Wicked by Design

by Katy Moran

  ‘Hester—’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ she demanded, twitching away from his grasp, and she could not bear the sight of him, and the loss of her baby, so acutely painful that she had vomited green bile into her own hands before an entire drawing-room of people. ‘It’s true what they’re all saying? That you came here and couldn’t keep your hands off some countess and a young girl, for God’s sake, a debutante, your host’s own daughter?’

  ‘It’s true about the countess, but not about the girl,’ he flung back, almost defiant, and how dared he? There had been too many amused, pitying looks flung her way since her arrival at the embassy to seriously doubt the story, but to hear him actually admit it was as hard to bear as the all-encompassing pain of childbirth, and that had all been for nothing, too, and so had this marriage. She could no longer look at him, at the man she never would have chosen for herself but who had been thrown into her life in the middle of a war, so long ago now, it seemed, and who had made her love him with such acute and devastating intensity, the man she had followed across half the earth to warn that he had been sent here to die, not to bring home an heir. All she wanted was never to see him again. She turned and ran for a servants’ door in the grey-painted, wainscoted hallway. Letting it slam shut behind her, she found herself stumbling in her long skirts along a windowless, whitewashed corridor lit at intervals by tallow lamps guttering on assorted mismatching tables and stools, knowing that soon she would find her way outside.

  ‘Hester, for God’s sake, come here.’ Crow had followed her. Of course, she was his property and he must control her, he must forever have the last word. She stopped. He was standing behind her, his hair wild and stiff with dirt, his coat and jacket unbuttoned, still heartstopping even in this unshaven mess; how dared he have the temerity to still look so angry? Hester turned and snatched a lamp off the nearest table and hurled it at him, china dish, flames and hot tallow, everything. She didn’t wait to enjoy his reaction but ran so hard that her chest seared with pain, and still he caught up with her, slipping past with infuriating physical prowess and then blocking her path. Even the white linen of his cravat was splashed with mud.

  ‘I don’t care if this place burns to the ground,’ Crow said, ‘but I swear to God I will not leave you here.’

  ‘It’s you they want to kill, not me,’ Hester said, measuring out each word with fury. She had come here to warn him of this and so she must. She turned but he was so close that she couldn’t get away, now having to stand with her back against the wall.

  ‘And so now what do you propose to do?’ Crow said, ignoring the question of his own assassination, as though it were irrelevant to him. He leaned with one arm on the wall above her head, all soot-black lashes and grey eyes so pale against his skin, and the faint but intoxicating scent that even now made her want to lean against him and rest her head in the place beneath his collarbone.

  ‘What do I propose? Never to see you again. And to divorce you as soon as I get back to England. After all, we no longer have a child that you might keep from me if I tried it.’ Hester looked up at her husband and, hating him with as much passion as she had once loved him, she slapped him with all of her strength, and in response he took firm hold of each of her wrists, holding them gently at her sides.

  ‘Hit me all you like, because God knows I deserve it. But you’re still married to me now, and the marriage holds until we reach England and a lawyer, regardless of your feelings for me, do you understand? It’s still my duty to protect you, whether you like it or not.’

  With blistering rage, Hester snatched her hand from his grasp once more. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold up my own end of our so-called sacred vow and obey you. I have no desire to travel anywhere in your company, so let’s take it in turns to destroy the sanctity of marriage, one oath at a time. You began, now it’s my turn.’ At that moment, Crow turned away, and she instinctively followed his gaze. Three serving-maids stood at the end of the corridor, staring at them open-mouthed over the piles of folded embroidered tablecloths they were each carrying.

  ‘Well,’ Crow said in Cornish, ‘for now, we’re still married and I’ll either carry or drag you out of this godforsaken city beneath the gaze of a full audience, or you’ll come with me now and leave your dignity intact.’

  ‘Dignity?’ Hester said with cold fury. ‘You took that from me when you couldn’t stop yourself bedding half of St Petersburg – a widower so very devoted to the memory of his wife. I wish that I had died with my child. Why did I not die with her?’ The expression on his face reminded her to put nothing past him, not least the rank hypocrisy of all men when it came to the sanctity of marriage vows. She turned and walked ahead of him, tears burning her eyes and streaming down her face, already trying to forget the acute grief and the unbearable joy being part of this man’s life had brought to her.

