The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  Anna, still bent low, could see the full black skirts and petticoat of Empress Catherine’s gown, for while the other guests had put off mourning by her own command, she had herself remained in black, although she wore a lovely new white headdress as a show of celebration for the day.

  Behind the empress, other skirts and several men’s legs had all stopped as well. Aware of all the eyes upon her, Anna replied in the same formal Russian the empress had used. “Your Imperial Majesty, may I offer my congratulations on your daughter’s happy marriage?”

  “Thank you. But do stand, my dear, that I might see your gown; it is most lovely. You look quite a part of my garden.” She smiled. “I am pleased to see that you have worn your very best, to do my daughter honor. Did Vice Admiral Gordon bring that gown from Paris for you?”

  “I believe the silk did come from Paris, yes,” said Anna, “but the gown is my own work.”

  “Indeed.” The empress arched her eyebrows. “You are skilled, Anna Niktovna. Perhaps I will have you come and sew for me. How would you enjoy that?”

  How she truly felt would be of little consequence, she knew, because when royalty asked something of you, there was only one way you could answer. “Very much, Your Imperial Majesty. But I would pray you would not so command me until after General Lacy’s wife has had her child this autumn, for I’ve given her my promise I will stay with her till then, and I’d not wish to break a promise.”

  It was bold of her to speak so to the empress, and she knew it, but she stood her ground and hoped that she had not offended. One of the ladies who stood by the empress—a lady in waiting, presumably—looked wholly shocked, but the empress herself only said, “General Lacy’s wife is very fortunate to have engaged such a loyal companion. Have you left the vice admiral’s house, then, to live with the Lacys?”

  “I have, Your Imperial Majesty.”

  The Empress Catherine looked at her with eyes that seemed to see past the simplicity of those few words, to understand some hidden piece of Anna’s inner workings. “I, too, was raised in the houses of others,” she said very gently.

  Anna knew this, naturally, for everybody knew the story of how Empress Catherine had been raised from humble circumstances to the throne of Russia, though the story changed depending on the teller. All agreed she had been orphaned as a small child, and been taken to the household of a parish clerk, and then from thence to service in the family of a minister of Lutheran persuasion, where she’d stayed until arrangements had been made for her to marry a young soldier in the Swedish army. Some said that the marriage had occurred, while others said the soldier had been killed the morning of the wedding, but all were in agreement that the Russian army had then overrun the town, and Empress Catherine, brought before the commandant, had so impressed him that he had found service for her in a house of great respectability, from which she’d passed to service with Prince Menshikov, who’d introduced her to his friend the tsar.

  The prince himself came forward now to stand beside the Empress Catherine. Anna had not marked him out among the other men before, but there was no mistaking his lean features underneath the white wig that rose high on the crown of his head.

  Anna curtseyed again, and the prince gave a nod of acknowledgement before he murmured some words to the empress. Since the tsar’s death, the prince had kept close to her side, and the usual whispers had started to spread. General Lacy had recently said in disgust, of the gossips: “They’d have the poor empress so busy with lovers, she’d never be left with a moment to sleep. ’Tis the curse of a woman of influence that she must always be reckoned unvirtuous.”

  Anna agreed. There was certainly nothing in how Prince Menshikov and Empress Catherine were talking to each other now to imply they were anything more than good friends of long standing.

  The empress was saying, “I am well aware, Aleksandr Danilovich, but this will take but a moment.” She looked again to Anna. “I trust that General Lacy is as kind as he appears to be?”

  “He is indeed a kind man, and a good one, Your Imperial Majesty.”

  “I am glad to hear it. My younger daughter always has been charmed by him, and thinks him most heroic. And this young man who is with you, this is General Lacy’s kinsman, is it not? The one who fights?”

  So the rumors had risen to high places. Anna said, “Mr. O’Connor is kin to the general, yes, Your Imperial Majesty, but if you will permit me to correct what you have heard, he was provoked to fight, and only to defend a lady’s honor, so I hope you will not think to judge him harshly.”

