The Firebird's Feather

by Marjorie Eccles

  If Lydia were here now she would not see the handsome man she had married. She would be disgusted by the pouches beneath his eyes, his grey skin and the hair fast receding from his forehead. He was forty-nine years old, looked sixty and felt nearer seventy. After a long, considered moment, he put the stopper back into the decanter and returned to his chair. It was no use, he could at last admit, sitting here trying to make sense out of her death by drinking to the bottom of a bottle. For the sake of what Lydia had been to him he needed to take hold of himself.

  Lydia and the mysterious person she had become in the last few weeks. He would previously have gone to the scaffold before admitting that in fact he had never really, deep down, known his wife, what and who she was. She had been a contradictory character, he had always known that, but it had been part of her charm: her warm, loving nature, her sense of fun as a counterbalance to the moods he had always put down to the Russian inheritance of which she’d been so intensely proud. The pride that had been so sedulously fostered by her father, Nikolai Kasparov – he who had been a passionate anti-Tsarist, a fighter all his life against the centuries-old tyrannies and injustices which the people of his homeland still endured. Lydia had grown up steeped in the dark history of their people, and with the conviction that one day wrongs must be righted, if necessary at the cost of spilled blood.

  She had been extravagant, as much with money as with her emotions, but he had never minded that; he had shrugged and allowed her to spend as she wished. He delighted to see heads turn in admiration of her beautiful clothes and arresting presence when they appeared anywhere, Lydia outshining everyone, as she always did; he had shared her satisfaction when she came home with yet another costly trophy, some highly priced, ornate Russian work of art to adorn the house. It was only her bridge debts that he frowned upon, and even so only slightly, though his frowns had deepened of late, when their size had increased, the last one alarmingly so. She claimed they were debts owed to Fanny Estrabon – her dearest friend, although Louis had recently had moments of wondering if there had not been a cooling off there. He had been wrong of course; they’d remained thick as ever. He suspected the ‘debts’ were more likely to have been a loan Fanny was conveniently forgetting to repay. She was a bridge fiend, and notorious for running up liabilities, her excuse being that her husband was unbelievably stingy with money. Louis had smiled wryly at this – he knew very well it was likely to be true: her husband, Paul Estrabon, was not only his business partner but had been close to him ever since their schooldays together. The bond between them was as strong as that of many brothers, certainly stronger than that of Louis to either Henry in Shropshire or Barnabus in Australia.

  He had never before had reason to suspect Lydia of lying to him, and that she might have had reason to do so pained him more than he could endure, but there had been no getting away from it. Had everything he had given her not been enough? What more could he have done? Why had she deceived him? And apart from Louis himself, only she knew what had been kept in the safe. Only she could have gained access to his keys. Louis knew the two detectives hadn’t been slow to deduce this.

  He opened the bottom drawer of the desk. From under a pile of papers he retrieved the letter, folded into four. Opening it, he held it for a while between finger and thumb, like something unclean, before carrying it to the empty grate. He struck a match and held it an inch from the paper. But before it had more than caught the corner, he pinched out the flame with his thumb and forefinger. Then he refolded the letter and put it back in the drawer.

  Six

  After leaving the Challoners, Marcus drove back to his sister’s home, where he was presently staying. He crawled through a noisy chaos of buses and cars held up by slow horse-drawn traffic, frustrating the urge he had to move as fast as he could, away from what he’d left behind: the brief glimpse of Louis Challoner, very nearly on the edge of going to pieces, and Kitty – looking lost, but so grave and contained. Dry-eyed. Grief so controlled he feared it.

  Kitty, he thought, with something approaching despair.

  Eliza was, unsurprisingly, not at home when he arrived. He asked for whisky and soda to be brought, and went into what had been his late brother-in-law’s study, shrugged off his jacket and threw himself into a deep, leather armchair. For once he was glad of the emptiness of this luxurious mansion flat, one in a gloomy block off Bryanston Square, which usually oppressed him with its cold atmosphere, so different from the warm one, even in its present despair, of the house he had just left. Tonight, he did not want to share with anyone the rage and self-disgust that consumed him, least of all with Eliza.