  Part 5

  BY WEEPING CROSS

  55

  Side by side, Hester and Crow walked in silence over filthy cobbles slippery with algae, she tearstained and he still liberally mud-splashed. Gulls wheeled overhead, flashes of white against a bright, mocking sky; they had left the embassy with nothing other than the clothes they stood up in. Why did her grief feel so much sharper and more acute now that he was here at her side? No matter how much Hester now loathed her husband, it was clear to her that he too was quite undone; as they walked to the wharf, he lit one cigarillo directly from another. She dreaded the moment the last cigarillo was gone. They passed a wagon loaded with crates and barrels, observed by a little boy smoking a pipe in a patched blue caftan with the padded sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and Hester couldn’t escape a sudden certainty that they were being watched – not by the child, but by someone else. Just a few moments ago, a harassed-looking ship’s purser had hurried past with a sheaf of foolscap papers, heading for the forest of masts waiting at the wharf. She stopped and Crow turned to her, so expressionless that she felt a deep sense of unease.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘We’ll lose the tide.’

  ‘There’s someone watching us.’ It sounded foolish even to her, but was it so foolish, given all she knew? As one, they glanced up and down the alleyway, listening to the clamour of the wharf hundreds of yards away, the wide spread of the Neva still concealed by the bulk of wooden warehouses, seagulls overhead. Hester heard only the crash of wood against cobbles as someone carelessly lowered a crate from a davit on to the wharf, the resultant burst of furious shouting and, somewhere, the incessant barking of a dog. Even so, she still felt watched – an odd, cold sensation on the back of her neck, and then she heard the sharp report of a pistol shot, and breathed in the harsh smoke. At her side, Crow dropped to his knees, head bowed; even as the pool of blood spread, he was half laughing. Hester opened her mouth to scream but as if in a nightmare she could make no sound. She turned and saw George Cathcart hurrying towards them, breaking into a lopsided jogging motion – he must have followed them from the embassy, so earnest and shambling; they could get help after all. But then she saw what George was actually doing with his hands – he was fumbling to reload his pistol, tipping powder on the wet cobbles instead of down the barrel.

  ‘For God’s sake, stop making a fucking mull of it, George,’ Crow said, leaning over as he knelt in the filth of the seaweed-strewn cobbles, blood spewing from between his fingers as he clutched at the wound. He’d already drawn his own pistol but George was now upon them and with surprising agility kicked it out of Crow’s hand, his unremarkable face twisted into a ratlike expression of concentration. Crow reached out for it, but George kicked him again, hard in the belly this time, close to where the shot had struck, and Crow lurched forwards.

  ‘Always the golden boy, weren’t you?’ George said conversationally, ramming a ball down the barrel of his pistol. ‘Always Wellington’s favourite, like a son to him, everyone said, no matter what you did. Even losing us Waterloo because of your ineptitude wasn’t enough to make him see you for what you really are, was it?’<
br />
  On his knees, Crow looked up at Hester with such an extraordinarily desperate expression that she opened her mouth to call out to him, but couldn’t speak; before she could move, his shoulders heaved and he vomited blood on to the cobbles. Purged, he swore in an inventive patois of French, English and Cornish and got to his feet, dark blood still seeping from between his fingers. ‘Hester, run!’ he ordered, still as much of an autocrat as ever, even now. Head down, spitting blood on to the cobbles, he charged with a lopsided lack of grace, but George kicked him between the legs so hard that he went down again, falling with the sudden, swift finality of a stone dropped into a river from a bridge.

  ‘Even marrying your blackamoor slut wasn’t enough to make Wellington see the truth about you, was it, Jack?’ George sneered as Crow lay on the cobbles, arching and twisting like a dying mackerel. ‘Although the gossips tell me he wasn’t precisely delighted with your choice.’

