The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  What that life had been, and what loved ones it might have contained, Anna hadn’t been able to learn, for he never would speak of it, but Anna sometimes suspected that, like Captain Jamieson, he’d had a daughter once, for there had always been something decidedly fatherly in his attachment to her.

  Even now, as they made their way carefully over the small wooden bridge of the Winter Canal, the Siberian kept a firm hold of her elbow as though she were still the young girl she had been when she’d first come to live here, when he and the cook had helped care for her during the vice admiral’s sojourns at sea.

  “Fool idea,” Dmitri was saying, “to send you so late in the day, in the darkness. You ought to be home getting warm, eating food. Does he want you to end up as ill as himself?”

  “I feel fine.”

  “You feel fine.” He dismissed that idea, and said, “You feel frozen. These clothes, they are not made for warmth.”

  Anna knew that Dmitri, like many traditional Russians, still deeply resented the loss of the old way of dressing, the robes and the boots and the great hanging sleeves that had now given way to the more Western styles that the tsar himself favored, and that he’d decreed all his subjects should wear. The waistcoats and close-fitting breeches and stockings that men of rank now wore were things that Dmitri despised. “In Siberia, men would not last through the winter in such clothes,” he’d often complain, “and the women would freeze in their homes.” But he stopped short of actually saying he wished the old ways would return, for the tsar was the tsar, after all, and in Russia, the tsar was as near a divine being as one could be without angering God.

  Anna hugged her cloak more closely round her bodice, wishing she were able to wear breeches like a man, because the wind now swirling round her woolen-stockinged legs beneath her skirts was sharp as knives of ice.

  She had her head tucked down, and so she did not see the dark bulk of the man who waited for them at the bottom of the bridge, until he spoke.

  “What is your business here?”

  Dmitri, at her shoulder, looked the stranger up and down. “You are no guard,” he threw the challenge back. “Our business can be none of your concern. Now stand aside.”

  “I am the watchman. And whoever passes here becomes my business.” The voice was hard, as were the eyes that glittered darkly in the light cast upward by the lantern that he carried. “Where is your light?” he asked. “You are required to carry one, when you are walking in the night.”

  Dmitri said, “It is the evening, not the night. It was not even dark when we came out, and we’ll be home again by suppertime if you but step aside and let us do what we’ve been sent to do.”

  “And what is that exactly?”

  The Siberian was trying to contain his temper. “That,” he said, “would be between my master and His Majesty, and I assure you both of them will see to it that this becomes their business if you interfere.”

  The wind bit deep, and on the bridge the air grew colder.

  Men, so Anna had observed, replied to threats in one of two ways, much like bears. They either dropped and turned and scuttled off, or else they stood their ground and bellowed back and tried to make themselves look larger.

  The watchman was standing his ground. “Your insolence demands I interfere! I could lay hold of you for daring to come out without a lanthorn, at this hour,” he said.

  Dmitri laid his hand upon the long old-fashioned knife he carried, and since Anna knew that knives like that were also not permitted, by the tsar’s decree, she stepped in smoothly with, “Good sir, I do apologize. My servant has been drinking, he is not himself this evening. Pray, take no offense at what he says.”

  Dmitri frowned, but from respect he did not contradict her as the watchman weighed her words. Her accent, when she spoke in Russian, was not perfect, but in this case Anna hoped that fact might help. Bravely moving forward, she offered him one of the two silver rubles she carried, the ones the vice admiral had given her to pay the guards at the palace. “Here, take this for your troubles.”

  He was wary. “In such a time, a man would be a fool to take a bribe.”

  She did not need him to explain what “such a time” was. Scarcely a week had gone by since the tsar had ordered the arrest of the empress’s favorite, the dashing Willem Mons, for his corrupt ways that had made it near impossible for anyone to speak to Empress Catherine without paying him a fee or favor. All of this—so it was said—was done without the knowledge of the empress or the tsar, and not two days ago a crier had gone through the town to spread the proclamation of the tsar that any person who had ever paid a fee to Mons step forward to give evidence against him.

