The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Yes,” he told the children finally. “I can fix this.”

  Arrogance again, she thought. And yet she felt relief as well, and gladly passed the crow to him, still wrapped within her morning gown. And then, in an attempt to reestablish proper boundaries, she instructed him, “Then go and do so, please. And send a housemaid, if you would, to help us set the room to rights before the children’s mother wakes.”

  He did not answer straightaway, and glancing up, she noticed that his eyes once more appeared to be amused, and had a light in them that made her feel aware that she was standing there in no more than a night shift, with her hair undone in curls about her shoulders. Though she felt her color rising she returned his gaze with coolness, and he gave a nod that managed to both honor her and mock her as he said, “Yes, Mistress Jamieson.”

  And with the bird held safely to his chest he turned and left, and Anna had the strangest feeling that, although she’d seemed to score the point, she’d somehow lost the game.

  Chapter 30

  I wasn’t sure why Rob had stopped, until he gave his watch a tap and told me, “You’ll be late for your appointment.”

  I’d forgotten. It was not a long walk back, but I was glad I’d worn flat shoes and not the high heels I’d been contemplating earlier this morning. As it was, we reached the entrance to the Hermitage with a full fifteen minutes to spare.

  The wind off the Neva was sharp, but at least it had scattered the dull bank of clouds and the sun had come out, shining brightly against a great wedge of blue sky. In the sunlight, the Hermitage glittered like something straight out of a fairy tale, one of the loveliest palaces left in the world with its green and white walls and the gilded trim and those innumerable windows that looked to the river.

  Its grand front steps were, as usual, clogged with a great queue of tourists and visitors waiting in groups for admission. Rob hung back.

  “You’ll be working,” he told me. “I’d just be a bother. I’ll wander about, I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Aye, I’m sure. You can just come and find me,” he said, “when you’re finished.”

  I nodded, and went on ahead.

  I’d met Yuri, Sebastian’s friend, twice before this. A senior research associate in the museum’s Department of Russian Culture, Yuri had helped me to authenticate the portrait by Makovsky that now hung above my desk, and he’d taken us to dinner once. He was a friendly man, with earnest eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses, and a wild shock of thick black hair that stubbornly refused to settle into any style. Greeting me with the traditional kiss, he drew back and asked, in Russian, “Will we speak Russian or English today?”

  “Russian, Yuri Stepanovich.” Smiling, I said, “I’m in need of the practice.”

  “Then I will give you practice. Come up to the office, it will be better to speak there. More comfortable, and much more private.”

  Privacy was something that the main rooms of the Winter Palace couldn’t offer. Built during the reigns of later eighteenth-century empresses, some years after the time in which Rob and I had just “found” Anna, this was the largest of the six buildings that made up the State Museum of the Hermitage, and inside, it held all the grandeur of a Windsor or Versailles. The ceilings soared, the windows turned the light to something magical, and every surface seemed to be in competition with the next—the painted murals gazing down, the polished columns, malachite and marble and rare woods and gold leaf everywhere. The whole effect was dazzling.

  But it also drew enormous crowds each day, with tour groups jostling one another as they shuffled after their official guides, all giving scripted talks in a cacophony of languages while leading their own charges through the warren of the galleries beneath the watchful gazes of the women who sat hour after hour at the doorways of each room to see that no one broke the rules.

  The Hermitage owned some three million artifacts and artworks, and even though the items on display were maybe only five percent of that, I’d figured from my own past visits here that it would take me years to see them all, but every tourist I could see appeared to be making a brave effort to do just that. Some, who were clearly mid-tour, looked exhausted. The noise and the heat and the bustle exhausted me more than anything else, and Yuri’s small office, tucked back in a nonpublic corridor, felt like a welcome retreat.

  It had absorbed a little of his personality and had a pleasant, rumpled, and relaxed feel that invited me to simply shift the papers from a chair and take a seat.

