The Firebird (37 page)

The little girl did not smile back, but asked her in a hopeful tone, ‘Can you catch a bird without hurting it?’

Anna was fully awake now. She raised herself up on her elbows and focused more fully on the child who stood beside her bed – a pretty little girl with white-blonde hair still tightly plaited down her back, and in her nightshift. She could have been no more than five or six.

Anna said, ‘I have never attempted it. Why?’

‘There’s a bird in our room.’

Anna blinked. ‘Is there?’

‘Yes. It flew in through the window and it won’t go out,’ she said. ‘None of the servants will help, only Ned, and we can’t fetch Mama because she’s lying down. She lies down in the mornings, she doesn’t feel well in the mornings because of the baby inside her, so Michael and Ned have been chasing the bird, but they’re going to hurt it.’

Anna sat up. ‘You say none of the servants are helping?’

‘Just Ned. Da’s already gone out, and the rest said that having a bird in the house was bad luck.’

‘Nonsense. Rather worse luck for the bird,’ Anna said, as she rose and shrugged into her coloured silk morning gown, wrapping it closely around her long nightshift and tying the sash before holding her hand to the child. ‘Show me where.’

The child led her down the empty corridor. The general and his wife had bedchambers downstairs, and Anna was grateful for that, since the noise spilling out from the children’s room could not have helped but disturb Mrs Lacy if she had been trying to rest closer by. There were scuffling sounds and a high girlish shriek and the clatter and thud of an overturned chair, and a man’s voice cursed lightly in words that should not have been said before children.

She opened the door on a scene that she might have thought comic if not for the worry that showed on the varied young faces all fixed on the grey-and-black crow flapping panicked from window to wall. There were four other children besides the one holding her hand, and all still in their nightclothes. The eldest, a boy, was already quite gangly and tall, on the brink of abandoning childhood, and clearly his father’s son down to the feature; the next eldest would have been either the girl with the ringlets of gold or the boy at her side, who both looked to be nine or ten years of age, although the boy was a little bit smaller, all elbows and knees and continual motion. The youngest child, younger than even the girl who had come to fetch Anna, sat huddled on one of the beds with the blankets drawn tightly around her head, not looking up as the bird swooped and fluttered.

‘Now, drive it to me, Michael, just like before,’ said the man who could only be Ned, the one servant who’d come to the aid of the children. Anna hadn’t expected that he would be Irish, although she supposed it was not such an odd thing for men such as Lacy to want to employ their own countrymen. Vice Admiral Gordon had once had a Scottish valet, and a coachman from Scotland besides, but they’d both been much older than this man.

She judged him to be not yet thirty, a lean man but broad-shouldered, with dark-brown hair fastened back at the nape of his neck and his jaw darkly roughened with the morning’s beard that he had not yet shaved. He wore neither waistcoat nor coat, only his unlaced shirt half-tucked into his breeches, and from the rapid rhythm of his breathing and his look of set determination Anna guessed that he’d been at this for some time.

The bird swooped once more and he dove for it, swearing again.

Anna said, ‘Will you please mind the use of your language in front of the children?’

He looked at her then, for the first time, his dark eyebrows lifting a little before he turned back to the task at hand, keeping his eyes on the bird in its flight.

The small girl at her side urged her into the chamber and shut the door firmly behind them before she announced, ‘I have brought Mistress Jamieson.’

Not looking round, the man said, ‘Aye, she’ll be a grand help, I can see that.’

Anna, stung by his sarcasm, found herself in the uncommon position of not knowing how to reply. The servants of her own house, and Dmitri in particular, had sometimes given voice to their opinions, but they’d never shown her open disrespect.

She felt her temper rise, and when the man had tried and failed twice more to grab the crow as it flapped past, she told him archly, ‘You will never catch it that way.’

‘Will I not?’ His last great lunge had winded him. He stood now half-bent over with his hands braced just above his knees, and turned his head to look at her. His face was not unpleasant, and might even have seemed handsome to some women, but she only saw the challenge in it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It is too badly frightened.’

At her side the little girl looked up and let out a small cry. ‘It’s hurt! It has a hurt leg, look!’

The crow was trying now to perch and settle, but no matter where it came to rest it could not seem to grasp the surface and its one leg dragged so awkwardly it threw the bird off balance, sending it flapping to the ceiling once again.

In calm tones Anna told the child, ‘Go to your little sister, now, and tell her not to be afraid. ’Tis but a bird, and does not mean you harm.’

It was, in fact, a hooded crow, with black wings and a vest of ashen grey, and had she shared the superstitions of the servants she might well have shared their fears as well, for hooded crows were widely seen as heralds of ill fortune. But she did not hold to superstitions, and she only saw a wounded and exhausted creature, losing strength.

She told the children, ‘Will you all sit down, please. Be as quiet as you can.’

The boys, as boys would do, looked first to Ned to see his own reaction, and a moment passed before he gave a silent sort of laugh and settled in a nearby chair to watch her with the certain eyes of one who thinks to see another fail.

When all were seated, Anna stood alone and waited for the crow to calm.

Ned murmured, ‘Well, what now? Will you then charm it with a song, to fly down to your hand?’

Again his tone amazed her, and she briefly dropped her gaze to him, and told him, ‘You are insolent.’

‘Aye, frequently.’ His eyes were laughing at her now, and too familiar.

Anna looked away, refusing to allow him satisfaction. For a minute more, the crow flapped round the ceiling in confusion, and then all at once it dropped down with a flutter to the floor, and hopped and limped and dragged its leg in ever smaller circles, till at length it came to rest not ten feet from where Anna stood, collapsing there in weariness.

She tugged once at the loose end of the sash of her silk morning gown, and slipped it from her shoulders as she took a cautious step towards the bird, and then another. It flapped once, and shuffled further off, and might have taken once more to the wing if she had not, in one swift motion, tossed the morning gown on top of it and knelt to wrap the fabric round and gather up the crow with care, while speaking soothing words to it.

‘There now,’ she said. ‘There now, you will be well, there is no need to be afraid.’ Securely swaddled in the folds of coloured silk, the bird tipped its head sharply up to look at her with one bright eye, its long beak moving silently as though it sought to speak.

The room was silent, too, until at once the children started speaking all together, and pressed round her for a close look at the captive crow. This was not at all, thought Anna, how she’d planned to meet the general’s children, yet she likely could have done no better for a first impression, since it was soon obvious that all of them, from half-grown Michael to the smallest of the girls, now brave enough to venture from her blankets, thought what Anna had accomplished was no ordinary feat.

The oldest girl said, ‘But we cannot put it out of doors again, not in the snow, not till its leg has healed.’

The brother closest to her age was in agreement. ‘Can you fix it, Ned?’

The children parted for the man as he came forward. Close, he seemed much taller. Anna did not wish to meet his gaze and so encourage any further insolence, nor was there any safer place to focus her attention, for his chest was covered only by a holland shirt, and that unlaced. Instead she looked down as his hands reached, not to take the bird away from her, but simply, and with unexpected gentleness, to turn the wrappings slightly so that he could peel a fold of cloth away to see the injured leg.

His hands were browned as though from being in the sun, and strongly shaped, and in a line across the knuckles of his left hand rose a narrow ridge of scarring that she could not seem to look away from.

‘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 re-establish 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 straight away, 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 nightshift, with her hair undone in curls about her shoulders. Though she felt her colour rising she returned his gaze with coolness, and he gave a nod that managed to both honour 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.

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 artefacts and artworks, and even though the items on display were maybe only five per cent 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 non-public 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-grey 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.’