Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  ‘I’ll return to my regiment, in fact, sir,’ Kitto said, briefly summoning a measure of frigid calm.

  ‘As of this moment, you no longer have a regiment.’ Crow let Kitto shove him again. He was much too angry to get the better of anyone, least of all Crow.

  ‘You can’t take me out of the army,’ Kitto shouted, all pretence at self-control now quite abandoned.

  ‘I can and I will, as you well know.’ Crow contented himself with watching Kitto step away, and the boy gave a hard-edged laugh. Crow turned on him before Kitto had time to regain his poise, pushing him against the wall once more, so that a three-legged stool shrieked across the floorboards. Kitto glared at him, their faces just inches apart, his chest heaving.

  ‘I really don’t think,’ Crow said, ‘that it would be wise to test me, do you?’

  ‘Stop it!’ Nadezhda cried out. ‘You’re both abominable.’ Even as she spoke, the door swung open and Joséphine and Thérèse de la Saint-Maure stepped into the room, Joséphine issuing a swift command to the guards outside to leave them all locked in together.

  Thérèse swept the room with her gaze. ‘I do prefer not to have the name sullied by public brawling. We heard you all the way from the bottom of the stairs: extraordinary.’

  *

  As Kitto watched, now too angry to speak, Crow let him go with a little shake, as though he were some cur or street urchin, and bowed to their so-called great-aunt, lighting yet another cigarillo. ‘You must tell me, ma’am, how I may serve you,’ he said with a sarcastic gesture of welcome at the chained and padlocked shutters, the squalid crumb-littered tablecloth and the grease-smeared glasses arrayed on the japanned tray.

  The woman Joséphine cast a curious glance in Kitto’s direction, ignoring Nadezhda completely. ‘Come, Jack – you could hardly suppose Napoleon wouldn’t want to test your loyalty. You only need ride to Petersburg and return with at least one piece of significant intelligence that we don’t already know.’

  Kitto laughed again, but only with contempt. ‘So you’re not working with the French after all, Jack?’ He was now long past the point he had arrived at once before to such catastrophic effect, so furious with Crow that he no longer cared what he might do or say. ‘Oh God, you’re such a worthless bastard. Do you think I’m an idiot? You just lied straight to my face not ten minutes ago.’

  Nadezhda winced, but Thérèse de la Saint-Maure, Joséphine and Crow barely seemed to notice this fresh outburst, only glancing in his direction as though he were a starling that had got in by an unshuttered window.

  ‘I’m so sorry, ma’am,’ Crow said, ‘but given that I’m now considered a turncoat by everyone from Petersburg to Southampton, how easy do you think it would actually be to glean any useful intelligence from England, beyond what I’ve already given up to Napoleon? I came here on your invitation, to do one specific task. How must I manage this expansion of my brief?’

  ‘By doing what you apparently do best, my dear,’ Thérèse de la Saint-Maure said, ‘lying and cheating.’

  Crow smiled, humourless. ‘Well, I’m afraid that I have no more cards to play, so then we find ourselves at an impasse.’

  ‘No,’ Nadezhda said, ‘no, we don’t.’ She was standing right beside Joséphine, who held herself curiously rigid.

  ‘Your Russian soldier is holding a knife against my back,’ Joséphine said with surprising calm. ‘Obviously Napoleon’s guards made a poor job of stripping you all of your weapons.’

  Nadezhda only smiled, her fine-boned face vivid in the lamplight, and Kitto remembered the knife sheathed in her corset. She must have reached around to quietly tug it free. Crow was just watching them all thoughtfully: dangerously quiet, in Kitto’s opinion. They would never be able to get down the stairs and out of the door, even with Joséphine as a hostage. Still holding her prisoner, Nadezhda glanced up at the dim, cobwebbed ceiling, and Kitto followed her gaze to a loft hatch. He moved a chair beneath it, climbed up and moved the hatch, revealing a yawning black maw above. Without a word, Crow walked to the door and bolted it from the inside with one liquid movement.

  ‘What on earth is the meaning of this?’ Thérèse demanded, watching as though they were drunken villagers chasing a pig.

  Crow just shook his head, tossing off another glass of brandy. ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘it takes in the region of five minutes to die from a well-placed knife wound to the kidney. If I were you, I wouldn’t risk finding out just how accurate the Russian boy’s aim is. I’m extremely sorry for the inconvenience, but we’re leaving, and I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us, for part of the way at least. We can’t possibly let you stay here to sing like a bird, my dear.’