  “Here.” He passed me a catalogue for the exhibit itself, newly printed and smelling of freshly cut paper and ink. “I have sent one of these to Sebastian already, but this can be your copy. You’ll find your Surikov in there, on page thirty-three.”

  I was still studying the cover. “This is beautiful. It’s by Polenov, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. From the time that he lived in his house in the forest, with Repin, in Normandy. He painted several like this, with the road through the trees.”

  The detail they had chosen for the cover showed a solitary peasant strolling off along that road, seen from behind, with sunlight breaking through the rain-gray clouds ahead of him. I’d seen another painting by this artist, with a peasant and a donkey on the same road, but the solitary man did seem a perfect fit for the exhibit’s title: “Wandering Still: the works of the Peredvizhniki beyond Russia’s borders.”

  As I started to search through the catalogue’s pages for page thirty-three, Yuri said, “We have put the exhibit itself in the Menshikov Palace. The official opening is not until Tuesday, so the big ceremony will be then, with the two curators from Paris and New York, and our director, but on Sunday there will also be a small preview reception for some of our International Friends of the Hermitage. You should come to that.”

  “There’s no way I could meet Wendy Van Hoek before then, is there?”

  Yuri smiled. “She does not arrive until later tonight. But tomorrow we’re hanging the final few paintings, your Surikov among them, and she’s asked to watch. It would be a good time for you to meet her. I’ll arrange it, if you like.”

  “That would be perfect. Thank you.” I glanced at him over the catalogue. “What is she like?”

  “Miss Van Hoek? Like her father,” he said. “Did you meet him? No? Well, he was passionate, very obsessed with his paintings. He viewed them as part of his family. And she has this passion as well. But,” he added, as he swiveled back in his own chair, “she also loves living well, traveling, and this needs money.”

  “So you think she might be willing to sell this one painting, then?”

  “To the right buyer, I think that she might be persuaded, yes.” Yuri half-smiled. “Only not to Sebastian.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “Ah, so he told you?”

  “He didn’t give details,” I said. “All he said was that Wendy Van Hoek didn’t like him much.”

  “Not much, no.” Yuri’s smile was so broad now that I couldn’t help but be curious.

  “What did Sebastian do?”

  “He didn’t tell me, either. I was hoping you would know. From the first time I met them, they’ve been on the knives,” he said, using the Russian expression for people who shared a dislike for each other. “It can happen with people, sometimes. Anyway, it was a wise thing he did, sending you.”

  I wasn’t sure “wise” was the word that applied here, so much as “convenient” or even “self-serving,” but I never questioned my boss’s decisions in public. Instead, I replied with a vague nod and flipped the last catalogue pages to see, close up, what I was meant to be buying for Vasily.

  It wasn’t an actual painting, a full composition, but rather a “study” of one of the faces the artist intended to paint in a larger work, rendered with great care in oil on canvas the size of a magazine cover.

  Yuri, watching my face, knew that I’d found the Surikov. “It is incredibly beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” My gaze
didn’t lift from the face of the old bearded man on the page, his eyes downcast with dignity, and just the top edge of what I assumed was a scroll of some kind showing down at the bottom, as though he were reading from something. I said, “This is one of the bishops, then? From the mural he did of the… what was it, the First or Second Ecumenical Council?”

  “That one’s from the second, in the year 381,” Yuri told me. “I’m impressed. You’ve done your homework.”

  “I do try.” I smiled. “I like to know the history of a piece.”

  I knew there’d been four murals painted by Surikov, back in the late 1870s, one for each of the four ancient councils at which the rules and creeds and shape of Christianity itself had been debated and decided by the Church’s leading clerics. Those murals had graced Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior for over half a century, until on Stalin’s orders the Cathedral had been dynamited, totally destroyed.

  There’d been no room in Stalin’s Russia for religion, or the art that was a part of it.

  Only one mural had managed somehow to escape the destruction, along with the sketches in pencil on paper that Surikov had made to show those who’d hired him what he planned to paint.

