Wicked by Design by Katy Moran

Author:Katy Moran [Moran, Katy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786695376
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Part 3

COUP DE GRCE

35

Hester stood at the end of the great hall at Nansmornow, cradling Morwenna. They were both cast into shadow by low evening light streaming in through the arched window behind her. She wore a light muslin gown that hung from her hips in loose, Grecian folds, and in her arms Morwenna held on to her necklace of coral beads. Crow longed to pull her towards him, Morwenna safe between them. He tried to walk to his wife and child but he couldn’t move; he called to Hester and she came closer, his desperation rising with her every step, but when she was close enough to emerge from the shadows, she turned her face to the light and he saw that it was no longer her own, but the bloated, ruined mask of a drowned corpse, a penny-sized crab crawling out of a dark fissure in her cheek.

Several days before Kitto and Nadezhda neared Chudovo, Crow woke to a room ringing with the echo of his own scream, and a headache of sickening ferocity. Every day when he woke up, it was to the same unbending truth: he was never going to see Hester and Morwenna again. He closed his eyes and instead saw Tatyana’s face, her mocking smile as she spoke: I’m quite sure that even now you won’t allow Captain Helford to suffer for your own failings. In truth, he had indulged in such destructive grief that he’d squandered his brother’s future as well as his own. Only when he found this bastard Russian princess would his name be worth passing on to Kitto, only then could he hold a pistol to his own jaw and end this relentless nightmare. Coloured lights swam before his eyes, and there was no warm, perfumed body in the bed beside him, no scent of unfamiliar stale breath on his creased pillow, and so where was he? Somewhere, someone was knocking on a door. Leaning over the side of the bed, he reached for the chamber pot and spewed. Recognising the willow-leaf pattern on the top edge of the pot, he saw he was back at the embassy. Swearing quietly in Cornish, he lay back on the laundered pillows, breathing in the incongruous scents of starch and the ambassadorial lemon-balm barrel-soap. The door-knocking intensified.

‘What?’ he demanded, still in Cornish, and then switched to French. ‘Quoi?’

Cathcart’s valet, Varley, edged his way into the room. ‘As your lordship doesn’t have your own man, my lord, Mr Brooks suggested that I might perhaps assist you with dressing for dinner. It’s six o’clock already, sir.’

‘Good luck, Varley,’ Crow said, and closed his eyes, missing Hoby, whose chief virtue had always been judging when to preserve a diplomatic silence. He had no way of knowing if his own valet was even still alive. How was it possible that he must dress for dinner, that such a thing could be considered of even the vaguest importance? He was still drunk, and there was very little anyone could do about it.

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