The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  I would have been happy to order for both of us, but Rob had stubbornly wanted to choose for himself, using very bad Russian and sign language and that incredible swift smile that instantly made the poor server forgive him for making her work harder.

  “This is no ordinary pie,” he excused himself now, in reply to my comment, and shifted his chair at our small corner table to open a little more space between him and the very large man at the boisterous table behind. “It’s exceptional.”

  “What is that, salmon?”

  “I think so, aye. And this is hardly an ordinary lager.”

  I said, “It’s a strong lager, that’s why. That’s eight percent alcohol.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “Explain what?”

  He looked at me, cheerfully innocent. “Nothing.” He ordered another, and drank it while finishing what I had left of my own square of apricot pie.

  As always, he’d surfaced from seeing the past looking spent and exhausted, but still rather pleased with himself.

  “How on earth,” I had asked him a half-hour ago as we’d made our way back past the Admiralty gate, “did you manage that?”

  “Manage what?”

  “Finding Anna. With all of those people.”

  “Blind luck. She walked past me.”

  “But how did you know her?”

  He’d shrugged then, and told me, “She laughed.”

  I supposed, when I thought of it now, that the way someone laughed was the one thing that didn’t much change as a person aged. Certainly Anna, in some ways, was unrecognizable from the young girl she had been when I’d seen her in Calais, just yesterday.

  This afternoon she’d been more a young woman, already now entering into her late teens with all the mature poise that girls of that long-ago time had most probably needed to gain, unlike girls of my own generation. My own teenage years had been freer, but from the way Anna had set her slim shoulders I’d guessed she had already learned how to balance the weight of responsible burdens.

  But still, she’d seemed loved, and her clothes, if not fancy, had looked to be well made and fine. She’d been wearing a long cloak and hood when we’d first seen her, walking in the snow of the great space beside the Admiralty.

  The hood, falling forward, had covered her hair and a part of her face, so it hadn’t been till she had entered the house and had hung up her cloak in the lobby that I had been able to see what she actually looked like.

  She wasn’t a stunningly beautiful girl, but her features were even and lively enough to be pretty. Her eyes were still lovely, that softly gray-green color, under arched eyebrows that matched the dark brown of her lashes. Her hair had stayed dark brown as well, and it still fell in curls round her forehead and cheeks.

  She stood close to my height, neither tiny nor tall, with a slim build that gave her a natural, tomboyish grace, and she seemed—as she had when a child—to be always in motion, if not in her body, then in her intelligent mind, which revealed itself plainly whenever one looked at her eyes.

  Rob was following my train of thought. “Does she look as she did when you saw her the first time?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.” I’d only had a brief glimpse of her then, and I couldn’t be certain.

  Rob shrugged. “We’ll ken more,” he said, “after tonight.”

  It was already nine in the evening. The sun had just set, and the light from inside the warm restaurant reflected back now in the darkening windows. “Tonight?”

  “Aye, it’s early yet. We’ve only got… what? Three days?”

  “Nearly four.”

  “You’ll be working for some of that,” Rob pointed out. He had finished my pie and was draining the last of his lager, his eyes shining more brightly blue than they ought to have done. Two strong lagers, I thought, drunk as quickly as he had downed those ones, would have an effect.

  I tried the tactful approach. “Are you sure that you’re up to it?”

  Rob grinned. “You mean, am I blootered?”

  “Your accent is thicker.”

  “I’ve no got an accent.” His arch look accused me of being delusional. “But if you have doubts, maybe you should do some of the driving.”

  I said, “We’re on foot.”

  “So we are.”

  “So that doesn’t make sense.”

  Unconcerned, he stood smoothly and shrugged on his coat before gallantly helping me into mine. “Where,” he asked, “was the tsar’s palace? The one Gordon sent Anna to?”

  I remembered the snow, and the sledges; the bite of the wind. “That would have been the Winter Palace. It’s not far.”

  It was, in point of fact, a short walk away in the gathering darkness. We crossed one canal by its bridge and strolled down on its opposite side, with the lights from the buildings all round making shimmering points of bright color that danced in the black water.

  Rob took my hand in his own, and I didn’t object. I suspected he’d done it without really thinking, his full senses occupied elsewhere, but I liked the feel and the warmth of it; and when we turned onto the darker canal that led up to the Neva, I was grateful for that contact to assure me I was safe, because at this hour of the evening, even with the few old-fashioned lamps spaced out along the buildings, this was not the kind of place where I’d have come to walk alone.

  Our footsteps fell with echoes on the tilting granite paving stones, and echoed still more wildly from the high walls of the buildings to each side of the canal that made the passage feel like some deserted alley streaked with strange distorted shadows. At the farther end, beyond the small arched bridge that marked the edge of the Embankment, cars chased back and forth along the street that ran beside the river, in a constant swishing pulse of tires that faded to the distance, but that noise was muted here beneath the constant slap of water on the cold and slippery walls of the canal itself, its restless surface several feet below the weathered iron railings running at my side.