  Edmund, she was thankful, couldn’t understand a word of what she said, for he did not speak any Russian. He’d have surely been amused to see her rise again to his defense.

  The empress looked past Anna to where Edmund stood, his head still bent respectfully.

  “Is that his sword, behind him on the ground?” she asked.

  “It is, Your Imperial Majesty.”

  “Why did he remove it?”

  “We were dancing,” Anna said.

  The empress made no comment, only turned her head a little as Prince Menshikov leaned in a second time to tell her something, then she nodded and looked back at Anna with a kindly smile. “Till the next meeting, Anna Niktovna.”

  Dipping in her final curtsey Anna saw the empress give a gracious nod to Edmund as she passed with all her party down the pathway, heading back toward the banqueting pavilion at the north end of the garden.

  “Well,” said Edmund, moving up to stand behind her, “what the devil was all that about?”

  She said, “Nothing of consequence.” And then, struck by a sudden thought, “But now you’ve met the empress.”

  Edmund laughed. “Aye, so I have. It seems what you did tell me on the Meadow was not all a lie. But then, the very best of lies,” he said to her, “are hidden half in truth.”

  And with a smile, he went to fetch his sword.

  ***

  Rob handed me half of the orange he’d peeled. “Well, I certainly had the impression,” he said, “that was only the second time Anna and Catherine had met. Did you think that?”

  I’d translated for him the essence of what both the women had said to each other, and thinking back now, I agreed. “Yes, you’re probably right. Catherine didn’t know Anna had gone to the Lacys’ to live.”

  “So we’ve likely not missed anything.”

  “No.” At least, not the scene I had glimpsed when I’d first held the Firebird; when Catherine had looked down at Anna and said, “You were never a nobody.”

  “So,” Rob concluded, “we’re on the right track.”

  It had been a long time since I’d walked in the Summer Garden. I could see the changes for the better made by recent efforts to restore it to its former grandeur, though it was much smaller now than it had been in Anna’s time. The Meadow had long gone, replaced two centuries ago by the parade ground called the Field of Mars, where modern incarnations of the regiments we’d just been watching at the wedding still stood in their ranks and fired salutes for state festivities, and where St. Petersburg’s eternal flame burned for the memory of the fallen.

  Other things were lost to memory. Of the buildings that had stood around the gardens as we’d seen them on the royal wedding day—the stables and orangeries and sheds, only the palace now remained to stand as plainly as it always had, without pretensions, seemingly unbothered by the busy tourist boats that chugged past on the great canal called the Fontanka. Now, as then, the Summer Palace with its square walls and its rows of simple windows seemed to gaze across the ever-flowing Neva at the gold dome of the fortress, lost in dreams of grander days.

  The gardens held a wilder kind of beauty, now, the oaks and lime trees stretching high above us in this green and peaceful world of quiet solitude. The broad path we were walking on was lined on either side by statues, pale and white against the dark trunks of the trees, and in the fading light they watched us pass, like ghosts.

  Rob walked beside me, uncomplaining, a
lthough I had kept him out and running round the city after Anna for some hours, and it was going on for sunset.

  “I enjoyed it,” he said now, when I apologized. “I’m starting to like Edmund.”

  “So is Anna.”

  “Is she?”

  “Can’t you see it?” How, I thought, could anyone not see it? There were just so many signs, how could he possibly have missed them?

  “I’m no good,” said Rob, “at reading signs.”

  I sighed, and said, “You’re doing it again.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Answering questions before I can ask them.”

  “You did ask,” he countered with logic that was not about to face argument, because to Rob it made no difference whether I spoke with my voice or my thoughts. He looked up at the white marble figure of some smirking god we were passing. “These statues,” he said, “must have tales they could tell.”

  From his casual tone it was hard to tell if he was making an innocent comment or trying to prod me to use my gifts. “Yes, well, the problem,” I said, “is that most of the tales wouldn’t be of St. Petersburg, would they? They’d be about where all these statues first came from. Ancient Greece, maybe. Italy.”

