The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  There could be no mistaking her: the first Empress Catherine, the widow of Peter the Great.

  “Damn,” I whispered. And meant it.

  Chapter 2

  Sebastian had noticed. “You’re not even listening.”

  Bringing my thoughts back to where they belonged, I gave him my attention. “Sorry. You were saying?”

  “I’ve forgotten, now, myself.”

  It was later on that afternoon, and he and I were clearing up before the workday’s end. I found it calming, the routine of putting everything in order, going over both our schedules for the next day, sharing any needed details.

  After frowning for a moment at his mobile, his face cleared. “Oh, right. Next weekend. Thursday week till Sunday. Have you any plans?”

  “I don’t, no. But I’m sure you have some for me, since you’re asking.”

  “Well, I rather thought I’d send you to St. Petersburg.”

  He had my full attention now. “St. Petersburg? What for?”

  “To view an exhibition.”

  I could tell, from how he watched me while I counted forward silently to figure out the dates, that he was waiting to see how long it would take me to put two and two together.

  Next Thursday would be the second of September. “What, the Wanderers exhibit, do you mean? The one that’s coming from America?”

  The Wanderers, or Peredvizhniki, had been a group of Russian realist painters whose liberal political views set them at odds with the Academy of Arts, so in protest of what they deemed the uselessness of “art for art’s sake” they’d broken free of the Academy and formed their own group aimed at properly reflecting the society around them, warts and all. True to their name, they’d taken their exhibits on the road, across the country, through the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, and it only seemed appropriate that now their works had ended up in far-flung places, from the Netherlands to Tokyo. The exhibit had been in the pipeline for a few years, ambitiously gathering paintings on loan from museums and private collectors and galleries, and more ambitiously making arrangements to tour it from New York to Paris to Sydney. But first, it would have its grand opening months in St. Petersburg.

  “Got it in one,” said Sebastian. “Yuri’s one of the curators. You remember Yuri? And he tells me Wendy Van Hoek will be there for the opening.”

  I waited for the rest of it. “Yes?”

  “And I’d like you to do a deal with her.”

  “I’ve never met Wendy Van Hoek,” I reminded him.

  Sebastian counted that as a point in my favor. “She’s rather”—he paused as though searching for a way to put it politely, finally settling on—“formidable. But then I’d imagine one can’t be a Van Hoek without having that attitude. God knows her father was even more frightening to deal with.”

  Her father, I knew, had been one of the greatest private collectors in Amsterdam. I’d never met him, either.

  I told Sebastian, “Surely you should be the one to do the deal. She knows you.”

  “She thinks she does, yes. But unfortunately, what she thinks she knows, she doesn’t like,” he said. “We don’t get on.” He paused at the expression on my face and asked me, “What?”

  Drily, I remarked, “I didn’t know that any woman could resist your charms.”

  “She isn’t any woman.”

  I had never seen Sebastian frown like that about a woman. It intrigued me. “So, what is this deal you’re wanting me to do with her?”

  “She has a Surikov. I want to buy it. It’s in the exhibit, you’ll see it.”

  “And who is it for?”

  He said, “Vasily. He’s set his heart on it, and you know Vasily.”

  I did. A lovely man with quiet charm that masked a fierce tenacity, he was, hands down, my favorite of our clients. He’d suffered, as his parents had, under the Soviet regime and had been tortured in the Lubiyanka prison, though he rarely ever spoke of that. Instead he seemed determined now to focus on the beauty in the world and not its ugliness. It made a difference, knowing I’d be doing this for Vasily.

  Besides, I liked St. Petersburg. I’d done a term of study there, at the St. Petersburg State University, and knew the city well.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do my best.” I made another mental calculation of the time remaining and the things I’d need to do. “I’ll have to get myself another suitcase, though. My old one’s broken. And I ought to go and have a chat with Vasily, beforehand.”