  This was the Winter Canal, spanned up ahead by two bridges—the small one at ground level, and above that the old gallery that ran high over it, a graceful curve built to connect the upper stories of the Hermitage Theatre on our side of the canal and the even older building on the other, all enclosed with rows of windows that looked lovely in the daylight but at night gave me the feeling I was being watched.

  “The Winter Palace used to stand right there,” I said, and pointed up ahead to the pale walls we were approaching. “There are drawings of it in my grandfather’s book… well, drawings of all the Winter Palaces built on this site, actually. The second one, the one Peter the Great died in, was just sort of absorbed into the next, then eventually all that was torn down to put up this theater.” I gave him a short history of how the theater had come into being in the late eighteenth century, and how it had fallen into disuse in the Stalinist years, and how it had recently been lovingly restored. “And while they were restoring it, they found bits of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace preserved underneath where the stage is, and all along here. There was part of the original courtyard, and several rooms, and all that’s been restored as well, inside,” I said. “And here, just here, is a bit of the palace’s old façade. See how this section of wall is a different design?”

  The piece of the old façade was maybe four feet wide, rising two stories and painted a color that would, in the daylight, be rich butter yellow in place of the pale green that plastered the rest of the theater. The windows here were old and framed in oak, with metal sills that sloped to shed the rain, and all the simple moldings had been painted white. In at least two places I could see, the architects had left a bit of brickwork bare, to show the structure underneath. And at the pavement level was a deep well, like a cellar entrance, running the full width of that old section of façade and covered by a low, protective, sloping box of plexiglass set into a metal frame.

  Rob stopped, and gave my hand a squeeze. “All right then, go to it.”

  “I’m sorry?”<
br />
  “I’m letting you drive for a change. Like I said.” Not put off by the look on my face, he went on, “You’ve been watching me do it for days, now. Just give it a go.”

  “You are drunk. I can’t do what you do.”

  “But you’ve not truly practiced, now have ye?” His gaze touched my face in the shadows. “Are you not the slightest bit curious to learn the limits of what you can do?”

  I looked away. “I know my limits.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, I’ve ten pounds says you might just surprise yourself.”

  “Rob.”

  “What?” He let go of my hand. “You were willing to come on your own to St. Petersburg. Willing to try to do this on your own.”

  “Yes, well. Willing and able are two different things, aren’t they?” I said that lightly, but he wasn’t having it.

  Whether because of the lager or some more inscrutable reason, he’d turned serious. “When you first got on that train to Dundee,” he reminded me, “when you first made the decision to go help your Margaret by holding the Firebird, surely you thought, deep inside, that you could?”

  “But I didn’t. I couldn’t.” My voice had dropped low. There was no one around us to hear, but I did it instinctively, faintly surprised at the fierceness with which I defended my actions. “I knew that I couldn’t. That’s why I got off that train, Rob.” I looked at him. “That’s why I came to find you.”

  “Aye, I ken why you did it. But using my gift’s not the same thing as using your own, is it?” He, too, had lowered his voice; maybe even stepped closer, I wasn’t completely sure. “I think,” he said to me slowly, “this makes you feel safer, just being a bystander. Coasting along letting me do the work, as though we were on holiday someplace ye no ken the language.” His mouth curved so briefly it might have itself been a shadow. “Like me here in Russia. I no ken the language here, either,” he said, “but I’ll not let it stop me from ordering meals for myself. I can learn. So can you.”

  I shared none of his certainty. “Rob.”

  “Aye?”

  I shook my head, breaking away from the steady blue hold of his gaze, because there was no way I could hope to explain.

  “Would it really be so terrible,” he asked me, very quietly, “to be like me?”

  I paused before I said, “That isn’t it.”

  “Then why are ye so feart of what you are?”

  I’m no feart. The words in Anna’s voice, a memory at my shoulder, made me lift my own chin higher and reply, “I’m not afraid. I just… I can’t, that’s all.” And when he would have argued, I explained, “I can’t just start a vision cold, like you. It’s not the way it happens, for me. I need to be touching something.”

  Rob considered this, and gave a nod toward the wall. “So that should do. You said yourself it’s the original façade of the old Winter Palace that was here when Anna was.”

  “Well, yes, but it’s been plastered over since, and painted. I don’t think—”

  “The bricks are there.” His tone, while quiet, held a challenge. “Will you try?”

  I measured his resolve against my own with a long look, and sighed. “And if I can’t?”

  “You want to have some faith.”

  The problem wasn’t faith, I thought, so much as finding someplace I could stand where I could reach that section of the wall. The wide glass box, like a low greenhouse, that covered the well in the pavement in front of the wall jutted out for at least a full meter, and rose past the height of my knees at its highest point. Climbing on top of it, or even sitting, was out of the question—I wasn’t about to trust glass, even plexiglass, to hold my weight. It was too deep to lean across also, which meant that I’d have to position myself to one side of that section of wall and reach over to touch it.

  And that was a problem as well, since to one side, the theater’s wall jutted out sharply and made it a tricky affair to reach round it. The other side wasn’t much better. It had a great drainpipe that ran from the gutters above and left only a tight space for me to squeeze into. It wasn’t a comfortable spot.

