The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Must you kiss everyone?” asked Katie.

  “Yes, it is the custom. If you’re greeted in this way, then you cannot refuse the kiss,” said Anna. “Nor the egg.”

  “I wish I had a real egg.”

  From the open doorway just behind, a man’s voice said, “Will this one do?”

  The light in Katie’s face, all on its own, would have told Anna who it was that stood there, had she not already recognized his voice.

  And as she always did in Edmund’s presence now, she put on mental battle dress, composed her features carefully to be polite but only just, and straightened without haste to turn and face him.

  He had leaned one shoulder jauntily against the door frame, with his black wool coat left open to reveal the yellow waistcoat worn beneath, all edged with braid. She’d never seen him in a color, only in the plain black coat, or in the plain white of his shirtsleeves; never with this vibrant dash of light that made him seem a bit more human.

  In his hand he held an egg that had indeed been painted with a rainbow’s colors, red and blue and gold and green. “My landlady did give this to me earlier this morning, with instructions that, as soon as mass had ended, I should give this to the princess, and exchange it for a kiss. And I could think of but one princess in all Petersburg,” he said to Katie, “so now, Princess Katie, will you—”

  Katie cut him off, blond curls dancing as her face mingled delight and firm denial. “I’m no princess, Ned.”

  He paused, and feigned confusion. “Are you not?”

  She was decided. “No. Your landlady meant the imperial princesses. They’re at the palace.”

  “I see. Are you sure about that? Well, they’ll have so many eggs by now,” he said, “they’ll not miss mine. Here, you can have it.”

  “No,” she put him off again, but for a different cause. “You have to do it properly.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Like Mistress Jamieson was showing me. You have to tell me, ‘Christ is risen,’ then I answer you, and then you give the egg to me, and then I kiss you.”

  Edmund schooled his face. “It seems a lot of effort,” he told Katie, “for a kiss.”

  “It is the custom,” Katie told him, very solemnly, in a near-perfect imitation of the way that Anna had just said those very words, and Edmund’s mouth twitched faintly.

  With a shrug he came away from the door jamb and crossed to the little girl’s bedside, and Anna moved out of their way, standing back several paces to watch while the Irishman bowed very gallantly low to the child and announced, “Christ is risen. Now, take the damn’d egg.”

  “Not yet. First I must tell you, ‘Truly He is risen,’” said Katie, and looking to Anna, asked, “Is that right?”

  Any notion Anna might have had of telling Edmund not to curse in Katie’s presence fell away then, for she saw the child herself was not at all affected by it. Innocence, she thought, was often blind to other’s wickedness. And Edmund did not look so very wicked at the moment.

  He looked much as he had looked when she had watched him with the children in the yard, nearly two weeks ago: a gentle man, a stranger to her eyes, without a trace of the sardonic, cutting wit he liked to turn on her when they were in a room together.

  Seemingly mindful that Katie was still weak from illness, he leaned lower still for his kiss and received it at last, saying, “Three kisses! Sure, that’s a generous reward.”

  “Mistress Jamieson says every egg gets three kisses.”

  “Indeed? Well, I’ve no doubt she’d tell you the truth.” He was standing again at his full height and looking at Anna, as though he were trying to guess at her thoughts. “Mistress Jamieson, you appear troubled.”

  She said, “Hardly that. I was only admiring the egg.”

  “Oh, yes? I’ve another just like it.” Drawing a second egg out of his coat pocket, he held it up in full view as he leveled his gaze on her own, and the glint in his eyes told her she was a fool to have ever believed him not wicked. He said, “Christ is risen.”

  He was seeking to amuse himself at her expense, she knew, for he’d be well aware that there was no one she’d want less to kiss in friendship than himself. But this had naught to do with friendship. He was offering the egg, but he had not, as any gentleman would do, come near to give it to her. No, his stance demanded that she cross the length of floor that lay between them, put her pride aside, accept the egg, and kiss him, because custom and tradition gave him power to demand it. Anna damned his dark and laughing eyes in silence, taking care to keep her face composed. She would not let him triumph, any more than she would disappoint the little girl who watched them.