  “Go tomorrow, if you like. In fact, why don’t you take the day?” he offered. “It’s Friday, you could start your weekend early. Get some rest.”

  The way he said that made me raise my eyebrows. “Do I look as though I need rest?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked me over and pronounced, “You’re not yourself.” And then he said, “Oh, hell, is that the time? I’m late for drinks.”

  “With whom?”

  “Penelope.” He stopped and stood a moment near his desk, expectant. “Jacket, or no jacket?”

  “For drinks with Penelope? Jacket.”

  “I thought as much. Damn. Where’s my tie? Is that it on the chair, just behind you?”

  I crossed the few steps to look. “No, that’s a scarf.”

  “A scarf?” He frowned. “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” A woman’s scarf, in shades of blue, the colors of the tie that I caught sight of now, coiled tidily at one end of the bookshelf. “There it is.”

  He looked where I was pointing. “Thanks.” He threaded it into his collar, flipped it around and over in a Windsor knot. “How’s that?”

  “It’s crooked.”

  “Could you…?” Standing with his chin angled slightly to the ceiling, he glanced sideways at the blue silk scarf still hanging on the chair. “It must be hers,” he said. “The Scottish woman from this morning. Margaret…”

  “Ross.” I fixed his tie as I had done a hundred times before. I had a brother. I was good with ties. “I don’t remember her wearing a scarf.”

  “Well, that’s where she was sitting. And apart from yourself, she’s the only woman who’s been in here today.”

  “She left her address, didn’t she? I’ll put it in the post to her.”

  As I stepped back, his hand came up to smooth the finished tie with satisfaction. “Thanks. You’re all right locking up, then?”

  I assured him that I was. Alone, when he had gone, I took the blue scarf from the chair and brought it out to the reception desk to put it in an envelope for posting.

  It was, I thought, the least I could do. No matter what my day had been like, I knew Margaret Ross’s had been worse. She must have been so hopeful when she’d woken up this morning, still believing that her carving could be traded for the means to buy a little bit of happiness, a little bit of life. And we had killed that dream and stomped on it, and that seemed inexcusable.

  The scarf was a designer one. My fingers touched the label. Hermès. Not an inexpensive, everyday thing, but a rare indulgence—something that the woman I had met today could ill afford to lose.

  I found the address she had left Sebastian, and I copied it with care onto the envelope. And then I took the scarf and started folding it.

  I shouldn’t have.

  ***

  My visions, when I concentrated, started out more cleanly. Though I didn’t ever fall into a trance in the accepted way, the concentration brought a sense of calm, a peaceful deep awareness not unlike the way I sometimes felt relaxing in the bath. Then gradually, against the void, I saw a small parade of moving images, projected like a filmstrip running past until one image grew to blot out all the others, and I viewed it much as I would view a film at the cinema, observing what was going on.

  This vision wasn’t clean, like that. It came on as a random flash, the same as I had felt when I had held the wooden Firebird, the same as I’d so often felt in childhood, but the end result was much the same: I saw a glimpse of Margar
et Ross’s life.

  I saw loneliness, drawn in her silent and dreary surroundings, a chair by a window that looked onto a small narrow garden with walls, and a clock ticking somewhere, relentlessly counting the slow-passing minutes. In all that drab room, I could only see one bit of color—a travel brochure from a cruise line, the white ship enticingly set on an ocean so brilliantly blue that it dazzled the eyes.

  And then that scene grew smaller as another rose to take its place: a window and a desk… a doctor’s surgery, I thought. And Margaret Ross herself, much as she’d been this morning, sitting in a chair, her shoulders sagging with dejection. I could hear the doctor speaking, and I caught my breath because it seemed so cruel, and so unfair.

  I pulled my mind back, made an effort, and the visions stopped, but there was no way to unsee what I had seen, or to ignore what I’d learned.

  It was still very much on my mind the next morning.

