Wicked by Design Page 8

  ‘Trust me, I’ll likely get enough shooting when my leave is over – Marshal Davout is still manoeuvring around Russia like a terrier looking for a fight, don’t forget. There’ll be plenty of fun and games for me before the year is out.’ Kitto laughed again as Morwenna threw the ball at him, leaving a watery trail across the ancient waxed floorboards, and Hester passed him the tissue-wrapped packet she had been holding.

  ‘It’s your Twelfth Night present,’ she said. It had been sitting on the edge of the wash-stand in Crow’s bedchamber for weeks, an unspoken presence.

  Kitto flushed again. ‘I’m sure I don’t deserve one.’

  ‘Why should you think of presents for your ageing family while you disport yourself in Paris? Paris! I don’t know how you had the nerve. When I think of the silk alone, never mind the gloves, I could honestly crown you, Kitto.’ Hester smiled because Kitto was irresistible in his rare moments of penitence, but surely Crow must speak to him about escorting some young person of compromised virtue right into the heart of enemy territory, in the middle of a war?

  ‘You’re not ageing that much.’ He folded back the tissue revealing a medal of St Christopher struck from Cornish gold. He had the hands of a horseman now, she noticed, his long fingers tanned by wind and sun. He kissed her dutifully and she hung the medal around his neck, endowing him with the blessing of the patron saint of all travellers as she clasped the fine golden chain.

  ‘Crow had it commissioned, you know.’

  Kitto looked away, the gold glinting against the white of his shirt. He rolled the ball back to Morwenna, who gripped the sides of the bath with her small, fat hands and began to caw like a young rook. ‘I’ll take her out,’ Kitto said, ‘you’ll only get your gown wet. Yes, little maid, I’m coming.’ Facing Morwenna with the firm, unthinking confidence of one who had grown up handling the young of most creatures in the Lamorna Valley, from chickens and lambs to squalling, ash-smudged babies crawling too near the hearth, Kitto lifted his niece out of the bath and folded her into the linen towel spread along the chaise, and Hester’s eyes scalded with unexpected tears. Soon he would be going back to Russia, and he might never ride with Morwenna too fast along the beach, or come up to the schoolroom to show her how to paint the interior parts of a ripe, sweet-smelling quince, or lead her down a dance in a London ballroom when inevitably there would be whispered jibes about her grandfather, who had been born enslaved on a Jamaican plantation and died a captain in the British navy.

  ‘Here!’ Kitto thrust Morwenna into her arms, a struggling bundle of linen and strong, angry small limbs. ‘Don’t be maudlin, Hets.’ And then his expression changed completely, the smile quite vanishing from his eyes, and Hester turned to see Crow leaning in the doorway; he had already dressed for dinner, and his hair was wet. He was holding three glasses of champagne.

  ‘Can we drink,’ he said in Cornish, ‘to the fact that all of our guests will be gone by the end of the week, praise be? Meur ras dhe Dhuw.’

  Hester settled with Morwenna into the nursing chair, and Crow set the glass down on the window-ledge beside her; as ever, she was so very aware of the heat of his presence. He glanced at Kitto. ‘Are you certain you’re quite well enough to dine downstairs? MacArthur won’t thank me for sending you back to him in a mess.’

  Kitto lifted his glass in silent obedience, addressing Crow with rigid politeness. ‘By your leave, I’ll go and dress, sir.’

  Crow raised his eyebrows, watching him go, and then dropped on to the chaise, lying back, managing not to spill any of his champagne. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, turning his head to look at her. ‘I’m still relegated to the doghouse. I’m a dangerous traitor, apparently. He’s really not yet learned to see any grey between the black and the white.’

  ‘You must talk to him about Paris. He could even be accused of espionage.’ Hester looked down at Morwenna as she suckled; she felt the tingling rush of the milk as it let down. ‘You don’t think he’s been drawn into anything like that, do you? He’s so young. What more has he said to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Crow said. ‘It’s my guess he escorted a courtesan back to France who no doubt told him she had been most cruelly used. It’s one of the oldest tricks there is, but I doubt he told the girl anything her paymasters at the French court found particularly useful. Don’t exercise yourself about it.’ He closed his eyes again, letting the glass of champagne hang loosely between his fingertips.