  ‘A pair of old women,’ Thérèse said, scornfully. ‘Do you really think any of them care what happens to us? If they see us, you’ll be shot down before you so much as reach the garden wall, and we alongside you.’

  Crow gave her the sort of smile that Kitto always thought of as his brother at his simultaneous worst and best, equally as charming as he was life-threatening. ‘Well, since we don’t appear to have any other choice, we’ll just have to put your theory to the test, won’t we?’

  ‘You can’t even begin to be serious,’ Joséphine said, ‘you can’t—’ She broke off, gasping, and Nadezhda shrugged, obviously more than happy to allow Joséphine to feel the edge of cold steel right through the scant protection of linen and muslin.

  ‘I’m sorry, madame,’ Nadezhda said.

  Dispensing with further discussion, Crow sprang on to the stool and hauled himself up into the gloom of the loft space above. ‘Here,’ he said lightly, reaching down with both arms. ‘The stool will slip. Use a chair, boy, or better still the table, and do it quietly.’

  Kitto ignored the fact he’d decided Crow was dead to him and followed his brother’s commands to the last breath; he moved the table, edging it cautiously across the filthy waxed floorboards beneath the critical gaze of Nadezhda and the two old women, and then went to Thérèse de la Saint-Maure, who was watching him with such a look of awful disdain that it was hard to speak.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kitto said and, standing behind his great-aunt, he put his hands around her waist and lifted her on to the table; she was light as a bird: nothing but tea, toast, whalebone and venom. Crow reached down and with a whisk of bombazine gown and cedar-scented petticoats she was gone, up into the loft space, and it was such a profoundly terrible thing to do to an old woman that Kitto wasn’t at all sure whether he wouldn’t rather have been shot, his brains blown out against that bloodied post, but Crow appeared again, head and shoulders, black hair hanging in his eyes, and said, ‘The devil! Move.’

  Nadezhda and Joséphine came to the table, somewhere between an undignified dance and a shuffle, and Kitto lifted Joséphine, too – Joséphine Bonaparte, consort to the Emperor of France – and Crow twitched her up into the loft as well, and Kitto only just managed to turn his head from the swirl of damp, mud-spattered linen. He was left with only Nadezhda, so pale and resolute in her worn and stained uniform that he wanted to kiss her even more than he wanted answers from his brother: nothing else seemed to really matter. He would happily have spent the rest of his life living in the look that passed between them, her clear brown eyes holding his gaze.

  ‘You’re holding the knife, may I remind you,’ Crow said from above with studied calm.

  ‘Are you so worried about being overpowered by two old women?’ Nadezhda demanded, jutting her finely moulded chin up at the roof space, and Kitto shook his head. Now that his own anger had cooled, even just a little, he saw that of course she didn’t understand that quite empty expression in Crow’s eyes; she didn’t know that in such a frame of mind Crow might continue apparently as normal for weeks, if not months, and then suddenly snap with such bloody-fisted destruction that nothing was ever the same again. God only knew what had happened to him, but it was just a matter of time before he made everyone in his close vicinity pay for it. Heedless of all this, Nadezhda climbed with w
iry competence, shaking off Crow’s steadying arm, and Kitto followed her and, with all the strength and silent speed he could muster, he twisted around to sit on the vast, rough beam where Joséphine and Thérèse perched, emanating silent outrage. There was something almost sacrilegious about seeing two women of that age sitting with their legs swinging over a yawning gap, like a pair of little girls perched on a beam in the hayloft. The dark space disappeared off into a deeper blackness on either side of the hatch: the loft ran the entire length of the farmhouse. Between the beams, only a relatively small area at the far end of the loft had been boarded out, with heaps of last winter’s straw and apples laid out on old news-sheets emitting that faint rotting scent; the rest was only plaster and lath, and Kitto knew if he didn’t take care he’d put a foot through the ceiling of either this bedchamber or some other upstairs room in the house.

  ‘When you’re quite ready,’ Crow said, at his most insufferable, stepping with swift precision from one beam to the next until he’d crossed the length of the loft, balancing with all the natural grace of a cat, even though in just the last half-hour he’d drunk enough brandy to fell most reasonable people. At the far end, at what must be the northernmost end of the house, where the apples and hay were heaped up, the faint grey outline of a door showed. ‘This way,’ Crow said. ‘We can get out here. Now.’

