Wicked by Design Page 2

  ‘You have approximately two minutes to tell me where in heaven’s name you’ve been before you do so in front of an audience,’ Hester said. ‘I shan’t imagine it’ll be long before the servants and possibly our guests come to investigate all this commotion.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, not daring to smile while she was still so angry with him. ‘Are you to deliver ultimatums?’

  ‘You had better believe it, my lord.’ Hester spoke with what he felt was unnecessary sarcasm. The front of her nightgown clung to her, a little damp with breast-milk; she was no less desirable for it. ‘Where have you been? For all I knew, you were a house-breaker.’ Her voice cracked infinitesimally as she looked him up and down in rising disbelief. ‘Is that a crossbow?’

  ‘Yes, and good Christ, you’ve quite ruined the wall.’ He wanted badly to kiss her, but in this present mood she would likely skin him if he tried it, and indeed he could not blame her. ‘Hughes is a fool – where is he?’

  ‘I sent him to bed once I’d discovered that you’d absconded for the evening. Why should the poor man wait up for dilettantes and criminals?’

  ‘Because this particular dilettante and criminal pays his annual eighty pounds?’

  They were standing so close that Crow felt crackling heat in the air between them, and genuine anger shot through him: markswoman though she was it had been the work of moments to disarm her. ‘Give me that pistol.’ He took it from her unresisting hand, setting it on the mantelpiece even as Hughes himself came in with a pair of nightgown-clad footmen holding lamps, and Lord Castlereagh’s sharp-eyed valet. ‘Go back to bed, all of you,’ Crow said. ‘I have relieved my wife of the night-watch, that’s all, which my own servants – I need not add – ought to have been keeping.’ A single glance at her face was enough to inform him that when they were alone she would make him sorry for his own evening’s work. He had a reckoning to pay, and he would waste no more time. In one movement he lifted Hester, ignoring her stunned intake of breath and a whispered furious blasphemy; bearing her in his arms like a bride crossing the threshold for the first time he carried her up the stairs as Hughes, the footmen, and Castlereagh’s man melted silently back into the servants’ quarters.

  ‘That was Castlereagh’s valet – did you not see?’ Hester hissed into his ear as they passed portraits of one Lamorna ancestor after another. ‘Are they not all suspicious enough as it is without you creeping about in the night like a common criminal? You’ll break your neck heaving me about like this, and very well it will serve you.’

  ‘I shall do no such thing. Do you think I have never walked around this house in darkness before, Het?’

  She made no reply; she was actually too angry now to speak, and by the time he set her down in his own bedchamber her eyes were swimming with furious tears that made him feel so extraordinarily ashamed that for a moment he too was lost for words. ‘You’ve heard about Louisa’s daughter, haven’t you? Het, I’m sorry,’ he said. He was sorry, too, for everyone’s sake, that a child of his own blood would be brought up by that wet-eyed deviant Lord Burford.

  ‘Oh, as to that I’m only surprised you don’t have more bastards,’ she said with scalding scorn. ‘Don’t apologise to me! I have sufficient skill in mathematics to understand that the child was conceived before you and I were married, and probably before I even had the misfortune to be washed up on your beach. And I suppose you found out this evening, too. I wouldn’t put it past Lord Castlereagh and Emily to plan the timing of that little revelation between them. I don’t even particularly care about it. Where have you been?’

  He knew he could do little but tell her the truth, even though she now did not trust him enough to tell him how devastated she clearly was about the base-born child, and how humiliated she felt. He lifted the crossbow and the sling over his head, setting them both down on the ancient walnut chest of drawers that had stood in this room for as long as he remembered. ‘I’ve been lamping for rabbits in Reverend Tregarthen’s garden.’

  She took two quick paces away from him, her eyes narrowed. ‘With a crossbow, not a rifle. Quietly, so no one could hear you?’

  She was right. He couldn’t help himself, although Christ only knew that killing on the battlefield and killing in other, quieter places had infected both his sleeping and waking hours with unmentionable nightmares. How did she always know immediately what he had been thinking when her own thought processes were still so often a mystery to him?

