Wicked by Design Page 5

  ‘Milk, my lord?’

  ‘I thank you, no.’

  Pouring for herself, Hester forced herself not to look at the prime minister as he sipped his tea. After drinking that much tincture of opium, Castlereagh would soon be quite asleep, which could only mean that Catlin, who had prepared it, was now certain that the possible consequences of drugging the most powerful man in Britain were less appalling than his discovery of Crow’s whereabouts. It wasn’t until Catlin gently removed the cup and saucer from her hand that Hester realised how much she was shaking, and that hot tea had splashed all over her wrist.

  7

  Arm in arm, Hester and Catlin hurried down the whitewashed servants’ passage; as soon as they were out of earshot of the library, Catlin stopped, taking Hester by the shoulders and giving her a slight shake as though they were still girls fleeing some childhood crime on the island of Bryher.

  ‘Get a hold on yourself, my lady,’ Catlin hissed. ‘I saw what he did but if Lord Lamorna finds out there’ll be bloodshed in this house. Het.’

  ‘I know—’ Hester fought for breath, both sickened and shamed at the memory of Castlereagh’s touch, of his unclothing her. ‘Crow would kill him if he ever found out. I know he would. God, I should like to kill him myself. But what am I to do?’

  ‘I don’t see what you can do, but you must come with me, my lady, please—’

  She was begging. Even as a servant, Catlin had never begged anyone for anything – but this was no respectful request, either. Flying along beside her, Hester smelled the blood before she saw it: the hot, sickly scent of raw meat. A thick, dark red trail lay along the well-scrubbed flagstones. She followed Catlin in silent horror; closer to the kitchen, it was smeared into footprints. She pushed open the heavy oak door, gaining a hurried impression of the familiar iron range, the long table, the neat arrangement of white crockery on the dresser. It was impossible at first to tell who was actually bleeding: Crow, or the tall, hunched figure he was supporting. She let out a small, involuntary noise as she realised the blood was not Crow’s after all. Even wounded, the stranger moved with a familiar coltish grace that she couldn’t place, his head bowed, black hair dripping on to the flagstones. Her breasts were tingling again and leaking milk; with rising and profound irritation, she felt it soaking into the linen of her nightgown. Arms folded across her chest, she watched in appraising silence as together Crow and the injured young officer stepped unsteadily towards the kitchen table.

  ‘The young sir has been shot, my lady,’ Catlin said. ‘I thought it best Lord Castlereagh shouldn’t know.’

  ‘About what? Who has been shot – who is he?’ Hester demanded, pushing away another memory of Castlereagh’s smile as he had revealed her nakedness; Crow must never, ever learn of it. Catlin just shook her head. It was quite clear that Crow had slipped into the mode of a soldier, and would take no notice of anyone. He swept an array of terracotta pudding bowls off the table, and they shattered on the flagstones. Next to follow was the remains of the Twelfth Night cake – thick white icing and marchpane exploded like parts of a grenado, scattering cake and fat orange sultanas across the floor.

  ‘Lie down,’ Crow ordered the injured man in a tone Hester had only ever heard him use with his brother. The command was quite unnecessary: the young soldier could barely stand. Now face down on the table, he turned his head as gobbets of blood dripped on to the rag rug. Only then did Hester recognise Kitto, no longer a boy, and her vision blurred with tears of shocked relief and joy.

  ‘For God’s sake, help me get his jacket and shirt off.’ With one bloodstained hand, Crow snatched a flask of brandy from the dresser. As he drank, he met her gaze at last with a kindling, fiery glance that she chose to ignore. One of his arching cheekbones was smeared with blood and rust-brown leaf mould, his black hair stiff with blood. In furious denunciation of Castlereagh’s violation, Hester forced herself to shatter an intense desire to shake and then kiss her husband by focusing her attention on his brother. She instantly recognised Kitto’s expression: stubborn refusal to submit, precisely the look he’d worn so often as a boy, to no one’s benefit. She knew it was costing him every shred of strength he possessed not to cry out in pain, which was just as well, with every bedchamber in the house occupied by a scion of the top ten thousand and the prime minister in an opium-induced waking dream on a chaise in the library.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Crow set down the brandy, gripping the edge of the table, and Hester knew it was because his hands would otherwise shake. She took a kitchen knife and began to cut away Kitto’s blood-blackened shirt herself. ‘Well, you certainly know how to make an entrance,’ she said austerely. ‘No, don’t tell me – I’d rather not hear about the comprehensive tour of London’s finest fleshpots you elected over keeping Christmas with your family. How long has it been since we saw you? A year and a half?’

