The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Rob.”

  “Aye?”

  “You knew about the books before we left Dundee,” I told him, “didn’t you? You knew she didn’t have to sell the Firebird to take that cruise.” A little hurt, I asked, “Why did you never tell me?”

  He looked back toward the fortress, so I couldn’t see his face. “And if I had,” he said, “ye would have had a different journey, would ye not?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Thought of all the paths I never would have taken, all the turnings I would never have discovered, all the things I would have missed. “I guess I would have.”

  Quietly, Rob told me, “It just seemed a thing worth following, your Firebird.”

  I watched his back, the way he held his shoulders, and I knew that like the heroes in the varied versions of the Russian fairy tale, the treasure I had ended up with when I’d chased the Firebird was not what I’d set out to find, nor what I had expected it to be, but something better, beyond price.

  His voice was even. “So, what happens now?”

  I stumbled on the answers. “Well… I guess we try to sort it out, somehow. I mean, it’s going to be a bit of an adjustment for me, I expect, but—”

  Rob’s head came around and he cut me off. “Will ye stop doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Answering questions afore I can ask them.”

  His smile stopped my heart. Then my own heart replied with an answering smile as I realized what I had just done.

  You did ask it, I told him.

  If I had not loved him before, there was no way I could have resisted the way that he looked at me now.

  Aye. His thoughts flooded into my mind like the river below us, and left no more corners of emptiness. Maybe I did.

  He reached for me then, and he wrapped his arms warmly around me, and kissed me, a long thorough kiss that stole most of my power to concentrate. When it had ended I drew back to look at him.

  “Rob?”

  “Aye?”

  “I still have to go back to London.”

  “I ken that.”

  “I’m sure I can get things arranged with Sebastian so I can work partly from Scotland, but that might take time.”

  Rob repeated, “I ken that.”

  “I mean, it might take a few months.”

  Then I heard my own words, and I suddenly realized how closely they followed the last ones that Anna and Edmund had said to each other. I knew Rob had noticed it, too, because I saw the smile in his eyes as he lifted one hand to recapture a strand of my hair that had feathered away in the wind. As his fingers closed round it, he brought his hand warm to the side of my face, and his touch held a promise.

  “I’ll wait,” he said gently, “for you to come home.”

  And to my satisfaction, that was the last thing he was able to say for some time.

  The End

  About the Characters

  This book began with one character, stubbornly standing alone on the page and refusing to let me forget him. Long after the other characters from my book The Winter Sea had gone about their business, Colonel Graeme stayed alive in my imagination, standing in the doorway of a cottage on the northeast coast of Scotland.

  Those who’ve read The Winter Sea will doubtless have remembered Colonel Patrick Graeme, former captain of the Edinburgh Town Guard who, like so many other Jacobites, had followed King James VII into exile, and returned in secret in the months before the 1708 invasion attempt that is at the heart of my earlier novel.

  Although I found no record of what Colonel Graeme did between that failed invasion and his death at Paris twelve years later, I’d come to know his character enough to know that, if he had been able to take part in the 1715 rebellion, he would have done. And so I chose to put him there, along with his nephew, John Moray—another real-life character, and one I’d grown so fond of that I didn’t let him die in 1710 as history demanded, extending his life instead and providing him with a fictional wife and children, including young Anna. That John and Colonel Graeme would return to Slains to protect Anna in the dangerous last days of the 1715 rebellion seemed natural to me, and that they would then take her to the convent of the Irish nuns at Ypres, a place John Moray knew himself, made equal sense.

  But while Anna Moray might have been my own creation, along with a few other minor characters—the Logan family in their cottage close to Slains; the neighbors of the nuns, and Christiane, at Ypres; Dmitri, Father Dominic, the Winter Palace guards, and Mrs. Hewitt in St. Petersburg—most of the people in the eighteenth-century story were real, and I didn’t want to take too may liberties with their lives. To that end, I have tried to place people where they actually were at that time in the past, keeping where I could to the original documents and records and, when possible, to their actual words.