  I met Vasily early, for breakfast at his favorite restaurant, the St. Pancras Grand, on the upper concourse of the train station. He liked the retro English menu, and the elegance of the place with gold leaf on the ceiling and dark wood and leather bistro-style seating. We had a lovely chat about the Surikov, the painting he was keen to have me buy for him while I was in St. Petersburg, but it was what he said as he left me that changed the whole course of my day.

  He ordered a takeaway meal at the end of our breakfast, another whole plate of Eggs Benedict, and so I teased, “You’ll be putting on weight, if you start eating two breakfasts.”

  “It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for the old man at the end of my street. He has no one to live with him, so he eats poorly some days. I have seen it. Whenever I come here, I bring him Eggs Benedict.”

  “You’re a good man, do you know that?”

  He shrugged it aside. “It’s not good. It is right. When a person needs help, then you help them. What else would you do?”

  I thought about that, after Vasily left. From my handbag, I took out the envelope that I’d brought with me to post back to Margaret Ross, and I looked down at the address a long time, and then I walked from the restaurant and round to King’s Cross, and I bought a return ticket up to Dundee.

  Because he’d been right. Margaret Ross needed help. I could help her. The truth was, I couldn’t not help her. I’d never have lived through the shame.

  What Sebastian had told her was perfectly true: there was really no way, by conventional means, to determine her Firebird’s provenance. But if I were to hold it again, and to concentrate, I might find some information imprinted upon it to help me know where I should look for the proof that the carving had once been the gift of an empress. In less than a week, I would be in St. Petersburg, there on the ground, where the first Empress Catherine had lived, ruled, and died, and where Margaret’s mysterious ancestor, Anna, had most likely been in that flash of a vision I’d seen. I’d have time then to dig around, learn what I could, ask my colleagues who worked in the Hermitage… there were a number of ways I could try to help.

  Starting with holding the Firebird.

  Nobody needed to know, I assured myself. Not if I simply asked Margaret Ross if I could look at the carving again, maybe study it privately, just for a moment. She’d see me holding it, no more than that. No one needed to know.

  And secure in that reasoning, I started north on the train.

  The doubts didn’t start to creep in for a couple of hours. I had been going over the plan in my mind when I’d suddenly noticed a hole in it, and once I’d noticed that hole, it had seemed to grow larger until it was all I could see.

  Empress Catherine and Anna, I suddenly realized, had lived nearly three hundred years ago, and since that time, countless people would likely have handled the carving, obscuring those earlier imprints with later ones, clouding my readings.

  The vision I’d seen had been something spontaneous, something I hadn’t controlled. If I wanted to be any help at all to Margaret Ross now, and given I might only have one chance to hold the carving, I’d have to be sure I could sift through the levels and layers of time to arrive at the right one.

  And that was why, when my train slid into Waverly Station at Edinburgh, I didn’t change to the train for Dundee, as I ought to have done. I stepped right off the platform and walked up the ramp from the underground dimness to daylight, with Edinburgh Castle set high on its unyielding rock just ahead of me. It was why I walked the busy length of Princes Street, and turned toward the river, and was heading down the hill now to the one place I’d been certain I would never go again.

  Chapter 3

  The house looked like all of the rest of the old Georgian houses that ringed the small private park, making a circle around the tall trees that were fenced in and gated and rimmed by a hedge of dense holly. The houses rose four stories tall, all with similar rows of large white-painted windows set into their gray stone façades, and high steps leading up to their similar doors with arched transoms above.

  No one would ever have guessed that the house I was standing in front of was one of the foremost centers for the study of the unexplained: the Emerson Institute of Parapsychology, named for J. Norman Emerson, the Canadian archaeologist who’d pioneered the use of psychics in his expeditions in a quest to study what might lie beyond the limits of our current scientific understanding.

  I had never heard of Emerson, or the Institute, until four years ago. My elder brother, Colin, was the one who’d put me on to it. One morning he’d come down to breakfast looking even more thoughtful than usual. Giving a nod to the stack of brochures at the side of my plate, he’d remarked, “You’ve decided on Edinburgh, then, for your master’s?”