  But I tried.

  With my hand pressed against the cold plaster, I tried. Closed my eyes and reached out with my thoughts. Something flashed very briefly, but I couldn’t hold it. The images simply refused to take shape, floating past me and through me and into the darkness.

  My arm started aching from being held out at that angle and finally I let it fall, backing away in frustration. “You see?” I told Rob. “I can’t do it.”

  He’d stood back through all of this, giving me room, but I saw him take stock of the wall now, his chin tilting up as he followed the course of the drainpipe before moving in himself. Turning, he leaned back and settled his shoulders so one rested firmly against the long wall where the newer part met the façade of the old Winter Palace. The drainpipe pushed him outward at an angle, yet he looked at ease, relaxed against it with the air of someone who could stay like that all night.

  “Come here,” he said.

  I eyed his outstretched arms warily. “Why?”

  “Just come here.”

  I might have been crossing a chasm, I went so reluctantly; but of the things that I might have forgotten, I hadn’t forgotten the feel of his long body pressed against mine when he held me—the solidly sheltering warmth of his chest and the weight of his arms round my waist. Loosely linking his hands in the small of my back, he said, “You need support, that’s all.” Shifting again so his thighs were braced strongly round mine, his boots firm on the pavement, he told me, “I’ll not let ye fall. It’ll be like that time that you telt me about, when your brother was talking you down from that tree.”

  This didn’t feel anything like that, I wanted to tell him, but I went for humor instead. “What, you’ll boss me around, will you? Tell me where to put my hands and feet?”

  Rob gathered me closer, and I felt the quick laugh that lifted his chest. “Well, your hands, anyway.” He nudged my left arm. “Put your arm,” he said, “over my shoulder.”

  His shoulders were muscled and hard like his chest, but his jacket provided a padding that cushioned my wrist as the back of my hand came to rest on the wall just behind him. The wall of the old Winter Palace, which I had been trying to touch in the first place.

  He said, “There. How’s that, then?”

  “It’s good,” I admitted. My arm and my hand were supported and comfortable, and with Rob holding me there was no way I could fall. In fact, if I just leaned in a little…

  “Relax,” he said. “Put your head down on my shoulder, and concentrate.”

  Easy for him to say, I thought. But strangely, it did make it easier, having him hold me. I rested my cheek on the weave of his jacket and let his strong heartbeat compete with the echoing sounds of the night and the quiet canal as my eyes closed.

  The noises began to recede, and his heartbeat grew muted, and out of the blackness the filmstrip of images flickered and grew and began to run backward. I watched the blur, waiting as I always did, until Rob’s voice within my mind gently advised me, You’ve gone too far back. Stop, and make it run forward.

  I can’t do that. You need to—

  Concentrate, was all the help he would give me. Just will it to stop.

  It resisted my will with astonishing ease for the first several seconds, but finally, when I applied all of my effort, the images started to slow.

  Rob? Is that me or you?

  It’s all you. Good, he said when it stopped. Now, you want to come forwards, but slowly. One frame at a time, almost.

  That was no easier. It took a few tries before I could manage it, and even then I whizzed past where I should have been and had to roll the frames back with an effort. My attempts were as unlike Rob’s smooth way of scrolling through time as an elephant’s moves were unlike a ballet dancer’s, but he was patient.

  You’re close now, he told me.

  But how will I know…?

  You’ll ken the right place, when yo
u’ve found it.

  I slowed the frames further, not wanting to pass it again, drawing strength from this newfound control over what I was seeing. Then one of the images, black as the night, seemed to pulsate a little, the smallest vibration. It drew my attention, my focus, and started expanding until it had grown to the size of a cinema screen. I saw Anna, and somebody walking beside her approaching what must be this very canal, looking more dark and lonely than it did tonight, even.

  Why are you keeping back? Rob asked.

  I’m not. This is just how I see. From the outside, the way I saw everything. From a safe distance. No more than a… what had he called me? A bystander.

  Go closer.

  Rob.

  He was deep in my mind now, and nudging me forward. I felt it as surely as though he were pushing me. Wanting to show him I wasn’t the same, I deliberately tried to move nearer the image. It broadened. I tried again. And then again, till I stood at the brink of it, hesitant.

  Not ready yet to believe.

  Go. He nudged me again, and I gathered my focus and pushed through the image itself, and then I was inside it, incredibly, soaring above what I saw, rising wildly and spinning with little control, till I suddenly felt him right there with me, catching me, holding me steady, and bringing me down to the ground again, safely, as Anna passed by.

  Chapter 27

  Dmitri was grumbling. He usually grumbled, and being called out of the warmth of the kitchen to walk in the dark and the cold to the palace had blackened his mood even more. He was a Siberian, one of the great brigade of peasant laborers who had been forced by decree to come help build St. Petersburg, spending his days hauling timber and stones for the houses and churches and wharves that had risen by sheer force of will from the marshes. The men who’d been dragged here from all over Russia had been given freedom to leave once their term of hard labor was done, but Dmitri, with no means to make his way back to Siberia, had like so many stayed on as a servant, his old life forever discarded.