  “France,” Rob corrected me. “This one’s from France.” He had finished his half of the orange, but I could still catch its strong scent as he said, “If it’s native impressions you’re after, though, some of these trees might have been here in Peter the Great’s time.”

  I tipped my head back, looking up at the fine lace of leaves overhead, less distinct now that part of the sky had begun to turn blue-green as well, bringing shadows.

  “I wouldn’t know which ones, though, would I?” I said.

  “Not unless you touched them, no.”

  I glanced at him, and our eyes met for a moment, and I saw they held the same unspoken challenge that Edmund O’Connor’s had held when he’d asked Anna whether she’d walk with him, there on the Meadow, or whether she feared to.

  She’d taken that challenge and met it directly.

  But I wasn’t Anna. I looked away. “Well, they’ll be locking the garden soon, anyway,” I told him. “And we should eat. And tomorrow, I think we should start back at Lacy’s and see if we can’t pick up after the wedding, at some point.”

  Rob didn’t judge me. Perversely, that bothered me more than if he had reacted, had called me a coward, had stopped being so… so forgiving. So calm. So damned brotherly. I didn’t want Rob to act like my brother. The force of that shook me so deeply I stopped on the path.

  “Right then,” Rob said, “I’ll follow your lead.”

  He was only replying, I knew, to what I had just told him, my plans for the morning, for where we should next look for Anna. I knew that. And yet, as I fell into step at his side once again and we walked through the gates of the old Summer Garden and onto the Neva Embankment, with twilight descending all round us, I had the same feeling that Anna had felt at the midpoint of that minuet—the same sense that the ground was beginning to feel much less solid beneath me than when I had started this dance.

  Chapter 37

  Captain Hay had returned to St. Petersburg. It had been slightly more than a year since he’d left the tsar’s service and gone south in search of a climate that would more agree with his health, and Anna had missed him. He’d been such a regular visitor to the vice admiral’s throughout the whole time that she’d lived there, that truly he seemed like a favorite young uncle to her, and he greeted her that way when he came to dine with the general the last day in May.

  It made quite a full table for dinner: the general, his wife, Father Dominic, Vice Admiral Gordon with Sir Harry Stirling and Captain Hay, and of course Edmund beside her, his shoulder for want of space brushing her own when he reached for the bread.

  Anna lost track a few times of what they were actually talking about, but she put her distraction down more to the liveliness of the conversation than to her awareness of the dark man at her side.

  Gordon sat at her other side, with General Lacy as usual heading the table, his wife at the foot, and Sir Harry and Captain Hay sitting to either side of the Franciscan, who seemed keen to hear all the news out of Rome.

  Anna, living with Vice Admiral Gordon so long, had grown very accustomed to having the business of King James’s exiled court talked about openly, but this was the first time she’d seen it happen here, at General Lacy’s own table. She’d known his sympathies, certainly, and that he’d fought for King James in his youth and still passed his glass over the water, but it gave her pleasure to hear him now talking of current affairs with the ardor of one who was still a true Jacobite.

  “And did you see Daniel O’Brien, when you came through Paris?” he asked Captain Hay.

  “I did, aye. He is well. He said he’d spoken to the Duke of Holstein’s agent there, who did assure him that the duke, were he to gain the throne of Sweden, wishes nothing more than for King James to be restored.”

  Vice Admiral Gordon nodded. “Aye, the duke says much the same to me.”

  “I also met with our friend General Dillon, while in Paris,” Captain Hay went on, “and found him very desolate. The king no longer holds him in his confidence.”

  “Why not?” asked Gordon. “Dillon is a good man, and a loyal one.”

  “The king is well aware of that, but General Dillon,” said the captain, “keeps unfortunate companions. Like the Earl of Mar.”

  The name meant something to the men around the table, for apart from Father Dominic they all seemed understanding of the reasons why the king would have withdrawn his trust from General Dillon.

