by Katy Moran
‘It’s so very hard about the little child, is it not?’ Joséphine said, and when Hester could not reply, and could not even breathe, the older woman sat beside her, and held her as she sobbed and shook, and it was the first time anyone had done so since Morwenna had died: at the embassy Lady Cathcart had only looked mortified, and half-heartedly offered her smelling salts, until there was nothing one could do but seek solace in the confines of that fourth-best bedchamber shared with an indigent English governess who had fled a master with groping hands in some distant Russian province. After some time, Joséphine poured Hester a glass of brandy, which she drank although she would have preferred a strong cup of tea, with thick Cornish milk. ‘Now,’ Joséphine said, ‘when your husband wakes, you may tell him that his gamble paid off.’
Hester stared at her. ‘Madame, I can only begin to guess.’
‘Darling, we’re in retreat. Among others, your husband sowed seeds of doubt in Napoleon’s mind. Marshal Davout has been sent west, and out of Russia. You’ll remember the retreat of 1812 when France lost so many sons. We cannot risk losses of such a magnitude again, and it’s already nearly June. Five months between now and the first snows is too little time when one can’t even be sure who is an ally and who is an enemy.’
Hester felt the brandy scorch down her throat; she didn’t care about the fate of nations, she knew only that Catlin and Morwenna had drowned as they fled Lord Castlereagh and the English government, and if buried at all they’d have been committed to the earth with no name, and no one to remember who they even were, and perhaps not even together, although one heard stories about drowned women and sometimes men washed up with a child still in their arms. Try as she might, she had no answer for Joséphine, who sat watching her, expectant of seeing her counsel give rise to comfort.
‘My dear Lady Lamorna,’ Joséphine said with the air of one making a last-ditch attempt. ‘Believe me, you would find your grief easier to bear if you would consent to share the burden of it with your husband.’
Hester could only sit in helpless silence, even as Joséphine took her hand in her own.
‘Child,’ she said, smiling, ‘at the least, you must take it from me that there are few things more attractive than a repentant man. And, trust me, your husband is very sorry indeed. Why not let him beg?’
Numb and unfeeling, Hester sat with Crow long after Joséphine had followed Thérèse to bed. He stirred towards morning, and she turned to look at him, realising that he had been watching her for some time.
‘My love,’ he said. ‘Oh, my love.’
Hester ignored that, her sight darkening and uncertain for want of sleep. ‘I’ve accepted Joséphine and your aunt’s offer of safe passage tomorrow morning, although God only knows why either of them still wish to help you in any way, after the turn you served them. You scarcely deserve it, but Thérèse has also given us a sum of money: she says it is no more than you’re due, as the heir to Saint-Maure, but indeed I think she’s a fool to indulge you.’
‘So do I,’ Crow said, and she saw how thirsty he was, and held a glass of cold fennel tisane to his lips. ‘Never mind it, I promise you can be released from my protection as soon as it’s safe.’
‘As if you’re in any condition to protect me,’ Hester said, briefly enjoying her own cruelty, and still far too angry with him to accept Joséphine’s counsel. ‘What happened to Kitto, then, and this Russian princess you were supposed to bring home?’
She watched in uneasy confusion as Crow managed to laugh, closing his eyes. ‘The boy has her. And God only knows, he betrayed me with quite royal magnificence, my dear.’
57
Three weeks later, at the western reaches of the Danish sea, mountains rose up on either side of the fjord in the choppy grey waters of the Skaggerak, and in the pearlescent, stretched-out twilight of a northern summer Hester tacked the tender, edging tentatively closer to the dark bulk of shoreline. Deposited under French protection at a tumbledown wharf in St Petersburg, she had sailed single-handedly from a reed-choked mooring to the mouth of the Neva and into the Gulf of Finland, skirting the Baltic, through the island-strewn waters of the Kattegat, finally reaching Skaggerak, this ocean gateway to the North Sea.
