The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  This would have been the entrance hall in Anna’s time, the first place any visitor would see when they’d been ushered through the massive double doors that had originally opened onto steps that met the river. Any visitor back then would have been awed, as I still was, by the sheer scale of this great room, its stone floor laid with large square tiles, a double row of Tuscan columns holding up a ribbed and painted ceiling arching in enchanting vaults, the side walls painted shades of quiet green and sand and made to look like marble, set with arching niches in which statues of Greek goddesses and gods stood fixed in contemplation of those passing by, between the candles on reflective gold medallion backings hanging on the walls to either side.

  Rob looked around. “So what in here’s original?”

  “I’m sorry?” Then, as I took in his meaning, “You can’t be thinking I can do this? Oh, come on. We haven’t got that sort of time.”

  He looked down at his watch. “We’ve nearly fifty minutes. And if you’re wanting me to stay alert, it’s easier,” he told me, “if you’re driving. So then, what in here’s original?”

  There were a few things that I knew of, but it had to be something that I could touch. “The stairs.”

  They curved up, broad and grand, to either side of the large statue of Apollo at the farther end, and framed the double doors that would have led out to the formal gardens. Made of water-seasoned oak, their darkly polished treads displayed the heavy wear of centuries, concave along their centers where so many feet had climbed.

  The stairs had been roped off, so tourists wouldn’t try to use them, but if I stood very casually beside them, and pretended I was looking at Apollo, with Rob beside me, shielding me from view, I could just lay one hand discreetly at the railings, and…

  I closed my eyes.

  It came so very easily, this time. I didn’t know if that was from the fact that I was feeling rushed, and maybe pushing myself just a little more because of it, or if it was because I really wanted to be able to explore this, and to test what I could do. But for whatever reason, I slipped comfortably and quickly to that place where all the images began to run, and blur, and shift in focus.

  There, you’ve got it, Rob assured me. Go.

  And I found Anna.

  ***

  They’d been ordered to wait. The antechamber into which the guard had led them was too large to let Anna feel comfortable. She’d paced the inlaid floor at first, until she’d realized Edmund could not sit while she was standing, and so now she sat and fidgeted on a large Spanish chair, whose leather seat was fastened on with thirty copper-headed nails, a number she knew well because she’d spent the last ten minutes counting them.

  Edmund, sitting solid and relaxed in his own chair beside her, commented, “See now, this is why I could not picture you with nuns. You never can be still.”

  “I can.”

  “I’ve only seen you do it when you’re feeling all unwell,” he told her, “or with Mr. Taylor, though perhaps the two are intertwined.”

  She tried to wither him, as Gordon had, with just a look. “That is unfair to Mr. Taylor, and you know it. He’s a good man.”

  “Aye, he’s nothing like myself. I’ll give him that. But you are nothing like yourself, when you are with him, Mistress Jamieson. Why is that?”

  Anna looked away. “I have no time for playing games today, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “Now, that’s a shame, for I was thinking to divert you while we waited.” He shifted in the chair as though removing something from his coat, and Anna heard the sudden slide and shuffle of a deck of cards.

  Her gaze came sharply back to see the cards held in his hands. “You keep them with you?”

  “Always. Cards can serve me better than a purse of coins,” he told her, “and they often have.”

  “I know no games.”

  He smiled. “I was not going to play you. Here.” He spread the deck into a fan and held it out toward her. “Choose one.”

  “Any of them?”

  “Aye,” he said. “And hold it to yourself, don’t let me see it. There, now put it back.”

  He closed the fan and shuffled once again. His hands were expert and their movements were so fast she couldn’t follow them. “Now, cut the deck in two,” he told her. “Anywhere you like, and turn the top half over.”

  Anna did, and stared in pure astonishment.

  “Is that the card you chose?” asked Edmund.

  “Yes.”

  “The ace of hearts.” He smiled again. “Of course it is. All right then, put it back again, let’s see where it ends up.”