  “Anyway,” the captain said, “I did not stop too long in Paris, for even though I traveled with an alias, there are too many eyes there for my presence to go unremarked, and knowing I had just come from the king, the rats came out to sniff about. I did not wish to find myself in irons, or worse. O’Brien told me of a former courier, some years ago, who’d come across with money for the king, and who resisted all attempts to turn his loyalties so strongly that the agents of the English had him poisoned. Far from killing him, it turned him mad, so that his friends were forced to bind him, and O’Brien said the man has never yet recovered.”

  “Who was this?” Sir Harry Stirling asked, with interest.

  “Maurice Moray.”

  Anna let go of her cup of wine and would have spilled it had not Edmund’s reflexes been quicker. As he righted it, she bent her head to hide her face. “I’m sorry.”

  Captain Hay was speaking, still. “You will have heard about his family, I am sure. Of Abercairney. This Maurice was the youngest of them, I believe.”

  “Indeed, I know them well,” Sir Harry Stirling said. “His elder brother Robert married my own father’s widow, for she was still young at my father’s death. Robert,” he said, “only narrowly missed being hanged after Sheriffmuir, but though he won his release, his wife died not long after, and left their five children all motherless.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Lacy said, “how very sad.”

  “That whole family has come quite undone, in standing for the king,” Sir Harry said. “But then, ’tis true of many families that have done the same, both Scots and Irish.”

  Edmund put in drily, “We should all do as the English, merely drinking healths to James instead of raising swords for him, for then we might avoid the broken heads and lost estates, as they do.”

  Anna had blinked back the sting of tears enough to lift her head again, and yet the pain of hearing of her uncles’ fates, and knowing full well that her Uncle Maurice would not have been made to suffer anything had she been more discreet and not revealed him to his enemies, she could not keep the bitterness from sharpening her voice. “But it is by our actions, surely, and not by our words, that we reveal our worth.”

  “I know that, Mistress Jamieson. ’Tis why I made the joke.”

  “Forgive me, sir, it did not sound a joke to me.”

  Across the table, Captain
Hay watched their exchange with curiosity, as though, surprised by Anna’s tone, he sought a closer study of its cause. “Mr. O’Connor, you did lately come from Spain, I understand?”

  “I did, sir. I left Spain nearly a year ago, and came here the beginning of November last.”

  “I only ask,” said Captain Hay, “because in Paris I did hear some talk of an O’Connor who had left Madrid last year under suspicion he was Stanhope’s spy.”

  “That would have been myself, sir.” Edmund took the accusation full on, straightening his shoulders as he settled back, so that the roughness of his coat brushed Anna’s arm. “In faith, I have lost count of all the things I was accused of when I left, but I remember that was one of them.”

  “And were they right, then, to suspect that you were spying for the English?” Captain Hay asked, pressing, as he liked to do, until he had the truth.

  Anna could feel the irritation of the man beside her, even though his voice stayed pleasant. “Surely there’s no answer to be made to that, for if I were a spy I’d scarcely own it, and if I were not, my answer would yet be the same as if I were.”

  The general laughed. “He is no spy, and I myself will own to it, if he will not. Like General Dillon, he has merely had, upon occasion, some unfortunate companions. Is that not so, Edmund?”

  Edmund dragged his gaze from Captain Hay’s and sitting forward once again remarked, “So it would seem.”

  Sir Harry Stirling, in his own good-natured way, disarmed the situation with, “I see your bruises have now disappeared, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “Very nearly, aye, Sir Harry.”

  “I am glad to see it.” With a grin, Sir Harry added, “I have heard the harlot’s husband is yet in his bed.” He sent a charming look to Mrs. Lacy. “Madam, my apologies for sullying the conversation, but you have a table full of men and I’m afraid we cannot always mind our manners as we should.”

  The general smiled as well. “Perhaps,” he said, “we ought to let our Edmund deal with Captain Deane, when he arrives.”

  That made the other men, save Father Dominic and Edmund, burst out laughing, and Vice Admiral Gordon said, “In truth, I’d pay to see him do it.”