One hand on the tiller, shifting it in response to the touch of the wind on her cheekbone, she glanced overboard and saw drifting green seaweed and rock-strewn sand. Sprawled in the narrow space between the mast and the prow Crow was mercifully unconscious with his sailor’s ability to sleep in the most damp and uncomfortable of places. Part of her longed to shake him awake in fury at his utter uselessness. At least the fever had abated enough to allow him to truly rest, thanks to the vials of foul-smelling pastes and liquids she’d bartered for valuable ammunition in some windswept Danish fishing village stinking of smoking green wood and dried cod.
‘Damn you, John Helford, for that’s who you really are, despite all your godforsaken titles,’ Hester said succinctly, but her only answer was the crash of surf against rocks and sand. Blaspheming quietly to herself, she dragged up the centreboard and hauled the rudder out of the water, securing it with the tiller-line. She was shivering already, but that was only going to get worse. ‘I hate you,’ she told her sleeping husband. ‘I hate you with every breath in my body.’ And then she gathered up her skirts and slid into the water, gasping at the shock of the all-encompassing cold as she plunged in past her waist, wading ashore with the painter in her hand. Tears seeped as she dragged the tender as far up the beach as she was able with Crow a dead weight inside it.
Blaspheming quietly, she reached into the tender and hauled out a coil of rope, tying one end to the anchor chain before staggering up the beach holding the anchor, the chain running along beside her. Calculating the distance with shrewd, exhausted expertise, she let the anchor drop on to a heap of seaweed and allowed the line fall beside it. There hardly seemed to be any tide here at all but, as she slept, the tender would stay afloat. Her eyes burned with exhausted tears as she struggled out of her gown and petticoats; wringing the ruined fabric and then spreading her garments over rocks to dry, she lay down in her short shift, shivering and exhausted, wishing that she was dead. Later, she ignored the splash as Crow stepped out into the shallows, even when moments later she felt the damp, warm weight of his greatcoat spread over her. Even with her eyes shut, she still saw the beach in the never-quite dark of a northern summer night, and the small outcrop of seaweed-covered rock that, at this distance and from this angle, might have been a very young child sleeping on her front. Not sleeping, but drowned and washed up on a beach. She couldn’t look. She must not look. That way madness waited.
‘You should have woken me,’ Crow said. She opened her eyes at the timbre of his voice, watching as he walked up and down beyond the tideline, collecting driftwood. He moved with slow deliberation, as if drunk, even if for once he wasn’t. At last, he crouched down so close that she could have reached out and touched his salt-stained jacket. He cursed softly at the pain, at the cost of moving, tipping sparks from his strike-a-light into a heap of dried seaweed, coaxing tiny flames from thick white stinking smoke. The dressing on his wound ought to be changed, she knew. The gouge was healing well enough, so the pipe-smoking Danish bone-setter had assured her with sign language, or she would by now be a widow. It was little consolation.
She closed her eyes and when she opened them again he’d walked down to the waterline, now so much closer; the sea a dull silver edged with fiery northern twilight, the sky above deep blue, the tender now afloat but thankfully still securely anchored. She felt that hours had passed, even though the sky was still light, and Crow was stripped to the waist, and she could just hear him repeatedly swearing to himself in French as he pulled away the blood-soaked bandage. Without a word, she forced herself to sit up, to walk down the stone-strewn beach to where sea met the land, shivering in her shift. There was nothing to say, but without looking up at her husband she pulled away the bandage and let it fall into the water at their feet. The wound was
still angry, skin and flesh not knitting together. She took from him the vial of herbs pounded in oil, pouring it in a slick on the fresh crumpled strip of linen. He let her smooth the bandage over the wound, circling the taut, muscled expanse of his belly, the faint strip of dark hair that led down from his navel. She tied it as best she could, knowing that they could risk bartering no more ammunition, and had little else to sell.
‘Why did you fail to find this Russian princess?’ she asked, again voicing the question that still lingered between them, unanswered, for so many weeks. ‘You never fail at this kind of thing. I was quite capable of spiriting myself out of Russia just as I spirited myself into it. Don’t tell me you abandoned the mission for my sake – Kitto’s reputation depended on you succeeding, so why would you risk that?’