  With her head up she approached him calmly. “Truly He is risen,” she replied, and took the egg from his scarred hand.

  He did not bend for her, as he had bent for Katie. He stood straight and tall, his downward-angled gaze an open challenge. She had never let a challenge yet defeat her, so she raised herself on tiptoe and began the kiss.

  She would have given all three kisses quickly and been done with it, but needing to stay balanced on her toes she had to slow her movements, and her senses then had time to notice things that Anna would have been more comfortable not noticing. Like how his skin smelled pleasantly of shaving soap. And how his jawline tightened when he… what? When he did what? She could not see what he was doing, and so she was unprepared when Edmund turned his own head slightly, at the last, as though by reflex more than conscious thought. She felt the feather of his breath against her own skin as the corners of their mouths just barely brushed.

  She could not say which of the two of them was first to pull away from that brief contact, but they both stood rather stiffly for the moment that came afterward, till Katie, from the bed, asked, “Do you have a third egg in your pocket, Ned?”

  “No.” He cleared his throat and looked at Katie, and became himself again. “But if my princess does command me, I shall go back out into the town and kiss as many maidens as I can, to win you more.”

  He bowed, as Katie nodded eagerly and answered him, “Yes, please.”

  She had a heaping bowl of painted eggs beside her bed by suppertime, and Anna had the fair beginnings of a headache.

  Mrs. Lacy, who had come to sit as well by Katie’s bed, said with concern, “I hope you have not also caught the illness.”

  Anna had since set aside the Bible in exchange for a more adventurous book from General Lacy’s shelves, that being Mr. Pope’s translation of the Iliad of Homer, but she could not seem to concentrate upon it, so she marked her place and closed the book and smiled at Mrs. Lacy. “No, I’m sure that I have not. ’Tis but an aching head.”

  The older woman, nodding at the bed where Katie lay now fast asleep, said, “Likely it was not helped by her chattering all afternoon.”

  “I’m pleased to see her well enough to chatter.”

  “I am, also.” Mrs. Lacy’s eyes grew serious. “I feared it was the smallpox, to begin with. We’ve been fortunate so far, to have escaped it, but each time one of the children does complain of feeling ill, or has a fever, I confess I fall to worrying.” Her belly was no more than slightly rounded yet, but still she laid a hand on it protectively. “I could not bear to lose a child. In truth, I know not how the Empress Catherine has endured it.”

  Nor did Anna. Of the dozen or so children that the empress and the late tsar had been blessed with, only three had lived above their first few years, if that long. And of those three, there were but two remaining, now that young Princess Natalya, only seven years of age, had sickened following the tsar’s death and succumbed, and had been buried with her father. It had not been the tsar’s coffin, with its host of sad attendants, that had tugged at Anna’s heart when she had stood upon the river’s ice and watched the long procession of the funeral passing by, but the much smaller coffin following behind it, for she’d known well that a mother’s hopes lay buried there.

  Small wonder Empress Catherine had retreated from her social wa
ys, and kept herself apart from those who earlier had freely gained her company.

  “The empress is a very special woman,” Anna said, in full agreement. And remembering what Colonel Graeme had once said about the sons he’d lost, she added, “I do pray she’ll find some consolation in the princesses yet living.”

  Mrs. Lacy gently said, “A living child may be a consolation, to be sure, but it cannot replace the child that was lost.”

  Anna wondered if her mother thought the same, in her home far across the sea with her new husband, her new children. With her head bent she replied, “I have no children, so I cannot know.”

  “You will have children one day,” Mrs. Lacy said, and as though that reminded her of something she continued, “Mr. Taylor of the English Factory greeted us this morning in the street. He is a nice young man.”

  She could not contradict that. “Yes, he is.”

  “He’s asked permission of my husband to come pay a call to you, one day. My husband told him that, if you had no objections, he’d be welcome.” Her sidelong glance held interest. “Do you have any objections?”

