The Firebird's Feather

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘I’ve rather let the side down, Mother, haven’t I?’ was Bridget’s answer to Ursula’s last remark. She didn’t sound at all contrite and added, ‘But don’t try and avoid my horrid example, Kitty, by panicking and accepting the first one who proposes simply in order not to be left on the shelf.’

  ‘Bridget, how can you say such – good gracious me, so this is what you are proposing to wear for the coronation? How extraordinary!’

  Until then Ursula had been too busy talking to notice anything unusual. Now she was momentarily sidetracked as her eye alighted on the enormous, white hat, its crown frivolously covered in ruched chiffon and trimmed with velvet parma violets, delivered by the milliner and now lying on Bridget’s bed with the white raw silk dress spread out beside it. There was nothing extraordinary about either dress or hat. In fact when Bridget had tried them on, Kitty had thought them both extremely smart, the dress narrow and modishly short enough to show an inch or two above the ankles. It was presumably the wide satin sash Aunt Ursula was referring to, in bands of purple and green, which Kitty suspected Bridget intended to wear, not around her waist, but crosswise over her bosom. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her mother that the colours of the outfit – purple, green and white – were those chosen as their own by the Votes for Women campaigners. And that wearing them on that particular day would be an act of defiance, not to mention disrespect – the suffragettes, as the women who wanted universal suffrage were disparagingly called, being held in such abhorrence by the new king. Though it might possibly be repeated by many other daring women.

  The dress was subjected to a closer inspection and eventually received a nod of approval at the cut and the way the seams were sewn. Ursula loved fashionable clothes, despite her own inability, unlike Lydia, to wear them with any sort of panache, and Bridget’s dress allowance was generous. But her satisfied comments on the new outfit not having elicited any appreciable response, she switched her attention back to the previous conversation as if she’d never been deflected from it. ‘I hope, Bridget,’ she said severely, ‘you won’t let your uncle and aunt hear you speak like that. Left on the shelf, indeed!’

  Kitty suspected her mother would simply laugh; it was the sort of thing she might have said herself. Papa, however …

  They were not very much alike, Kitty’s parents. Where Lydia was exuberant, unpredictable and extrovert, her father, Louis Challoner, was an amiable, unhurried and indeed rather indolent man who was taken to his offices in Bishopsgate each morning, made a lot of money and wanted nothing more than an untroubled existence along with his wife and daughter. He adored Lydia and she – well, he was a decade older than she was; he liked his creature comforts and was already settled well into middle age, set in his ways. Neither of them would expect Kitty to marry a man she didn’t love but they did expect her to marry someone and were not encouraging when she asked what she should do if she didn’t find the right man, Papa because he was a fuddy-duddy old thing who still thought women should adhere to the Victorian ideal of wifehood and motherhood, and Lydia because she no doubt knew where dangerous ideas could lead.

  ‘Besides,’ Aunt Ursula went on, ‘dear Kitty was born too sensible, thank goodness, to do anything so rash as make an unsuitable choice.’ She smiled approvingly.

  She was correct, in one way. Too many of the young men considered eligible would be those Kitty had known as spotty, unprepossessing boys – her friends’ brothers, or boys who had galumphed around with her at dancing classes – and there was no danger of her choosing any of them, however suitable a match! Sooner would she die an old maid. But afterwards, after the excitement of her first entry into adult life had subsided, what would there be to occupy her time, even if she were to be married? The tedium she had felt throughout the last impatient years, waiting to grow up, would simply continue in a different form. Idle days filled with shopping for new clothes and other luxuries, a succession of parties, dinners, balls, Saturdays-to-Mondays at country houses, and other pointless occasions. Becoming a society hostess if she should be lucky to catch someone ambitious and moneyed enough to want such a wife, and giving him children, providing him with heirs?

  When all the time she wished – how passionately she wished – for a different life, one with meaning and purpose to it.

