The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Well, at least it’s not a fortified border,” I’d consoled him, “with guards and wire.”

  “It should be.” His tone had been dry, but his eyes had been mischief. “They’re nothing but trouble, the English.”

  “We are not. We’re wonderful people.”

  “Oh, aye? Will you prove it, then? Give us a len of your mobile.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He’d held out his hand and rephrased. “May I borrow your mobile? Mine isn’t working.”

  “Oh.” I’d handed the phone over, and Rob had dialed a number that set off an answering ringtone from one of his own pockets. Calmly ringing off, he’d passed my mobile back across the aisle. “Thanks.”

  “That’s a sneaky way of getting someone’s number.”

  “What?”

  “You could have asked.”

  He’d looked at me, all innocence, and said, “I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”

  And looking at those eyes, I had agreed with Dr. Fulton-Wallace that he was a devil. But I’d missed him when he’d left the train at Berwick.

  Ten miles out, my mobile had chimed out the tune that meant a text message had just arrived. “Am safely back in Scotland,” it had told me. “Where are you?”

  We’d texted back and forth the next three hours, my whole way down to London. I had asked him later why he’d gone to all that trouble, typing all those texts, when he could simply have reached out to me with thoughts. He had the skill.

  He’d told me, “You weren’t ready for it, then.”

  I’d slipped my hand in his and said, “I’m ready now.”

  But I’d been wrong.

  ***

  I set Rob’s wristwatch on the shelf beside the pillow of the bed and curled myself into the blankets, staring dry-eyed at the dark.

  I didn’t want to think about the rest of what had happened on that evening after I had bought the watch for him, after we’d walked out holding hands into the rain-slicked street, with all the streetlamps coming on. I’d played that evening over in my mind enough times since that I could run it forward like a film at will, and feel that I was back there—feel the dampness of the air, the rising chill that made me glad of Rob’s more solid warmth beside me as he held the pub’s door open so that I could go ahead of him.

  The pub was crowded, but with patience we found two stools at the bar together, and when Dr. Fulton-Wallace turned up a short while later, Rob gave up his seat to her and stood behind us, close against my shoulder so the three of us could talk.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said, getting to the point. “I’ve been looking at both of your scores on this latest psychometry study, and I’d like to have your permission to film you.”

  “Oh aye?” said Rob.

  “I’ve been doing this twenty years now, and I’ve never seen anyone who can do what you can do, Rob. And both of you working together—I think it would really inform the community, if we could properly document it.”

  I felt a cold flip in my stomach.

  Rob said, “Well, I’d have to apply for permission to take part in something like that, we’ve got rules in the force about public appearances, but if ye send me the details I’ll certainly ask.”

  I kept out of the whole conversation that followed. If Rob even noticed he didn’t let on, he was talking enough for the two of us anyway, and Dr. Fulton-Wallace was too focused on the details of her project and the good it could do to be distracted by my silence.

  The big man behind her who only a moment before had been talking and joking along with his mates had gone silent as well, leaning closer as though he were listening. And when she finished her last drink and thanked us and wished us good night and went out, he made some comment thickened with whisky and expletives that made his friends burst out laughing.

  “Did ye ever, in your whole life, hear a bigger load of shite?” he asked them, and they all agreed that they had not. Then more loudly, so everyone round us could hear, he announced, “This lad here and his girlfriend, they’re reading our minds.”

  “Freaks,” said a lanky young man with a shaved head who stood on the fringe of the group. “Go on then.” He stepped forward and faced Rob, belligerent. “Read my mind. What am I thinking?”

  Rob answered him calmly, ignoring the looks we were drawing. “You’re wanting to fight.”

  The big man prodded Rob like a bear-baiter. “And are ye seeing a fight in his future then, laddie?”

  Rob said, “I am, aye. But not with me.” Tilting his head to one side he looked quietly at the young man with the shaved head a moment, then told him, “Your mother…”

  “Right, here we go!” someone predicted, to more scattered laughter.

  Ignoring them, Rob said, “She’ll be home from hospital soon. And you’ve nothing to fear, it was never her heart.”

  In the moment of nearly stunned silence that followed, he finished his pint, set the glass down, and looked at me. “Ready to go?”

  Feeling colder than ever, I went with him, hearing the talk and the comments beginning again at our backs.

  Freaks.

  Outside it was starting to rain again, lightly, the streetlights and headlights reflecting and running together the way all the colors had done in a painting I’d once seen deliberately ruined by acid. A beautiful picture destroyed.

  And it wasn’t Rob’s fault, but I turned on him anyway. “How can you not let that get to you?”

  “I’m a policeman. That’s not the first drunk in a pub I’ve come up against.”

  “No, I mean everyone pointing and whispering, saying you’re different.”

  He shrugged. “I am different,” he said. “So are you.”

  “I don’t want to be different.”

  He slanted a thoughtful look down at me. “Aye, but you are. Were you thinking to hide it your whole life?”

  I didn’t know how to reply to that. But I did know I could never take part in a film of my psychic ability, baring my secret to strangers and skeptics alike who’d be watching me, judging me.

