by Katy Moran
Somehow Catlin couldn’t face the old gardener and his wife who lived in the lodge-house, so she just pushed the gate open and urged Morwenna to walk beside her, her small hand warm and sticky in Catlin’s own. The rolling lawn was deep green and quiet, the ancient house long and low in the afternoon light, white rhododendrons in flower along the east wall, and there was no one scything the grass or window flung open to admit the scent of the hedged rose garden, and with the little maid in tow Catlin was not sure whether to take her straight to the front door, or around to the back. What if this whole house had been requisitioned by the English and no longer even belonged to Lord Lamorna? What then?
‘Chicks, Cat?’ Morwenna said.
‘Oh, there’s chickens, maid,’ Catlin said absently, and whisked the child up into her arms and carried her around the side of the great house till they came to the gate in the high wall of the kitchen garden.
‘Egg, please.’
‘We’ll see.’ Catlin wasn’t at all sure they’d even be admitted to the house. The kitchen garden was quiet too, ranks of onions and carrots and turnips standing to attention like soldiers on the parade ground and no one weeding, and the laundry-yard quiet, too, sheets still on the line even though it was Thursday, but perhaps they’d had weather, and Morwenna had a strand of Catlin’s red hair loose from her cap and was winding around her finger, and it was all Catlin could look at as she pushed open the scullery door and walked into the house for the first time since Beatie and Lizzy had been killed there by the English soldiers, since she had run into the night with this child in her arms. She heard voices from the servants’ hall along the passage, but she kept going as a body always must keep going, and pushed open the door.
68
Not far from Truro, on the road that led upcountry from Cornwall and into England, the parish of Mitchell lay hemmed about by moorland and wilting in the sun. In the courtyard at the Plume of Feathers, Crow leaned on a wall feeling the heat of the bricks even through his jacket and shirt, watching the innkeeper who crossed the courtyard, bowing as he came, licking his lips before he dared speak.
‘Medway will have the horse shod in an instant, your honour.’
‘Good,’ Crow said, and watched Jennings hurry back to the taproom in his mud-splashed gaiters and jacket greasy at the elbows, with flakes of dander littering the shoulders. What it would be like when he was just an ordinary man, and could no longer command such treatment; would unkempt innkeepers still be afraid of him then? He heard the dull rhythm of hoofbeats in the lane, and the more distant grinding of carriage wheels in stone and mud. Soon he would be riding south once more; soon he would be a man with no name, and not Lamorna at all, or even Crowlas, all of his titles passing to Kitto, first by means of deception and, before long, by means of his death honourably in battle so that no one need enact tragedies over it. Across the yard, a child of indeterminate sex traversed the cobbles with a basket of brown hen’s eggs, dragging patched skirts in straw and mud, stopping only to stare at Crow, wary but still wondering whether to try him for a penny.
‘I should look where I were going if I were you,’ Crow said, ignoring the commotion kicked up by the arrival of a mud-splattered outrider outside the gates, ‘because if you don’t, either you or I will end wearing the eggs.’
The child only stared at the gate, clinging to the basket with none-too-clean hands, and Crow took the flint from his waistcoat pocket to light a cigarillo, watching as his own brother rode into the yard on one of Count Lieven’s grey horses. Still in civilian dress, and liberally mud-splashed, Kitto called with impressive hauteur for the child to send for a stable-boy.
‘Oh, come now,’ Crow said, ‘can’t you see the infant is already busy?’
Kitto looked at him with a creditable lack of surprise and dismounted, gentling Lieven’s grey with swift and unconscious expertise. The child had enough native self-preservation to disappear into the dark cool of the tavern, leaving them both alone.
‘What’s a few days here and there between us, after all?’ Kitto said, advancing on him. ‘You’ll have everything signed off with Nancarrow before long, I don’t doubt. Why don’t I just give you orders to stable the damned horse?’
‘I suppose you could always try it,’ Crow said idly. Kitto stopped where he stood, sketched him a mocking bow and walked off towards the stables himself with the grey at his side, leaving Crow to smoke and watch as his own carriage rolled into the courtyard with his own driver and groom on the box, both of whom had the good grace to look horrified at the sight of him.
