on,’ Lord Lamorna said, sounding bored.
‘No one but myself,’ Nadezhda said, and now she had begun, she could not stop, and the words spilled from her lips, uncontrollable as hot vomit. ‘And maybe I was the last to know that the Kurakins weren’t my real parents, but what of it? No one ever tells anything to a young girl. Which is why Ilya Rumyantsev thought he could just use me like one of those camp whores out there, because I haven’t a name of my own, and it’s why I’m glad he died doing it, and even though I didn’t kill him I wish I had, I wish I’d been brave enough, but I wasn’t. I just let him do it and he died – he just died. And so I was happy to shoot that damned fucking soldier.’
Lord Lamorna raised his eyebrows infinitesimally, and despite everything Nadezhda found herself feeling ashamed of the soldiers’ language she’d employed in his presence, and could not go on.
Kitto turned to his brother. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ he snapped. ‘Stop it.’
Lord Lamorna ignored him and pulled out one of the carved wooden chairs. Nadezhda sat in it, pressing her hands to her face, which was wet with tears.
She found that she wanted to keep talking. One felt, perversely, as though it was in Lord Lamorna’s power to do something about this entire mess. ‘Have you any idea,’ she went on, ‘how many times I’ve asked myself why I didn’t fight back?’ Tears streamed down her face; her nose was running; it hurt to speak the truth, to remember what she had been forced to live through, and she wished beyond anything that this was a lie, too, that it hadn’t really happened. Lord Lamorna passed her a handkerchief, and she took it, breathing in the oddly reassuring scent of fresh soap. ‘Ilya Rumyantsev died as he forced himself upon me. He just died. I don’t know why, or how. Perhaps it was his heart. Perhaps it was a punishment from God, I don’t know, but he just died. One minute he was alive, the next he was dead. That’s all. And I’m glad of it. I’m truly, honestly glad he’s dead and I wish I’d shot his brains out.’ There was nothing else to say, and ordered speech was now quite beyond her power. She had spoken the truth about something, at least.
‘Are you happy now?’ Kitto demanded of his brother. She sensed that he was reining in his rage at Ilya Rumyantsev in order not to frighten her with it, and he seemed to know that she would want no one to touch her, so only came to stand close to her chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to her, ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you. If he wasn’t already dead, I would kill him, I swear to God.’
Lord Lamorna made no reply – he had an unsettling habit of listening to other people only when they interested him – but he went to the sideboard and took up a dusty cut-glass carafe from a sideboard laid with a grubby lace cloth, removed the stopper and poured a glass, holding it for one moment beneath his nose before passing it to her.
‘Abysmal,’ he said, ‘but it won’t kill you, child.’
She wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ilya Rumyantsev’s violation of her or the brandy, but it didn’t occur to her to refuse it, and the cognac lit a trail of fire down her throat.
Lord Lamorna pulled out another chair and sat down beside her, and again she felt entirely safe in his presence. ‘You’ve no idea who your natural parents may have been?’
Kitto watched with ill-suppressed rage. ‘Don’t answer him,’ he said. ‘He’s manipulating you.’
Weakened but still strong enough to keep some of the truth to herself, Nadezhd
a felt the lie leave her lips as though tugged on a string. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I haven’t the smallest idea.’
46
Crow finished his cigarillo and lit another immediately as the girl blew her nose into his handkerchief. She might well weep.
‘No one’s going to hurt you again,’ Kitto said to her, just as fierce and hot-headed as he was wrong. ‘Do you understand? I don’t care who your father was, or even your mother – no one will touch you.’ He went to stand behind her chair; she leaned her head back, not quite touching him, but as though his nearness brought her comfort and, really, this was all Crow needed.
‘Have you been fucking her?’ he asked in Cornish, breathing out coils of smoke.
Kitto went quite still, and gave Crow a look that was unsettlingly reminiscent of their father. ‘What did you say?’
‘Well?’ Crow disregarded the urge to soundly slap him.
Nadezhda herself looked up. ‘It’s really extremely rude to converse in a language I can’t understand.’
They both ignored her. ‘What do you take me for?’ Kitto demanded, also in swift, furious Cornish. ‘She was raped. And even when she wants to, it’s not going to happen until we marry.’
Crow put out his cigarillo, and the entire room seemed to move into sharper focus, from the grubby floorboards to the disordered cushions on the chaise longue beneath the window. ‘Say that again.’
‘Well, what else can I do?’ Kitto demanded. ‘We’ve been riding alone together for weeks – you of all people ought to understand that. It’s exactly why Hester married you.’
Crow laughed, knowing exactly the effect it would have. ‘I’ve never heard anything so entirely ridiculous in my life. Dear God. If you live long enough to marry anyone, you’ll do so with my consent or not at all, and if indeed we leave this place still alive, which seems unlikely from where I stand, you’ll return to Cornwall to recall a degree of conduct.’