  ‘The fleshpots were in Paris, I believe. The rest of the story I mean to have later.’ Crow turned to Hester. ‘Just trust me, if Castlereagh hears of this, we’ll all swing. It needs to look like none of it ever happened.’

  ‘Which will be no trouble at all, with the entire house full of guests and their prying servants!’ Even had she capitulated to Castlereagh, it would not have been enough, she knew.

  Crow merely raised his eyebrows, and Hester understood it would be useless to question him now: Lord Lamorna had given his orders and merely expected them to be followed. Kitto set his teeth and closed his eyes as she peeled the bloody linen away from his shoulder. Although Kitto had taken an equal share in black hair, pale grey eyes and soot-dark eyelashes, he was surprisingly different to his brother. Even in this wholly shocking and unshaven adult incarnation, and severely injured, there was still a sweetness to his mouth, the fossette at his cheek. Just below his shoulder blade, bruising flowered where the musket-ball had penetrated, and his skin was singed in a ring around the entry wound. Thick, dark blood oozed from the wound.

  ‘That ball will have to come out.’ Crow selected a long, thin fish knife from the selection Catlin held out, draining on to a clean cloth. Holding it up to the light, he ran the edge of his thumb along the blade. ‘Are you ready, boy?’

  Kitto made no reply. Hester said tightly, ‘He’s swooning.’

  ‘Wait!’

  They both turned, incredulous, to stare at Catlin, who had gone white, and Hester knew she was already imagining being turned out of doors for speaking so to Crow. ‘Sir,’ Catlin went on, a little breathless. ‘Sir, you ought to wash your hands.’

  He ignored her, turning to inspect the wound.

  ‘Catlin, what do you mean?’ Hester prompted. ‘Can’t you see we have so little time?’

  Catlin shook her head. ‘Have you never noticed that babies delivered by washerwomen always thrive, and the mothers don’t die so quick, whereas one look at a fancy London doctor with filthy hands and blood all over his apron, and they drop like flies?’ As she spoke, addressing Crow’s straight back, she ladled steaming water from the pot on the fire into a deep earthenware bowl, then held it out towards him. Turning, expressionless, Crow washed the blood and grime from his hands, drying them on her clean linen cloth. He drank from the brandy flask again and Hester reached across, taking hold of his wrist as he held the knife. ‘Will half a pint of cognac make your hand more steady, or less?’

  Crow looked up at her, his eyes so pale and stark against his blood-splattered face. Without a word, he waited for her to release his wrist. She knew quite well that he would have killed anyone who threatened to harm her: she’d seen him do it; he would kill Castlereagh here in this house if he ever learned what had just happened in the library. And yet to criticise him in the presence of others was to transgress. How she longed to be alone with him.

  Kitto opened his eyes; they were dark with shock and oddly lightless.

  ‘Now!’ Crow entirely failed to conceal his alarm. ‘Catlin, we must do this now.’

  Catlin took hold of Kitto’s unresisting hand, turning to H
ester. ‘We’re going to need more linen, my lady – quickly—’