  No one truly thought that Mons would suffer death for his offense, for after all his elder sister had once been the tsar’s own mistress, in the time before the tsar had met and married Empress Catherine, and Willem Mons himself was such a handsome, charming fellow, of the sort that often knew the way to talk themselves out of the greatest difficulty. But the fact remained that, at the moment, he was fallen from his post and locked in prison, and most likely would stand trial, for taking bribes.

  Anna summoned a smile, and said, “This is no bribe. I do but seek to pay the fine.”

  The hard eyes grew more wary still. “What fine?”

  “Why, sir, the fine for coming out without a lanthorn.” She offered him the coin again. “It is a ruble, is it not?”

  A ruble would be more than two days’ pay, she knew, for many men. The watchman seemed to think a moment, then he nodded curtly, once, and pocketed the coin. “Be on your way, then.”

  As the watchman stepped aside to let them leave the bridge, Dmitri took her elbow in a fierce protective grip, his own eyes fixed upon the grand front of the palace as they made their way toward its steps.

  “And what,” he asked her, “did you go and do a thing like that for?”

  Anna was not truly sure, because now she had only one ruble remaining and two more guards yet to be paid, but she replied, “He would have seen your knife.”

  “He’d not have seen it very long, for I’d have buried it within his thieving heart.”

  “Dmitri, please.” Her glance implored him to be sensible. “I lost one escort earlier today to Mr. Trescott’s tavern, and if I lost another to the gallows the vice admiral would not easily forgive me.”

  The normally fearsome Siberian softened a little, and despite his pride he showed a grudging sort of gratitude by guiding her around a patch of roughened ice. But still he felt the need to point out that the watchmen of today had lost their manners altogether. And the palace guards were little better.

  Anna shushed him as they neared the closest of the two stone flights of steps that climbed the porticoed façade of the great Winter Palace. Near the base of those steps stood not one but four guardsmen, and since she had no idea which one of them she was supposed to approach, she addressed them all, clearing her throat with a small, cautious cough.

  “I am come from the Vice Admiral Gordon,” she said, “on a matter of business.”

  All four guardsmen looked at her, and she’d begun to think that maybe none of them was the right guard, the one whom she’d been told to pay, until at last one of the younger guardsmen stirred and came across so that he stood quite close to her, his back blocking the view of the others as he held his open hand between them. “Let me see your business, then,” he said.

  When Anna put the one remaining ruble in his palm, he closed his fingers round it with a nod and told her, “Come this way. But only you, alone. Your man must wait.”

  Dmitri frowned, but both of them knew better than to argue or to try to make demands, so he stayed back while Anna climbed the curving stairs behind the guard, who asked her, low, “There is a letter?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded for a second time, and led her through the shadowed, torch-lit portico and past another guard into the palace. It was not as grand a place as she’d imagined it would be, although she realized s
he should not have been surprised by that, for Gordon had so often said the tsar did not feel comfortable with grandeur. And she’d seen with her own eyes how much at ease the tsar looked when he strode the streets himself, so tall above the men around him and with so much energy, yet dressed in nothing grander than his dark green regimentals, with no wig nor fancy trappings and adornments to reveal his rank.

  His palace, she decided, was much like the man—constructed with an eye to practicality and comfort, not to fashion. This reception room she stood in was not so unlike the rooms she walked through every day at the vice admiral’s house, save for the icon set high in the far-facing corner to serve as a focus of humble devotion. The doors, with their draft-blocking curtains drawn back at each side, stood wide open to other rooms leading beyond, and they, too, looked as unpretentious. Where she had expected to be dazzled, she instead felt welcomed, and the feeling gave her courage.

  “Wait here,” said the guard, “and I will find the man you need.”