  Six times the ace of hearts returned into the deck, and six times Anna drew it out again at Edmund’s bidding, always in a different place and by a different method.

  “How,” she asked him, “do you do that?”

  “Are you finding it impressive?”

  “Yes.”

  He grinned. “Well then, I’d be a fool to tell you.” Shuffling the cards once more, he himself flipped the ace of hearts over with casual ease, put it back and reshuffled and cut and produced it again, did it over and over till Anna was thoroughly awed.

  “Were you born with those cards in your hands?” she accused him.

  “Aye, cards in my hands and my fists up.”

  She looked at those hands and gave voice to the question she’d wanted to ask since the first day she’d met him. “Your left hand, sir…”

  “Aye?”

  “Did those scars come from fighting?”

  He turned the ace of hearts out of the deck and put it back again, and studied his own fingers while he did it. “No,” he told her, “those I got from being whipped across the knuckles as a lad, for thieving, by the steward of the lord who kept the manor where I lived. They left my right hand untouched, as you see, so I could use it in my work.”

  “What did you steal?”

  His dark eyes met hers briefly in a glance that slid away as he looked down again, and half-smiled without humor. “I stole nothing, Mistress Jamieson. It was another boy who did the thieving, not myself.”

  “And was he also whipped?”

  “He would have been, had I revealed him, but I saw no point in it,” he said. “He was a smaller boy, whose need was greater than my own.”

  “That hardly makes it just, for you to have to bear his punishment,” said Anna with a frown.

  His shoulders lifted in a shrug. “’Tis often easier, when someone will suspect you of it anyway, to take the blame.”

  She found she did not know how to reply to that, for any words she thought of sounded glib and superficial in the face of such a declaration, and although he’d said it very casually, she had the sense, from how he concentrated his attention on the cards directly afterward, that he had just revealed a key component of his character that few besides herself had ever learned.

  She drew a breath as though to speak, let it escape, and then drew another one. “Mr. O’Connor, I—”

  Hard footsteps rang out behind them, approaching the door, interrupting her. Edmund in one motion gathered the cards in a neat stack and held them secure in one hand while the same guard who’d told them to wait swung the door open wide.

  “Her Imperial Majesty says she will see you,” he told Anna, adding, to Edmund, “The girl only. You may wait here.”

  Edmund, not understanding the Russian instruction, asked Anna, “What did he say?”

  “That the empress is wanting to see me alone.”

  “I’ll wait here, then.” He stood with her, not from respect alone, Anna thought, but to provide her a bit of encouragement. As the door closed at her back, he was taking his seat again, and she could hear the small tap as he straightened the deck of cards, starting a new shuffle.

  Head up, she followed the guard through a room where the ceiling and walls were all covered in blue-and-white tiles, like the Dutch ones in Vice Admiral Gordon’s house, and beyond that into one of the most stunning rooms she had ever seen. Not an enormous room, but
an exquisite one, paneled all over in richly burled wood with five windows that looked to the Neva.

  She’d heard tell of Prince Menshikov’s walnut study before, from the vice admiral who had been in it, but seeing it firsthand was like being inside a richly made jewel case, and the empress herself was the jewel at its center, serenely composed on a three-cornered armchair, with two of her ladies-in-waiting behind her, and the great Prince Menshikov himself leaning on the edge of his desk.

  The tick of a longcase clock standing against the wall just behind Anna was all she could hear while she curtseyed as low as her gown would permit.

  “Well then, Anna Niktovna,” the empress said, “what brings you here on this fine day to visit me?”

  Anna, not rising, replied, “Your Imperial Majesty, please do forgive me, but it is a matter most private.”

  The prince said, amused, “She has come to apply as your seamstress, no doubt, as you lately invited her to.”

  Anna heard the small whispers and quickly hushed giggles that told her the ladies-in-waiting were enjoying the joke, too, at her expense, but she ignored them and waited for Catherine’s reply.