  Crow forced himself up on to his knees and George strode over, slowly, enjoying himself, his pistol ready at last. High above the warehouses surrounding them, gulls wheeled in the blue sky, and Hester saw Crow glance across the cobbles at his own firearm, knowing that if he went to reach for it George would shoot him.

  ‘It’s about time you learned that you can’t have everything your own way, you entitled whoreson bastard,’ George said, and so Hester pulled out the pistol she had carried for hundreds of miles and shot George Cathcart directly through his right ear, so that he fell sideways into a heap of his own fragmented skull and shattered brain matter, releasing a rising stench of human ordure. Crow waited on his knees, bleeding through his fingers still, until she dropped into a crouch, and then he forced himself to his feet and held back Hester’s hair as it escaped from pins and from ribbons, and she retched on to the cobbles.

  56

  The droshky driver was sanguine about the condition of his passengers, one a filthy and near hysterical woman and the other bleeding with alarming profusion from an abdominal pistol-shot wound that hurt like the very devil. At his laconic call, the horses stopped at the end of a boulevard far less fashionable than the environs of the British Embassy and the Admiralty, drawing up outside a tall but down-at-heel mansion painted the dirty peach-pink of last year’s smoked fish.

  ‘What is this place?’ Hester demanded of Crow through shut teeth, pressing wadded folds of linen against the bleeding mess; she had undone his cravat with shaking fingers, and he could not forget other times when she had done so, only looking at him then with a quite different expression in her eyes. Crow had no strength to answer her now but, summoning all his willpower, he climbed down from the open carriage and handed Hester out of it, noticing odd details as shock, pain and fever began to overwhelm him – the crimson of the droshky driver’s padded caftan against the grey, muted boulevard, and how Hester’s curls sprang free of the wide binding ribbon she wore and all those wretched pins, and how much he wanted to leave a kiss curls behind her ear as he had done so often before. Now, she could not let go of his hand fast enough, as though even the thought of his touch repelled her, and amid rolling, endless waves of pain he could not forget the soldiers’ prayer he had repeated every morning and evening for so many years of his life: God keep me from the surgeon’s knife.

  ‘Never mind where we’re going,’ he managed. ‘There’re a few kopeks in my waistcoat pocket – if you would pay the driver, please.’

  Hester’s eyes blazed as she dug in his pocket, passing a careless fistful of coins to the droshky driver, who smiled grimly as he took them, and Crow had not the heart to tell his heiress wife that Castlereagh had long since embargoed his bank accounts as though he were already in a cell awaiting the gallows, and now they had no money at all. He glanced up at the house and saw that all the windows were shuttered, quite dark, and fought an urge to call back the droshky even as the little open carriage whisked to the end of the boulevard. Penniless and hunted by his own government, there was nowhere else to go but here.

  ‘If you please,’ he said to Hester, and leaned on her arm, leaving a glossy trail of blood as she helped him to the door, silent and resolute, and how could he have failed her so comprehensively? Everything that had been wonderful and good he had destroyed, and could never have again. With what little remained of his strength, he hammered on the door, and the same lantern-jawed butler admitted him as the last time he had come here, so long ago now, it seemed.

  ‘Oh, but Madame is surely at home,’ he said, in answer to Crow’s incoherent enquiry for his great-aunt even as blood seeped from between his fingers, quite as though he had come to call for an ordinary morning visit, and was not falling over his own feet because everything had grown so dark, and the pain was now nearly unbearable. At his side, Hester maintained a dignified, shattered silence as they were led up the stairs – indeed he would have fallen if were not for the strength of her grip at his elbow – and it was not until they were admitted into the familiar gloomy drawing-room and Thérèse de la Saint-Maure and Joséphine herself got up from painting watercolours at a marble table by the fire that tears began to stream down Hester’s face.

  ‘I’m not at all sure who either of you are,’ she said, ‘but my husband seems to know you and, if you please, he has been shot.’

  Crow was just conscious of being led to a chaise below the window; Joséphine and Thérèse were too old to be much shocked by anything, it seemed, even being manhandled through the loft of a noisome barn and left tied to a tree, and he heard his great-aunt call for a servant. ‘You really do have the most extraordinary quantity of impertinence,’ she said with caustic ire, leaning over him to hold a burning feather beneath his nose.