  Other women never seemed to find those sort of routines boring, even Lydia, but then, Papa allowed her freedom to arrange her life as she chose. In addition to the usual trivial pursuits, she had her passion for bridge (sometimes gambling rather reckless sums, the only one of her activities Louis ever objected to), and riding and exercising her horse – not to mention the hours she spent working in her room with Hester Drax.

  That thought took Kitty abruptly back yet again to something she had witnessed a day or two previously: Lydia and Miss Drax leaving the house together for some unspecified destination, walking and not taking a hansom, even though it was raining quite hard; Hester wearing a dismal mackintosh and her usual sour expression, holding the umbrella over herself and Mama, who had tucked her arm inside Hester’s as they hurried away, talking earnestly together. Nothing wrong in that – except that a lady and her maid didn’t normally walk arm in arm, even if you were Lydia and it was only for the comfortable convenience of sharing an umbrella.

  The Challoner house was brick built, tall and dignified, situated in Egremont Gardens, a large, quiet square not far from Hyde Park. Street noises were muffled by thick doors and heavy, lux-urious window drapes and today, now that Mr Findlater from two doors away had managed to get his motor car started and had driven his dust-coated and motor-veiled passengers away in clouds of smoke and a great deal of noise, the square was left to its usual Sunday morning silence, undisturbed save for the distant traffic sounds, church bells, the boom of clocks from Westminster, the occasional clop of hooves as a carriage or a hansom drove round the square or the yap of No. 22’s fat pug as their footman took it for its daily trot around the railed gardens. Indoors, too, there were no sounds apart from the monotonous ticks of the clocks Papa endlessly fussed with. The thick carpets hushed her footsteps as Kitty trailed around; and she distinctly heard the soft plop of falling rose petals from one of Lydia’s lavish flower arrangements as they scattered, ruby red on to the wavy, richly banded deep green of polished malachite. Louis’s generosity with money meant that Lydia, who worshipped anything beautiful and Russian that kept alive her origins, had filled the house with many similar, ornate pieces of furniture and ornaments. With enviable flair she had set them against fashionably pale walls, creating an effect that was much admired. Kitty carefully scooped the scattered rose petals together and threw them into a waste-paper basket, using her handkerchief to remove any traces they might have left on the semi-precious polished stone.

  It was still not yet midday.

  Tempting smells of Sunday lunch were escaping from behind the green baize door to the kitchen quarters. Half an hour and then everyone would be back home, and she had already frittered away nearly all the precious time she’d wangled, but still she couldn’t nerve herself to do what she’d intended. Inside the house it was dark and cool with the blinds prissily drawn by Mrs Thorpe to prevent any fading of the upholstery and carpets. It seemed perverse to keep out the sun and she went from room to room, sending them shooting up again, opening the windows wider to let in more of the scent of the lilacs, not caring about the housekeeper’s pursed lips. Finally, she made herself go upstairs.

  But when her hand was on the knob of Lydia’s door, she stopped. It wasn’t forbidden to go into her mother’s room when she wasn’t there, but it was understood. She hesitated, went in, then closed the door behind her and leant back against the panels, feeling like the interloper she was.

  Facing her was the icon on its stand in the corner that Mama called the krasny ugol, the beautiful corner. She professed to have given up on religion and there was no Bible or cross, no vigil lamp or other holy object to share the corner. Kitty had often wondered: was the icon a vestige o
f the faith she had been brought up to and in spite of what she said was reluctant to abandon, or was it superstition that made her keep it? Or even perhaps simply for decoration? It was very beautiful. The Madonna’s gentle, sorrowing face under her unadorned veil was dim but haloed in gold leaf and the icon was elaborately decorated with precious stones.

  She deliberately avoided looking at the writing desk and wandered to the dressing table where her mother sat in her red silk peignoir while Hester Drax brushed her hair or fixed it into its elaborate wide puffs and rolls. It came past her waist when it was down, thick, beautiful hair like pulled toffee, with golden, and sometimes red lights through it. Not like Kitty’s – thick, that was true, but just uninterestingly fair. She had been told she had a regular profile and she knew she had good teeth; she was tall and had a slim figure, which admittedly gained interesting curves when she could be persuaded into the detested boning and lacing; but she was afraid that was as far as it went for her.

