The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  With a sympathetic look at Mr. Taylor, he said, “Shall I now relieve you, sir, that no one else should make the same mistake?”

  His solicitous expression could not hold. When Mr. Taylor, with a reddened face, had quickly taken leave of them, Charles broke into a grin and Anna glanced at him reprovingly.

  She said, “You’ve embarrassed him.”

  “Nay, I have flattered him.” Falling into step beside her as she started walking once again, he said, “No doubt he has designs of it. You see the way he looks at you.”

  She saw. But still she asked, “What way is that?”

  “The way a boy looks at a newly shining sword he must not play with, yet desires with all his heart.”

  “Only a soldier,” she said, smiling, “would imagine any girl would find it pleasing to be thought of in the same way as a weapon.”

  “’Tis in truth the highest compliment.” He steered her round a knot of huddled men. “But I did not intend to please you, I was merely stating facts.” He cast a keen glance at her face. “You do not fancy him, I take it?”

  “Mr. Taylor is a good man, and a kind one.”

  “Damning words.” Charles grinned again. “You do not fancy him.”

  “I’ve little time,” she said, “to fancy anyone. My days are full.”

  “Ah yes. How is my uncle?”

  “Must you say it in that tone?”

  “What tone?”

  She sighed. “As though the term were illegitimate.”

  His short laugh had no humor in it as he said, “Your choice of adjectives is… interesting.”

  Anna said, with little patience, “Play your games of words with men like Mr. Taylor, not with me. You know I did not mean it in that sense.”

  “No, it was the proper term, I do believe. My grandmother did lie with the vice admiral’s father, and without the benefit of marriage bore his child, which makes our claim upon the Gordon name most illegitimate.”

  She turned on him, not caring they were standing in the middle of the street. “When has he ever made you feel so? When, in truth, were any of your family made to feel so? Was your grandmother cast out? No. She was cared for. Was your father, as a blameless infant, sent to be concealed? No. He was educated well,” she said, reminding him of what they both knew was the truth, “and sent here with good prospects by the vice admiral’s arrangement. That his sons now think themselves ill-used would doubtless have astonished him.”

  She wheeled at that and walked on without bothering to look behind to see if he were following.

  He was. His long strides caught her up before she’d reached the tall gates of the Admiralty, and for the whole length of its walls they ventured on in silence. Then he cleared his throat. “Am I to then assume,” he said, “my mother has been by, to pay a visit?”

  “Aye, this morning. With her usual complaints.”

  “She asked for money?”

  “She returned what the vice admiral tried to give her, for the purchase of your regimentals.” Glancing sideways at his new brushed army uniform, its gold braid all intact, she told him, “And in truth they do look very dashing.”

  “Thank you.” With his head bent, he allowed the briefest flash of the old smile that had endeared him to her years ago. He thought a moment then, and added soberly, “My mother’s bitterness is not my own.”

  “Your mother is a bitter woman.” She was judging, and she knew it, but she’d seen Vice Admiral Gordon’s face this morning after Charles’s mother had stormed from his chamber, and she was in no mood yet to forgive. “When I first came here, as a child, and you and I were introduced, did he not say, ‘This is my nephew’?”

  “Yes, he did. And he has never called me less, I will admit it. But my father was no more than his half-brother, and my blood is more diluted still.”

  “I do not share his blood at all,” said Anna, “yet he treats me on a level with his daughters, and has always done so.”

  “Does he?” Charles said the words so rashly that he seemed to want them back, because he paused before he asked, “Did he send Nan to fetch his letters from the Custom House? Or Mary?”

  It was obvious he hadn’t, so she didn’t bother answering.

  “Of course he didn’t.” Charles’s tone implied that was the end of the discussion.