  Rob stopped me there on the pavement and turned me to meet his eyes. “Hiding the person you are,” he said, “won’t make you happy. I never hide who I am. What I am.”

  Freaks.

  I’d nodded. We’d gone out to dinner. He’d walked me home afterward. And at the door when he’d kissed me good night, he’d done something he’d never done.

  Always before when we’d kissed, though there hadn’t been that many times, he had kept his thoughts closed to me. This time the wall had been very decidedly down. I’d been slammed by the force of his feelings, a flood of sensations that caught me and tossed me around like a turbulent river and knocked the breath out of me, so when he’d lifted his mouth from my own I had felt like I’d just escaped drowning.

  I’d thought at the time he was showing me how things could be with us, if I could get past my own reservations. But now, looking back, I felt certain that Rob, with his gifts, would have already known what was going to happen, which meant that his kiss was intended to say something else, though I didn’t know what. Good-bye, maybe.

  Aloud, he’d said only, “I’ll see you, then.”

  “See you on Monday,” I’d said.

  But I hadn’t. I’d closed the door after him, run up the stairs, and I’d gone right on running.

  Chapter 7

  You’re quiet this morning,” Rob said. He was driving, his eyes on the road as he swung round the first turn at Old Craighall Junction and onto the Edinburgh bypass. It was just after nine and the traffic was easing a little, but Rob’s car still had to contend with the lorries. He’d been rather quiet, himself.

  I replied, “It’s taking all my energy, digesting what I ate this morning. Your mother wouldn’t let me out the door without a full cooked breakfast.”

  “Aye, well, that’s my mother. Did she give you porridge, too?”

  “She did. I likely won’t need food again for days.” She’d also sent me off with a sp
are blouse, in case I spilled something on mine, and loaned me a stylishly cut denim jacket, in case I got cold. I was wearing the jacket now. “I like your mother,” I said.

  Rob agreed she was easy to like.

  “And your father is charming.”

  “Aye, he would agree with you there.” A faint smile, but he wasn’t about to be sidetracked. He sent me another look. “Did you not sleep well?”

  “I slept. Are there horses,” I asked, “in your field?”

  “Yes and no.” With a twitch of his mouth he explained, “It’s the shadowy horses you heard, if you heard them last night. They belong to the field, like the Sentinel.”

  “Oh.” I had never known horses had ghosts. “Can you see them, as well?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I looked out the window and watched the world passing and wondered what Rob saw that I didn’t see.

  “So,” he said to me, “tell me about what you want me to do for you, up in Dundee.”

  I explained how I’d met Margaret Ross, how I’d handled the Firebird, what I had seen. And I told him, too, what I had seen when I’d held Margaret’s scarf. Well, a part of it. Not what I’d seen at her doctor’s—that seemed a betrayal of confidence—but what I’d glimpsed of her loneliness, and of the travel brochure. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “She’s spent her life helping everyone else, you know, putting her own life on hold, and she had her heart set on that cruise.” It affected me more than it probably ought to have done. I looked down. “The thing is, she’s believed her whole life that the carving was worth something. And so it would be, if someone could prove where it came from.”

  He glanced over. “Someone like you?”

  “I just thought if I held it again, really tried, I might see something useful. I’m going to Russia next week, to St. Petersburg, right where her ancestor lived. I just thought…” I broke off, feeling suddenly foolish, and wearily rubbing my forehead I said, “I don’t know what I thought, to be honest.”

  “You wanted to help. I’d have done the same thing, in your place.”

  “No, if you’d been in my place,” I told him, “you would have been able to pick up the Firebird and know its whole history without even trying hard. I’m not that good, Rob. You are.”

  He gave a nod as though he’d fit a puzzle piece in place. “That’s why you stopped here yesterday to go see Dr. Fulton-Wallace, was it? You had doubts.”

  “And she confirmed them.”

  We were coming off the bypass now at Glasgow Road and for a moment Rob’s attention was diverted by his need to navigate, but I had the impression there were several things he would have liked to say. All he said in the end, though, was, “Right. So what’s your plan with Margaret Ross?”

  “I’m going to give her the scarf back.”

  “And she’ll think you’re mad to have come all this way to deliver it.”

  “Probably.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I’ll introduce you, and say you’re a colleague with specialist knowledge, someone who can maybe tell us more about the Firebird. She’ll let you hold the carving, and then afterwards you’ll tell me what you saw, and I can go and try to prove it in St. Petersburg.”

  He ran that sequence through his head in silence for a moment, gave a nod and said, “Seems fair enough. One question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, not to show my ignorance,” he said, “but what’s a firebird?”

  I smiled, and giving it its Russian name explained, “It’s the zhar-ptitsa, a bird out of folklore, with bright glowing feathers like flame. One feather would light a whole room, and it’s said that whenever a firebird’s feather falls, then a new art will spring up in that place.” I’d grown up on the old Russian fairy tales told by my mother at bedtime, but Rob clearly wasn’t aware of them. So while we drove north, I told him of the Firebird who stole the golden apples from the garden of the tsar, and made the tsar so angry that he sent two of his sons to catch the bird and bring it back alive.