  The man who would deliver the vice admiral’s letter to the tsar. The man who would expect a silver ruble as his payment, when she had none left to give. She tried to think of what to do, of what to tell him, but her thoughts were interrupted by the male voice rising angrily within the room that opened to her right.

  Through the door that stood ajar she could just glimpse a tall man’s figure entering the chamber from the room that lay beyond it, and when next his voice erupted Anna recognized it as the tsar’s.

  He raged, “You dare to ask for such a thing? For him? It is beneath you.”

  The Empress Catherine—for, thought Anna, no one but the empress would be brave enough to stand against the tsar in such a temper—made reply more calmly, but as clear: “I have forgiven him. Why cannot you?”

  “You ask too much.”

  “You used to be forgiving.”

  They were speaking, Anna thought, of Willem Mons; they must be. She had never lived with men so volatile, who gave vent to their anger at this volume, and it made her feel uncomfortable, uncertain whether she should cross to close the door and try to give them privacy.

  The tsar fired back, “How can you think that such a man is worthy of forgiveness? He has spat on all I stand for. All I’ve built. Do you not understand the damage he has done? My Russia, all that I have made, my whole life’s work—it stands as all here in St. Petersburg must balance, on the thin supports we drive into the swamp, and let but one of those foundations fail,” he warned, “and everything will fall, and then the swamp will rise and swallow it again, you understand? And my supports, my pillars, these have been obedience and honesty. Above all, I would give my people honesty!”

  “I know.”

  “He smiled. He smiled while he betrayed my trust. While he betrayed you.”

  Empress Catherine started to say something, but the tsar was not yet finished.

  “No! I will not have you ask for mercy. Not for him.”

  “For her, then. For Matrena.” Willem Mons’s other sister, who’d been fool enough to join him in his scheming and was also now in prison and awaiting trial. The empress told her husband, “She is young still, and so beautiful.”

  “You think I value beauty? Do you?” Suddenly a great resounding crash made Anna jump, as though the tsar had smashed a window with his fist. He shouted, “Thus I can destroy the thing of greatest beauty in my palace!”

  Anna thought that, had she stood in front of him herself, such violence would have stunned her into timid silence, but the Empress Catherine only said, with admirable calm, “And have you made the palace any the more beautiful, in doing so?”

  The tsar, confronted with that gentle challenge, did fall silent. Then he asked, in pure frustration, “What am I to do with such a woman?” And his booted feet stomped heavily across the floor before a door slammed, hard.

  A male voice close to Anna’s shoulder said, “Good evening,” and she jumped again, and wheeled to face the man who’d so surprised her. He was not a guard. His clothes were richly made, embroidered heavily with silver, and he wore a long gray wig in the French fashion. “I am told you have a letter you would like to give me.”

  Anna tried recovering her earlier composure. “Yes,” she answered him in Russian, as he had addressed her. “From Vice Admiral Gordon, for the tsar.”

  She took the letter from her pocket and, her ears still ringing with the tsar’s impassioned speech on honesty, she said, “He sent me with a payment I should give you for your trouble, but the watchman would not let me pass unless I paid him, also, so I fear that I have nothing I can give you.”

  He considered this.

  Still holding out the letter, Anna added, “I am sure Vice Admiral Gordon will be pleased to send you payment by another means tomorrow. I will come again myself, sir, to deliver it, I promise you. But he did say this letter is most urgent.”

  “Many things are urgent.” He assessed her with a gaze that lingered too long for her comfort. “I suppose you are a maiden still? A pity, for that might have made a more diverting payment. Very well. That is a charming ring you wear. I dare say that will do.”

  “My ring?”

  “Yes. It was not expensive, surely? And I have a daughter of my own who would admire a ring like that.”

  The ring, a simple gold band with a tiny pearl, had been a final gift to her from Jane, Vice Admiral Gordon’s luckless stepdaughter, before she died. It was a token of affection, not a thing that she could lightly part with. Even as she clenched her fingers in a small show of protection, she was saved from answering by the approach of footsteps and a swish of skirts behind her.