  Anna raised her head and looked, she knew not why, toward the bowl heaped full of painted eggs that sat by Katie’s bed. And then she forced a smile and told the general’s wife she could not think of any reason why they should not welcome Mr. Taylor, if he chose to pay a visit. “As you have observed,” she said, “he is a nice man.”

  Mrs. Lacy sent another sidelong glance in her direction, but she merely gave a nod and, with the matter settled, moved the conversation on to other things.

  ***

  “I’ll tell you,” said the general, full of charm as he upended a decanter of fine claret over Mr. Taylor’s cup, “a merchant’s life is fine, I’ll grant you, but there is no occupation can compare with soldiering.”

  The afternoon was gray, and in the drawing room the rush-backed chair that Anna had moved closer to the windows, for the light, was growing harder at her back and more uncomfortable to sit in. Had she been a child, she thought, she would have fidgeted. And had she been a man, she would have sat as Edmund now was sitting, all but lounging in his armchair with his legs stretched out at ease in front of him, his elbows propped so that his hands were linked across his stomach, making him the very picture of a man digesting dinner in contentment.

  Anna rolled her shoulder slightly to relax the cramping muscle as she tried to keep her focus on the tiny, even stitches she was placing in the fullness of the fabric that would be the petticoat of her new gown, when it was finished. She liked sewing. Liked the steady repetition that allowed her thoughts to drift, and the unequalled satisfaction of creating something functional, and sometimes even beautiful, with her own hands. Embroidery, for her, had never held the same appeal. The whorls and leaves and flowers worked in thread were wasted effort if they did not have a use.

  The general’s wife, who sat with perfect grace upon her stool before the harpsichord, said, “Leave him be, Pierce. Mr. Taylor surely does not wish to be a soldier.”

  “No, indeed.” He was a pleasant-faced young man, with fair hair slightly tinged with red and clear blue eyes that held no guile. And coming as he did from Perth, he also had a Scotsman’s practicality. “I’ve not the nature for it, I’m afraid. I have no quarrel with most men, which makes me disinclined to choose a path in life that leads me into conflict.”

  Edmund asked him, “And if conflict came to you, how would you meet it, then?”

  “With honor, I should hope, sir, if it could not be avoided.” Mr. Taylor sipped his wine, and with a flash of humor added, “But I’d still prefer to be among my ledgers and my books, than on a battlefield.”

  The general’s wife agreed. “So would we all.”

  Anna said nothing, for it would not have been ladylike to say where she’d have wished to be, in any time of conflict, but she felt herself observed from all sides while the talk devolved to that of trade in general, and the weather, and the rumor that the elder princess would at last be married to the Duke of Holstein.

  “He has waited long enough for it,” was General Lacy’s wry opinion. “And he’s been more patient in his suit than many men would be, but patience often wins the day in love, eh, Mr. Taylor?”

  Mr. Taylor, diplomatically, chose not to make reply to this. Instead, he paid a compliment to Mrs. Lacy on her home, and one to Anna on her sewing. “I do mind that very silk arriving at the Custom House,” he said, “and I said then to Mr. Wayte, ‘Just see if we don’t have Vice Admiral Gordon in to buy it,’ for I saw it was the color of your eyes.”

  Mrs. Lacy smiled approval. “So it is, and she is making a fine job of it. A most accomplished seamstress.”

  Edmund cut in languidly. “I do confess I’ve never yet seen Mistress Jamieson remain so still and quiet for so long. Are you quite well?” he asked her.

  Biting back the first retort she would have liked to make, she told him, “Very well, I thank you, sir.”

  “I see my pawns are safe, this afternoon,” he said. Then, looking past her shoulder, “Mr. Taylor, will you have a game of chess?”

  “I do not play it, I’m afraid.”

  Edmund made no comment, only glanced at Anna pointedly, then back at Mr. Taylor. “Cards, then.”

  General Lacy, turning in his seat, said in a murmur, “Edmund.”

  Mr. Taylor was already answering, “I do play piquet, sir.”

  “Excellent.”

  A servant brought the folding table covered with green plush, and cards, which Edmund shuffled rather clumsily, as though he had not done it in a while. He dealt, and Mr. Taylor gathered up his hand while General Lacy settled nearby in a chair to watch, and Mrs. Lacy played a flowing tune upon the harpsichord.