  ‘You fool,’ Hester said, stepping forward now. He stepped back, just once. ‘After everything, you miss the excitement of it all so much that you go out stalking rabbits in the middle of the night when your gamekeeper’s boy could perfectly well do it himself?’

  He found himself completely unable to explain that there had been no choice – that he couldn’t stand the battened-down strain of entertaining half the Cabinet here in his own hall when Castlereagh was only waiting for the chance to prove him a traitor. He knew how to hunt quietly in the darkness, and how to kill: such waters were easier to navigate. Out beneath the silent moon, crouching in the shelter of the Tregarthens’ rose bushes and snuffing out life after life in the dark, one felt in control. Why could he not simply tell her that? He couldn’t frame the words.

  ‘Well?’ Hester demanded. ‘Is that it? You miss the war?’

  And because, despite everything, she was right about that, Crow said simply, ‘Yes.’ He took her gently by the shoulders, hardly able to bear the shame of the tears still streaking her face. Her nightgown had slipped down so that it barely concealed her breasts. ‘Het,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. God knows, I’m sorry for it all.’

  ‘Have you forgotten what it does to you, fighting in wars?’ she demanded, and now fresh anger rose up in him, too.

  ‘How can you ask me that?’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry about the child – about Louisa’s child.’

  ‘So you keep saying. But think of your little adventure tonight, and the way you drank your own weight in brandy through all those years of fighting and subterfuge. What about the child who actually lives under your own roof? What if our daughter were to vex you in the way your brother once did? What then?’

  Crow briefly closed his eyes, turning to walk rapidly to the window. ‘Kitto did more than vex me, although God knows I didn’t deal with him as I should have. Do you think I don’t wonder why he kept refusing his leave, and why he hasn’t come home, even though MacArthur said he ought to be here by Christmas? It shouldn’t have taken him more than one month to sail from St Petersburg, and it’s been two.’ He sensed Hester standing close behind him, knowing that the moonlight would be shining through the fine linen of her nightgown. ‘You must know that I would never hurt the maid,’ he said to her in Cornish, holding on hard to the windowsill. He had done so much that was wrong. He didn’t deserve this woman; he didn’t deserve their child, asleep in the nursery. He turned and against all odds she put her hands behind his head and kissed him, her fingers light against the sweat-damp skin at the nape of his neck. He ran his hands down her back, with only that gossamer layer of linen between his fingers and her naked skin. Lifting his wife again, he carried her to the bed, and the curtains at the windows and around the bed had all been left undrawn, heavy velvet shifting in an easterly wind coming in through the casement he always left open; he’d never been able to sleep in an airless room. At last, he laid her on the bed and knelt before her in supplication, sliding that profligate nightgown up around her waist and brushing the inside of her thigh with kiss after kiss, higher and higher, until her fingers curled in his hair, pulling it tight.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, and then kissed her there again so that she arched her back as she lay on the bed, ‘you and only you, Hester.’

  ‘You are so shockingly badly behaved—’ She broke off, liquescent and incoherent, clutching at his hair again when he cupped the round warmth of her rear in his hands, and as he did so, there was a knock on the door that persisted even after his imperious dismissal, but she had alread
y curled away from him, tugging down her nightgown.

  Hester sighed. ‘You must go – whatever it can be at this time of night.’

  By the time Crow reached the door and turned the handle, still dizzy with desire but his every sense now also surging with the urge to fight or to flee, he found Hughes once more, still dressed, holding a glowing Davy lamp, his face alive with alarming panic, dark skin sheened with sweat.

  ‘It’s the Deliverance, your honour – that caravel of Sir Hawkins Boscobel’s,’ Hughes said. ‘They say she foundered for some reason right out beyond the cove, and the tide and the wind will soon have her smashed into pieces against Carn Du.’

  And for the briefest moment Crow remembered lying on the Belle’s bowsprit when he was a midshipman at twelve years old, watching the sea sparkle and heave far below, knowing even as dolphins played in the spray as they crossed Biscay that this same ocean might easily one day be his grave. He turned to Hester: there was no choice.

  ‘I know,’ she said, tears standing in her eyes. ‘I know you must go, but be careful. Do you understand?’

  She came to take his hands and he loved her with all the force of his being. ‘Of course,’ he said, knowing this might well be the last thing he said to her, ‘I’m ever your obedient servant, my dear.’