  From those sketches, we knew what the murals had probably looked like. Two of the sketches had come up at auction a few years ago. Yuri showed me a picture of one of them now, from a file he’d set out on his desk. “You can see here,” he said, “this one bishop who’s standing and reading the scroll to the others, this is clearly the same man we see in the study in oils. I believe that it’s Gregory, Bishop of Constantinople, perhaps even reading his famous speech.”

  There, he had lost me. I asked, “Famous speech?”

  “Yes, you don’t know this story? He made many enemies, Gregory did, and a lot of the bishops opposed him, and so he resigned, saying he was like Jonah the Prophet, who brought the great storm because he did not wish to deliver the bad news God sent him to carry, and that he was willing, like Jonah, to be cast out, sacrificed, if it was needed. But first, he delivered his finest oration. I think,” Yuri said, “this is what we see here, in this mural.”

  I studied the print of the sketch, and compared it again to the face in the work in the catalogue. “I think you’re right.”

  “He has good taste, this client of yours.”

  I agreed. But it went beyond that, for Vasily, I knew. He had personal reasons for wanting this painting, and when I explained them to Yuri, he nodded with new understanding.

  “Then I think you may have an excellent chance of convincing Miss Van Hoek to sell you this piece. She is also very sentimental.”

  “We can hope.” I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. Yuri was polite enough to sit here talking with me half the day, but I knew that he kept a busy schedule, so I closed my catalogue and stood. “This was so kind of you, Yuri Stepanovich. I really do appreciate it.”

  With a very Russian shrug he said, “It was my pleasure. Have you somewhere you must go at once, or would you like to visit your young man?”

  I know I stared at him a moment, wondering how on earth he knew I’d come with Rob, and why he’d mention it. And then the penny dropped, and I remembered who he meant.

  I grinned. “Yes, please. I’d love to.”

  My “young man” was not a person but a painting of a person, hanging on a wall below us in a room on the first floor. It was my favorite of the Russian paintings here, not as important as the larger and more celebrated canvases that easily commanded their own walls and had been lighted so that people could admire them, but this modest portrait did for me what all the best art did: it drew me in, and held me captivated.

  Yuri said, “It’s too bad we don’t have a copy of this in our gift shop, since you’re fond of it.”

  Flattered he’d remembered just how fond of it I was, from my last trip here, I replied, “I really don’t mind coming here to visit him. And anyway, it wouldn’t be the same. A print would never have this kind of depth.” Even though I was with Yuri, I could feel the keen eyes of the woman supervisor seated in the corner settle on me out of habit as I leaned a little closer to the portrait. “I always wonder,” I told Yuri, “who he was, and how he lived, and what it was about him that caught Briullov’s eye.”

  “You see, for me it is the people who have owned the painting,” Yuri said, “that always make me wonder. What their lives were like, and how they came to have this. Why they let it go.” As though inspired by my own fascination with the portrait, he looked closer, too. “A painting like this would have witnessed a great many things. It’s a pity we can’t see what it has seen, over the years.”

  I could tell him, I knew. I could touch it and tell him who’d owned it, and give him a glimpse of their lives. What surprised me was not that I realized the fact, but how much I was actually tempted to do it. My hand almost lifted and I had to catch myself, not wanting to alarm the woman supervisor.

  Even after Yuri had excused himself and gone back to his work, I lingered awhile longer in my study of the portrait, and the urge to touch it was a thing that took some effort to control.

  Only a week ago, I’d been half-dreading holding the Firebird carving a second time, and it rattled me now that the wanting to touch and to learn was becoming a kind of compulsion.

  That feeling didn’t lessen when I left the painting and the room and wound my way back through the crowded galleries. Come find me, Rob had said, and yet my mind was too distracted to allow for focused searching, so I didn’t try.