  As Anna sewed her seam, she kept one part of her attention on the game. She found it difficult, no matter how she tried, to not compare the men at play. In looks, and manners, and in dress, young Mr. Taylor should have won, and drawn her eye; so it was frustrating to her that he did not, that more and more her eye returned to Edmund’s roguish face, his plainer clothes, the square hands with the scars across the knuckles. And the more she watched, the more she grew aware that he was not as unaccomplished with the cards as he appeared.

  His hands were lazy in their actions, and she did not truly see how he controlled the play, and yet she grew convinced he was controlling it. But not for his own gain. When it seemed certain that he would not lose, the cards turned very suddenly in Mr. Taylor’s favor, and it seemed to Anna she had not imagined the faint smile in Edmund’s eyes that vanished even as it formed, as though it were enough amusement for him just to play the game.

  He turned his head, and caught her looking. If he guessed at her suspicions, he said nothing, only, “Will you play the winner, Mistress Jamieson?”

  “No, thank you. I must finish with this seam.”

  “Aye, for ’tis of great concern to finish with a gown you cannot wear, in time of mourning.”

  Mr. Taylor, seemingly surprised at Edmund’s tone, said mildly, “But the mourning will not last forever.”

  Anna gave a nod. “As Mr. Taylor says. Afflictions pass, Mr. O’Connor, just as surely as the winter brings the spring. You ought to know this, with your Cailleagh.”

  General Lacy roused himself from deeper thoughts, at that, and looked between the two of them. “What’s this about the Cailleagh?”

  Anna said, “Mr. O’Connor shared a piece of Irish folklore with the children and myself, a few weeks past.”

  “I was that surprised,” Edmund remarked to the general, “they’d never yet heard of it, being half-Irish and all. ’Tis a piece of their heritage, surely.” His dark eyes touched Anna’s with meaning as he added, “People should know who they are.”

  Mr. Taylor said, “Aye, there is much to be said for tradition.” And looking in his turn at Anna, his honest face could not hide how he admired the picture she made in her chair by the window, the fabric spilled over her lap and her needle in hand. Then he
turned back to Edmund and asked, “Shall we play one more hand, sir? I must say, I’d forgot just how much I enjoyed this game.”

  Edmund’s mouth curved in a smile that seemed private as he looked down, reaching a hand for the deck of cards. “Aye,” he replied, “so did I.”

  Chapter 34

  Spring came, and with the thawing of the river the whole city came again to life, the merchant ships returning and the open-air exchange on Vasilievsky Island growing once more crowded with the merchants and their goods, and with the men who kept the warehouses and worked about the docks.

  Vice Admiral Gordon now divided his own days between the Admiralty and Cronstadt, the small island with its castle and its shipyards near the tsar’s old house of Monplaisir a half-day’s journey distant down the Neva, where the greater ships were forced to put to anchor when they ventured in toward St. Petersburg, and where the warships of the Russian Navy often gathered with the galleys before setting out to sea.

  From time to time he visited the general’s house to see that Anna was well, and just as often carried a small gift within his pocket as he’d done when she was younger. Last week he had brought her a wrapped piece of palest pink silk, for a lining to the bodice she was piecing at the moment, and two days ago he’d given her a handful of dark hairpins each set with a tiny pearl. “It is the fashion of the French, I’m told, to dress their hair with jewels,” he’d said.

  So on this morning, when the shoes arrived by messenger without a note, she knew from whom they’d come. Even the general, when he’d seen her with the package, had deduced, “Another gift from the vice admiral?”

  Anna had nodded, still struck speechless by the beauty of the shoes. They were of silk brocade in twists of cream and berry-red, with silver buckles, pointed toes, and heels much higher than she’d ever dared to wear.

  “He is a cruel man,” General Lacy had remarked, in all good humor, “to give such things to a girl who cannot wear them till the mourning has been lifted at year’s end. I dare say by that time you’ll have those worn out just from looking at them.”