  Hester backed out of the kitchen, and even as she ran down the narrow, whitewashed passage towards the laundry-room, she heard only horrifying silence. Gasping for breath and trying and failing to piece together what in the world had just happened, she paused in the laundry-room; it was misty with lavender-soap-scented steam rising from a selection of the small nightgowns and napkins that had been set to dry on a rack before the banked-down fire. Hester snatched a folded sheet from a basket resting on the flagstones by the hearth and heard the unmistakable creak of door-hinges. Releasing a strangled, terrified gasp, she froze. Crow, Kitto and Catlin were all in the kitchen. Who, so close to morning, could possibly be coming into the house from the laundry-yard, right through the servants’ entrance? Even the earliest-rising kitchen-maid would approach from the attics, not from outside. Hester watched her own shaking hand reach for one of the irons resting by the grate. Her fingers closed around the cold metal as she listened to heavy footfalls. Flattening herself against the wall, she glanced sideways through the doorway and saw the broad-shouldered form of Captain Wentworth of the 11th Northumbrian regiment as he moved towards the kitchen. Just days before she’d handed him a stirrup cup as the hunt gathered on the lawn and had poured his tea in the drawing-room afterwards. Crow had been quite clear on the matter: if Wentworth reached the kitchen, not even he would be able to save them all. Without question, they would hang or be transported.

  Hester thought of her child asleep upstairs and set down the basket with quiet precision. She stepped out into the corridor, suddenly overwhelmed by the physical immediacy of Wentworth’s as-yet unheeding presence – his grimy scarlet uniform jacket, the grubby white leather of his kit-belts, his shoulders dusted faintly with flakes of dead skin, the sharp scent of his sweat. She brought the iron down on the back of his skull with as much force as she could muster. It wasn’t enough. With a strangled shout, he turned to face her and Hester screamed. Wentworth was in no position to reply. Crouching on his haunches, he rocked silently back and forth, clutching his head. His carefully combed fair hair was now thick with dark, oozing blood. Leaving him there, like a child fleeing a broken pie-dish, Hester ran to the kitchen to find no sign of Kitto or Crow, and only Catlin frantically wiping blood from the flagstones by the door.

  ‘He’s outside!’ Hester gasped, in Cornish. ‘Wentworth! He came in through the scullery, Catlin. I hit his head. Keep him downstairs, for God’s sake!’

  ‘The ball’s out,’ Catlin said, quickly. ‘His lordship took the boy upstairs. I’ll hide the sheets in your bedchamber – I don’t believe even Lord Castlereagh or that prying valet of his would dare go in. But I heard the little maid stirring – Beatie Simmens won’t be able to keep her quiet for long.’

  Hester didn’t need to be told. Her breasts were agonisingly full, her nightgown sodden with milk. Clutching her arms around her chest, she ran up the back stairs, hissing, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ She stepped out on to the polished parquet floor, her ears full of the child’s cries, and reached the nursery door just as Beatie opened it from the other side, clutching an angry, squirming bundle.

  ‘Oh, mistress, thank heavens you’ve come—’

  ‘It’s all right, Beatie, just go back to bed for now.’ Hester took the warm, damp weight of her daughter and sank into the nursing chair by the window, frantically loosening her nightgown and leaning her head back against the windowsill with relief as her daughter began to suckle. Morwenna’s name had come to them both the moment she was born on a sun-soaked Azores morning, still wrapped in the caul. A sea-maid, Crow had said, seeing the face of his child for the first time, the old legend of his childhood coming to his lips. You’re alive, he said to Hester, and for the first time ever she had seen him weep. Smiling and exhausted, relieved that such pain as she’d never known had at last come to an end, Hester had lain back against her pillows and said, Yes, Morwenna. A year old and now replete with milk, Lady Morwenna Helford sank into sleep once more. Her skin was lighter in tone than Hester’s, close to white, her eyelashes so long and delicate, and her fine, golden-brown spirals of hair glistened with a faint sheen of almond-oil. Hester kissed her daughter’s rounded forehead and handed her back to Beatie.

  ‘Stay in the room, do you understand?’ she demanded. Eyes wide, Beatie nodded, and opened her mouth as if to speak. ‘No,’ Hester interrupted before she had a chance to begin. ‘No questions. Just listen. No matter what you hear, don’t open that door to anyone. If anyone tries to come in, take the back stairs and hide in the attics with the child. Will you do that, Beatie? Will you do that for me?’

  Beatie nodded, and Hester fled to the door, unable to stay another moment in her daughter’s company, knowing it might be their last together. Not half an hour earlier, she’d struck and injured an English officer, and Kitto and Crow had both been covered in blood; Kitto might even have bled to death. She could make no sense of what had happened: it was only clear that all of it was deeply incriminating.

