Wicked by Design Page 9

  ‘Nathaniel Edwards just rode over from Sancreed. Captain Wentworth is to raid Newlyn on Castlereagh’s orders – there’s a prayer meeting in the chapel. It’s said they’re plotting sedition, aided and abetted by me. I’m going there now, but only because they will all be cut down like wheat.’

  ‘They’re raiding a prayer meeting on your own land?’ Hester demanded, knowing it would be useless to argue with him just as she knew this might be the last time she saw him alive. ‘Just a prayer meeting? But what possible proof or justification—’

  ‘Ask our guest Lord Castlereagh,’ Crow said, pale with incandescent fury. ‘He sanctioned the entire manoeuvre. You must take the child and go.’ He handed her a heavy leather-wrapped roll of banknotes and the silver pistol that was always kept concealed behind those volumes of Livy on the dining-room bookshelf, along with a ball-bag heavy with shot and cartridges, and turned to face his brother. ‘Stay here, Kitto, do you understand? You’re commissioned in the British army – you can’t be implicated in a Cornish rebellion, however manufactured it might be.’

  ‘No!’ Hester cried in Cornish. ‘Crow, can’t you see what Castlereagh is doing? This is a trap. This is just how he always meant to incriminate you. He wants you out of the way. He’ll see you hanged.’

  Crow simply kissed her forehead, one hand pressing briefly at the small of her back as he pulled her towards him, then turned and walked out of the wide-open front door, and Kitto followed him, flouting his brother’s orders without a word. Even if Crow understood how much Castlereagh hated him, she was sure in that moment that he didn’t really know why, and how much Castlereagh had longed for Crow’s mother to notice him all those years ago. Hester turned to face Dorothea, who alone had followed her. The dining-room had fallen eerily silent; at a glance through the open doors, she saw the rest of the men still at table, sitting in awkward quiet as though they had witnessed a family argument and not the start of a revolution. After a moment’s shocked silence, Hester snatched Dorothea’s arm and they ran together to the library, closing the door behind them.

  ‘It was a trap, wasn’t it?’ Hester demanded. ‘Castlereagh never meant to come to terms with my husband. All he ever wanted was an excuse to finish him. Is this for the benefit of Russia, too, or England alone?’

  For a moment, Dorothea only stared at her, her face flushed with the heat of the drawing-room and the liberal quantities of champagne before dinner. ‘Run,’ she said, and Hester knew that she was not speaking as the wife of a diplomat up to her emerald necklace in political scheming, but as one woman to another. Her sudden and unmistakable frankness was terrifying. ‘Take your baby, Hester,’ she said, ‘and run.’

  Leaving her, Hester sprinted up the stairs, snatching her velvet skirts out of the way, only to hear the sound of footfalls in the hall below. Turning to glance over her shoulder, she saw soldiers filing in at the front door – men of the 11th Northumbrians who had respectfully bowed to her outside the draper’s in Penzance not two days before.

  ‘Lady Lamorna!’

  Stifling a terrified scream, Hester reached the landing; she dared not look again but she heard at least two sets of footfalls on the stairs behind her, and darted across the hall into her own bedchamber, where Lizzy had laid out her nightgown. She reached the door set into the wainscoting and, turning the well-worn brass knob, let herself into the servants’ passage, closing it carefully behind her. What would happen to the servants if Wentworth’s men raided the house? Tears prickled at her eyes as she stumbled up the whitewashed back stairs, tearing along the narrow corridor that led towards the nursery. The sheer quiet filled her with terror the like of which she hadn’t felt since the French Occupation. The servants’ door into the nursery was slightly ajar, and stinging bile rose up her throat. The nursery was never quiet. If Morwenna were not crying, or babbling, Beatie never stopped talking to her; even if Morwenna slept, Beatie knitted or sewed, and one heard the soft clacking of the needles, or the creak of the rocking chair, or even the soft sound of their breathing. Now she heard only the sounds of the world outside the house, the call of an owl, and the distant crashing of surf against rocks. She pushed open the door, and the first thing she saw was a pool of dark blood spreading across the ancient waxed oaken floorboards. Vomit surged up her throat and she spat bile and champagne on to the rag rug, forcing herself to step further into the room. Beatie was still in her rocking chair, exactly where she had been sitting as her throat was cut, doubtless from behind as she dozed, her head now lolling to one side.

