Wicked by Design Read online

  ‘As if it would make the blindest bit of difference. As if I would even dare, anyway. I should rather face a dozen cuirassiers.’ Kitto closed his eyes again as he finished the ale in the cup, and then his anger suddenly receded like a wave on wet sand. ‘Jack, it hurts abominably.’

  ‘I know, but you’ll be better directly.’ Crow fell silent, wanting to tell him it had been a long time not to come home, to not meet his niece. And sooner or later he would have to demand an account of his brother’s ill-advised detour via Paris with some French courtesan. Surely Kitto was too inexperienced to be deployed in any sort of manner by the Corps of Guides? And, despite Crow’s differences with Wellington, it would have been a matter of honour with the man to have told him. Which could only mean that instead of being sent on an intelligence mission, Kitto had likely been the subject of one.

  He looked up, his lips white with pain. ‘You can tell Mrs Rescorla that I’m not having any of her concoctions – none of that filthy laudanum.’

  Crow took the cup from him and set it back on the tray. ‘Oh, naturally.’ Easing his brother back on to the pillow, propping him on to his side, he watched him sink into deep unconsciousness, which was scarcely surprising considering his own order to Catlin not to stint on the laudanum in the ale Kitto had just drunk. The door swung open and Catlin herself came in, still in her dressing gown and cap, clinging to a bundle of clean clothing which she dropped on the end of the bed.

  ‘With respect, my lord, but you ought to change that jacket and do it now. Captain Wentworth is downstairs. I can only thank God that I had a moment to push a mop along the passage and across the kitchen floor, there was that much blood. I’m afraid Lady Hester hit him before she realised who it was, but if he’d seen the boy in that state we’d all be on our way to Bodmin gaol.’

  Wentworth. That could only mean Crow now had to explain to an upstart of an English soldier why one of his men was dead. Or even why the cargo of a wrecked ship had been stolen from a beach on his own land and hidden in an ancient tunnel, also on his own land. He forced himself up out of the chair and held out a hand to Catlin, taking the jacket she held.

  ‘No shirt?’ he asked, coolly. ‘This one is pretty well bloodstained.’

  Catlin shook her head. ‘There was no time to find one, my lord, and I daren’t risk waking Mr Hoby. I thought your lordship would say that the fewer who know of all this, the better, no matter how close-mouthed they might be.’

  ‘No, you did right – the shock would finish Hoby anyway,’ Crow said, tugging on the close-fitting jacket and buttoning it over his bloodstained shirt and waistcoat. His valet was cut from far more fragile cloth than his housekeeper. He spoke with a lightness he didn’t feel, instinctively wishing not to frighten her. Catlin Rescorla had nerves of iron, but she was still a woman under his protection.

  ‘If we rearrange your cravat, I dare say you’ll look no more dishevelled than you ought.’ Catlin twitched the muslin at his throat with a few deft touches of her blunt, work-worn fingers. ‘I left Captain Wentworth in the library – there was still just about a fire, and Lord Castlereagh won’t know anything about any of it, believe me.’

  ‘Do what you can with the boy – keep his fever down,’ Crow said, glancing at Kitto’s sleeping form, forcing himself to sound reasonable and even-tempered. ‘It’s likely to go badly with him, I fear.’ With a brief nod, he turned and made for the door. Running downstairs in the dark, he could only hope Wentworth wouldn’t look too closely in the candlelight – he had washed his hands again, but his nails were still black with his brother’s blood. Not for the first time. There was, after all, a reason that Kitto had stayed away.

  He found Captain Wentworth standing with his back to the fire in the library, and Castlereagh still unconscious on the chaise. Like most men, Wentworth was short enough for Crow to look down on, with the well-fed look of a cherished second son of a minor baronet. Still, Crow was very sure there was more to Wentworth than these obvious parts. It was easy for a man to make his reputation in a theatre of war, less so when one’s regiment had been deployed in Britain since Napoleon’s brother had been sent running from England. Crow scented in Wentworth the desperation of a man in search of glory. His father would have offered the man port before excoriating him. Crow dispensed with the port.