  They had reached the western limits of the Admiralty and crossed together into the tight maze of streets where many of the British lived. Already the November afternoon was growing dark, and soon the watchmen would be coming out to start their long patrols and climb their towers, ever vigilant against the sliding shadow of a thief, or the bright flicker of a flame that might again engulf the houses that were springing up so quickly all around, their wooden walls daubed thick with plaster to present a fine appearance that, in spite of every effort, could not yet withstand the frost and every spring gave way to cracks and imperfections.

  Like the families who lived in them, Anna thought. She said to Charles, “You know him not at all.”

  “I know that blood is blood, and I am certain that, for all the love the vice admiral might bear me, I am yet one more unsought responsibility he well could do without.”

  She thought on this so deeply that she did not realize they had reached the front door of her house until Charles stopped and placed a hand upon her shoulder, keeping her from walking on. She roused herself, and looked at him. “Will not you come inside?”

  “No.” To her disappointed face, he added, “I have somewhere I must be.”

  She nodded, if a little wistfully. “I’ll tell him that I met you.”

  “Yes, you do that.” He looked at her a moment with what might have been regret. Or even pity. Then he added, “You may give him my affection.” His kiss warmed her cheek as he bent down. “And mind that you tell him how dashing I looked in my new regimentals.”

  Inside, the lobby of the house was in near darkness, and she had to stand a moment till her vision had adjusted. It was early yet, she knew, to light the candles, but she saw the warm glow spilling through the partly opened door of the vice admiral’s room, beyond the antechamber, and she gladly shed her cold wool wraps and went to give his letters to him.

  Nan and Mary were upstairs. She heard their cheerful voices rise and fall in conversation like a song, and knew that if she were to join them she’d be happily included, but she wanted Gordon’s company, just now.

  He was in bed, as he had been these past two days, yet she was pleased to see that he was sitting up and reading, with his pipe in hand, and there was nothing of that whistle in his breathing that there could be when these bouts of asthma laid him low.

  “I have your letters,” she announced, and leaning in exchanged them for a kiss that landed just where Charles had kissed her, so she added, “I met Charles near the Admiralty. He walked me back. He would have come inside, but he did not have leave to be so long away from duty, though he said to give you his affection.”

  “Did he?” The vice admiral, looking pleased, set his book and his pipe down and started to open his letters.

  “He looked very well,” she remarked. “And quite dashing, in his regimentals.”

  “No doubt.” He’d unfolded the first letter and with his eyes on it, asked in an offhand way, “Why did you need Charles to walk you back? Where was Gregor?”

  “Gregor fell ill at the Custom House.” Anna schooled her face to look convincing. “Mr. Taylor very kindly walked me back across the river, and Charles saw me the rest of the way.”

  That earned her a brief glance above the letter’s edge. “Mr. Taylor of the Factory?”

  “Yes.”

  Returning to his reading, he said, “Ah.”

  She might have felt exasperation at his obvious amusement had she not been quite so pleased to see his sense of humor surfacing again, after what had been, in her view, too long an absence.

  He’d had more to bear these past few years than many lesser men could have endured, and that he’d borne it strongly and
with minimal complaint had been a model others facing so much loss might aim to follow, but she’d seen his grief in private and she knew that the events had left their mark.

  The first had been the foolish, needless death of his son William, in a youthful drunken brawl in faraway Gibraltar, cruel news that had reached them in the first cold winter they had spent here. Then had come the even crueler death of his beloved wife, who’d fallen ill not long after she’d come across to join them in St. Petersburg. And this past spring she’d been followed by her daughter Jane, the vice admiral’s stepdaughter, whose decline and death had also been a bitter loss to Anna, who had nursed Jane in her lodgings for those final wrenching months.

  They had shared much in common, she and Jane—both loving the vice admiral and belonging to him in a way, yet neither one his own.

  I know that blood is blood. So Charles had said, and Anna in her heart knew he was right.

  “What troubles you?” asked Gordon. “Usually you do not keep so quiet.”

  Anna saw no need to weigh her words. “Am I a burden to you?”