  I slowed my steps in the Pavilion Hall, a soaring bright space with a high open gallery running around it, supported by rows of white columns and graceful vaults patterned with gleaming gold leaf. From the intricate pale parquet floors to the light-colored marble and elegant high-arched French windows that looked out across the broad Neva, this was a space that spoke to me of privilege and of royalty. I felt the pull of other voices speaking, too, and trying to be heard.

  The other tourists here were mostly clustered round the great gold clock shaped like a peacock, housed in its own cage of glass, or standing to admire the large mosaic set into the floor.

  Beneath a giant crystal chandelier, I knelt as though to readjust the heel strap of my shoe, rested one hand on the parquet floor to brace myself, and for a moment, closed my eyes.

  The images began to rise, to form into their filmstrip, running backward in a blur. I tried remembering what Rob had taught me—concentrating hard, I stopped the film and tried to run it forward, frame by frame. It nearly worked, but then I lost it and the images began to blur again, and…

  “Miss?” A man’s voice interrupted; wrenched me back. “Are you OK?” He was American, an older man, his face and voice concerned. “Do you need help?”

  A woman I assumed must be his wife had stopped as well, and others from their group had turned to look. Flushed with embarrassment, I shook my head and stood, assuring him that I was fine. “My shoe…” I offered, as an explanation, and he gave a friendly nod and, when I’d thanked him once again, moved on, allowing me a clear view of the doorway at the far end of the Hall, and of the man who stood within it.

  Rob, in contrast to the other tourists here, looked fully capable of walking round all day. If he was bothered by the heat, he didn’t show it. But I caught his edge of restlessness.

  You ready?

  With a nod, I went to meet him.

  How’d your meeting go?

  Fine.

  As we walked down the great Jordan staircase, he watched me instead of admiring the opulence. Are you OK?

  Yes, I’m fine. Why is everyone asking me that?

  He responded with silence, and striving for something more normal I asked him aloud, “What did you find to look at, while I was away?”

  “Oh, a lot of things. I spent most of my time coveting Nicholas II’s library. Have you seen it?”

  I had. An English Gothic haven, rich with walnut shelves and leather, with a staircase and a fireplace, it appealed to me
as well.

  Rob carried on, “And there were rooms not far from that with some of Peter the Great’s own things in them. I found those fair interesting. Not only his swords, but a few of his nautical instruments, tools for his woodworking, and his old lathes. I had no idea,” he said, “that he was such a regular guy.”

  “That he liked making things with his own hands, you mean? Oh yes, Peter was famous for that. He’d go down to the shipyards and roll up his sleeves and start building the ships right along with the workmen. And it wasn’t only big things. Did you see the ivory chandelier he partly carved himself from walrus tusks? It’s really something.”

  “Next time,” was his promise. He fell quiet for a minute more, and then, as we were passing by the gift shop on our way toward the exit, he asked, “Was it something interesting you saw?” To my deliberately blank face, he said, to clarify, “Upstairs. Just now.”

  I couldn’t lie. “I couldn’t do it properly. I didn’t have you there to help.”

  “You did it fine last night.”

  Last night I’d touched the wall myself, perhaps, but Rob had still been holding me, and amplifying what I did. “Last night you helped as well.”

  “Not much.”

  “That’s your opinion. Anyway, it hardly matters, does it?”

  Rob, not fooled, returned the question. “Does it?”

  Not at all, I wanted to reply. Because it shouldn’t have. For all that I might envy Rob the things that he could do, they had no place in my own life. My normal life.

  I sidestepped round it. “Not for what we’re doing now. There’s nothing left of General Lacy’s house that I can touch, is there? It’s all on your shoulders.”

  “For now.” With a shrug of those shoulders he followed me out through the exit and into the bustle and flow of the Neva Embankment. His hands in his pockets, he looked to the west, past the dome of the Admiralty. I sensed he was keen to go back, to pick up where we’d left Anna earlier, but as though he had tapped into my own vague frustrations and wanted to give me some time to recover myself, to find balance, he brought his gaze patiently back to mine, lifting an eyebrow. “What time does the pie shop start serving lunch?”