  ‘I’m extremely sorry about your head, Captain Wentworth. What do you mean by frightening my wife so that she went downstairs alone, in the middle of the night, only to find you coming into the house through the servants’ entrance?’

  Wentworth opened his mouth and then closed it again. ‘I’m surprised that Lady Lamorna is so nervous.’

  ‘Are you?’ Crow watched him. Wentworth wilted beneath his gaze, but only a little. Crow took a cigarillo from the case on his desk and leaned across to light it at the candle-flame, smoking and waiting for Wentworth to take aim. He exhaled smoke. ‘What is that you actually want, Wentworth, apart from a promotion?’

  ‘I find it odd, my lord, to say the least, that you were out on the night when I am informed all the cargo from the Deliverance was stolen. The beach at your very own cove has been picked quite clean.’

  ‘Has it all gone already? People are so unscrupulous.’ Crow didn’t bother to disguise his boredom. He had faced far worthier opponents than this well-upholstered suckling pig. ‘I went to bring home my brother, as it happens. He’s dangerously ill, and could travel no further unaccompanied.’ Crow smiled, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘The rigours of the Russian campaign appear to be catching up with the poor child. He’s entirely done in, but I should say he’s earned the right to a little recuperation. Not even seventeen, and Wellington has mentioned him in despatches, and of course he got his captaincy after Novgorod – just the start of a long and brilliant military career, one hopes. Will you do me the honour of staying here tonight, Wentworth? The house is rather full, but I’m sure we can find a chaise or a spare attic. Otherwise you may close the door on your way out. I’m afraid that at this extraordinary hour of the night I lack servants. If you’ll excuse me, my brother is extremely unwell.’

  Wentworth bowed and turned to go. Crow stopped him with a single look. ‘Before I forget, I’m afraid I had to kill one of your men.’

  Taken off guard, Wentworth stared at him.

  ‘No one can regret it more than I do – except his people, of course, if he has any. We met on the road from Newlyn, and for some reason your man refused to identify himself when I called out. I’m sure you’ll agree that in these times one can’t be too careful, Captain. You’ll find him on the lane near the cove.’ Crow was quite sure that nothing in his expression betrayed the half-hour spent running through the wooded valley with a corpse over his shoulder, never sure whether Kitto would still be alive when he returned to him, if the ball fired by Wentworth’s man had punctured some vital organ or severed some vein. There had been no choice: it was impossible to risk leaving the body so close to the hidden cargo.

  For a moment, Wentworth did nothing but blink behind Crow’s skein of cigarillo smoke. Finally, he saluted with one clenched fist held to his forehead, as he was bound to do. ‘Very good, Lord Lamorna.’ He bowed and walked out of the library, leaving Crow with the slumped, unconscious form of Lord Castlereagh, and Crow knew that England and Cornwall were now at war, if Captain Wentworth of the 11th Northumbrians had anything to do with it.

  *

  Leaving Beatie with the child, Hester closed the nursery door, only to find her husband leaning on the wall opposite. Crow stood with a cocked pistol against one shoulder, his hair in wild disarray, his bloodstained shirt half undone, revealing the swirling Otaheitan tattoos on his chest.

  ‘The little maid?’ he said, meaning their daughter. Hester had only ever heard him speak their child’s name once, on the sunlit morning they had chosen it. And why was the certain knowledge that Morwenna was not his only child so very hard to bear, when every branch of the peerage in Britain budded with children of indeterminate origin?

 
; ‘She’s gone back to sleep,’ Hester said, ‘praise heaven. What about Kitto? Where’s Captain Wentworth?’

  ‘The boy is fevered, but Catlin’s with him. Wentworth’s on his way back to Newlyn. I asked what the devil he meant by frightening my wife.’ Crow’s face was tight with tension and dark with new beard, and Hester knew that in his current state of mind he would stand guard outside their daughter’s room all day and all night, in his own ancestral hall, unless she stopped him.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘If you’re seen like this, we’re finished.’ He submitted to her and, side by side, they went to her bedchamber. Crow closed the door behind them, leaning on it with his eyes closed again, still holding the pistol. Gently, she took it from him, setting it with practised care on the carved oak blanket chest at the end of the bed. A steaming bowl had been set on her dressing table: Catlin must have brought up the water, and Hester felt a flash of guilt for all the extra work she had been put to. ‘You’re covered in blood.’

