by Katy Moran
‘Come here,’ he said in a tone that brooked no disagreement.
After a moment’s hesitation she sat before him, cross-legged and wary.
He smiled, knowing that even as he did so he still looked a little cruel. ‘I remember your mother,’ he said. ‘I met her at St James’s Palace when I was only a boy – a long time ago. It was just before Christmas, and she gave me a candied orange. You’re extremely like her, you know.’
‘I never knew her,’ Nadezhda said. ‘I never even saw her.’
Even Crow couldn’t be quite sure just how much of the quaver in her voice was manufactured, but pressed home his advantage all the same. ‘I do think she pined for you, just a little. She always used to look at us children with such a queer starveling expression that we were rather afraid of her: you could not have been much more than an infant then, thousands of miles away. My mother used to say it was a shame the princesses were kept at home by the queen, never allowed to marry, never allowed to taste the joys of life beyond that prison of a palace. One has to admire Sophia for that delicious affair with her father’s young Russian guest all that time ago, no?’
‘I suppose so,’ Nadezhda said. Her caution in the face of his confidences was laughably obvious to him.
‘Now listen to me,’ Crow said, playing on her uncertainty, ‘if I hear another word about marriage to my brother, I’ll do something that we’ll all regret.’
She frowned, pettish, hugging her arms about herself; now the fire had died down it was cold so far from the embers. ‘You’re very fond of making pronouncements about what you don’t at all understand, Lord Lamorna,’ she said. ‘For all that, you’re not my brother – you’re not my guardian – and you have no right to give me instruction.’
‘Oh no,’ Crow said gently. ‘If you were my sister, I would have taken you across my lap and quite comprehensively schooled you long ago, you manipulative little witch. Christ knows I’m tempted to do it anyway, and hang the resultant threepenny opera.’
She gasped, furious, unable to help herself.
‘But then again,’ Crow went on, merciless, ‘if you were my sister, you would never have found yourself in this unenviable position to begin with. You would have been at home, stitching your sampler and playing the harp and staying up all night at dances.’ He ignored the fate of his actual sister, Roza, which had been a long way from this idyllic picture, and levelled his gaze at Nadezhda, gauging the effect of his words, which had produced in her an expression of horrified revulsion.
‘I would rather die,’ she said, ‘than ever live like that again.’
‘Would you?’ he asked. ‘Who are you working for? The tsar himself or the Green Lamp? Are you loyal to your father, or has someone persuaded you to work against him because he left you in the wilds of Kazan for eighteen years to be raped by some entitled young bastard?’ He knew quite well that was likely the only thing she had told the truth about, and he pitied her for it despite himself.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Nadezhda said, and Crow laughed.
‘You won’t beat me at this game. I’ve played it far longer than you. You know exactly who your parents were and I’m willing to bet you always have. I’m only curious to know exactly what I’m about to unleash upon England – a Russian queen loyal to her tsar or working against him. No? You’d rather not say?’
Stiff and shaking, Nadezhda got to her feet. ‘Leave me alone. You don’t know what it’s been like, being used as a chess piece.’
‘Oh, yes I do,’ he said, breathing out a trail of smoke. ‘But one day I’ll make you very sorry for my brother’s part in it. Remember that.’
With frozen dignity, Nadezhda got to her feet and stalked back to the fire, nestling once more above Kitto’s crooked knees, twitching the grey woollen blanket over them both, and Crow knew that anyone else who had met the elder Sophia would also see the resemblance immediately, irrefutable evidence of a holy sense of humour somewhere. As he waited, the sky began to lighten, thin streams of sunlight lancing down between the branches above heavy with fresh green leaves. Unable to rest, he gathered brushwood and woke up the fire with rag and kindling from the stolen French pack while Kitto and Nadezhda lay fathoms deep in the clear sleep of the very young. He went to piss, and when he returned, Kitto had woken and was methodically disembowelling the French pack, taking out a small kettle and a twisted newspaper wrap of coffee. Neither said a word, and Kitto got up and went to the stream to fill the kettle as Nadezhda slept on, the air thick with unasked questions, and when he came back, he set the kettle near the edge of the licking, leaping flames and crouched down to watch steam curling away from the water.