  His sister lived here alone, apart from servants, and she had been happy enough to have Marcus stay with her as long as it did not interfere with the ceaseless round of social activities she had embarked upon since the premature death of her husband. In the event he might as well have been staying in a hotel for all the family intimacy they shared. She rarely came home before three in the morning and never rose until eleven, in order to prepare herself for the next engagement in her diary. The only times they saw each other seemed to be at the homes of mutual acquaintances or if they caught glimpses of each other at the theatre, or across a dance floor. As it was, Marcus might as well have been living with his father, had it not been for the fact that Loddhurst was inconveniently situated thirty miles out of London … inconvenient for present purposes, at any rate. And in any case, he and his father …

  He took a long pull of his whisky, savage with himself for playing fast and loose with opportunities that would never be granted to him again. He was at a loss to know why he had got himself into this situation – or rather, he knew perfectly well, but damned himself all the same and just wished devoutly and with all his being that he had never agreed to it. It had been done for the wrong reasons though mainly, like some errant schoolboy, to appease his father for disappointing him so badly.

  Until his retirement Sir Aiden Villiers had been a career diplomat, holding various posts in places as far apart as Warsaw, Constantinople, Vienna and St Petersburg, the latter a place where he had served for eight years. Marcus’s mother had died when he was a child of seven and his sister Eliza eighteen. The large gap in their ages and the fact that Eliza had married young meant that brother and sister had never had the opportunity to get to know each other well. Sir Aiden had chosen to keep his son by his side while he lived abroad, delegating his education to a succession of tutors rather than sending him away to school. As father and son they had developed an easy relationship, though not too close; they were perhaps too alike, keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Marcus, who was always adept at his lessons, had delighted his tutors and Sir Aiden had expected great things of him when he went up to Oxford.

  What had come over him there? A certain arrogance that led him to believe he was so brilliant he didn’t need to work as he should have done? Perhaps. More to the point, life as the child of a diplomat in often turbulent countries had been a protected and sheltered one, since freedom was necessarily curtailed. The unaccustomed association with sometimes wild young undergraduates, many of whom regarded time spent at Oxford as nothing more than a lark, a rite of passage they were expected to go through as a nod to education before taking their place in the social milieu, had led him to drift into bad habits, although to do him justice he had never succumbed to excess. Rather it had been three years of wasted opportunity, fooling around, and ending up not with the brilliant degree, which had been predicted, but with a mediocre one, which had shocked and shamed him and devastated his father. In a mood of self-disgust Marcus had taken himself off to knock about the world in general until he’d worked off his own fury with himself.

  He had returned to England to rejoin Sir Aiden, who was now living here in retirement and seeming hell-bent on turning back his home, Loddhurst, to its former glory as quickly as possible. It was a house they both loved; not too large but of some distinction, and his father was obsessed with repairing as quickly as p
ossible the neglect that had occurred during his protracted absences abroad. He was still a comparatively young man, hale and hearty, and confidently expected to be master of Loddhurst for many years yet. Marcus did not enquire too closely into the reason for the hurry.

  He himself had at last begun to turn his thoughts seriously to considering how he could make up for lost time, toward plans that would lead to an interesting and useful life, at least until it should be time for him to take over the running of Loddhurst – a prospect not likely to occur in the near future but one he thought he would at some time enjoy. In the meantime, it might still be possible to prepare himself, if not for attaining a post in the academic life as had once been his aim, then perhaps entering the Foreign Office himself. His father, reading him better than Marcus was aware of, had not rushed him into anything, although on that day several months ago when he had contrived to put him in a situation that required a firm decision, it had clearly been because he thought it was time Marcus moved forward.