  I was generously helped in my efforts by people like Sister Maire Hickey of Kylemore Abbey, County Galway, one of that same community of Irish Benedictine nuns who shelter Anna in my novel. Those nuns remained at Ypres until their convent was destroyed by bombing in the First World War. Forced to leave, they spent a few unsettled years before finally purchasing Kylemore Castle, in the west of Ireland. There, on the shore of a beautiful lough, surrounded by the Connemara mountains, they have lived since 1920, and it was from Kylemore that Sister Maire not only answered my questions about the history and daily routine of her community, introducing me to Rev. Dom Patrick Nolan’s book The Irish Dames of Ypres (an indispensable source of information on the specific nuns who lived there in 1716), but also, as a further kindness, took the time to proofread my finished chapters dealing with the convent, to help me ensure my portrayal was accurate.

  The convent at Ypres may be gone, but the details—and drawings—of John’s memorial stone in its church are preserved in the papers of his family. As an amateur genealogist myself, one of my greatest pleasures in writing historical fiction is researching the families of my characters and restoring their lives, in a way. Although his brother William, being Laird of Abercairney, makes the history books, John’s sisters and his other brothers Robert (Robin), James, and Maurice are more frequently ignored. Since Maurice, as noted in correspondence kept among the Stuart Papers, was actually passing through Flanders at the time of my story in 1716, it seemed fitting to let him stop in at the convent to pay his respects to the grave of his brother. His account of his family’s misfortunes, and of his own crossing, I took from his letters, and his mission to Paris for King James VIII was real. His sudden and unexplained madness is recorded in the Stuart Papers, and whatever its cause, he presumably never fully recovered, as at the end of his life in 1740 he was dependent on the charitable care of his nieces and nephews in Scotland. He apparently never married.

  It never fails to fascinate me just how many of the people in the past, who seem at first glance unrelated, were in fact connected to each other in their lives, through blood or marriage, and these relationships can often make it easier for me to understand the real-life actions of the people in the story. It also gives me scope to create motives for my characters in any situation I invent.

  The fact that Father Graeme was not only Colonel Graeme’s son, but cousin to the Morays, made him useful to me when I needed to transport young Anna to Calais from Ypres. And here, I did take liberties. With Anna being fictional, the journey Father Graeme takes to Ypres and back is fiction, too. His character, though, including his former service as a soldier, and the reason he became a monk, are all recorded history, and he was at that time living in Calais. He loyally provided information to King James for the remainder of his life. And while his journey to Ypres was my invention, his relationship to Mrs. Ogilvie was not.

  Rebecca Ogilvie and her husband, Captain John Ogilvie, had in fact been apprehended and taken into custody by British authorities in 1704, when they’d come across from France in the wake of John Moray and Colonel Graeme (who were on an earlier mission for King James, in what became known as the Scots Plot). Brought before a spe
cial committee of the House of Lords, Captain Ogilvie not only turned informant, revealing the names of others who had come across from St. Germain, but went a step further and offered to spy on the Jacobites, an offer that was apparently accepted, as he then entered into a correspondence with the British spymaster Harley, who paid Ogilvie a “royal bounty” of £100.

  The Ogilvies then returned to France, and Father Graeme, at least, appears to have been unaware of their change of loyalties. As both he and Captain Ogilvie had served in Catalonia, perhaps their friendship was an old one. As late as 1739, the trusting Capuchin monk mentions receiving letters from the captain. And in that spring of 1717, when I have him bringing my fictional Anna Moray into Calais, Rebecca Ogilvie had in fact just arrived from England, and mentions in a letter to her husband that Father Graeme came to see her. It was happily convenient for me that, in real life, she did make the crossing to Calais with Captain Thomas Gordon (whom she also mentions, less agreeably, in that same letter).

  Captain Gordon also featured in The Winter Sea, and I was more than pleased to have him reappear in this book, and take charge of little Anna.