  Sobbing, one hand pressed to her mouth, Hester forced herself to step closer to the silent crib, hearing only the sound of coals shifting in the grate and her own disordered breathing. She reached the carved wooden cradle that had sheltered Crow, and Kitto, and their father before them, and finally Morwenna herself. Now; it must be now. She looked down and saw nothing but the faint indentation where Morwenna had lain with the white lace-trimmed cap, her hands open like a pair of small starfish – and yet there was no Morwenna, there was no blood, only the blanket. It meant nothing. She was only a baby: they might have smothered her, perhaps that had been easier, even for a hardened soldier. Stifling a low, animal moan, Hester cast around the nursery, but saw only the crib itself, the blood around Beatie’s rocking chair, old embroidered curtains shifting at a window left ajar, the tidy piles of napkins, blankets and gowns resting beside one another on the linen-chest next to the marble-topped wash-stand – the sheer mundanity of it all was a mockery. Morwenna was not here, dead or alive.

  She heard footfalls on the landing outside in the family quarters, muffled by the rug Crow’s grandfather had brought home from Rajasthan, long ago. Wentworth’s men were coming. They were searching for her, even now. She reached the servants’ door and let herself out, pulling it shut behind her, praying that the hinges would not creak. Half sobbing, she paused at the bottom of the next flight of the stairs and ran up towards the servants’ attics. It was dark up here, and she stumbled, tripping over a soft, heavy obstacle, rough linen and tightly braided hair beneath her outstretched fingertips.

  ‘Lizzy!’ Hester gasped, looking down at her maidservant as her eyes grew used to the moonlit dark. Lizzy was lying on her side, curled up. Hester moved her hand and placed it on the floorboards, touching wet warmth. Not urine but blood. Lizzy’s every breath now came in a strangled rattle that Hester knew too well: she was dying of some violent injury concealed by the darkness. Somehow, Hester found her hand and bent over at the frantic, fluttering pressure of Lizzy’s work-worn fingers.

  ‘The little maid,’ Lizzy said, so quietly that Hester had to lean in close; she could smell the clove pastilles Lizzy habitually chewed. ‘Mrs Rescorla took her, but I’m sorry, mistress. They made me tell them where, but I told them the long way round. The soldiers—’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Lizzy.’ Hester forced out each word. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be real. ‘But where did Mrs Rescorla take Lady Morwenna? Lizzy, please can you—’ Hester had to lean even closer to hear what she was struggling to say.

  ‘The old keeper’s cottage.’ And with one last rattling breath, Lizzy died.

  14

  After running for half an hour, the keeper’s lodge was now no more than a few moments’ walk away, and although from this vantage point Hester couldn’t see the dark ocean, she could hear it rushing up to meet the rocks far below to the east. Thinking of nothing save the shape of her daughter’s hands, plump and strong, and the curve of her cheek, the bed-warm tangle of her curls, Hester pushed on into the trees. Low-hanging branches, gorse and last year’s dead bracken caught at the heavy velvet skirts of her evening gown. She ran on, quickly emerging from the sparse woodland, with little choice but to take her chances on the open moorland above Lamorna Cove. Skirts and petticoats alike tangled around her legs as she ran, and the satin boots Lizzy had buttoned her into just hours before were sodden, her stockinged feet sliding around inside them, the skin on her heels quickly rubbed raw.
Lizzy is dead. Lizzy is dead. Beatie is dead. The words rolled around the inside of her skull like pebbles shaken in a bowl.

  Glancing back over her shoulder where Nansmornow lay hidden by trees and the shoulder of the valley, she glimpsed movement and her heart seized. Emerging from the cover of a stand of windblown hawthorn trees came six dark moving shapes. Men: Wentworth’s English soldiers. Once, their very presence would have made her feel safe, but now every loyalty had shifted. Now they were surely looking for her as well as Morwenna under Castlereagh’s orders. Don’t run, she told herself, suppressing a sick burst of fear. The walk down the scrubby, sandy path took a lifetime, and all the while she thought of nothing save Morwenna, racked with terror that she would reach the cottage only to find it contained nothing but the trestle table they always used for a shooting supper folded in the corner, the windows cobweb-strewn, whitewash peeling from walls that were always damp when there was not a fire leaping behind the old black grate.

