Wicked by Design Read online

  Hester picked up a spray of narcissi, examining the pale petals, wondering how Dorothea dared speak so lightly of serfdom to the daughter of a man who had been enslaved. ‘Honestly, please rest assured that Kitto hasn’t a political bone in his body, but I’ll speak to my husband.’ It was simply too dangerous to discuss Kitto with a woman of Dorothea’s unusual insight: she’d spent the best part of twenty years as the wife of a diplomat, watching men and women smile and lie to one another. Hester continued without looking up from her narcissi. ‘Actually, I’m glad to have you alone, Dorothea – in all these weeks, we haven’t yet had the opportunity to speak privately. I’m quite aware that your intervention made matters a great deal easier when Crow and I were in town for the Little Season before Christmas. In truth, you contrived to make me sought out rather than only tolerated and gossiped about. You should know that I’ve actually no wish to be pursued by society, but the fact is I can’t escape my husband’s position. So I want to thank you for making something I’m unable to avoid marginally less unpleasant. And the fact is that any social success I meet with now, regardless of how little I care for it or wish it for myself, will certainly make life easier for my daughter in fifteen years’ time.’

  Dorothea looked up from arranging a trio of white hellebore in a pewter bowl of water, accepting the change of subject without flinching. ‘You know, Hester, when one is in the sort of social position I’ve contrived for myself, one gets used to dishonesty. It’s refreshing to be simply told the truth, and you’re wise to think of your daughter. Are you really dreading the Season to come? We’ll all shortly be in London, will we not?’

  ‘Will we?’ Hester countered.

  ‘You know, in Russia you would be far less remarkable,’ Dorothea said, sidestepping her question. ‘You must have heard of our most promising young poet? Pushkin’s great-grandfather was an Abyssinian Moor adopted by Peter the Great, and Alexei’s African ancestry is quite clear to look at him and his mother, although far less so with his siblings. Nevertheless, they were all brought up at court.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him, of course,’ Hester said, ‘although I don’t doubt this black but socially acceptable poet has been made to suffer in ways you may find hard to imagine, and his mother before him. But that isn’t what you came to talk to me about, is it? We could, after all, have discussed your Pushkin or even Kitto in the drawing-room with everyone else.’

  Dorothea smiled. ‘Oh, indeed. We are only women, Hester, and as such we may discuss the sort of affairs of real interest to me in privacy, or not at all. Soon I do think we will all be in London for the start of the Season proper, but there’s something I wish you to consider in the meantime.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Hester added a tendril of ivy to an arrangement of narcissi and freesias, leaning back in her seat to judge the effect.

  ‘Your husband,’ Dorothea said. ‘We all know the fact is that he controls every port in Cornwall, and his lands are rich in tin – for now. But even without the Lamorna mineral wealth, one has to wonder how much you stand to gain from allying yourselves solely to England.’

  Hester looked down at the narcissi in her hands. ‘Well, if we’re to be political, where will Russia’s allegiances ultimately lie, Dorothea? To Britain as a whole, or to Napoleon and France?’

  Dorothea adjusted the position of a fragrant spray of lily of the valley. ‘France is still strong under Napoleon even now he’s been expelled from England, true. He’s a threat to Russia, plain and simple. But the simple fact is that although Britain claims to be our natural ally, all Britain really wants is control of Russian trading routes to the east, right through the Ottoman ports and into India. Your troops came to our aid at Grezhny and Novgorod, but at what cost? What price will be demanded in the future?’ Dorothea twined another strand of ivy between her fingertips. ‘Martha Mulgrave was quite right when she said that Castlereagh is only waiting for a reason to destroy Lord Lamorna completely. The question your husband must ask, Hester, is whether England is his most beneficial partner these days. His wisest ally? Or would he be better off serving Cornish interests alone?’

  Hester smiled. ‘Cornish and Russian interests entwined together, I presume?’ She glanced up at the clock above the mantelpiece. ‘It’s gone half past four. We really ought to dress for dinner, Dorothea.’