‘Carry on, Phelps,’ Crow said, grinding the end of his cigarillo beneath the heel of his boot, ‘don’t mind me.’
He walked over to the carriage and opened the door before his groom had the chance to, and handed Hester out into the yard; she didn’t betray the slightest shock at the sight of him, clad in mauve muslin half-mourning for their daughter, a loose spiral of hair grazing the soft hollow of skin at her décolletage, and the touch of her fingers against his sent a bolt of heat straight up his arm. A maidservant he didn’t recognise scrambled out after her and hovered on the cobbles, terrified.
‘Ellen, go into the inn and bespeak a parlour,’ Hester said and without looking at Crow she relinquished her hold on him. ‘You, my lord, may accompany me.’
Crow obeyed, suppressing a frisson of anger at her tone; he wondered if he would ever get used to being addressed by this woman as though he were a raw recruit on his first outing at the parade ground. But he would not have to get used to it, because she had to let him go, she must understand that he would only ever make her miserable. Jennings appeared even before they had got into the tavern, bowing and wiping his hands on his apron, leading the way to a dim parlour with faded green damask curtains at the window and dust motes suspended in silvery light puddling on ill-swept floorboards.
Jennings had scarcely closed the door, bowing and backing out before Hester stalked across the room and bolted it from the inside.
She turned on Crow, her dark eyes flashing as she answered his unspoken question. ‘I’m never setting foot across the threshold of Nansmornow again – the extraordinary notion that I should possibly want your house or the title you inflicted upon me—’
‘Then why are you here?’ Crow said.
Furious at being interrupted, she approached him with alarming speed; he let her back him up against the table; four uneven oak legs shrieked across the floorboards. The black woollen travelling cloak was flung back across her muslin-clad shoulders; she had already dispensed with her gloves, exposing forearms of a rich golden brown. ‘Why am I here? Because if you so much as go near the offices of Isaac Nancarrow, I’ll skin you alive. I will flay you. How dare you?’ She took hold of his jacket in both her hands. ‘How dare you?’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was all he could say but, judging by her expression of untrammelled fury, it wasn’t enough.
‘You’re an autocratic, infuriating and entirely hopeless person,’ Hester said, ‘and I hate you.’ And she kissed him with such merciless force that even he was momentarily stunned by the sweet salty taste of her and the sheer ferocity of it. She pulled away, one hand on either side of his face. ‘You cannot just arrange other people’s lives for them, do you understand?’
He broke away, no matter how much he didn’t want to. ‘Hester, I must leave you, I must let you go.’
She reached out and slapped him with shocking speed and surprising strength.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘Have you quite done, you hoyden?’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Hester snapped, and he took hold of her wrist before she could strike him again – there were, after all, limits – and now he had her backed up against the door, one arm lightly pinned above her head, her breasts heaving from the confines of her bodice, and he longed to ease them free of it and take one nipple after the other in his mouth, to divest her of those skirts and those petticoats and to serve her until she was quite beyond reason.
‘
Look what I’ve done to you,’ he said, quite seriously. ‘Hester, look what I’ve done. You deserve better than this.’
‘Oh, I should think that I do,’ she snapped. ‘Much better! It would be so refreshing to be married to someone respectable and possibly even considerate, if such an unlikely combination even exists. But it’s you that I have. Can’t you see that we got into this misery together and God knows that’s the only way we’ll get out of it.’ She kissed him again, but with such gentleness this time that he nearly wept, and just for a moment he dropped his head so that his forehead rested upon her shoulder, and he dispensed with the cloak with one expert manoeuvre so that, as one, they dropped to the floor. In a froth of muslin and linen petticoat, she straddled him with a profligate ease that made him cry out with longing and he put up his hands to her face, looking up at her as he tucked his little fingers behind her pearl-strung ears. ‘Hester,’ he said, ‘I love you, my God, I love you.’
*
This was not the Plume of Feathers’s finest bed, but it was the cleanest. Hours after getting into it, Hester woke among crumpled linen to the sound of rainfall, with Crow asleep beside her. A servant must have come in, because the fire had been banked down. The curtains had not been drawn, and the room was flooded with the pewter light of a Cornish full moon, illuminating the tattooed, muscled expanse of Crow’s back as he slept on his belly, his face turned towards her, even as raindrops silvered the mullioned windows. Poised to trace a line down between his protruding shoulder blades with the tip of her finger, she paused. It was never a good idea to surprise Crow out of sleep. Instead, she leaned closer.