He spoke without looking at Crow. ‘Jack, why are you here?’
Crow sat down, stretching out his legs. ‘Much as I understand how ironic it is for me to deliver any kind of homily, you’ll be well served if you learn to control your temper from now on. And since you now seem able to ask with a degree of civility, you may have your answer: I’ve come for her.’
Kitto turned abruptly, responding exactly as Crow had known he would do to such provocation. ‘What? Is this why you said I can’t marry her? You must at least consider it – what else can we do? She’s completely and utterly ruined. You heard what she said about that Rumyantsev bastard who died, and she’s been alone with me for weeks. What on earth do you want with Nadezhda?’
Crow knew quite well that it would do him no favours to say that it felt like only five years had passed since Kitto had been born, and that even if that were not so, any question of marriage was impossible. ‘I’m afraid you can’t marry her. Even if you were twenty-one and need care nothing for my consent, you still could not.’
‘Why? Why can’t you just give me permission? It’s the right thing to do. It’s what you did.’ Turning away, Kitto jabbed at the kettle with a stick, sending up a spray of tiny sparks like flecks of amber. ‘Hester would say you should allow it.’
‘I can’t.’ Crow tossed the end of his cigarillo into the lengthening flames, steadying himself. He would soon have to tell him the truth about Hester: it would be the first time he’d said it aloud: She is dead. We will never see her again, or my child. ‘You can’t marry Nadezhda, and it’s not because you’re absurdly underage and I won’t grant permission, but because she’s the Russian royal bastard everyone’s gossiping about from here to London, that’s why. She’s Princess Sophia’s daughter by Alexander. Castlereagh wants her as heir.’
Kitto turned to look at him, dirty and unshaven, that irrepressible urge to laugh rising in him even as his eyes darkened with emotion. ‘Nadezhda? They want her as Queen of England, and they sent you to fetch her? Why does that not surprise me in the slightest?’ He frowned, as if all this were an irrelevance to be brushed aside. ‘Crow, why are you drinking brandy at first light? It’s not as if it’s ale, or even wine.’
Crow was saved from answering that question by Nadezhda herself, who sat up with dead leaves in her hair. ‘Have you finished discussing my future with no reference to my wishes?’
‘Nadia—’ Kitto said, reaching out to her as if he were gentling a frightened horse, and despite Crow’s white-hot fury with her, he saw that her own anger died a little as she looked at his brother. She came to sit beside Kitto then, cross-legged once more, her hand beside his so that their little fingers brushed close together.
‘Is it true,’ she said to Crow, ‘or were you lying to him?’ Oh, she was good: very good. One had to hand it to her.
‘I very rarely lie to him,’ Crow said, watching her steadily, hating himself for allowing her this deception, for letting her continue to convince his brother of this romantic fiction between them when really she was in the employ either of the tsar or the Green Lamp, and in either case Kitto was for her merely a means of obtaining Russian leverage over England. But the lie must hold for a little while longer. ‘They want an heir untainted by association with Napoleon.’
‘A young manoeuvrable heir that Ca
stlereagh can do what he wants with, more like,’ Kitto said, watching him. ‘What a great lot of colossal nonsense.’
‘Castlereagh will not live long after I return to England,’ Crow said, well aware that Kitto was now looking at him with increasing alarm, almost as if he knew there were now only two inches of brandy slopping in the bottom of the flask.
Nadezhda smiled. ‘I’m not doing it.’ The expression on her face changed from incredulous amusement to shocked anger. ‘Do you think you can drag me to England against my will? I don’t care who my parents were, or what happens in your country. Why should I? I’ve never even been to England. I’m Russian.’ It was a truly magnificent performance, Crow had to admit.