  Please God, Hester thought, please God, still be there. Be safe. Sheltered by trees, the small stone cottage hove into view as she broached the brow of the hill, skittering and skidding down the root-tangled path towards it. The shuttered windows stared at her like accusing eyes: she had been downstairs drinking champagne and longing to go to bed with her profligate husband even as Wentworth’s men quietly infiltrated the servants’ quarters, killing her own daughter’s nurse where she sat, all of it orchestrated by Lord Castlereagh. And had he done so because she refused him? She had failed her daughter. Hester pushed open the door and found Catlin on her knees, cleaning out the grate with an old brush in the moonlight streaming in through one unshuttered window, and Morwenna sitting fat and unsteady on the hearthstone, passing a pebble from one hand to the other.

  ‘I thought I might as well keep busy.’ Catlin stood up, wiping both hands on her apron, and Hester made no reply, lifting Morwenna, her throat sealed tight with agony as she made every effort to recall the precise heft of her child’s weight in her arms, the exact softness of her neck, and the wet-sand shade of her curls that would bleach almost white when summer came, even as her skin darkened. Morwenna reached up and grasped a handful of Hester’s hair, which was springing loose from pin and satin band alike.

  ‘It’s because of what happened in the library!’ The words flew from her lips. ‘Catlin, you saw – and I refused him. And now this—’

  ‘None of that, my lady!’ Catlin said fiercely. ‘Do you really believe he wouldn’t have done it anyway? Don’t be a little fool, Het. Use your brain – what must we do?’

  ‘I think it must be Scilly,’ Hester said, forcing herself to sound calm, so as not to frighten her child. ‘That’s where we must go. And then on – on anywhere. I hate to put the Trewarthens in danger, but they keep a skiff by the cottages above the cove.’ Like Hester herself, Catlin had been an island girl, and was as adept at the helm of a boat as any fisherman, but hot bile rose up Hester’s throat at the thought of her daughter making a thirty-mile crossing over open water. And yet, in Lord Castlereagh’s hands Morwenna would be in far greater danger – no more than a pawn moved to ensure Crow’s destruction. She closed her eyes and thought of the drowned men lying in the chapel at Nansmornow after the wreck of the Deliverance, their bloated and battered features, their swollen fingers. She thought of the corpses in their winding sheets, lying side by side in every cart the estate could spare, and the silent, thin-faced women who had accompanied them home across the moors to St Erth. She, her daughter and Catlin might drown together, but there was no choice.

  And then she heard it: the booted foot of a heavy man slipping on the stone-pocked, sandy path that led to the door. With slow, rocking movements, Hester crossed the room and passed her daughter to Catlin, a strange roaring in her ears as she registered the sudden lack of weight in her arms while still breathing in her daughter’s nursery scent of milk, urine and mallow soap. Just faintly, she heard what was unmistakably more footfalls, and a sharp intake of breath. Hester drew her pistol. Thank God. Thank God for Crow and his imperious insistence that she carry it. Those men outside were going to come in here, and they would take her prisoner, Catlin and Morwenna, too. They would all three be used against Crow; she knew he would give his life to save them without a second thought, but she could not and would not live in the world without him.

  Crossing to the window, Hester prayed that Morwenna would remain quiet. She glanced at Catlin, who met her eyes, pushing her reddened knuckle between Morwenna’s questing lips, and then she looked at the window, and Hester prised open the shutters. One-handed, she hoisted herself up on to the windowsill, slapped in the face by iron-cold air. It was hard to balance, but she dared not relinquish the pistol, even for a moment. In wordless agreement Catlin steadied Hester’s legs as she made a shuffling, awkward turn on the windowsill. There was no sign of the men on this side of the cottage – they had all gone to the door, assuming that a clutch of women and an infant would present them with none of the difficulties that might warrant surrounding the place.