  10

  A week later and well into February, sweet white cyclamen were in flower along the carriage drive at Nansmornow and Kitto lay still fevered on the chaise in the library, his eyes half closed. It was late afternoon, and the curtains had not yet been drawn. Immediately outside the mullioned window, frozen parkland spread beyond the hard-shorn form of a hydrangea, and with the wind in this quarter, he heard the far-off rhythm of waves crashing against the cliffs. Even so close to the fire, he was alternately freezing and sweating, and the wound in his shoulder throbbed with a dull, relentless ache. He watched the door open and Crow came in with Count Lieven, both still dressed for shooting, Crow in their father’s old tweed jacket, the Russian ambassador grey-haired and flushed from the cold outside.

  ‘All I ask is that you use your common sense, Lamorna,’ he said, and Kitto wondered how on earth the man could have known Crow for so long and still expect anything like it. Lieven seemed about to say more before he noticed Kitto in the candlelit gloom.

  ‘Save your machinations, sir, unless you wish to edify my brother with them,’ Crow said carelessly. ‘Perhaps we can go at it again over champagne before supper?’

  ‘One day, Jack,’ Lieven said, ‘it’s just possible that you might learn a little humility, and the worth of valuing your friends.’ He turned and left, closing the door behind him with a sharp snap. Crow poured himself a glass of brandy from the decanter on his desk, drained it, and then walked over to the chaise and rested his hand on Kitto’s forehead.

  ‘Dear God, you ought still to be in bed, but then you’d be deprived of the pleasure of seeing me comprehensively put in my place by our father’s friends. That arm should still be in a sling.’

  ‘Mrs Rescorla said I’d do as well to try without.’ Kitto sat up. ‘I’m damned bored of staying in bed. I’ll go, though. The house is so infernally full of people.’ The room spun around him as he stood, ready to leave.

  Crow lazily tilted his glass, holding it up to the light. ‘If I thought you were intruding you wouldn’t still be here. Sit. There is only so long we can circle each other like a pair of spitting alley cats, as Hester puts it. I want to talk to you. I heard that you brought twenty of your regiment back to Petersburg alive after Novgorod,’ he said, ‘that you walked with them for more than a hundred miles through French occupied territory instead of riding like an officer. Sit.’

  Kitto obeyed: he had been expecting censure, not this – the closest his brother was likely to get to praise, not that anyone would have guessed it. ‘We had to eat my horse,’ he said, wondering who had told him, even as he did his best to ignore a vivid memory of the wide-open hazel eyes of the young French artillery officer he’d stepped across in frozen mud. He forced himself to look out of the window at the darkening parkland as a flock of starlings rose up, tossed in an easterly wind. ‘Are you expecting someone?’

  Crow had a disarming habit of occasionally treating pretension with amusement rather than hauteur. He didn’t smile, but there was a particular expression in his eyes. He went to his seat at the desk before answering. ‘Nathaniel Edwards and Mr Gloyne.’

  ‘An Gostel? You can’t be serious. Surely it’s not safe to receive the resistance here?’ Kitto hadn’t spoken Cornish, his first language, since joining the army but somehow it was easier to say what he meant when he did, especially to Crow. ‘Castlereagh and the others suspect you enough as it is: if you think Captain Wentworth’s satisfied with that story about only firing after the fellow refused to identify himself, you’re way out. You killed an Englishman in the woods.’ And Crow had done it for him, to save his life, his reputation.

  ‘Never mind that. What do you k
now of the Green Lamp?’ Crow leaned forward in his chair; he lit a cigarillo from the candle, looking up at Kitto with an expression he recognised from his earlier youth, and which told him he was about to find it impossible to lie to his brother.

  ‘One hears rumours, that sort of thing. Poets and dissidents. The tsar used to talk of freeing the serfs, but now all that’s been forgotten. For my own part, I don’t see how they can go on the way they are without revolution – not in a country that stretches from Europe to China and most of the population not even free.’

  ‘And I trust you haven’t said such a foolish thing to anyone, here or in Russia?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Then I also trust that if I tell you Countess Tatyana Orlova has rumoured links to the Green Lamp, then you will ensure that you have no remarkable connection with her?’

  Kitto forced himself not to flinch. Sometimes it really was as if Crow saw all, and knew all. ‘She hosts half the balls in Petersburg – what do you wish me to do, never to go out?’