  Restless and unsettled, she picked up the heavily chased silver hand mirror to view that regular profile but it seemed just the same as anyone else’s. (The very mirror in which she’d caught Lydia several times lately studying her face as if seeing it for the first time, or seeing it in a different light. Smiling. Sometimes she also spent minutes staring out of the window at nothing.) Disappointed with her own reflection, as usual, Kitty sniffed at the various bottles and creams, stole a dab of Chypre to put on her wrist and then idly opened the inlaid, velvet-lined trinket box where Lydia kept her ambers. This she wouldn’t mind: as a child Kitty had always been allowed to play with them as long as she was careful – her more valuable jewels, and the diamonds and the pearls Papa had given her were locked up in the safe in his study, and the lacquered firebird box was kept hidden in a drawer. The greatest value of these lay in their sentiment, because they had belonged to Lydia’s own mother. Kitty had heard the story so often she could have recited it in her sleep …

  Her Russian grandfather, Nikolai Kasparov, had been an intellectual, a young university professor who was foolish enough to encourage and support the left-wing revolutionary activity gathering momentum like a rising tide amongst his students. He was the son of a military officer of aristocratic lineage but he, too, had come to be sickened at the enforced feudal dependency of the working people by his homeland’s ruling elite, and their cruel subjugation of the peasants. It came to the point where he could no longer shut his eyes and he didn’t hesitate to show his sympathies with those who rebelled. In consequence of this he had fallen foul of the authorities and had narrowly escaped imprisonment by fleeing to find sanctuary and permanent exile in England, crossing the snowbound miles to Finland from St Petersburg in a horse-drawn troika with his baby daughter Lydia wrapped in furs, her dead mother’s jewellery in a chamois bag around his neck.

  Kitty let them run through her fingers, her grandmother’s bracelets, rings and brooches, pieces in different shapes and colours, though all of it was amber, mostly set in old, worked silver. A necklace of cherry amber beads; another as milky and opaque as butterscotch; a bracelet studded with shining cognac amber cabochons and a heavy ring set with an amber that was an unusual dark, bitter green. Best of all was a pendant piece suspended on a silver chain, clear and golden as honey, embedded in which was a minuscule, black insect, scarcely more than a speck, and a tiny sprig of delicate fern. When she was very young she used to cry for the poor little baby insect, simply alighting all unaware on a fern leaf when the tree resin that formed the amber had dropped stickily on to him, hardening and imprisoning both for all eternity.

  Lydia sometimes shared her tears. She cried as easily as she laughed. She was a mercurial, quicksilver creature, a delight to be with when she was happy, possessed of a great sense of fun and humour, the sort of person who lit up every room she entered. On the other hand, there was no one more dismal than she when the moods of deep, Russian melancholy descended on her, bewildering easygoing Louis, who had never had a temperament in his life and was at a loss to comfort her when she was weighed down with a despair quite unknown to him. He waited patiently until it was all over. Although she had been spirited away from her homeland at less than two years old and lived all the rest of her life among the phlegmatic British, he recognised that every day had to be full of drama; it was as necessary to her as breathing. Russian angst was deep in her soul, after all. These volatile moods, which usually ended as suddenly as they had begun, were marked by the presentation of a huge beribboned box of chocolate bon-bons, flowers or some other treat he knew she loved, handed over with a wry smile and a look in his eyes Kitty could never quite make out.

  But where was the cross? The silver, traditional Orthodox, three-barred cross with ornately worked trefoil motifs, embellished with a single, black amber cabochon, threaded on a chain and designed to be worn as a pendant? It was heavy, masculine in style and not the most attractive piece, and although Lydia treasured it, she never wore it. Certainly not with her riding outfit. She had probably decided to keep it elsewhere, but to make sure it wasn’t in the box Kitty tipped everything on to the polished top of the dressing table. The heavy ring with the dark green stone slid off and rolled across the room, where it came to rest between the connecting door to her father’s bedroom and the bookcase next to Lydia’s desk. Was it a sign? She scooped the rest of the jewellery back into the box and retrieved the ring and as she straightened, let her glance rest on the book standing resplendently alone between two weighty, carved soapstone elephants that were used as bookends.