  Hester was just tall enough to haul herself up on to the tiled roof, still white with frost. She couldn’t put the pistol down, without allowing it to crash to the heather below, useless. Seized with panic, Hester lifted one foot and felt Catlin’s hands beneath the sole of her boot, pushing her up with all of her considerable strength and no warning: she must have set Morwenna down on the flagstones. The pistol slipped from Hester’s grasp. With a surge of sour panic, she caught it with one flinging, desperate hand, making a starfish on the roof, hampered by her skirts and heavy petticoats soaked up past the hem. Frozen and half concealed by the pitch of the roof, she watched three soldiers in battered red uniform jackets huddle in conference outside the door, just below her. They’d take her child away. They were going to imprison her. Under orders or not, they must be stopped. One removed his shako to scratch his head, his scalp a teeming mass of sparse, mouse-brown hair and attendant lice, spotted with pus-yellow, infected sores. Hester shot him through the top of his skull and he crumpled like a puppet with the strings cut; she had just murdered an officer of the British army. Like Crow, she was now beyond the law.

  At the pistol shot, the dead man’s companions looked around wildly, and Hester pressed herself against the tiles, curled up on one side as she reloaded with frantic speed. The shorter of the two soldiers turned towards the encroaching trees, musket cocked. He moved just as Hester fired, and he took the bullet in the back of his neck instead of in the skull; he died anyway, sprawled on his front, and Hester thought of his mother, his wife, his child. The third soldier looked up and in the moment that he fired his musket, Hester rolled to one side, lent speed by her terror for Morwenna. The shot hissed past her ear and she suppressed – just – the need to urinate where she lay, loading her pistol with unconscious speed.

  The last soldier fired again and, lent wings by terror, Hester moved just in time; the shot dislodged a tile and she slipped, sliding skittishly down the roof. With all her strength she flung out one arm as she fell. Wrenching her head around to get that red jacket in view, she fired and he dropped like a stone, but even as Hester landed on the heather-rooted path at the side of the cottage, the wind knocked clean from her lungs, she knew he couldn’t be dead, not yet – she’d surely only hit him in the shoulder at best.

  Gasping for breath, Hester leaned against the weathered stone wall, reloading again. Inside, she could hear Morwenna wailing, and at the sound of the cry her breasts tingled, bursting with milk. Moving sideways, crab-fashion, Hester edged along the wall to the corner of the cottage. Turning her head, she saw the soldier lurch to his feet, one hand pressed to a dark, spreading stain across his belly. He was going to die, but he could still kill her first, and Morwenna and Catlin too. In one swift move, Hester fired, and this time she hit him between the eyes, obliterating the back of his skull, a merciful end. Having killed three British soldiers, she crouched on the sandy path, her face in her hands, shaking with dry, sobbing breaths. Crow co
uldn’t save her now. No one could.

  15

  From Nansmornow Crow rode hard to the top of the Lamorna Valley, galloping across field and moorland, setting his mare at hedge after hedge, barely registering the leap or landing, the shivering dewdrops clinging to last year’s dead bracken and the daffodils growing along the stone Cornish hedges, or the grey, black-faced ewes almost ready to lamb; he was aware only of his white-hot fury. Castlereagh had ordered an attack on his own land, on his own people whilst dining at his table and drinking his claret. Wentworth’s men had deliberately stirred up unrest in Newlyn, of that Crow had no doubt. And now this was the result of ignoring his own instinct for danger. Dawn came, the sun rose, and a grey mist settled on the moorland and kale-fields between Kerris and Paul, concealing even the pasterns of his grey mare, but Crow was scarcely aware of that, or the fact that Kitto rode shoulder to shoulder with him. An hour flew past, and then the streets of Newlyn were unpleasantly quiet, and the stone-built cottages of hewn granite with shuttered windows were silent. Crow set the mare hard along the straw-strewn filth of Fore Street, past the well and the jumble of market-stalls where traders gathered to sell salted fish and bread at inflated prices that hardly anyone could afford.

  He reined in, turning to Kitto, who had kept pace with him all this time, and who in his fevered condition should not have been setting the gelding at hedge after hedge.