  I had known from my previous research that Gordon had gone into Russia, and had risen to be governor of Cronstadt after years of distinguished service in the Russian Navy. I’d also known that he’d remained a Jacobite, but I am indebted to the historian Rebecca Wills for her book The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–1750, for giving me a broader window on the active Jacobite community at St. Petersburg, and for directing me, through her detailed footnotes and bibliography, to a wealth of useful primary resources for my own research.

  My favorite sources are always the letters and diaries of the times, and one of the most fascinating of these remains the detailed diary of Friedrich Wilhelm Bergholz, who was himself only in his mid-twenties when, as one of the courtiers of the Duke of Holstein, he kept an almost daily record of the happenings in St. Petersburg. His diary, which has been published in German and Russian (though sadly, not yet English) proved a treasure trove of details, from the days on which mourning for the tsar was lifted, to the wedding feast and celebrations of the duke and princess, and the way the Meadow looked upon that day.

  Bergholz also gave me little glimpses of my characters, from time to time, recording small moments like the morning when, while he and the duke were standing in the naval yard discussing ships with then Vice Admiral Gordon, the talk turned to the galleys. Like most galleys throughout history, the Russian ones were rowed by slaves and criminals condemned to man the oars, and Gordon remarked that “the British, as free people, do not want to hear about them at all,” to which Bergholz appended, “From his words, it was easy to see that he viewed these ships unfavorably, and was no friend of Vice Admiral Izmailovich, who commands the galleys here” (translation mine). I must confess this only made me fonder of Vice Admiral Gordon.

  John Deane’s thorough report to Lord Townshend on his aborted spying mission to St. Petersburg in June of 1725 paints, as one might expect, a less flattering picture of the Jacobite community there. The fact that I’ve portrayed Deane himself less favorably than many other historians is not something I did lightly or with malice; rather, it represents the personal conclusions I came to after reading, not only this one report, but several of his other writings, and those of the people who knew him, from his early life and the shipwreck on Boon Island, through his later career as British consul at Ostend, until his death in 1761, at home in England. I owe thanks to my friend, Maureen Jennings, author of, among other things, the Murdoch mysteries, who also spent almost thirty years as a practicing psychotherapist, and who generously read through Deane’s writings and agreed Deane might have suffered from either narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, an insight that helped me immensely in crafting his character.

  For all that Deane hated the Jacobites, his report to Townshend is nonetheless valuable in that it records, in minute detail, the timeline of his visit, what he observed while in St. Petersburg, who he met, and what they spoke of. Without Deane, I might not have known that Edmund dined every day at General Lacy’s house, and more minor characters like the innkeeper Thomas Trescott might have slipped my notice altogether. (Whether Mr. Trescott’s son ever did receive the English education Deane had promised him, I do not know, but one of Trescott’s sons, John, after graduating from the Russian Academy gymnasium, became a skilled cartographer and the only Briton in the eighteenth century to be made a full member of the Academy of Sciences; and another son, Thomas, did complete a five-year apprenticeship with the British instrument maker Benjamin Scott.)

  Deane remained particularly fixated on ferreting out the reason for Captain William Hay’s return to St. Petersburg. He would no doubt have given much to have had the chance, as I did, to read Thomas Gordon’s letter book.

  Letter books, in which a person’s private correspondence was drafted and copied, are a rare and wonderful resource for any historical novelist, and I treasure the week I was able to spend in Edinburgh reading Gordon’s letter book in the National Archives of Scotland’s Historical Search Room. I will forever be grateful for the tireless assistance of Alison Lindsay, head of the NAS’s Historical Search Section, who was—and continues to be—an invaluable help to my research.

  Gordon’s letters, written to everyone from his closest relations to King James VIII himself, provided me with a wealth of information, not only about the political intrigue and day-to-day life within the Jacobite community, but also about his own home life. The household supplies that he ordered each year to be shipped to him from Amsterdam are listed in fascinating detail, down to the various fabrics for his daughters’ clothes, and his favorite types of tea. His letters also revealed family connections and personal details that I’d never found elsewhere, including the deaths of his son and his stepdaughter, Jane, and the existence of his half-brother and his nephew Charles.