  He hadn’t yet finished his drink but he couldn’t sit still, and began pacing about restlessly. Dinner was not a regular occurrence here at this house, unless specially ordered, since both Eliza and he dined out most nights, but the events of the day had left him as tightly wound as a watch spring and he didn’t feel up to encountering anyone he knew should he go out to find some supper. He made a sudden decision to ring for them to make him a sandwich. After which he would drive down to Loddhurst tonight, rather than wait to see his father the following day. When Marcus had telephoned him to tell him of the tragedy, Sir Aiden had immediately announced he would find time to interrupt his journey to Paris the following day so that they could meet. Capital! thought Marcus grimly. There was a good deal his father himself would have to explain, even in the limited time there would be. It was not to be hoped or expected that he would put off his visit to Paris – it was one of the regular trips he made, to be with the woman who had been his mistress for many years, a Mme Estelle Bouvier, with which nothing was allowed to interfere.

  Marcus had been aware of Mme Bouvier and her place in his father’s life for as long as he could remember. Sir Aiden had never made any secret of his attachment to her, a charming and sophisticated Frenchwoman whom he had met when her husband had been an attaché in St Petersburg. Marcus knew nothing of Henri Bouvier, whether he was a complaisant husband, if there had been a separation, or even if he was now dead or still alive. The arrangement seemed to suit both sides, his father was obviously happy with it and he felt it was no business of his to comment on or question something so private.

  The idea of doing something positive by going down to Loddhurst tonight having energised him, and having eaten his sandwich, there seemed no reason not to start immediately. As he passed through the hall on his way to his room to change into clothes more suitable for driving, his eye was caught by an envelope lying to one side of the mat. The afternoon post had already been placed on the usual salver; this had been hand delivered and must have escaped his notice when he came in – a plain, white envelope, with his own name written in block capitals. Just his name, no address. When he broke the seal he found inside a single scrap of paper with some sort of pencil sketch on it. The sketch had been roughly torn across: the piece he was holding appeared to be a partial drawing of a dog with a long, bushy tail, lean flanks and long legs. Puzzled, he felt inside the envelope for the rest of it but there was nothing. Glancing at the drawing again it now seemed to him the sketch resembled the hindquarters of a wolf rather than a dog.

  In no mood for guessing games, he shrugged, crumpled the paper and envelope into a ball and tossed it into the fireplace, forgetting it was an unseasonably hot May day and there was no fire lit. It hit the fan of pleated, red paper in the grate and rolled out on to the hearthrug. He retrieved it but on second thoughts smoothed out the sketch. He stared at it but it meant no more now than it had a few minutes ago; it was nonsense. All the same, some instinct now made him fold it carefully and slip it inside his leather pocketbook.

  Seven

  It was an ordeal that had to be faced, going once more into her mother’s room, and sooner rather than later. Otherwise it would be a hurdle she might never find the courage to surmount. So at the end of that terrible, unbelievable Sunday, Kitty nerved herself to do it.

  The furious clatter of the typewriter sounded from behind the door of the little room Hester Drax used as an office as she went past. To work on the Sabbath was normally against her religious principles. She had, however, announced that the manuscript she’d been working on was finished for all save the last couple of chapters, but there were notes, full enough to make her confident of being able to knock it into shape in no time at all. ‘If you should want to see it published, of course,’ she’d added deferentially, leaving unspoken her own obvious wish that it certainly should be, and that Mama would undoubtedly have wanted it so.

  ‘That would be up to my brother, but it’s not something he must be troubled with at the moment,’ Aunt Ursula had said firmly. But there could be no harm in having the manuscript typed and ready for when he was in a position to decide what to do about it, and she was sure Mr Challoner would have no objections to Miss Drax staying on until that was done. Hester had merely nodded briefly. Absolved now from attending to Lydia’s personal wants, she was left free to concentrate wholly on the book, and she clearly had no intention of taking unfair advantage of the opportunity to extend her employment here by stretching out the time it was taking to finish the work. One could only admire her tenacity and determination. And her loyalty, of course.