  Crow poured another glassful of brandy and got up again, moving with the lazy, restless grace of a cat waking from sleep on a sunny windowsill; he could never be content for long. ‘I leave you to be the judge of that. But if I hear the slightest rumour of any connection between you and anyone involved in the Green Lamp, I will have you not only out of Russia, but out of the army entirely. You know, of course, that I can and I will do this, and that any such rumour reaches me quickly, even here. I’m sure you realise that this is not all I have to say to you, either. There is the matter of your trip to Paris.’

  Kitto had not survived the filthiest campaign since Borodino only to wait in humble silence for one of Crow’s blistering reprimands. ‘You’re the worst hypocrite I’ve ever met, you do realise that, don’t you? Saying that, and then receiving the Cornish resistance in here with most of the English Cabinet staying, and half society’s worst gossips? You’ve got some nerve.’

  ‘My God, so have you, indeed,’ Crow remarked, and Kitto felt it would be beneath his dignity to reply. At a knock, the door opened, and Nathaniel Edwards came in with Mr Gloyne, who ran the circulating library in Penzance and had always seemed to Kitto to be the most unlikely revolutionary, with his old-fashioned tricorn and the same faded embroidered waistcoat he had worn for ever. Both removed their hats in Crow’s presence, and each directed a swift, questioning glance at Kitto, answered by Crow with a nod. He was to stay: to Gloyne and Edwards he was still no more than a child, but for now Crow had decided that he was a man, and could listen.

  Mr Gloyne accepted a glass of brandy with a nod of thanks. ‘Your lordship will be pleased to know all cargo retrieved from the Deliverance safely reached Birmingham.’

  ‘Good,’ Crow said. ‘Where it was then swiftly and efficiently fenced, I trust?’

  Mr Gloyne nodded. ‘The funds have been distributed across the usual channels, my lord.’ He glanced at Kitto. ‘It was a risky venture, if you don’t mind my saying, even if it did end well. God knows we need what money we can lay our hands on when half the duchy villages are starving under English rule, but if that coin’s seen to touch Lord Lamorna, we’ll all suffer for it. The English government needs to think your brother really neutral, Captain Helford. They’re suspicious enough of him as it is.’

  Kitto said nothing, but the room seemed to spin around him – bookshelves, those so-familiar oil-painted landscapes in heavy gilded frames. It wasn’t only the lingering fever, he knew. Yes, it had been a crime to help steal the Deliverance’s cargo, but it was one thing to assist starving and desperate Cornishwomen, and quite another to engage in deliberate and premeditated insurrection against England amidst a war with France. In truth, he had come home after all this time to find himself commissioned as an officer in an army at war against his own brother, who had the nerve to order him to beware of his acquaintances in Petersburg.

  ‘Are you even actually loyal to anyone at all except to the notion of wringing as much profit from this situation as you possibly can?’ Kitto demanded.

  ‘Have you quite done?’ Crow asked calmly. ‘You might have a fever, but if you annoy me enough, you’ll know about it. And you do begin to.’

  ‘Don’t be hard on the boy, I beg you, my lord,’ Nathaniel Edwards said, not understanding anything at all. ‘It’s thanks to the captain we got away as we did – we were lucky he chanced on us. I was loath to go with the women, but go they would. I might have been little enough use, as the captain knows, but it seemed wrong to let the maids attempt to retrieve all that cargo alone. Things are come to such an evil pass in duchy-owned Cornwall that there seemed little choice. Castlereagh has filled it with either English landlords or men like Boscobel – new money, who’d do anything to join the aristocratic set, and see their tenants as little better than animals.’

  ‘All the same, be very careful,’ Crow said. ‘Let no one gather in the streets. It’s far too dangerous at the moment.’ He lit another cigarillo, blowing out tendrils of smoke. ‘For my own part, neither Wentworth nor even Lord Castlereagh will meddle any further while they still wish me to suppress all insurrection, but Captain Wentworth hates Cornwall, and he hates the Cornish. Do you think Castlereagh wouldn’t sanction calling in the captain’s men to take action against even the smallest perceived threat, and do you think he would not obey?’

  ‘I’m in agreement with you, my lord,’ Mr Gloyne said. ‘An Gostel will remain quiet this while, at least. But with everyone from Scilly to the Tamar calling you King of Cornwall, your honour, I’m afraid there’ll be trouble no matter how much care we all take.’