  The daughters who were living with him in St. Petersburg, Mary and Ann (whom I nicknamed “Nan” in this novel, to avoid any confusion with Anna), both married into the Jacobite community there—Mary to the merchant William Elmsall, and Ann to Sir Henry (Harry) Stirling, a match that Gordon wrote, in a letter to his cousin, was “the greatest satisfaction that I have on earth.” Fittingly, Ann and Sir Harry’s granddaughter, another Anna, married into the Morays of Abercairney, thus continuing the interweaving of the families that seems to so dominate the lives of those I write about.

  As of this writing, I don’t know what became of Sir Harry’s sometime secretary Mr. Taylor, although I presume he remained active in the English Factory at St. Petersburg, together with the merchants Mr. Wayte and Mr. Morley. Whether there ever was a Mrs. Hewitt, I cannot say, but there certainly was a Mr. Hewitt, with whom Thomas Gordon had a falling-out around this time, though they appear to have settled their differences a few years later.

  The military exploits of General Pierce (Peter) Lacy are easy to follow, thanks in large part to his journal, but his personal life in St. Petersburg proved more difficult to piece together, and I had to rely on the writings of others to fill in the gaps in his household. His wife, despite being a woman of quality and wealth, receives little mention anywhere, and depending upon which source one trusts, I may have left him short one daughter.

  The birthdate of his youngest son, Francis, is recorded at St. Petersburg in 1725, just after the events of this novel, and it is known that Michael was the eldest son, and Helen the fourth daughter, but I was forced to make my best guess as to the relative ages of the other children, based on the documents I had. I offer my apologies to them and their descendants if I’ve got them out of order.

  The girls all married well, mainly to high-ranking officers, and little else seems to be known of what became of them. The boys all followed their father into military service with foreign armies. Michael became a cavalry officer and was killed in 1735; the younger Pierce served the King of Saxony and lived a long life, dying in Belgium in 1773. Francis (Franz) rose to the rank
of field marshal in the Austrian army and died well respected in 1801.

  As for General Lacy himself, his heroism at Poltava was eclipsed by his even greater victories in the Russo-Turkish wars of the 1730s. He remained a favorite of Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth, who became empress in 1741. She allowed Lacy to return to his beloved Livonia, where he served as governor-general and commander of the military forces there.

  Lacy remained in Livonia for the rest of his life. When a fire broke out in a house dangerously close to the city of Riga’s stores of hemp and gunpowder, Lacy roused himself and, though in his seventies by this time, stood all night in the cold on the roof of the gunpowder store, directing the efforts to put out the fire. His bravery saved the city from an explosion, but he suffered a fever as a result, which in his doctor’s opinion was the cause of the steady decline of his health afterward. Having fought from the time he was thirteen years old, he met death at last, not on the battlefield, but in his own bed, surrounded by his family, in April of 1751.

  Edmund O’Connor, his kinsman, appeared at first glance a much less noble character.

  From Edmund’s own statement (recorded by the secretary of the British spymaster Lord Townshend), we know the dates that he arrived in, and departed from, St. Petersburg; that he brought letters from the Jacobites in Spain addressed to Gordon and Sir Harry, and on leaving, carried letters from those same men into Amsterdam, where as arranged, he met with Deane, and the letters were opened.

  Edmund made a good impression on Townshend, who found him “plain in what he says.” Deane was less sure of his loyalties, and having examined the facts, I found myself siding with Deane.

  The letters Edmund carried from St. Petersburg, and that he showed to Deane, spoke of invasion plans, and Edmund himself, in some detail, related the Jacobites’ intent to purchase Spanish ships and lure the British Navy into battle in the Baltic.

  But the deeper I dug with my research, the more it appeared that those plans might be false, and be meant to deceive.