  Kitto felt sweat break out all over his back beneath his shirt, and turned to his forbidding great-aunt, who looked at him as though he had just vomited in the middle of her drawing-room. ‘If you’ll allow me, madame,’ he said, helping her to her feet, stepping with her from one beam to the next as Crow had done. Crow passed them again, entirely focused on going back to assist Nadezhda and Joséphine.

  ‘And what do you propose to do now?’ Thérèse de la Saint-Maure said with an acerbic precision that reminded Kitto acutely of Crow. ‘It’s going to be rather a long way down.’ Steadying her, Kitto sidestepped a large wooden tray of wrinkled apples. The two loft doors were vast, towering up to the narrow space at the very top of the roof. Peering through the half-inch gap between them, he breathed in the scent of woodsmoke, frying onions and horseshit. They must be above the kitchens, and somewhere near the farm stables. The loft doors were held shut from the outside by a narrow wooden latch, and Nadezhda appeared again with Crow, Joséphine and her knife, and pushed the flat of the blade into the crack between the two doors. With one frenzied movement, she brought up the blade with enough force to lift the latch outside. The doors swung open so fast that each one crashed into the wall behind it, and light flooded in.

  ‘Quickly,’ Crow said and, turning, he climbed out of the door, clinging on briefly before dropping four or five feet to the farmyard of beaten earth below, immediately reaching up his arms with a single commanding gesture.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kitto said, uselessly, and helped Thérèse and then Joséphine climb down into Crow’s arms. Nadezhda followed, scrabbling down of her own accord, holding the knife to Joséphine’s back once more; Kitto jumped in a hurtling rush and cast one last look up at the shouldering bulk of the farmhouse as a fine spray of raindrops spattered his face.

  ‘This way.’ Crow jerked his head towards the dark line of beech and pine just visible beyond the farmyard and hurdle-fenced kale patches. French campfires glowed and, beyond them, the dark mass of thick, ancient forest spread out for miles. How many men sat between them and the relative safety of those trees?

  ‘Don’t look at anyone, do you understand?’ Crow said quietly. ‘Just walk as if you’re supposed to be here – start when I start, and don’t stop until we reach the trees.’ He stared at Joséphine and Thérèse. ‘If either of you screams, it will be the last sound you make.’ He turned back to Kitto and Nadezhda. ‘We reach those trees and we then leave them, understand?’

  ‘Wait for me there,’ Kitto said and, without waiting for an answer, he moved away from his brother and from Nadezhda and their two enraged prisoners, because if they left this place without weapons, they might as well not bother leaving it at all. He could deal with Crow’s attitude to disregarding orders when his own mission was complete.

  47

  Leaving them all behind, Kitto ran fast and low towards the nearest cluster of campfires, listening all the time. It was still early, and few of the soldiers would be dead drunk yet, which meant he would have to be all the more careful. Every sound swelled in significance: the crackle of campfire-flame, the low, rumbling talk of the men gathered around the nearest fire cleaning their muskets and whitening their belts with vinegar and chalk, one voice singing of the lavender fields and apricot orchards and the dark-eyed girls of his faraway Avignon homeland. Kitto could hear his own breathing, too, and the floral scent of his great-aunt Thérèse’s hair pomade clung about him still. If Crow was going to comprehensively delimb him this unsanctioned mission might as well be worthwhile. He stepped closer to the campfire, half listening to the ebb and flow of conversation: the men were waiting for orders to march on Petersburg, but Napoleon was wavering, so it was said, cautious about being trapped with his army once more in the grip of another murdering northern winter if Russia’s alliance with Britain proved unshakeable.