  ‘I know,’ Crow managed. ‘Truly I’m sorry. It’s only that I don’t wish my wife to be left quite alone. I’m so very happy you’re here after all, and indeed I do thank you.’

  ‘I think we should let him suffer, just a little,’ Joséphine said, and the last thing Crow saw before darkness claimed him entirely was Napoleon’s mistress unbuttoning his shirt.

  *

  Hours later, Hester stood by the window, looking out at the moonlit, aspen-lined boulevard, peaceful shards of lamplight glimpsed between the shutters of the other houses: there must be so many ordinary Russian families sitting down to their supper, perhaps a daughter of the house standing by the pianoforte to sing, or accompanying a sister at the harp, children not yet sent up to the nursery playing at spillikins by the fire. She couldn’t bear to turn and look at Crow lying sprawled on the chaise before the hearth, his wound dressed by Thérèse de la Saint-Maure’s household servants. Don’t worry yourself, girl, Madame de la Saint-Maure had said. My people all know how to keep their mouths shut. You’ll get away from here as quietly as you like. And Hester could not be quite sure if the old Frenchwoman had only meant to be kind, or whether she called her girl as one heard that slaves were called girl, or boy, and denied the distinction of a name. Hester was aware of a disturbance in the air and the faint scent of rose oil as Joséphine Bonaparte came to stand beside her with only the faint shushing of starched petticoats beneath the fresh muslin of her gown: a woman, Hester thought, who had survived for so long by learning how to move in near silence.

  ‘I suppose this is a very odd thing to say, Lady Lamorna, but you do remind me of my sister.’ Joséphine smiled as she stood at Hester’s side, joining her in this vigil. ‘Her name was Euphémie, her mother a slave on our plantation. She came to France with me from Martinique when I was first married – which was a most miserable affair, I can assure you, long before ever I met Napoleon, you know. I rather think I would have put period to my existence without Euphémie.’

  Hester did not know what she was meant to say, how on earth she was supposed to respond to such confidences: there was more to unravel here than she had the strength to even begin to unpick.

  ‘Will my husband live?’ The words poured swiftly forth, and surely Hester was the greatest sinner alive to be overwhelmed with fury at the thought of Crow’s
death.

  ‘I do think it’s likely, yes, as much as one can be certain about these things,’ Joséphine said with genuine pity in her expressive hazel eyes. ‘Madame de la Saint-Maure’s butler served as an army surgeon for many years, and he says the ball only left a deep nick without embedding in any vital organ, perhaps grazing the stomach itself. Had the shot penetrated where it struck, Lord Lamorna would be facing an unpleasant and protracted end. Nevertheless, I’m sure you’d like nothing more than to box his ears. Can there be anything more infuriating than someone one is entirely enraged with then getting himself shot, so that one must feel sorry for him, and so horribly afraid?’

  ‘Very little, no,’ Hester said. ‘And it sounds as if he treated you with an amazing lack of consideration, too, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you felt the same.’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ Joséphine said. ‘You absorbed the entire story with such a lack of hysteria that it only goes to show you’re precisely the right sort of wife for Lord Lamorna, and never mind all those stories one hears.’

  Hester burned then with shame, and with anger, and felt tears start to her eyes, hand in hand with scorching mortification. Everyone in this city knew just how long Crow had mourned her supposed death. Soon the gossip would reach London, Vienna and Paris, just as it had done after they were married, scurrilous little notes crossing Europe in double-lined hot-pressed paper. They would say she had received no more than was due to her, and that of course she’d deserved nothing else. Against the loss of Morwenna, none of it even mattered. She herself did not matter, and neither did Crow, now so deeply asleep on the chaise drawn close to the fire by the servants, his black hair disordered against a crisp white linen pillowcase. Joséphine passed her a handkerchief in silence and then, to Hester’s surprise, this small and vivacious Frenchwoman led her to the chaise opposite the one occupied by her unconscious husband, and made Hester sit down upon it.