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘you’ll come there with me now.’
She got to her feet. ‘The devil I will not.’
Crow sighed and stood up, too, just close enough to remind the pair of them that he could quite easily overpower her. ‘Rail against it all you want, it makes no difference.’ In his time, he had lied and cheated his way around Europe and beyond, but Kitto’s serious expression and his fingers grazing Nadezhda’s knee rendered it all tawdry, and all Crow wanted was for this to be over. He closed his eyes a moment and saw Hester slipping down a sodden, tilting deck with the child in her arms. He reached across with another cigarillo and lit it from the embers of the campfire, but the smoke only made him feel nauseous, and as though he must shake until he spewed, and that there could be no relief. ‘I’m going to shave,’ he said. He fought the queerest desire to peel away his own skin and step out of it; he couldn’t stand up a moment longer without moving.
49
Kitto watched Crow walk away into the trees in the direction of the stream, and Nadezhda stood at his side as they both stared after him. For what seemed a long while, neither spoke.
‘Is he always like this?’ Nadezhda managed eventually. ‘He’s really rather a lot, your brother, don’t you think?’
‘He’s out of his mind drunk and he looks as if he hasn’t slept for weeks.’ Kitto let out a long, shuddering breath. ‘You can put the knife down. You won’t be needing it.’
Nadezhda glanced at him, her fingers white with tension around the leather-bound handle of her knife. ‘Who says I won’t? Have you forgotten that he was in the French camp, in French uniform? If he’s working for them, how do you know you can trust him?’ She shook her head, apparently bemused.
‘I need to talk to him alone. God, this is just unbelievable. He’s just unbelievable. Wait here.’
Nadezhda frowned, and Kitto left her, following the path Crow had taken through the trees. He found his brother stripped to the waist, revealing the swirling blue-black tattoos that covered his torso and back as he knelt by the stream. Crow didn’t turn, wet hair dripping between his shoulder blades as he plied the razor, calmly shaving in the middle of chaos – it was all just so entirely like him.
‘Jack, all this about Nadezhda being an heiress to the throne, I mean it’s ridiculous – she doesn’t want that,’ Kitto said, the words tipping out in a rush. ‘I mean, she so obviously wants no part in it. This is – it’s medieval. You can’t force her, you really can’t.’
Still without turning, Crow dipped his razor into the stream, shaking away bright drops of water; the tattoos across his shoulder blades shifted as he moved. ‘Surely you know me better than that,’ he said, without elaboration.
‘What do you mean?’
With a flick of his wrist, Crow swept the razor up his throat in one long stroke and rinsed it, speaking without bothering to turn and face him. ‘I told you. She’s coming back to England with me to satisfy the whim of Lord Castlereagh. As are you. To learn some damned fucking manners, if nothing else.’
Kitto couldn’t even begin to comprehend it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do mean no.’
Still facing the stream, Crow put down his razor in the pebbles lining the edge of the rushing stream.
‘I don’t even care about any of the rest of it – who Nadezhda’s parents are. That’s her business,’ Kitto said, fighting to keep his voice steady. ‘But, Jack, what’s wrong? You’re in pieces. I can see how drunk you are, even if she can’t. Never mind all that stuff about the French, about Nadezhda. What have you done?’
Crow leaned forwards, the muscles in his back rippling beneath the tattoos as he splashed his face with handfuls of water bright in the morning light. ‘Come on then and say what you want to say, why don’t you?’
Kitto hated him then with a fierce, bright intensity. ‘All right. We both know what you’re trying to forget. How could you do that to Hester – those rumours about Countess Orlova? Isn’t it difficult enough with the things people say about Hester already – even to her? And then you do this, shaming her before all society.’
‘You actually believe I would have done that to my wife, if she still lived?’ At last, Crow turned to face him, standing up with that same wholly unsettling calm as Kitto tried to grasp the enormity of what he’d just been told. ‘I did it because she’s dead,’ Crow said, and Kitto felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach by a horse. ‘Because Hester and Morwenna drowned when the Curlew went down off Cézembre, escaping the English you are so loyal to.’