  Despite having screwed up her courage, Kitty found her footsteps dragging as she neared her mother’s bedroom door, further along the corridor. This time the feeling that she was intruding was worse, so without giving herself time to think she pushed the door open.

  There was no reason why the room should have changed, and of course it hadn’t. Her mother’s scent still hung in the air; the lovely icon winked sapphire and ruby lights from its corner; the silver-topped bottles on the dressing table gleamed; Marie Bartholemew’s leather book still stood supported by its soapstone elephants on top of the bookcase. The firebird box had not been magicked from the back of the drawer where she had always kept it hidden away.

  But her presence, like a ghost in the room, choked Kitty so that she could scarcely breathe. Like a thief, she lifted the box and slid the drawer shut. And then, hesitating for only a fraction of a moment, she picked up the exercise book which was her mother’s next proposed work, the one numbered three, still on the desk where she had left it, and fled back along the passage to her own room as if pursued by Satan.

  Once back there she flung herself on to her bed, where she curled up, her back against the headboard, the box clutched to her chest, getting her breath back. Her only thought had been to take the box to safety, as something precious that had been secret between herself and her mother and must not be meddled with by other people, especially the police, should they want to search Mama’s rooms, as Jon had warned they surely would. Similarly with the exercise book, although she would make sure to replace that before Hester Drax should notice it was missing.

  She ran her fingers over the rich, encrusted design on the box lid and as she felt the filigree gold work beneath her fingers, all at once the desire to open it left her. It was ridiculous to feel as if this familiar object gave out something dark and unwholesome. It was not Pandora’s box which she should not open lest she should release all the evils of the world. She lifted the lid. No evil spirits flew out but as in Pandora’s box, there was something lying there. Not Hope in this case. What lay there was nothing more than a blank, torn-off scrap of drawing paper – or blank until it was turned over. The reverse side showed a pencil drawing depicting the head and forequarters of an animal – the rest of its body was missing, presumably the half that had been torn away. The animal was recognisably a wolf, a volk, as Lydia had translated it.

  Although she had never been kn
own to pick up a needle Lydia had tried at one time or another – and later rejected – most things considered to be feminine accomplishments, the sad little landscape painting that Papa out of kindness kept hanging in his study being the sole remnant of her enthusiasm for watercolours, for instance. She hadn’t been too skilful with a pencil, either, but this was one of her better efforts. But … a wolf? And why on earth was it put secretly away, shut up in her firebird box? Even more curious … why was it only half a drawing? Where was the other half? The animal’s long, pointed muzzle, the narrow eyes became more realistic, and more menacing, the longer Kitty looked at it. It was ridiculous to feel that small, cold chill running down her spine, and her flesh creeping.

  That the box contained anything at all was surprising. All her life, Kitty had known and loved it. Why did Mama keep it empty, she used to ask when she was a little girl, and begged to have it to keep her own childish treasures in. But, normally so generous, she would not let Kitty have it. Perhaps it had been too cherished an object to give to a child, though she had loved the box too much to have maltreated it. Nor was it intrinsically valuable – the glowing red stones she had once thought of as rubies she knew now were only red glass.

  ‘It will be yours one day, darling,’ Mama had always said. She had never envisaged that day coming so soon, and in such a way. And that she would not want it when it did.

  Later that evening, undressed and in her nightdress, Kitty sat huddled on the broad sill of the sash window that had been thrown up from the bottom, knees drawn to her chin. It was still hot and now humid. Thunder felt to be in the air. A feathering of clouds was massing together above the tops of the trees in the square garden; the branches were stirring, waving in the cold little breeze that was beginning to spring up. She shivered and when Papa’s Viennese clock on the landing chimed eleven, though sleep seemed a long way off, she made herself climb into bed. There she lay, still as a statue, feeling too exhausted to sleep, but in the end sleep fell on her like a cloak.