  “The sons were, of course, both entirely useless,” I said, “but their younger brother, Tsarevitch Ivan, waited up on his own in the garden and nearly caught the Firebird’s tail. The bird, before it flew off, dropped a single feather. Ivan picked it up and took it to his father, and the tsar was so impressed he gave Ivan permission to follow his brothers and hunt down the Firebird, too. So Ivan set out, and ran into a helpful gray wolf who devoured his horse—”

  “How was that helpful?” Rob asked.

  “Well, all right, that wasn’t so helpful, but all Russian folktales have dark parts. The gray wolf decided that Ivan was brave, so he offered to help him, and let Ivan ride on his back.”

  Rob pointed out that, if the wolf had been thinking ahead, he would never have eaten the horse to begin with. He glanced at my face and said, “Fine, I’ll shut up. Carry on.”

  “It’s a magic wolf, Rob. He runs faster than any horse ever could. Now, the gray wolf carried Ivan away to the land where the Firebird lived in a great golden cage in another tsar’s garden. The wolf told him, ‘Go get the bird, but whatever you do, don’t touch the golden cage.’ But Ivan didn’t listen, and he touched the cage, and he was caught. This other tsar, the owner of the Firebird, said to Ivan he’d forgive him, even let him keep the bird, if Ivan did him one great favor. In another land,” I said, “there was a rare horse with a golden mane. The Tsar said, ‘If you journey to that land and get that horse for me and bring it here, I’ll let you have the Firebird.’ So the gray wolf carried Ivan to the other land, and in the stables there they found the horse, and hanging near the horse there was a golden bridle, and the wolf said to Ivan, ‘Now go get the horse, but whatever you do, don’t touch that bridle.’”

  Rob said, “And I’m guessing Ivan didn’t listen.”

  “No, of course he didn’t. He was caught again, but the owner of the horse with the golden mane told Ivan he would forgive him and let him keep the horse, if he’d first journey to this other land and bring back the tsarevna there, Yelena the Beautiful…”

  And on it went, with the patient gray wolf helping Ivan through trial after trial, sometimes by shape-shifting, sometimes by giving advice that more often than not was ignored. After Tsarevitch Ivan sat down on the ground for the third time and wept, Rob pronounced him an idiot. And when Ivan’s brothers appeared near the ending to kill him and cut him in pieces, Rob thought it fair justice.

  “That isn’t the end, though,” I told him. “The gray wolf came back, and found Ivan in pieces—”

  “And ate him.”

  “No. He brought Ivan to life again, and Ivan went to his father’s court and reclaimed all that his brothers had stolen: the horse with the gold mane, Yelena the Beautiful, even the Firebird.”

  “And what did the wolf get?” Rob wanted to know.

  “Nothing, really. He just went away.”

  Rob looked sideways at me, and then back at the road again.

  Hiding my smile I said, “That’s not the only Russian folktale with a firebird in it, though. There is another one I know…”

  “Is Ivan in it?”

  “No. The hero of the second tale’s an archer, with a magic horse, and one day the archer sees a feather on the ground, a gorgeous feather, like a flame. Of course he wants to pick it up, except his horse says—”

  “It’s a talking horse?”

  “I said the horse was magic. Pay attention. So the horse says, ‘Leave the feather where it lies, for it will only bring you trouble.’”

  “And of course he doesn’t listen to his horse,” Rob guessed, but gamely he sat back and let me tell the second fairy tale.

  This one was rather different from the first. The archer did pick up the feather, true, and take it to the tsar, and as with Ivan he was sent to catch the Firebird, but after he had done that, he was sent to bring a princess from her home across the sea, and on the way he fell in love with her, and she with him. And even though the archer faced much troubl
e, as the horse had warned, it ended as it ought to, and the archer got the princess for his bride forever after.

  “And to show his thanks,” I said to Rob, “the archer built the magic horse a stable made entirely of gold.”

  Rob said, “I like that story better.”

  So did I.

  Rob drove in thoughtful silence for a few miles longer. “Both those stories are alike, though, really.”

  “How is that?”

  “The firebird drops a feather,” was his summary, “and if you’re fool enough to pick it up and chase the bird itself, you’re in for trouble.”

  “And adventure.”

  “Aye.” He nodded. “True enough. But what you bring back with you in the end,” he said, “might not be what you started out in search of to begin with.”

  I was thinking of that while we made our approach to Dundee on the long bridge that crossed the broad estuary where the River Tay swept out to meet the wide sparkling sea.

  Rob asked, “What’s the time?”

  I’d forgotten I still had his watch. Feeling for it in my pocket now, I drew it out. “It’s nearly half-past ten.”

  Why did you keep this? I wanted to ask him, but Rob only held out his hand for the timepiece and strapped it back onto his wrist with the ease of long practice and asked, “D’ye ken where she lives?”

  All I knew was the address. We had to stop twice to ask people to give us directions.

  Dundee was a lovely town, built up the south-facing side of a hill so it always looked straight at the sunshine, its stone-built historic appeal charged with bright modern energy. But Margaret Ross’s street didn’t have any of that. Her mid-terraced house sat third up in a drab row of others that looked just the same, with their square staring windows and low-walled front gardens and plain iron gates.