  ‘The chance would be a fine thing,’ Hester said, and kissed him. ‘Now go.’

  He reached the top of the stairs at a run, knowing that he was almost certainly too late to save a single life on board the Deliverance, and that he might be lost himself in the attempt, but that he still must try.

  3

  Crow rode before them all, right along the headland to Lamorna Cove, every manservant in the house roused and a number of them mounted, and to hell with what the so-called noblemen still asleep in their beds thought of their horseflesh requisitioned. A good number of females and stable-boys followed on foot, at a desperate run, and he prayed that Hester was not among them; he wouldn’t put it past her to dress herself and to come, but not for the world did he want her to witness the devastation of a foundering ship. He tasted salt on the air even as rain and wind lashed his face: the storm was rising, not abating. As they thundered away from the gates of the park at Nansmornow and down towards the village of Nantewas, he glimpsed lamplit windows among the trees and knew that the men of Rosemerryn had already gone down to the cove. As they rode on he found that the same was true in Nantewas – windows bright with lamplight, front doors flung open to the rain, and no one to be seen. Everyone had gathered on the beach. Goading his mare, he left the fern-hung slopes of Nantewas behind, setting her hard down the hill towards the shore and passed the villagers there, a rain-soaked huddle of women and children, watching the grey, foam-splashed fury of ocean and sky, waves like walls of black water overtopping the great stone quay, smashing against it in great clouds of thick white spray.

  The cove was a mess of lashing wind and white-tipped waves, and he could see now that by the look of it the Deliverance had come to grief outside the bay, and was by the strength of tide and wind forced against Carn Du, the great tusk of granite guarding the seaward entrance to the cove. With a jolt of horror Crow realised that she was in point of fact actually sinking before his eyes, sliding inexorably beneath the waves, and that he could see desperate figures still clinging to the tilting yards – crewmen waving, but as yet unreachable, even so close to the carn. He heard one of the Trewarthen women say, ‘Lord Lamorna is here!’ as if it were in his power to personally save all seventy men aboard the unseaworthy bath-tub that the unscrupulous lapdog of the English Hawkins Boscobel had put out from Newlyn. After six years in the navy, Crow could imagine all too clearly the panic – sails flapping and useless, masts leaning at sickening angles. Squinting against the rain, he saw that one of the Trewarthen gigs had already gone out, battling a filthy swell, his own men rowing hard towards the wreck in the hope of picking up survivors. God, they would be lucky to return alive. Still in the saddle, Crow knew there was no one left on the beach who could row well enough to crew for him, and no time to send word up the coast and have the breeches buoy and line-throwing cannon brought around.

  Shouting to those of his men still on horseback, Crow called on them all to dismount. If he could not reach the Deliverance by sea, he must reach her from Carn Du itself: there was nothing to do but to send a rope-team into the water, himself at the fore. There was just a chance that men could be pulled from the water so close to the wreck, even if the gig could never reach them without also being smashed against the rocks. Whisking the coiled rope from his saddlebag, Crow slung it over his shoulder and sprinted to the narrow, winding path that led away from the beach and up towards the cliff-top, along to Carn Du. He snatched at handfuls of broom to steady himself, careless of the needles tearing into the palms of his hands. Once he reached the cliff-top, wind tearing at his face, his hair, he saw waves and spray smashing against the cliffs, against the rocks, and the spars of the Deliverance again, still sliding beneath the waves, with now only two figures clinging to them.

  ‘Run!’ Crow shouted at the men behind him. ‘With me, come on!’ And where in hell’s name were Castlereagh, Mulgrave, Vansittart or any of the others? Peers of the realm still asleep in bed, leaving servants and fishermen to save lives? Reaching the outcrop of Carn Du, the heap of vast grey rocks rearing up against a sodden sky, Crow tore off his coat and jacket and unshouldered the rope. He lashed it around his waist with swift expertise, leaving one long end for his men to belay him with, and the rest to throw. This he coiled for now, and slung over his shoulder. Looking again, there was but a single man still clinging to the yards of the Deliverance. Squinting through spray and rain, Crow saw that the survivor was not even a man, but a boy. If he climbed down the seaward face of Carn Du as far as he could, there was a chance he could toss the rope to him, and failing that to anyone still clinging to wreckage below even as it was flung at the rocks. Amid the thundering roar of the surf and the hideous crunch of wood against rock as the top spars of the Deliverance were smashed against granite by the force of the ocean, he shouted to Hughes to take up the belaying end of the line.