  “Aleksandr Danilovich,” said Empress Catherine to Menshikov, “may I have use of this room for a moment, to hear this young woman?”

  “Alone?” The prince did not sound shocked, so much as curious at this strange breach of protocol.

  “You were not always a prince,” she reminded him, “and I was never a princess, but though we were common, the tsar gave us both the great honor of his private audience when we had need of it. How can I do any less, when I’m asked?”

  In the small pause that followed, Prince Menshikov must have smiled, for when he spoke next his voice had warmed. “How indeed?” Standing away from his desk, he said, “Come with me, then, ladies, into my chamber next door. I daresay we can do something there that will keep us all well entertained.”

  The ladies-in-waiting, with more giggles, followed him, as did the sober-faced guard. When the door had swung shut and the great latch had clicked, Empress Catherine told Anna to rise.

  “Now,” she said, “tell me, what is this matter so private?”

  Straightening her shoulders, Anna reached into her pocket and produced the letter, holding it toward the empress. “This. Vice Admiral Gordon had it given him by Captain William Hay, who traveled here for no cause but to bring it to you. It is from King James,” she said, “in Rome.”

  The empress did not move to take the letter, only looked at it in Anna’s hand a moment and then nodded at the desk and told her, “You may put it there.”

  “I fear I cannot, Your Imperial Majesty.” As the empress’s eyebrows began to lift, Anna went on, “This comes from the hand of my king, by the efforts of men he does trust, and I would not be doing my duty to any of them if I left it where others might see it, and did not deliver it properly into your hand.”

  The empress still sat in her chair, without moving. “If that letter touches, as I should imagine it does, upon some new endeavor of his to return to his throne, for which he has need of us, then it should properly go to Prince Menshikov, or to the young Duke of Holstein. They are more accomplished in affairs of state.”

  “But this is not addressed to either one of them,” said Anna. “It was written to the tsar, and—”

  “I am not the tsar,” the empress cut her off. And then, more softly, with a trail of sadness running through her tone the way a raindrop ran down window glass, “I’m not the tsar.” She looked away, toward the desk. “I was not meant to do such things as this, Anna Niktovna. I was meant to be a mother and a wife,” she said, and on a not quite steady breath revealed, “Now I am neither.”

  Anna’s heart ached of a sudden for the empress, who was set so high with all the court at her command, and yet seemed so unbearably alone. It was not fitting, Anna knew, to speak familiarly to such a woman, yet she could not help but try to ease her pain by saying, “You have daughters.”

  “One is gone, the other grown, and all the others in their graves, with all my sons. And with their father.” Empress Catherine closed her eyes for one brief instant, and when she reopened them, they glistened with a brightness Anna recognized from all the tears that she herself had ever gained control of.

  And it was the memory of those tears and why she had so often nearly cried them that emboldened her to say what she was thinking.

  “But the daughter grown yet needs you,” Anna said, “as do your people, for they too have lost their father, and they need to know that they’re still in their mother’s thoughts, and heart.”

  “And so they are, but thoughts and heart accomplish very little, Anna Niktovna. As we say in Russia, we will know the bird by how it flies.” The empress brought her gaze to Anna’s, kind, and yet still sad. “I may now wear the feathers of an eagle, but my flight betrays me. I am still the little wren who nests beside the door,” she said. “My only purpose, all my life, has been to care for those I love, to feed them and look after them. The tsar, my husband, knew this well. He did not leave his throne to me because of my abilities, but only to be sure that I would live when he was dead, that his successor would not have me killed or sent into Siberia. It was a kindness, that is all.” Her voice held quiet certainty. “I cannot be the ruler that he was, Anna Niktovna, and that letter is not meant for me, but for the Duke of Holstein, or Prince Menshikov, as I have said. Your king requires an eagle for his purpose, not a wren.”