  Setting down his second letter, partly opened, he gave her his full attention. “No, of course not. Why should you imagine that you are?” His mind was quick. “Did Charles say something to upset you?”

  “No.”

  His eyes were on her face now. “No?”

  She had been but a child when she had first locked gazes with him in Calais, and in two months she would be seventeen, but in the time between she had not learned the trick of telling lies to him without revealing it. She looked away. “He only said he felt himself a burden to you sometimes, and I wondered whether I…”

  “No.” In his voice there was no hesitation. “You have never been a burden.” Looking down again, he seemed to fix his concentration on the wax seal of the letter he was opening, and told her, low, “You’ve been a blessing.”

  Anna blinked the grateful wetness from her eyes, because she knew he would not thank her for a show of strong emotion. He was softer than he seemed, inside, and did not like to show it. “It is only that you have this house,” she said, “and the expense of it, and Nan and Mary and the servants.”

  “I shall have one servant less, if Gregor does not make it home by nightfall,” was his dry remark. “And if you think I’m eager to be rid of you, then I suggest you go ask General Lacy his opinion on the matter, and he’ll set you straight.”

  “General Lacy?” She frowned as she sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Aye.” This letter was stiffer and more tightly folded than the first. He had to open it with care. “He met me in the street the other day and asked me would I think of sending you to live with him awhile.”

  She couldn’t think why General Lacy, whom she’d only rarely seen, would ask a thing like that, but Gordon knew the reason, and enlightened her.

  “He saw how kindly you took care of Jane,” he said, the rough edge to his voice a slight betrayal of his sentiment, “and thought you’d be good company for his own wife, who has been ill herself and is in need of some assistance.”

  “General Lacy has more servants in his house than we do.”

  “Aye, but he wants a girl of rank to be his wife’s companion,” Gordon said. “I told him no, he could not have you, and he seemed to take it well, which if I know him means he plans to make a new attempt to sway me in a few days’ time. And I shall tell him no again.”

  She took this in, and turned it over in her mind while Gordon read his letter. It might not be such a bad thing, she considered, to go live with General Lacy for a while. His house was grand, and he himself by reputation was a kind and generous person. And besides, by her employment with so powerful a man, she could not help but earn the vice admiral more favor with those men who could advance him.

  “You should tell him yes,” she said, “if he has need of me.”

  When Gordon did not answer, she glanced round and saw him bowed above the letter with his handsome face set deep in lines of sorrow. She had seen those lines before.

  “Someone has died?”

  His nod was brief. “A friend.” He passed a hand across his eyes. “I am a fool to weep, for it was hardly unexpected. He was old, and I have neither seen nor heard from him for years, but still,” he told her, in a voice that rasped a little, “it is hard to lose a friend.”

  He took a moment to compose himself, then setting down the letter showed the shadow of a smile and told her, “We had some adventures in the old days, back in Scotland. Colonel Graeme was the very best of men.”

  The fire on the hearth was suddenly too far away, and Anna felt a cold hand wrap around her heart and squeeze until she could not draw a breath that would be deep enough to let her speak. She turned her face away, before her brimming eyes betrayed her, and she stood and took a not quite steady step toward the fireplace, in search of warmth.

  There was a chance, she thought, that it was not her colonel. Not the man whose laughing eyes and Highland voice still came to her in dreams sometimes; who’d told her of her parents and their love for one another, and who’d risked his life to fetch her safely out of Scotland for no other reason than that she was his own nephew’s child, and blood was blood…

  She felt the memory of his arms wrapped strongly round her, that last morning that she’d seen him, when he’d left to go to Paris and she’d wanted to go with him. She could hear his voice, regretful even now: “I cannot take ye where I’m going, lass.” And her own childish answer: “I’m no feart.”

  She watched the flames dance on the hearth and saw them blur and wished him back again to hold her as he’d held her then; to kiss her hair and tell her he forgave her for the lie, for feeling fear, for being so afraid of bringing harm and danger to him that she’d run away, that she’d left him, to keep him safe.