‘Wake up.’ They were nearly forty miles from Nansmornow, but Crow kept horses at every staging-inn from here to Penzance. They would ride through the east gate long before suppertime, but even so it was still rather an unforgivable thing to do to one’s servants: there would be lower kitchen-maids frantic in the bean rows, and the larder would be ransacked for bacon pie and hastily thrown-together orange creams, and spinach with nutmeg. Hester leaned closer still. ‘John, wake up. It’s time to go home.’
He started and turned over, smiling at her, still half asleep, those extraordinarily long thick black lashes almost brushing the winged ridge of his cheekbone. She saw the shadow pass across his face as he thought of Morwenna, and Hester recalled the weightless feeling in her arms when she had passed her daughter to Catlin at the quayside on St Mary’s.
‘Time is cruel,’ he said, reaching up to smooth the tear from her cheek with the edge of his thumb and drew her close so that she rested her head upon his chest. ‘We see it all so clearly and nothing can be altered. We should break our fast, and someone may have to drag the boy out of bed by his heels. I left him in a temper to either drink every quart of rum within five miles or lose an entire quarter’s worth of blunt at hazard. Not that he has a quarter’s worth, God take his eyes.’
But when Ellen had dressed Hester, and Crow had assembled his toilette for the day with all the efficiency of a soldier who had spent years in the Corps of Guides with no batman to assist him, they found Kitto already in the parlour, lounging in the corner at a table laid for breakfast by a serving-girl with a smear of ash on her apron, and an expression which betrayed her opinion of people who rose at ungodly hours of the night. Kitto’s hair was extremely dishevelled, dusted with hayseed.
‘Coffee?’ Crow asked his brother gently.
‘You haven’t been to bed,’ Hester said, ‘have you?’
‘I thank you, yes, and not exactly, no,’ Kitto said, eyeing a dish of hard-boiled eggs with distaste. ‘I’ve been thinking – Jack, I suppose I can have my allowance, can’t I? God knows what’s to happen about my pay.’
‘Are you actually absent without leave?’ Hester said, taking the coffee pot from the serving-girl who had almost poured coffee into the eggs. Kitto leaned his head back against the tall settle and groaned.
‘I wrote to Wellington before I left Petersburg,’ Crow said. ‘You’ll be back with your regiment before Christmas, I should think. But you can have all the ready you want, although God knows what you’ll find to spend it on in Cornwall.’
Refusing cream, Kitto drank his coffee, wincing. ‘The thing is, I thought I might go back to London instead. There might have just been the slightest difficulty in the village last night about the smith’s daughter, although believe me she was very willing. And anyway, MacAllen told me there’s a new hell opened – he’s had the most astounding run of luck at E.O.—’
‘No!’ Hester and Crow both spoke at the same time; Crow, extraordinarily, failed not to laugh.
Kitto stared at them. ‘What?’ He drank more coffee, staring at them both over the chipped rim of his cup. ‘I tell you what, I’m damned if I’m going to Nansmornow to play gooseberry for you two.’
‘That’s exactly what you’ll do,’ Hester said, passing Crow the cream. ‘We’ll entertain for you – you won’t be bored. But you must come home.’
‘Listen to her, boy,’ Crow said. ‘It’ll only be more trouble if you don’t, let me assure you.’
‘You both hate entertaining, sir,’ Kitto said with calculated respect.
‘We leave in less than quarter of an hour, and if you don’t get into the carriage I’ll pull you off that horse,’ Hester said conversationally. ‘You may think I won’t, but I will.’
‘Don’t try her,’ Crow advised, switching to French as the serving-maid came back in with a dish of hot bacon. ‘It’s not worth it.’
Kitto did eventually get out of the carriage, though, after falling into a dead sleep against the window for five hours. He woke with a start when they changed horses at the forge nestled among the scattered granite houses of Treswithian and sprang out on to the grass verge thick with sea campion, replacing the hired groom on his horse.
‘Don’t break your neck,’ Crow told him. ‘You’re still half drunk.’