  There were seven soldiers sitting around the fire, all from the same regiment, and all with the emaciated and blistered look of men who had in recent weeks marched a very, very long way. They were boiling a kettle of rice, the youngest of them crouching on his haunches near the camp kettle, sawing the end of a dried sausage into it. Their muskets and packs were ranged a yard or two behind them, and Kitto knew that if he were seen here he’d be dead within minutes: perhaps he was destined to die in this camp after all, perhaps Death had been waiting for him at that firing post and refused to be cheated. Moving quietly forward, he lifted one discarded Charlesville musket, slinging it over his shoulder by the grubby canvas strap, instantly reassured at feeling the weight of a weapon again. He snatched up a pack with a ball-canister still strapped to it, weighty with lead and cartridges, and then reached for another Charlesville, hanging it from his other shoulder. He heard the men’s chatter, and the rise and fall of the late evening birdsong, and then he simply walked away, step by agonising step, knowing that every moment brought him closer to being shot in the back of the head with a pistol, but equally that to run would be to attract fatal attention. Looking ahead towards the looming woodland, he could just see Crow, Nadezhda and the women disappearing into the trees, no more than a hundred yards away: what had taken them so long? They must have stopped for some reason. He walked on until he saw them waiting for him in tense silence in the darkness of the beech and pine; he had reached them, he was alive, and they were no longer unarmed, even if it was only muskets that were near impossible to aim at a target. Joséphine watched him approach with both hands pressed to her mouth, but Nadezhda only turned away as Kitto reached out to hand her one of the Charlesvilles.

  ‘All right, they’re not rifles or pistols,’ Kitto said, ‘but it’s better than nothing.’

  ‘What an absurdly suicidal thing to do,’ Joséphine said, and at last Crow turned to him, and Kitto found that he couldn’t stop shaking.

  Crow took the musket Nadezhda had refused and cast a critical eye over it. ‘French piece of shit,’ he said, squinting down the barrel and then hooking it over his shoulder by the strap. Kitto was quite sure that Crow was going to hit him, but instead Crow just gave him a very slight nod, and he felt exactly the same sense of sickened disbelief as he had after surviving Novgorod when all his friends had died at the ramparts.

  ‘You complete and utter young idiot,’ Crow said mildly, and unslung a coil of rope from over his shoulder that he must have stopped to liberate from one of the wagons. Nadezhda wouldn’t look at either of them, and Kitto realised that his brother was about to tie two elderly women to a tree.

  ‘Jack, you can’t,’ he said.

  ‘What, do you want them to run for help before we’ve got away?’

  Silently, prompted by Nadezhda and the angled b
lade of her knife, Joséphine and Thérèse stood side by side at the pine tree, and Crow roped them to it with all the swift, unconscious expertise one would expect in a man who’d spent his formative years before the mast. ‘I’m extremely sorry, Josa,’ he said, ‘but you really shouldn’t have made me quite so angry. You can scream when we’re gone.’

  Without a word, and leaving the two speechless women quite behind, Kitto, his brother and Nadezhda all started running at the same moment. Every step felt like Kitto’s last, as the three of them ran as hard and as fast as they could, and every time one stopped, leaning against a tree, the others stumbled to a halt, too, kicking up sprays of pine needles before they ran again, together, as one.

  48

  Dawn hadn’t yet broken, and exhaustion shuddered through Crow as he sat up. Running, sprinting and walking in turn for hours through the night, they had finally all slept on last winter’s dead leaves among the birch and pine. He sat and waited, flicking dead leaves off his jacket, breathing in the scent of leaf mould, but heard only the wind in the trees and the faint crackle of the campfire. There was no sign of any pursuit, and he idly hoped that Napoleon had been in a protective mood towards Joséphine: only then might Joséphine in turn take care of Thérèse, not that he should care a damn what happened to either of them. Every shred of flesh in his body ached and even though in part at least Crow knew he had succeeded in his mission, he only remembered waking beside Hester in her wide, fresh bed at Nansmornow, and Beatie Simmens bringing the little maid in, and Hester settling back among the creased linen and lace of her pillows to let the child suckle. Last night’s victory meant nothing at all. Now that the boy was with him, and safe, Crow was only even more acutely aware of all that he’d lost. Moving with accustomed silence, he sat back, leaning against a thick birch trunk, looking across at Kitto and Nadezhda Kurakina. They were curled up together like young dogs, she with her chestnut curls close-cropped, in her breeches still instead of the seemly dress she would soon have to wear, Kitto’s arm draped protectively across her waist, in possession of the prize Crow had been hunting for so long, dishonouring himself with such spectacular results, all just to find this girl. As he watched, Nadezhda shifted a little in Kitto’s arms. She got to her feet and tugged the French camp blanket over Kitto, slipping away into the trees to relieve herself in the dark, Crow presumed. When she returned, he was smoking again and she froze, her eyes fixed on the glowing end of his cigarillo.