  Crossing to the warm water, she soaked the folded cloth lying across the edge of the earthenware bowl and watched as her husband took off his shirt, pulling the ruined fine lawn over his head. Stripped now to the waist, he reached out, tucking a stray spiral of hair behind her ear before taking the steaming cloth. She let out a long, shuddering breath, watching as he wiped the blood from his tattooed belly and chest, and praying that Crow would never know Lord Castlereagh had touched her as though she were a whore. Letting out a brief, exhausted sigh, Crow bent low to kiss her; he carried with him a faint aroma of cucumber and mint shaving water, dizzying when mingled with his own faint, salty scent. She couldn’t help pulling away. No, she told herself, furious. Don’t let Castlereagh do that. Don’t let him spoil this.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Crow said, not understanding, because how could he? ‘I’m so sorry about Louisa’s child.’

  Louisa’s child; your child. She took the warm cloth in her own hands, watching bloodied, still-steaming water drip down the illustrated expanse of his lean torso. There was so much Hester knew she must find a way of telling him, but she couldn’t see her way to doing it. She spoke without looking up at him: ‘Crow, what have you done?’

  He laid his hand over hers, one of the richest men in Britain, with an iron-hard grip on trade going out of every Cornish port, and fifty mines still seamed with tin while English coffers were empty after years of bloody and expensive conflict with France. Warm water trickled through their entwined fingers as he looked down at her. ‘I killed the English soldier who shot my brother.’ And Hester knew that here was the start of yet another war.

  9

  Two days later, Hester was arranging early narcissi, hellebore and freesias in the stillroom with Catlin and two of the young maidservants when Dorothea Lieven came in. At a single glance from Catlin, all three servants curtseyed and left, making for the scullery. It was said that Dorothea’s influence spread far beyond the ballrooms and drawing-rooms of Mayfair. She was as much of a Russian emissary as her husband: the tsar himself tasked her with the most delicate of diplomatic missions, soothing fractious relationships between those who mattered in the English government as much as in the Russian court.

  She smiled with all her usual assurance. ‘Oh, please don’t allow me to interrupt you, Hester darling. In fact, I know just what it’s like when one has reached the tail-end of a house party, and one only wants to be alone, frankly, so I’m sorry to intrude on all your quiet. But may I join you, all the same?’

  Hester gestured at the heap of greenery and pale petals tumbled across the scrubbed wooden tabletop. ‘Of course. But please let me call my housekeeper back, and she’ll bring you something. Some tea?’

  ‘Oh no. I really do know how it is with so many guests – I couldn’t possibly trouble your woman any further. Indeed I’m sorry for hurrying her away from the sort of job that just allows one to sit down for five minutes, especially with sickness in the house.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Mildly surprised that a cosseted daughter of Baltic German nobility brought up by the Russian tsar’s own mother should possess even the concept of an overworked servant, Hester picked up a spray of narcissi; there was a fire licking at the grate with tongues of bright flame, and the warmth in the room had brought out the scent of the flowers.

  ‘How is dear young Captain Helford?’ Dorothea went on, stripping fresh green fronds from a curling branch of ivy. ‘Weren’t we fortunate that it wasn’t an infectious disorder, with so many people in the house?’ She laughed. ‘Only think, you might have finished the entire Cabinet with a single dose of typhus. No doubt the papers would call it a plot.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Hester said lightly. ‘Kitto is much better, thank you. Young men do so often succumb to feverish complaints after the rigours of campaigning, and then of London with their friends. We’re thankful it seems nothing more serious than that.’

  Dorothea spoke without looking up from the tangle of ivy in her hands. ‘Well, he’s been quite the sensation in Petersburg, as I’m sure you’ll know. It was exactly the same when your husband was first on the town in London – I remember it very well.’