  Vice Admiral Gordon, from the bed behind, was asking, “Did you know him? Colonel Patrick Graeme was his name. He lately lived in Paris.”

  “No.” She had not known if she would have a voice, yet there it was, if not entirely her own. “I did not know him.” In her mind she saw the chessmen in the Earl of Erroll’s library at play upon the board, and smiling eyes that watched them move. She asked, “How did he die?”

  “In his own bed, at peace.” The pause that followed afterward seemed overlong, and yet she felt the trail of wetness on her cheeks and knew she could not turn around. At long last Gordon’s voice said gently, “Anna. I have never pressed you for the details of your upbringing, but if—”

  She interrupted, “They are dull. And for my part, I have forgotten them.” And taking up a piece of wood she bent to tend the fire.

  A minute later, when she straightened, she’d recovered her control, and when she turned back to the bed her face was nearly as it had been, and the flush upon her cheeks was just as likely to have come from standing too close to the flames as from her misery.

  She bore the thoughtful gaze of the vice admiral till at length he looked away and set that second letter to the side while he attended to the third. The words of this one changed his features yet again, but this time in a way she’d never seen: a sort of pride, edged with excitement.

  “Anna, do forgive me, but I find that I must send you out again upon another errand, if you have the strength for it.”

  “Of course.”

  “And take Dmitri with you, this time. He is not so prone to falling ill.”

  Dmitri, from the kitchens, was a sturdy-shouldered man who held his drink with more efficiency than Gregor. Anna nodded, and when asked she fetched the pen and ink and paper from the writing desk and waited while Vice Admiral Gordon neatly wrote a letter of his own, enclosed the other one within it, and sealed everything with care.

  The fact he had not used his letter book to first compose the letter told her this was something private. And his next instructions told her why.

  “Now listen very carefully. Take this,” he put the letter in her hand, “and these,” two silver coins drawn from the bag bene
ath his bolster. “Give the first ruble to the guard outside the palace of the tsar, and let him know you come from me. He’ll take you to another man, to whom you pay the second ruble, and he in his turn will put that letter safely in the tsar’s own hands.”

  She stared down at the letter and the coins, amazed he’d ask her to do something so important.

  “I apologize,” he said, “for I can see that you are tired. Were there another way to see that note delivered, I would do it, but I am myself in no condition yet to walk so long out in the cold, and there is no one else to ask.”

  She paused, remembering her earlier exchange with Charles about her own position in this house. “You could ask Nan,” she said, “or Mary.”

  Gordon studied her a moment, and she knew his eyes were seeing more than she would have them see, because his voice again grew gentle. “Do you think I hold them dearer than yourself because I do not send them out to be my messengers? The plain truth is, my dear, that while I love my daughters, neither would be capable of taking on a task like this. The plain truth is,” he said again, and held her gaze with his so she would know it, “there is no one I can trust, as I trust you.”

  Her heart, still aching from the news of Colonel Graeme, warmed a little and she closed her fingers tightly round the things that he had given her. “Then I will do my best,” she gave her promise, “to be worthy of it.”

  And with that, she went to find Dmitri.

  Chapter 26

  I said to Rob, “You’re such a bloke, sometimes.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, look at you. Give you a fish pie and a beer and you’re perfectly happy.”

  I’d known he would like this place. The Stolle restaurants were a small chain with several locations strung all through the city and served what one might call traditional Russian “fast food”: homemade pie. This was my favorite Stolle site, just round the corner from our hotel and not far behind the Hermitage, cleanly attractive both outside and in, and designed like an old-fashioned coffeehouse, painted in warm hues of gold, terra-cotta, and rich weathered green. Rectangular pies of all kinds with their latticework crusts baked to flaking perfection were laid out still warm on the butcher-block counter, where aproned servers sliced off appropriate sections as ordered.