Crow looked away out to sea; she couldn’t help looking at the unshaven and distractingly beautiful line of his jaw. ‘Just keep me alive,’ he said, ‘until you are safe in England. That’s all I ask.’
‘He really did betray you,’ she said, wanting him to suffer, ‘is that it?’
He made no reply and, unable to help herself, Hester glanced up the beach, and Crow followed her gaze to the rocky outcrop that from here looked so much like a child asleep on the sand. The drowned so often looked to be sleeping when one found them. Crow turned away from her, expressionless, which was just as well because she could never allow him to hold her again; she could never admit even the most distant possibility of another child to lie between them in the night, only to be lost.
58
Six weeks after sailing the tender into the down-at-heel and French-loyal Norwegian port of Christiansand, where Crow had simply walked up to the captain of a noisome Archangelsk frigate bound illegally for England with sealskins and whale-fat in barrels, and demanded to be taken home, Hester found herself once more in the fish-scale-spangled chaos of the Port of London. For weeks, she had touched Crow only when she must, and now he steadied her as she walked down the gangplank in the damp skirts of a muslin gown worn thin at the seams, feeling about as far from respectable as she had ever done in her life. Her body betrayed her as it so often did where he was concerned, and the warmth of his touch, his fingers lightly holding hers, actually brought tears to her eyes, even as he steadied her the moment her threadbare boots touched the cobbles. He stood still for barely a moment before leading her with purpose away from the wharf towards one of the side-alleys where hackney carriages could be hailed. The streets were unnaturally quiet, with none of the usual mudlarking, bun-selling, pickpocketing and gin-soaked women or children to be seen, only the odd gathered group of young men who watched Hester and Crow as they passed. Preserving what remained of his cigarillos, he was now chewing a wad of tobacco won from one of the crew of the Archangelsk frigate in some rum-soaked night-long congress she had not been party to. For the duration of their voyage, she’d confined herself to the silent cabin they shared; he had insisted on surrendering the bunk to her and when he slept at all, she would find him with his black hair in a dishevelled mess, tumbled in his greatcoat and pressed against the cabin wall with the seaman’s ability to cling like a limpet. She longed to be alone once more, to never have to see him again.
‘I don’t like this,’ Crow said curtly, as though the atmosphere was all her fault: it was threatening even for London.
‘Well, what now?’ she demanded, twitching her skirts away from the runnel of green-tinged human ordure streaming down the middle of the cobbled alleyway, all shadowed by buildings in various states of disrepair.
‘I’m taking you to Dorothea Lieven,’ Crow spoke without looking down at her, staring straight ahead as seagulls tossed and wheeled in a flat grey sky. Without waiting for a reply, he hailed a hackney; the driver’s features were mostly concealed by a greasy checked muffler, but his eyes were sharp and appraising, and Hester felt unpleasantly naked and vulnerable, knowing that the name she shared with Crow was more likely to lead them into danger than shield them from it. Crow handed her up into the carriage so that she breathed in a miasma of onion-tinged human sweat left behind by the previous occupants.
‘What of my wishes?’ she demanded when he had followed her in and was leaning across to close the door, so that she could not but be aware of the heat of his presence; indeed the air itself seemed to grow so hot between them that it was difficult to breathe. ‘What have you to say to my own feelings about what happens to me? Or will you just continue to order everything as you please?’
He sat opposite her, leaning back against the unclean cushions in a way that reminded her momentarily and with breathtaking clarity of Kitto. ‘And what else should you wish me to do? I presume you want to live? You’ll be safe with the Lievens. Castlereagh won’t dare try to reach you there: he can’t chance antagonising Russia any more than we already have.’
‘To be honest, I have no particular desire to live, because I have nothing left to live for, but I should just prefer not to give Lord Castlereagh and the English government the satisfaction of taking my life in some shameful fashion on the scaffold.’ Hester snapped.