  Mr Gloyne and Nathaniel Edwards bowed their way out, leaving Crow and Kitto alone again.

  ‘You should be careful!’ Kitto said, standing again despite the fact that the fever sent the room spinning around him like a child’s top, Crow was the head of this family and still his guardian: he had really no right to offer his opinion on any matter whatsoever. ‘You think that no one can touch you, but you’re wrong.’

  ‘And you’re commissioned into the British army,’ Crow said, watching him with what appeared to be little more than cold detachment. ‘You’d be better off having nothing to do with the King of Cornwall, you know. Go back to bed and keep the spleen to yourself – all things considered, it would have been better had you continued with the melodrama of your self-imposed exile, would it not?’

  Always, there was a sting. Kitto watched him with a sudden, breathless rage. ‘I couldn’t agree more. One has to go quite a long way to stay out of your shadow. But I suppose you think I can still be made to obey your every command, even though you’re well on the way to being a gazetted traitor?’

  Crow only smiled. ‘Oh, I’m quite sure of that.’

  Summoning all his strength, his head aching abominably, Kitto got up and walked out, leaning on the door as he closed it behind him. He couldn’t help thinking of the linen-wrapped, wriggling bundle Hester had brought to his bedside, the cannon-ball round head covered with a pale green knitted cap, the fat wrists and dark, liquid eyes, a child born to face obstacles Crow no doubt refused to even consider. He wondered if Crow’s daughter would share his own ability to make her father entirely lose control of his temper.

  11

  Several days later, Hester stood at the open door of the nursery, leaning on the doorframe. Morwenna was sitting in her bath before the fire, and Beatie stood at the dresser, folding nightgowns, shifts and small knitted caps, watching Kitto sprawl on the floor as he leaned against the faded cherry-striped chaise beneath the window. He sat with his long legs spread out before him, crossed at the ankle, just as Crow did. He held a ball, pretending to throw it to Morwenna, and then tossed it high into the air as she laughed.

  ‘You’ll have her splashing half the bathwater on to the floor, your honour,’ Beatie said, looking more at peace than Hester had ever seen her.

  ‘Oh good Lord, don’t be so stuffy, Beats,’ Kitto said lightly, and Hester realised that he must have roamed Nan
tewas with Beatie as a child, quite disregarded by his father in the days when no respectable female servant would have set foot at Nansmornow. The loyalty of local families to the Lamornas had not stretched to allowing their daughters to be dishonoured by serving in such a household as Crow and Kitto’s father had kept for so long. Kitto looked up at Hester with this new restlessness of his and she remembered how, even just two years before, he might have been so absorbed in sketching the seeds of a gourd that he wouldn’t have noticed a piano concerto with full orchestral accompaniment. He smiled – that at least hadn’t changed – and tossed the ball to Morwenna so that it splashed in front of her, throwing up bright beads of water that clung in the soft, fine curls of her hair.

  ‘Het, tell Beatie Simmens that she is not to force Mrs Rescorla’s revolting tisanes upon me.’

  ‘I’m sure I should never do such a thing, my lady,’ Beatie said, ducking her head to hide a smile of her own.

  ‘You may leave us, Beatie,’ Hester said. ‘Mrs Rescorla tells me you haven’t yet had your tea. I’ll take the child out of the bath myself – she’ll soon want me to feed her, anyway.’

  Still failing to hide her smile, Beatie dropped a little curtsey and went out of the servants’ door set into the wainscoting. When she had gone, and there was no longer a need to maintain the appearance of dignity, Hester sat on the floor beside Kitto and caught the ball, tossing it to Morwenna herself who began thoughtfully to chew it.

  ‘And do you make all the young servants fall in love with you, Christopher Helford?’ Hester went on, in French, so that there was no way Beatie or any other servant passing in the passage might understand.

  Kitto flushed, leaning his head against her shoulder. ‘I’ve known Beatie for ever, Hets.’

  ‘That only makes it worse, you silly boy. Be careful. I must admit this was the last place I expected to find you – a young soldier at home on leave when everyone else has been out shooting. You’re still not feeling altogether well, are you?’