  8

  Long after they’d given up expecting Kitto to come and keep Christmas with his family, Hester had still been adamant that no guest was to occupy the blue room. Crow silently thanked her now as he let his brother collapse on to the unoccupied bed. Kitto sprawled on his front, stripped to the waist save for the bandages, the wound salved with Catlin’s ointment of honey and comfrey. He was here, and for now he still lived, but Crow saw that his face was grey with shock and the inconceivable effort it had taken to stumble back to Nansmornow. Even so injured, the boy had appraised every stand of gorse bushes and every bank of heather as though each might conceal French partisan troops, even though there were none left in Britain. Kitto was a soldier now. He had endured the extraction of the musket-ball in hideous quiet, save his agonised vomiting of bile on to the kitchen flagstones. Crow pushed away memories of a glistening vein twitching deep within the wound that he knew he must not sever lest his brother bleed to death in minutes. God, the sickening relief when his probing finger found the shoulder blade intact, not shattered. With all the instinct of a partisan soldier, Kitto must have started to duck before the shot was fired, the lead ball meeting his flesh with enough force to slam into it, but not pass through him or to strike precious bone. Unable to go any further without a moment of rest, Crow sat in the worn cerulean brocade chair at the side of his brother’s bed, watching the frost patterns that had formed on the windowpanes like the shadows of fallen autumn leaves.

  Hayl Marya, leun a ras. He silently recited the Cornish prayer, so exhausted that shadows slithered and the edge of the Turkey rug shifted of its own accord. He was getting old; he was losing condition like an under-exercised hunter even as his young brother had become the consummate predator he himself had once been. Kitto’s eyes were closed but he was conscious, Crow realised, as well as drenched in sweat. His arm was starting to swell: Crow had not forgotten the vile discomfort of that, although it was better not to think of Waterloo, or the injuries he’d suffered there: shot, sword-hacked, trampled by horses. By rights, he should be dead and his father still the earl; he should not be sitting here beside his brother in their father’s place.

  Kitto interrupted this maudlin train of thought with painful urgency. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘Jack, Jack—’

  Crow held the basin, just in time.

  ‘Don’t let that butcher Dr Bolitho have my arm off,’ Kitto said, between heaving and spitting. ‘Don’t let them, will you?’ He was descending into fever already, his dark hair stiff with filth and sweat, his face hot against the pillow. ‘You’ll look after the whole thing, won’t you?’

  ‘Don’t worry on that score,’ Crow said, trying to forget the amputations he’d witnessed: the tortured clenching of teeth, spurting blood, metal grating against bone. ‘Bolitho will come nowhere near this house. Mrs Rescorla will have to tend you unless we want the entire Cabinet to know what you were doing on my land, you bloody young fool.’

  ‘W
hy couldn’t you just stay out of it? As if I needed any help from you.’ Carelessly and furiously inaccurate, Kitto spoke into the pillow, his shoulders now rigid with fury and pain in equal measure. ‘You crazy bastard. You shot him. You shot him. God, you never change.’

  Setting down the basin, Crow leaned over to the japanned tray Catlin had put on the bedside table and poured ale into a tin cup. ‘Cast aside your scruples and drink this – just a little.’ In no mood for insubordination, he eased Kitto into a sitting position and held the the cup to the boy’s mouth, taking his weight as he drank. Crow’s throat was parched and aching, too – the first physical consequence of a dogfight had always been this almost unbearable thirst. ‘There’s something I must tell you,’ Crow said in Cornish, ‘before you hear of it elsewhere.’

  Kitto leaned on Crow’s arm, looking at him with a distinctly fiery expression. ‘If it’s that Louisa Burford has spawned a brat, don’t bother. I heard of that in Petersburg. No one said it was yours, but I expect they soon will. Is that it? Jesus Christ, Jack, poor Hester. What a perfectly hideous cross for her to bear.’

  Crow was unexpectedly floored by the revelation that after the best part of two years at war, Kitto still retained his complete lack of acceptance that the world was harsh and unfair, and likely to remain that way whatever one did. ‘Save the dressing-down for when you’re feeling more the thing,’ he said.