  ‘John,’ Hester said, unable to quite suppress an odd little shudder of unease. ‘John, but you must speak to him about it, all the same.’

  ‘Oh, we began to,’ Crow said, his eyes lingering on Morwenna. ‘He read me a homily of his own – you would have been proud of my restraint at that moment, let me tell you.’

  ‘But going to Paris? It was an unbelievably foolish thing for him to have done. The outcome might not be so harmless another time.’

  He sat up then, and looked at her. ‘Do you really believe I don’t know it? Trust me, Kitto thinks himself above paying any heed to whatever I might have to say. He isn’t and will soon learn as much, but when we have that discussion they’ll hear it in Nantewas. He and I are due a reckoning, but it must wait until this place is free of prying eyes.’

  ‘Very well, I suppose that makes sense,’ she said carefully. He leaned back against the arm of the chaise and closed his eyes again. She could not help thinking they would all be better served if he and Kitto were simply capable of holding a difficult conversation without shouting at each other or worse, and yet he was her husband and she owed him her obedient acquiescence, or at least the appearance of it. He was the head of this household, and she must deploy her challenges to his authority with care. And before they dined tonight, there was another challenge to mount. You’ll have to choose your battles wisely, with such a one as that, Catlin had told her, and she’d been right.

  ‘You know very well that despite everything, he would still ride into the heart of an erupting volcano for you.’ Hester watched her husband as Morwenna suckled.

  ‘My love, so poetic.’ With his eyes closed, Crow didn’t move; he was still speaking in Cornish. ‘Just a little while more: it’ll be such a pleasant change to converse over the supper-table without fear of inadvertently condemning oneself to death on the scaffold by some chance comment.’

  ‘Dorothea came to find me in the stillroom again,’ Hester said. Surely there must be a way for them both to navigate this assembled court of vipers? ‘She thinks you’re a great fool for being rude to Count Lieven. He made you a sensible proposition.’

  ‘I’m never rude,’ Crow said. ‘But what would you have me do, ally myself to a vast empire with ambitions of which we know nothing? My love, all I can do is pray that Vansittart and the others grow to see Castlereagh for what he is: a fanatic. And then perhaps we’ll be left alone.’

  Hester sipped her champagne and looked down at her suckling daughter’s bee-stung lips, but she could not shake off her certainty that both she and Crow had each played their cards unwisely.

  12

  They were twenty for supper that night at Nansmornow, and Lord Castlereagh’s wife Emily Stewart languorously signalled to Crow’s footman for the dish of spiced venison. She had taken more champagne than she could hold with any dignity, and was leaning heavily against Crow’s shoulder. If he were to get up to piss, she’d fall off her chair. He breathed in the chopped-onion tang of her underarm sweat, wishing her at Jericho. Hester was at the foot of the table, in cheerful conversation with Admiral Blake, who had been a friend of her father’s and was one of the few people in the room who could look her in the eye. All he could do was observe the shape of his wife’s smile down the length of the table, her beautiful, generous mouth, and the loose spiral of hair that grazed her naked collar-bone, wishing himself in the place of the heavy embroidered wrap draped around her shoulders.

  Emily Stewart leaned close again, and Crow felt the boneless weight of her upper body against his arm. ‘It does rather seem as though you m
ight want to keep an eye on your young brother, my lord. Our incorrigible Dorothea has unsheathed her claws. He’s so pale after his illness – doubtless that only makes him more fascinating.’

  She was right on both counts: the Russian ambassador’s wife was sitting to Kitto’s left; Dorothea spoke quietly, leaning close to him, letting the tip of one long, elegant finger rest on the rim of his glass.

  Crow turned to look down at her, vowing to later advise Dorothea to leave his brother out of her scheming. ‘I take it as a compliment, Emily. She’s a connoisseur.’

  She smirked. ‘Enjoying Russian pleasures is something of a family tradition, isn’t it? Judging by what I remember of that summer in 1812, which admittedly isn’t much, darling Dasha taught you a thing or two as well.’ She leaned closer still, creating an illusion of an intimacy between them. ‘Do you know, Dorothea and I tossed a coin the night you walked into Sally Jersey’s drawing-room with your father, all those years ago. Young Lord Crowlas: you caused quite the stir that season – the prodigal, runaway son of Beau Lamorna, home on leave from the navy and unleashed upon London for the first time. I was quite furious with Dorothea for winning you in our little wager.’