  The lower bookshelves were crammed with Lydia’s preferred reading: Russian novels, of course – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, as well as books by English authors and a collection of tracts in Russian. The one standing on top between the elephants, red with gilt lettering on the spine, Deborah’s Fortune, was a romantic novel – written by Lydia herself. Not as Lydia Challoner, or even her maiden name of Lydia Kasparov, but under the pen name of Marie Bartholemew.

  Unlike many of her other interests, quickly taken up and as quickly abandoned, this one had survived, though she insisted her authorship was a secret kept within the family, for what reason Kitty could never imagine: enough people had liked and bought the book for the publisher to want more. Maybe she thought everyone, like Ursula, would suspect anything written by her must be too trivial to read. Kitty could see the point – Lydia, her mother! It was difficult to imagine her having enough perseverance and concentration, enough staying power, to write a whole book, much less another in the process of being typed for the publisher.

  There was only a single drawer in the desk, and though as far as Kitty knew she only kept in there the exercise books with marbled covers in which the rough drafts were written, her hand went towards it. Stopped. For a moment she was shaken with doubts. There was a word for what she was doing, and it wasn’t nice: snooping. Even snooping because she was worried. She had no idea what she was looking for. Something to convince her she must be mistaken? But here, among her personal things? That was ridiculous, yet she needed somehow to find reassurance that in spite of everything there would be an innocent explanation for what she had lately seen and suspected. She hated herself for thinking the worst.

  What stopped her was the sight of one of the exercise books lying on the desk. This, labelled with a large number three, must be for the next projected work. Lydia was adamant about not letting anyone, not even Kitty, see work in progress. It was easy to see why when she opened it, the guilty impulse to read it being too strong to ignore. There were only a few pages already written, covered with her distinctive handwriting, so wildly erratic that after a cursory glance Kitty abandoned all thoughts of attempting to decipher it. Written in green ink, in huge, loopy letters with many blots, misspellings and scratchings-out, scribbled at speed, it would later be transcribed by Miss Drax into a neat manuscript for her publisher. It was this heroic feat that made Hester Drax so indispensable, and all credit for it was given to her by Mama. ‘I simply couldn’t
do it without Hester!’ she declared. To which Hester replied dryly that of course that was very true, the manuscripts would have been unacceptable without her help.

  ‘Plain-speaking will be the downfall of her one day,’ Louis sometimes said. ‘She has no sense of her place in the scheme of things, that woman.’

  ‘But that’s why we get on so well, darling,’ smiled Lydia, who was nothing if not plain-spoken herself. ‘She doesn’t mean to be unpleasant.’

  ‘Well, if you get on with her I suppose that’s all that matters.’

  Hester Drax occupied what would surely be a unique position in any household. She was ostensibly employed as lady’s maid, but Mama, although scrupulously turned out day and night, despised the sort of woman who never lifted a finger to help herself, and this left Miss Drax free to make herself useful in other ways. For this purpose, she had a small room equipped as an office, complete with typewriter. It was an odd arrangement that seemed to work for both of them. They always had their heads together. And it was obviously true what Lydia said. She would have been the first to admit that she had not been well taught. Nikolai Kasparov had been too busy over the injustices being perpetrated thousands of miles away to see what was going on under his own nose, his own daughter growing up steeped in the terrible history of their people but basically uneducated in the formal sense. Through the offices and financial assistance of a good friend, she had in the end been sent to a fashionable school where she learnt little more than to be a young English lady, but where she also made friends who later introduced her to Louis, thus enabling her to make the sort of advantageous marriage that would otherwise not have been possible for her.