  ‘My lord,’ Hughes said, his face rigid with emotion, rain streaming down his dark skin from grizzled, short-cropped hair, ‘if you will permit me to speak? This is suicide. The waves are too high – you’ll be washed away yourself.’

  Crow turned to his assembled servants and tenants, rain-soaked, hair splattered across their faces as they passed the rope from one man to the next. ‘What then must I do? Stand here on my own land and watch people die? Just for Christ’s sake don’t let go of the line.’

  He ran light-footed to the great carn; he had climbed down it many times as a boy, clinging to fissures in the rock and leaping from narrow, algae-speckled ledges into the ocean twenty feet below, and he had clouted his young brother for doing the same too, but even then there had not been waves almost as high as the rock itself. Amid the roar of water and the groan of failing timber, Crow glanced over his shoulder as he climbed and saw the boy still clinging to a spar like kelp splattered against the upright timber of a jetty. What remained of the mast leaned at a heart-stopping angle. Wave-soaked, Crow clung to the rock, the rope taut above him, digging into the spare flesh of his midriff through his wet shirt. One boy out of a crew of seventy: was that really to be all? Another wave crashed into him, and he dug the fingers of one hand into a fissure in the rock, grasping a heaven-sent handful of sprouting marram grass with the other as he yelled over his shoulder at the boy, ‘Hold on.’ Crow could see now that he was really very young, perhaps only eight or nine, his face familiar – one of the many urchins one saw on the cobbled streets of St Erth. Crow knew in the same instant that the child was losing the will to hold on, that he was too cold, and too afraid, his face white and pinched with exhaustion and terror.

  ‘I’m going to throw this rope,’ Crow shouted, clinging with one hand as he unshouldered the coil. ‘And you must catch it, do you understand—’ He br
oke off as another wave crashed into him, and it took every ounce of willpower not to let go. By some miracle, the boy was still there too. ‘I’ll climb back up the rock,’ Crow went on, ‘and we’ll pull you up the cliff, do you hear?’

  If this gambit failed – if the boy didn’t catch the rope, or if he panicked and tried to jump with it before Crow had reached the cliff-top himself – they would both plummet down into the hellish cauldron below, and Crow knew he would have rendered his own child fatherless for the sake of another man’s son.

  *

  Hester’s hood flew back as she reached the headland after scrambling hand over hand up the steep cliff-path, tripping over the hem of a gown hastily pulled on top of her nightdress, even as she’d ignored Lizzy’s protestations. Everyone gathered on the rain-lashed beach had looked at her with such horror that she knew immediately Crow had done something quite idiotic. She ran along the wind- and rain-blasted cliff-top to Mr Hughes, who was wrapping his coat around a single, shivering boy, as a knot of men she knew from the village – Crow’s men – belayed a taut-stretched rope that ran right along the cliff-edge and to the rising granite mound of Carn Du itself. Blaspheming under her breath and every shred of flesh alive with terror, she ran to the rock, ignoring the men from Nantewas, Crow’s men, who were gently trying to steer her away.

  ‘John!’ Held back by them all, she hurled Crow’s Christian name into the storm, into the great cloud of spray that flew up, splattering her face, her hair – she had never called him Jack, as his brother used to, and as his father had done. As Louisa Burford had done. ‘John!’ Only the ocean replied, booming waves, along with a grinding rush of timber against rock, and she heard someone say that was the foremast of the Deliverance going down at last with the rest of the ship. Hester dropped to her knees, snatching handfuls of wet grass. Crow was not gone, his life given in exchange for this poor boy’s. He could not be gone. And then, as she watched, on her knees in the wet grass, rain streaming down her face, the taut rope quivered and a white hand appeared around the edge of the shouldering granite bulk of Carn Du. Getting to her feet, Hester was just aware of Mr Hughes at her side. ‘Wait now, my lady. Let him come around the rock.’