  Hester knew she hadn’t quite managed to conceal her surprise at that first revelation. Kitto rarely wrote to his brother, except for stiff, formal notes to request an advance upon his allowance or to announce his survival after the Siege of Novgorod or the victorious but punishing retreat from Grezhny in which so many men had died. Even her own letters from him were few and far between, and limited to commonplace remarks about the Russian princess whose foot he had trodden on as she taught him the mazurka, and the blood sausage he’d spent an afternoon bartering for in some remote outpost, only to cut it open and find a nest of dead flies. He often sent her his watercolours and sketches, though: the latest had been Countess N. Pushkina, a charcoal and pastel portrait of a woman in her middle forties, with quite as much obvious African ancestry as Hester herself – Kitto’s way of telling her that she was not alone in the world, she supposed. She pictured him on the stairs here at Nansmornow as a confiding nine-year-old when she’d been a sea captain’s daughter and a guest of his father, and he was all tousled black hair and grass-stained linen, and neither of them had ever imagined that they would one day be related. Miss Harewood, I know you’ll want to see my tadpoles. They’re all so particularly interesting.

  ‘You’re so quiet, Hester.’ Dorothea twined a strand of ivy around one fingertip. ‘One has no wish to pry, of course, but am I right in sensing a rift between Lord Lamorna and his brother?’

  Hester hesitated. Dorothea saw too much, and would easily find a way of using any such information to the benefit of Russia. She herself was only too well aware that Kitto and Crow were scarcely speaking to one another, and that Crow’s usual energy and decisiveness of movement were now interspersed with long periods of standing in silent contemplation at the window whenever he thought he was alone. Hester knew just how much Kitto loathed his former stepmother, and could only guess at the temperature of his feelings now he knew his brother had fathered her child, but by the same token Crow had killed an English soldier to save not only Kitto’s life but his reputation, and that was the least of the unmentionable history between them. In his own infuriating fashion, Crow had rebuffed her every attempt to discuss this frigid stalemate – and Dorothea’s interest in it must at all cost be diverted.

  In the end, she chose her words with care. ‘My husband is eleven years Kitto’s senior, and you must recall that he was absent for most of Kitto’s life, first at sea under my father’s command, and then later in the army. They have no shared childhood, and it’s very difficult to remain on the sort of pedestal on which an unhappy child will place a glamorous older brother seen only occasionally. Lord Lamorna became Kitto’s guardian at a trying time, and when he was at a particularly trying age.’

  ‘Oh, I do understand,’ Dorothea said. ‘Too old to really enjoy being a child, and too young to go on the town, with a fit of the sullens every five minutes. The army is r
eally the best place for youths of that age, when education is not a possibility.’

  ‘I entirely agree.’ Hester wondered just how much Dorothea knew about Kitto: he’d been expelled from Eton, and then almost hanged twice during the French Occupation for insurrection against the Napoleonic authorities then in control. Yes, Kitto had been more than capable of the youthful fits of melodrama Dorothea spoke of – slamming doors and hostile speechlessness – but he’d also been equally adept at laying gunpowder. Hester smiled. ‘I’m happy to hear he’s been a success in St Petersburg, although I confess it’s hard to imagine him in a ballroom. In my mind, he’s still collecting grasshoppers and keeping ants in a bottle.’

  ‘Well, if they can be brought to discussion, Lord Lamorna might wish to drop a hint in Captain Helford’s ear about Countess Tatyana Orlova,’ Dorothea said, now looking directly across the table at Hester. ‘She’s quite the Petersburg society hostess, but one does hear that some of her closest associates have links to the Green Lamp. I’ve known her for years, of course – we were educated at the convent together – and Tatyana’s star is so ascendant at the moment that no gossip seems able to touch her, but these things can change so rapidly.’

  ‘The Green Lamp?’ Hester let the question hang between them.

  ‘A most insalubrious organisation – poets and silly, romantic young revolutionaries questioning the power of the tsar himself,’ Dorothea went on. ‘I do realise that in England you are still without a monarch, and that parliament exercised some powers here even before Napoleon’s fool of a brother executed the regent, but you must understand that in Russia even the mildest hint of such views is abhorrent. The tsar rules as our father, but the Green Lamp question the legitimacy of his power at every turn. If it were only emancipation of the serfs they wanted, one might reason with them – as if we could survive without indentured labour in a country the size of Russia! – but more than that, it’s said they plan to actually kill the tsar.’