  Crow didn’t reply: forcing confidences in such a way was so impossibly ill bred that even his father wouldn’t have censured him for refusing to listen to them.

  Undeterred, Emily went on. ‘It’s so amusing to think how that wild young Lord Crowlas now has all these many responsibilities. An earldom.’ She glanced down the table at Hester. ‘A most unusual wife, and a precious child – one can barely tell the dear little thing is coloured, I assure you, and I’m sure it’ll be an easy matter to keep her out of the sun. How sad that Captain Wentworth doesn’t join us tonight – I must admit I find it perfectly shocking that the criminals who stole all that wrecked cargo have never been brought to justice.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Crow said coolly, noticing with grim pleasure that she dared not mention Louisa Burford’s child, or not to him, at least. ‘Perhaps that’s exactly why Wentworth and his young lieutenant refused my wife’s invitation this evening.’ He was quite unable to suppress a rising need to fight or flee, even though there was no visible enemy, no visible danger. And yet the doors and the windows were all unguarded, he knew. The house was not secure. He was failing in his duty. Battle-ready, a tingling rush soared up and down his lower arms, all the way down to his fingertips and, as he watched, Wentworth’s men burst in through the carved wooden double doors, a bright rush of red coats. Crow hauled himself up on to the table and over it, scattering carafes, splashing claret and champagne, silver chargers tumbling. He pushed past Lord Sidmouth and the rector’s oldest daughter, who watched him in slack-jawed silence, her shining forehead rippling with a crop of red acne. He swept the books off the shelf and took up the pistol concealed behind the six leather-bound volumes of Livy – it was always kept loaded and primed, and he turned to the door, ready to fire.

  ‘My lord?’

  Still in his seat – in reality, he had never moved from it – Crow turned to face Emily again, who was still smiling at him with what she clearly hoped was a coquettish air. He was aware of Kitto and Hester now watching him from the far end of the table, Kitto frowning a little, Hester with the expressionless glance that meant she would ask leading questions when they were alone. They had noticed that particular expression on his face: they knew how he looked when he saw things that were not there, but seemed as real as his own hand held before his face. Sweat seeped down his back, and the room filled once again with competing voices, the clatter of fork against plate. Hester had turned back to Lord Vansittart on her right, but Kitto was still watching him. Crow ignored his brother, draining his glass of claret and wishing it was brandy, wishing he was so drunk that it didn’t matter if he saw and did things that were not real. And yet why could he not shake this sense of deep disquiet, an instinct had never failed him in the past?

  ‘My darling boy, do you not attend?’ Emily traced a line along the side of his wrist with one finger, and he suppressed a shudder. ‘Lord Sidmouth and I were just asking if you think the princess royal will reply to my husband’s latest begging letter. It seems so ridiculous that we’re still without a king or queen, and she won’t take up her birthright. What on earth can she want with that tiny foreign duchy now that her husband is dead, and her son the duke? We’ll end as a republic, at this rate. You and Wellington might have rid us of the French, but still we have no king or queen.’

  ‘Neither the duke nor I can take credit for expelling the Occupation. For that you may thank every last British soldier who trained for months in North America only to fight and die at Salisbury.’ Crow turned his glass in the candlelight, watching the flames reflected in the carved lead crystal. ‘There is no princess royal,’ he said. ‘Princess Charlotte has been Duchess of Württemberg for more than twenty years. For four of those twenty years, her husband was loyal to Napoleon. Unquestionably, Charlotte has the experience and wisdom we’d all welcome in a monarch – it would be a pleasant change – but whether the people will accept her is another matter.’

  ‘The question on my mind is Russia,’ said the rector, flushed with too much claret. ‘We took Novgorod and Grezhny from Napoleon and as good as presented them to the damned Emperor Alexander on a plate, and yet still the man hasn’t formally declared his allegiance. What do you say to that, sir?’

  The rector was not only talking across the table, which in itself made Crow wish to close his eyes on the whole affair, but to top that he was addressing the Russian Ambassador to the Interim Government of Great Britain.

  Count Lieven spoke with all the exhaustion of his forty-four years. ‘Naturally, Russia seeks only the most profitable of partnerships with your country. But such things are complicated. Sadly so.’