  It was a speech intended to dismiss her, Anna knew, and yet she stood and gathered courage. “If you will permit me…”

  Empress Catherine’s eyes revealed a mild surprise, but she prepared to listen.

  “If you will permit me,” Anna started for a second time, more surely, “I believe His Imperial Majesty left you his throne out of more than just kindness.”

  “You are very young.”

  Anna tried hard to sort her words properly, say what she wanted to say. “Your Imperial Majesty, if you will look out these windows, in any direction, you’ll see what the late tsar has built here.” My Russia, he’d called it, that night last November when all in a rage he had broken the mirror—all that I have made, my whole life’s work. She minded well how he’d described how easily it all could be brought down again, and ruined. “I believe,” she told the empress, well aware that she had now gone past propriety, “the late tsar left the throne to you because he knew your flight so very well, and he needed the wren by the door to look after what someone else might have destroyed. He knew, you see, you would take care of his Russia. That you would continue what he had begun.”

  Empress Catherine had turned, and was staring at Anna with such an astonished expression that Anna dropped into a penitent curtsey and stayed there, her cheeks flaming color. “Forgive me, I shouldn’t have spoken, I don’t have the right. I am nobody.”

  Slowly, the empress stood, and with a few measured steps crossed the distance between them. Her hand lightly touched Anna’s hair, traveled soothing and cool from her cheek to her chin, where, quite gently, it made Anna tilt her face up till her gaze met the empress’s.

  “My darling Anna,” she said in her elegant Russian, and smiled. “You were never a nobody.” Letting go of Anna’s chin, she took the letter from the younger woman’s hand in a decided motion. “Tell Vice Admiral Gordon I will read this letter from your king, and tell him when I’ve done so, I will send for him, so that we may discuss its contents further. And tell him,” she said, smiling still more deeply, “that this little bird that he has raised flies very like a falcon, with a true and honest eye that does him credit.”

  Anna had no certain memory, afterward, of walking from the room, although she knew she must have managed it. She had no memory, either, of the guard escorting her out of the chamber of Prince Menshikov and back to Edmund, waiting in the antechamber.

  “Well?” asked Edmund, rising to his feet, his dark eyes keen upon her still embarrassed face. “What happened? Did she take the letter?�
�

  “Aye,” said Anna. “Aye, she took it. She—”

  ***

  I lost her then.

  More properly, Rob yanked me clean away from her and thrust me without ceremony back into the present. He was standing with his back to me, quite close so that he blocked the line of vision of the man and woman just now coming into the Large Corridor. It gave me needed moments to restore my equilibrium.

  OK? He asked, not looking at me.

  Yes, OK now. Thank you.

  Rob stepped away and, with what felt like nothing so much as a friendly hug, wandered off casually into the next room as I turned to Yuri and Wendy Van Hoek.

  Chapter 41

  Of all the things I’d been expecting Wendy Van Hoek to be, a kindred spirit wasn’t one of them; and yet before ten minutes had gone by, we’d formed an easy and immediate rapport with one another, moving from topic to topic as though we’d been friends for years. Yuri was watching the pair of us like someone watching the finals at Wimbledon.

  Physically, Wendy was not what I’d thought she’d be, either. From how Sebastian had spoken about her, I’d pictured a middle-aged, rigid-faced woman. In actual fact, she was not that much older than me, and incredibly pretty, with eyes that took an interest in the person she was speaking to, and long, straight hair the lovely golden-blond shade emblematic of the Netherlands.

  Her accent was American, and while it had been clearly shaped by summers in the Hamptons and a college in the Ivy League, its tone was fresh and pleasant. And she laughed more than I’d thought she would.

  “And then he spilled wine down the front of my dress,” she concluded the count of the many disasters that had marked her first encounter with Sebastian. “Red wine, all over my new Valentino,” she said, “and he stood there and laughed. I mean, honestly, you name a boneheaded move, and your boss made it.”