  “Yes,” I’d told him. “Russian Studies and Art History.”

  My mother had smiled. “Russian Studies,” she’d said. “You can study a Russian for nothing, at home. Just look there.” And she’d given a nod to our grandfather, reading his newspaper at the far end of the table. He’d remained dignified, as though he hadn’t heard, but he had folded his newspaper down for an instant to let his eyes smile at me.

  Colin had continued, “Then you might want to get to know these people.” He’d handed me a page he’d printed out from his computer, all about the Emerson Institute. He’d watched me while I read it through, then added, “They do studies there, real scientific studies, that might help you understand that thing you do.”

  The air had stilled and thickened in the kitchen. And my grandfather had set his paper down. His eyes had lost their smile. “You don’t ever tell anyone what you can do, Nicola. Do you hear? Always I’ve told you, since you were a little girl. Never tell anyone.” And when my mother had tried to placate him, he’d lifted a hand. “No. This is not for argument. I know,” he’d said, in a tone harsh with feeling. “I know what can happen. You keep this a secret. You tear up that paper.”

  My brother had calmly remarked that this wasn’t the Soviet Union, and the researchers in Edinburgh were not the KGB, who had done God knows what to my grandfather back in the 60s, when they’d learned through his neighbors that he had… abilities.

  What he had undergone in their intelligence program had been so traumatic he never had told us the details, but I’d felt the depth of his pain and concern as his eyes had met mine down the length of the table that morning. “Nicola,” he’d said to me, “tear up that paper.”

  I’d done as he’d asked. But I hadn’t forgotten. And then in my final year, when I’d come back from my term in St. Petersburg, I’d seen an ad in the paper for volunteers—anyone, just normal people, not psychics—to help take part in a new study the Emerson Institute was just beginning. No risk, I had thought. I could see what they did without ever revealing what I could do.

  So I had answered the ad.

  I cut those memories off, deliberately. At the edge of the green park I stood for a moment and gathered my courage, then drawing a steadying breath, I crossed over the road and went in.

  The receptionist was new, but
the other woman standing with her back toward me, leaning on the tall reception counter, was no stranger.

  Dr. Keary Fulton-Wallace wasn’t psychic. She’d had no clue I’d be coming, and when she turned round, her features plainly showed her surprise. I’d never known her age. I knew she’d told me once she had been a researcher for over twenty years, and so must be approaching fifty, but she had a youthful energy that made that seem impossible. She would have made a perfect Peter Pan, I thought, in pantomimes.

  Tossing her bright cap of auburn hair out of her eyes, she recovered herself and smiled at me. “Nicola! How wonderful to see you.” Just like that. As though the past two years had never happened.

  I hovered. “I’m sorry, I ought to have rung first. Is this a good time?”

  “Yes, of course. Come, let’s sit in my office.”

  Her office still looked the same. Only the calendar over her desk had changed, no longer seascapes but views of a garden. She shifted a pile of papers from one of the chairs at the side of her desk. “Let me get us some tea. Do you still drink the green kind?”

  The prodigal son must have felt like this, I thought—relieved and embarrassed and touched by the fuss being made.

  “Nonsense,” was her answer to my protests that she didn’t need to wait on me. “You’re very welcome company today, and I was just about to stop and take a break myself, at any rate.”

  She fetched the tea, and a half-plundered packet of Hobnobs, and settled in as though I were an old friend stopping by to chat. She’d made me feel just this relaxed and this welcome two years ago, when I had first ventured in, all uncertain, and she had explained what they did at the Institute.

  “Parapsychologists don’t try to prove extrasensory perception exists,” she’d said then. “We test hypotheses, like any other scientist, and our test results here have shown overall evidence that would support the hypothesis that ESP does exist. So we form more hypotheses, run more tests, try to find out—if it’s actually there—how it works.”