  “Then perhaps,” the Empress Catherine said, “this girl will share with you the jeweler’s name, so that you may commission such a ring for your own daughter, for that is a lovely thought, Sergei Ivanovich.”

  Anna had never before been so close to the empress. A part of her wanted to stand there and gape, but she quickly dropped into a low curtsey, bending her head in respect, her heart beating.

  The man she’d been speaking to bowed as well, deeply and gracefully.

  “Sergei Ivanovich,” said Empress Catherine, “I thank you for greeting our young guest so kindly. Now, if you would please fetch a maid with a broom, that would be very useful. A mirror has broken.”

  She sounded so calm and composed, as though having the tsar shout and rage had in no way affected her, that Anna could not help but marvel at her self-containment.

  “Yes, of course,” said the man.

  As the sound of his sharp heels receded, a hand lightly brushed Anna’s head. “You may stand, child.”

  She straightened, still keeping her eyes lowered. The fine silken brocade of the empress’s gown filled her vision, a woven enchantment of branches and birds on a field of pale blue speckled richly with pearls that were larger by half than the one in the ring Anna wore. That the empress had helped her to keep.

  Since the empress had already spoken to her, Anna reasoned it could be no breach of good manners to say in reply, “I do owe you my thanks, Your Imperial Majesty. You are most kind.”

  “You are Vice Admiral Gordon’s young ward, are you not?”

  In amazement that someone so high should have noticed someone like herself, Anna nodded. “I am, Your Imperial Majesty.”

  “And you are here on his business, I gather?”

  Again Anna nodded, and held out the letter still clutched in her hand. “I was sent to deliver this.”

  “Ah. For my husband, I’ll warrant. I’ll see he receives it,” the empress said, taking it into her own softly elegant hand.

  Anna thanked her, and waited, aware that she could not depart without being dismissed. The pause seemed to stretch overlong, then the empress remarked, “The vice admiral speaks beautiful Dutch, but he stumbles in Russian. You seem not to have the same trouble, you speak Russian beautifully.”

  Anna accepted the compliment with proper thanks, but in Gordon’s defense added, “But the vice admiral speaks
French also, fluently, and I cannot.”

  “You are loyal.” The words held the trace of a smile, and approval. The hand of the empress touched Anna again, this time under her chin, and she lifted her head in obedience, raising her gaze.

  It was commonly known that the empress had not been born royal, nor yet even noble; that she’d begun life as a peasant. A servant. Some dared even gossip that she had consorted with other men before she’d captured the heart of the tsar, and they spoke of her bloodline with open disdain, and dismissed her as common and plain.

  Yet to Anna, there seemed nothing plain in the face she was looking at now, with its soft rounded features and warmly intelligent eyes and the arching black eyebrows that echoed the black of the empress’s artfully curled and massed hair, which was dressed with small pearls like the ones on her gown.

  And the smile of those bowed lips was full of the kindness that Anna had seen in the smiles of the blessed Madonna, on icons.

  The empress asked, “What are you called, child?”

  “I’m Anna,” she said. “Anna Jamieson.”

  “But here in Russia, you must use your father’s name also, like Sergei Ivanovich. What was your father’s name?”

  Anna was going to answer the truth, and say “John,” till she realized that even so small a thing, seemingly harmless, might somehow endanger the uncles and family that she still had living, the family she’d sought to protect when she’d run from Calais in the first place. The world, she had learned, was not always as large as it seemed, and if Vice Admiral Gordon had known Colonel Graeme when they were in Scotland, he might also once have known Colonel Graeme’s nephews. She could still remember how he’d asked her in Calais if she were truly Anna Moray, as the priests had called her, and she’d always fancied there had been a sense of recognition in his eyes, as though the name were known to him. For her family’s sake, and for his own, she could not let him draw connections between her and her true father.