Crow turned away, taking up his razor and continuing to shave, and Kitto walked back to the fire; it took all his composure not to break into a sprint. He found Nadezhda crouching before the flames, stirring coffee.
When Kitto spoke, he said only one word. ‘Run.’
*
Crow knew his brother well enough to be sure that he and Nadezhda would both be gone by the time he returned to the guttering campfire. They had pulled the kettle from the embers, leaving him an inch of coffee, a childish act of courtesy that made him want to laugh. He pulled his shirt back over his head and drank the remains of the coffee: it was very nearly cold, but he knew he couldn’t go on without it. Streams of sunlight glanced down through the mass of leaves above, glancing off a flash of gold in the leaf mould. He reached down and picked up a fine chain threaded through the flat gold coin of a pendant: the St Christopher charm Hester had given to Kitto for his Twelfth Night gift when they had drunk champagne in the nursery as Hester fed Morwenna, and the boy had been so infuriatingly up on his high ropes. Only half aware of his surroundings, Crow turned the medal over and read the initials carved on the reverse. May God keep CMH, with love, HGMH, JETH. Christopher Meryon Helford; Hester Georgiana Maria Helford; John Edward Tristan Helford. His brother’s name, his dead wife’s, his own. It was done now. Expressionless, his vision shamefully blurred, Crow let the charm fall into the breast pocket of his waistcoat.
50
Nadezhda walked a few steps ahead of Kitto, swinging a birch twig at the undergrowth, trying to ignore his silence. Every verst between this stretch of forest and any town or village reached before her, seemingly endless and impassable. At last, she stopped, turning to face him.
‘It’s hopeless,’ she said. ‘At this rate, the French will take Petersburg before anyone can be warned.’ She hacked angrily at bracken with the birch branch, tiny green leaves smashed and shivering. ‘We’ll get the blame for it, too, you and I – everyone knows our orders were to make for Chudovo. We should have gone straight back to Petersburg as soon as we got there.’ She turned to Kitto, infuriated by his silence, and by the knowledge that their capture had been just as much her fault as his. ‘Are you even listening? We took Sevastopol and the Black Sea off the Ottomans, but if Napoleon takes Petersburg, it’ll be his navy all over the North Sea and not ours or yours. Maybe this is what he’s been planning ever since you chased the French out of England. All those people—’ She broke off: why did Kitto only watch her with that entirely emotionless look, as though none of this even mattered? ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, gripped by blind panic: what had his brother told him?
He only shook his head, walking on straight past her, still with that stunned, disbelieving expression he’d worn since leaving Lord Lamorna by the stream a
nd bidding her quietly to run. Nadezhda ran after him, catching him by the arm, and a bolt of heat travelled through her entire body, right from her fingertips. Her first instinct was to draw back, but she did not, and they both stood looking at her hand on his arm.
‘I told you the worst that has happened to me.’ She let him go, but did not look away. ‘You know everything now – you even know what I never before knew myself.’ Helpless in the face of his misery, she grasped for words. ‘The tsar came to my father’s estate once, all the way out near Kazan,’ she went on, looking up at Kitto’s devastated, irresolute face. ‘He came and stood in the kitchen with my father, and I showed him the turtle doves I used to keep in a crate by the stove without even knowing who he was, and when he’d gone our kitchen serf boxed my ears and cried into her hands.’ Nadezhda could not forget how that tall man in his magnificent and glittering uniform had crouched down before her, so much younger than Papa – Count Kurakin – who had looked so old and so vulnerable by comparison in his long Russian robes, almost as though he were wearing his dressing gown; she remembered such painful embarrassment.
And so this is your young daughter, Sergei Grigorovich? Tsar Alexander had said, tilting her chin with one crooked finger so that she had no choice but to meet his clear, blue gaze. She is a good child, I make no doubt of that.