‘Nonsense. Do enjoy the carriage ride, old man,’ he said, grinning at them both over his shoulder as he spurred the mare and rode away at a gallop, leaving Crow alone with Hester. She leaned back against his chest so that he felt as though he had the entire world encompassed in his arms, and together they watched the grey sky with trails of blue, and the moors yellow with broom in flower. The horses were changed for the last time at the toll gate north of St Erth, and the carriage sped from Rose-an-Grouse and Canon’s Town, and through Crowlas itself, where fields of ripening wheat lapped against moorland, and the post-road passed Longrock, circling Gulval, Penzance and Newlyn. Mount’s Bay spread out before them like glittering cloth and beyond it the Cornish sea, all the way to Scilly. After Newlyn, some of the wheat had already been cut, and there were hayricks in the fields, and the sheep had been clipped, thank Christ, but once they had passed the outskirts of Mousehole, moorland and field alike gave way to the green wooded Lamorna Valley that Crow knew more intimately than anywhere else on earth. They had been talking of commonplaces up until now, of Kitto clattering into the stable-yard at Nansmornow louder than an artillery wagon to warn the servants of their approach, but now with the coming of the wooded valley a hush fell between them. Crow knew that because this was the last place he’d seen the maid alive, there would be no help for it, and the past would flood the present with blood-soaked memory. Knowing him as she did, Hester reached for his hand, sitting as she was in his arms, and his hand held in both of hers rested on her thigh where the cloak fell away to reveal the crisp, clean muslin of her gown, their fingers twined together, his pale, hers rich brown. The east gate was open, and Crow fought the urge for brandy as they rolled along the carriage drive past the parkland; with the wind in this quarter, he could hear the rolling crash of the sea that had called him away from this place when he was a boy, and now welcomed him home. He closed his eyes briefly and thought of all the times he had come from Eton, and after that on leave, and then as a broken man made gradually whole, only to be smashed clear from his mooring again. He glanced out of the window, and at late afternoon sh
adows stretching across the lawn, and even as he breathed in the muddy scent of the lake he saw a woman running across the grass with a child in her arms and her cap askew. Please, just be one of the women from Nantewas, he silently begged. The pair grew closer, crossing the lawn, and he saw a flash of pinned and braided red hair as the child pulled off the woman’s cap, waving it aloft. Hester was searching in her reticule for something, and had not yet seen. Not that she would, because how could she see what was only a trick played by his own mind? Catlin Rescorla and the maid, his daughter, his own Morwenna. Catlin set the child down on the grass, stooping to speak to her, and they ran hand in hand towards the carriage, the maid stumbling on her skirts and steadied by Catlin’s hand. She had barely been able to walk when he saw her last. Thank God Hester didn’t have to endure this, what might have been.
‘John.’ Hester took hold of Crow’s arm, and her reticule crashed to the floor, sliding beneath the rear-facing seat, spilling hairpins and a tin of clove pastilles, and her handkerchief. ‘John,’ she said again. ‘Look out of the window.’
An Historical Note
This book took place during a period of history that never happened: Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase begins with a preface that ignited, long ago, the beginnings of Wicked by Design and this world inhabited by Hester, Crow, Kitto and Nadezhda. The alternate universe of Wicked by Design is however populated by several characters who owe a debt to real people. People used to say that Napoleon thought of his divorced wife Josephine as his lucky star, and so according to my flexible logic she had to survive beyond 1810 for him to have beaten Wellington at Waterloo in 1815. Dorothea Lieven will be an old friend to anyone familiar with Regency history, and Hester’s late father was inspired by Captain John Perkins. In the course of my Russian research, I stumbled upon Captain Nadezhda Durova, a young Russian woman who disguised herself as a man and served as a cavalry officer in the tsar’s army. Tsar Alexander discovered her secret, and awarded her the Cross of St George. Like my Nadezhda Kurakina, she had a gift for communicating with horses, and was charged with the responsibility of delivering a herd for use by the army. Her biography, The Cavalry Maiden, is a joy from start to finish. It’s said that the Prince Regent’s sister, Princess Sophia, really did give birth to an illegitimate child around 1800, but the truth about that child’s true identity in Wicked by Design is entirely my own invention.