Crow did not reply and, in truth, she only wanted to be managed by him no longer, to be free of him for ever, because to be near this man was far too dangerous: she couldn’t allow herself to feel such extremes of joy and pain, to risk losing again what she had lost before at such unbearable cost. She could find no words to explain this tangle of emotion and so kept her own counsel, staring unthinking at the drizzle-soaked streets of London – undersized children sweeping crossings, emaciated veterans of the Peninsular and American campaigns still clad in their ragged uniforms as they begged on crutches, and the occasional prostitute driven to walk the streets in rouge and stained satin. They reached the Lievens’ in silence, greeted by servants astonished at their down-at-heel appearance, but were immediately received by both Count Lieven and Dorothea, who came running from teatime in the drawing-room with their gaggle of sons and their small daughter, Lieven still holding a peg-doll with woollen hair even as they were all shown into his candlelit library. Hester curtseyed with precision at their condolences for Morwenna, but Crow only lit one of his few remaining cigarillos at a candle and went to stand by the window.
‘Hester will be quite safe with us, but what will you do, Lamorna?’ The count cast a worried glance at Dorothea, who was doing her best not to look astonished at the fact Crow had forgotten himself so much as to smoke in her presence, as though she were some common woman from the street. Hester certainly no longer cared enough to remonstrate with him. ‘Castlereagh still holds a great deal too much sway in the Cabinet, in my opinion. In your absence, there have been hangings every day, and not just in Cornwall. What of this mission to bring the tsar’s bastard to England? Certainly, it was nothing but a ruse to have you killed well beyond the public eye, but had you succeeded Castlereagh would have been outmanoeuvred. Where is the girl?’
Crow turned to face them with a humourless smile. ‘My brother found her first,’ he said, ‘and he has served me the turn I deserved. Kitto and Nadezhda Kurakina chose not to accompany me to England, despite the danger to her in remaining in Russia.’
‘Alexander’s brother Nicholas will fear any possible rival to his succession,’ Dorothea said quickly, glancing at Hester. ‘The tsar is still young, but with his brothers as heirs, no child of Alexander’s can consider themselves safe. I have it on fairly good authority that Grand Duke Constantine has no interest in becoming tsar, but Nicholas is quite another prospect entirely. All of the Kurakina girl’s foster-family are now dead – queen or not, she would have been safer in England.’
‘Perhaps,’ Crow said; he was alive with unnatural tension, his eyes constantly travelling between every door and window in the room as if he saw and heard things that others did not; Dorothea and her husband exchanged a silent, horrified glance.
‘What will you do, Lamorna?’ Count Lieven asked again. ‘Do you mean to retreat to Cornwall? Surely Castlereagh will issue a warrant for your arre
st wherever you go.’
‘Oh, I don’t intend to run from him,’ Crow said. ‘I go to Duke Street now, in point of fact. I only ask that you shelter my wife, and ensure that no harm comes to her. No blame for any of this can be attached to Hester, and under your protection I’m confident she’ll be safe.’
Dorothea and the count stared at him in silence. Dorothea actually put both hands to her mouth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t mean that, Jack – really, you can’t. How on earth could Kitto have put you in this position – to actually aid and abet the escape of the only person who might have kept you from Castlereagh’s reach?’
‘We need discuss that no further – I have reaped what I have sown, that’s all.’ Crow finished his cigarillo and cast the glowing end out of the window left ajar to admit a rose-scented breeze rising from the small garden below.
‘What on earth are you actually talking about?’ Hester said calmly. ‘Duke Street? You can’t mean that you go to Castlereagh himself? He’ll have you hanged by morning.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Crow spoke still with that disarming lack of expression in his features, as though he wore a mask of his own face. ‘He’ll want a much larger audience when the time comes. You forget: according to his telling of this story, I’ve committed high treason.’
‘Oh my God,’ Dorothea said quietly, and stood a fraction closer to her husband.
Lieven shook his head. ‘Lamorna, the man needs to be challenged, not appeased. He holds a great deal too much sway – he’s more a despot than a prime minister.’