  ‘It makes a mockery of the efforts of our fine young men, if I may say so,’ the rector said, and three seats away his eldest daughter flushed down to her décolletage. He turned to Kitto. ‘What do you make of all this, young Helford? You were at Novgorod, Grezhny and Vibetsk, hard won from the French in all cases, and yet still this tin-pot emperor refuses to make his loyalties clear, receiving French diplomats in St Petersburg, so we hear.’

  ‘I’m just a soldier, sir,’ Kitto said. ‘I only go where I’m told and do what I’m told.’ He was learning sense.

  But as Crow watched, Lord Castlereagh turned smiling to his brother and Crow found that he could not breathe. ‘Enough of Russia. Let’s turn back to our own shores. After all, we’ve been without a monarch for so long. Who would you have as our king or queen, Captain Helford?’

  Kitto set down his fork. ‘Whoever my brother says should be king or queen, my lord.’

  Lord Castlereagh raised his eyebrows, soliciting a ripple of manufactured laughter from those sitting closest to him. ‘And are you so obedient to your guardian in all things, Captain Helford?’

  ‘I must be, sir,’ Kitto said. ‘After all, he holds my purse strings, and the living in Petersburg costs me dearly.’

  Another ripple of laughter spread up and down the table. Two seats away from him, Hester held up a single red, translucent grape to the candlelight before eating it, watching Kitto with the extraordinary self-possession that had made Crow desire her with all his soul since the moment he had first laid eyes on her. She glanced at him and looked up at the embossed ceiling. Her bedchamber lay directly above it, and candlelight caught the single diamond she wore on a gossamer-thin gold chain – it rested just above the swell of her velvet-clad breasts. In two days, the house would be entirely their own again. The Season could wait: they would go to London late this year, and enjoy their bed together, and the quiet of a Cornish spring, and their own child, who could now walk unsteadily from between one’s knees to a sofa.

  Castlereagh signalled to the footman to fill Kitto’s glass. ‘But I believe your position sets us up with a problem, Captain. What would you do if your brother disagreed with me, and with the rest of the Cabinet? W
ho would then have the honour of your loyalty and obedience? Me – the government, I should say – or Lord Lamorna?’

  All other conversation ended and the table fell silent.

  ‘My brother would do only what was correct,’ Crow said, and turned to Kitto. ‘Emily is right. You don’t look quite well.’

  ‘I’m perfectly well, sir.’ Kitto glanced at Crow swiftly, before turning to Castlereagh. ‘Surely, when not beneath my brother’s roof, I’m answerable only to my colonel?’

  ‘How fortunate we all are that you think so, Captain Helford,’ Lord Castlereagh said, and Crow thought of how this man had grasped for himself the power to send anyone around his own table to the gallows: Kitto included, himself included.

  In the resulting silence, Hester got to her feet. ‘Shall we withdraw for tea?’ A fraction of a moment later, she was followed by every other woman present, all obeying her cue to leave the dining-room, abandoning discussion of politics to the men, and ending Kitto’s interrogation in a manner even Castlereagh could take no exception to.

  13

  Hester was pouring tea for Lady Mulgrave in the drawing-room when she heard the dining-room door fly open, crashing into the oak-panelled wall in the hall. Dorothea Lieven stood beside her, setting down the gilded porcelain milk jug with quiet precision. Conversation in the drawing-room came to an immediate end; all ten women fell silent, and there was only the rustle of satin against linen petticoats, the sour smell of gathered bodies in the fire’s heat, Dorothea’s rose-water cologne, and the crackle of flames behind the grate. Hester knew at last that she had been waiting for this moment all evening. Crow’s manner at the dining-table had communicated deep disquiet: the way he’d held himself with that unsettled, excessive awareness of his surroundings. Usually, of course, such things were all in his mind, and he woke up telling her to run from some battlefield that haunted his dreams. But at other times his supernatural apprehension of danger was entirely justified. Hester put down the teapot and stepped out into the hall to find her husband almost at the front door, still dressed for dinner, white linen and pale skin stark against the dark blue jacket, with Kitto not far behind him. Closing the space between them with a few swift strides, Crow held her arms close to her sides with that curious gentle strength.