The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  “You are prideful, sir. And overconfident.”

  His mouth curved briefly. “Not at all. But I’ve acquired certain skills in life that on occasion serve me well.”

  “You cheat, you mean.”

  “Is this how you say ‘thank you,’ then, in Scotland? I confess I’m ill-acquainted with the manners of your country.”

  Anna might have made a sharp retort about his being ill-acquainted with most manners, but she bit it back and opted for civility. “I thank you, sir, it was most kind, but I cannot accept them.”

  “Mr. Morley will hardly be having them back now you’ve worn them all over the town and the gardens.” His gaze angled down to the hem of her gown, where the toes of the shoes briefly showed as she walked. “Anyhow, they were made for that gown, so they were. They’re the very same color as those little flowers, there.”

  She was so surprised to think he’d taken note of such a pointless detail as the shade of the small sprays of flowers, that it took her several seconds to collect her thoughts sufficiently to get her bearings. Both the general and Vice Admiral Gordon were tall men, resplendent in their regimental uniforms with all the gold braid gleaming in the sun, which made it easier to spot them from a distance, standing not far off from where they had all been when she had left them. “Shall we go and join the others?” she suggested. “I am sure you’ll be most welcome.”

  Edmund stopped, though she’d walked on a few more steps before she noticed he was no longer beside her. When she turned, she found him looking at her strangely.

  “You were not sent to collect me.” It was not a question.

  Anna answered anyway. “No.”

  “Yet you took the trouble to come find me. Why?”

  “Because I did not think it fair you should be so deprived of better company,” she told him, adding, “and to thank you for the shoes.”

  “Aye, well, you’ve done that brilliantly, you have.” His tone was dry. He looked in his turn to the place where all the others stood engaged in lively talk. “As for the company, I would not deem it better, necessarily, nor think I would be welcomed in its midst, with such a face as this.”

  It was, in truth, a livid bruise, the mark of a disreputable man. She should not have remarked on it, she knew, and yet she could not keep from asking, “Is it painful?”

  “Only when I try to smile,” he said, and did just that, if briefly.

  Anna reckoned that the other man must look a good deal worse, and said as much.

  He laughed. “You’ve heard the tale, then?”

  She admitted that she had. “The merchants’ wives, just now, were speaking of it. Mrs. Hewitt never can resist a piece of gossip.”

  “True enough. And what, exactly, did you learn?”

  “That you did fight a harlot’s husband.”

  “Also true.” He stood there wholly without shame, and unrepentant. “She has lodgings in the house beside my own, and plies her trade there most discreetly, for her clients are most often men like Mrs. Hewitt’s husband. Her own husband,” Edmund said, “lives by her earnings, which he uses for himself and his own comfort. And he beats her. When he beat her last, I heard it through my own wall. She was weeping. I went over and suggested he remove himself. He disagreed with my suggestion. The result is as you see.” He turned that cheek a fraction so she’d have a better view of it, as though to him it were a badge of honor, which in many ways it was. “Is that the tale the merchants’ wives did tell?”

  “You know that it was not.” She did not need to tell the lurid details of the story she had heard, because no doubt he’d heard it, too, and knew it well enough. “Why do you not correct them?”

  Edmund smiled and for an answer gave the words she’d used herself. “I do not care what they believe.” And she could well believe it true. “But I am curious,” he told her, “why, with all that you’d just heard about my character, you’d seek to be my savior. I can well defend myself.”

  “Aye, from a man, perhaps, but never from a woman’s tongue. I did not think it right,” she told him honestly, “that they should so defame you when social custom bound you not to make reply.”

  The smile had left his features, yet it lingered in his dark eyes. “Social custom never stopped me.”

  There was still a space between them, and he stood regarding her across it as one soldier might regard another on a field of truce. And then he tipped his head a little to the side and offered her his arm again, and asked her, “Will you walk with me?” He did not miss the small betraying glance she cast behind her at the others, Anna knew, because he added, with a trace of his old mockery, “Or do you fear to harm your reputation?”

  Anna studied him a moment. Then she told him, “I am not afraid of anything.” And stepping forward, took his arm.

  “Indeed,” was his reply. “So I’m beginning to believe.”

  They left the crowds and joyful chaos of the Meadow, crossing by the little bridge over the Swan Canal into the Summer Garden. The sentries at the bridge gave Edmund’s battered face close scrutiny, but in the end allowed them entry, through the gate in the high fence, onto the broad and peaceful pathways of this green and private place that had been such a favored project of the tsar, while he had lived.

  The tsar had patterned his own gardens after those he’d visited in Amsterdam and Paris, on his European tours. He’d planted oaks and elms and lime trees; scores of tulips that in summertime gave way to masses of carnations, with artistic hedges set as backdrops for the countless busts and sculpted figures he had brought from every corner of the empire and beyond. Sightless faces of white marble watched them while they strolled, unhurried, down the broad paths edged with trees that had been clipped and trained to grow as living walls, some even shaped to arch above the path and cover it in shifting dappled shadow.

  Near one of the fountains several officers were sitting smoking long Dutch pipes of clay, and talking quietly, and in another corner near a statue of Apollo a small cluster of musicians stood and played their strings and flutes and oboes as though they were practicing, perhaps for a performance later on that night.

  Apart from that, there seemed to be no one but them remaining in the Summer Garden. Everybody else was in the Meadow for the evening, with the empress and the duke and his new bride.

  The sense of space, with nothing pressing in on her, felt wonderful to Anna. Had she wished, she could have spread her arms and run the whole length of that empty path and not been seen by any person but the man who walked beside her. She wondered how he would react, were she to let go of his arm right now and do exactly that.

  Glancing down, he asked her, “What has so amused you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That,” he said, “was not a smile for nothing.”

  “I am happy.”

  “I can see that. I presume it is the garden that is having this effect, and not myself. And fair enough,” he said. “It is a lovely place. You blend in nicely.” When she looked at him, he clarified: “Your gown. It is all flowers.”

  “Oh.” She’d thought, just for a moment, he was saying she was lovely, too. The gown, though, was quite worthy of the compliment. She’d made it a mantua gown, with a long flat train carefully caught up and folded and looped over silver cords held by the buttons on each side, a trick in itself to arrange, so the hem of the gown brushed the ground at the same length all round, while the back had a beautiful fullness. The sleeves fitted straight to her elbows and ended in turned-back cuffs, softened below by a fall of white lace, and the bodice lay smooth with its pattern so carefully matched to the waist of the petticoat that the gown’s front appeared all of a piece.

  Other men might have gone further, she thought, and remarked on the way that the frosted sea-green of the silk matched her eyes. Mr. Taylor had done so. But Edmund O’Connor did no more than look her once over and tell her, “That gown’s an improvement by far on the black one. It makes you look less like a nun.”

  “That’s a good
thing, then, is it?”

  “It is. Nuns are terrible creatures,” he said with a mock shudder. “Always peering down their noses at you, smacking you with rods and such.”

  “If you were smacked, I’m sure you did deserve it. For my own part, I knew only love and kindness from the nuns that I did live with.”

  “Sure, you never lived with nuns, then.” When her gaze assured him otherwise, he asked her, “When was this?”

  “When I was small.” He seemed to study her so long she turned her head to him defensively. “You doubt me?”

  “No. I’m trying to imagine it.” Whatever he imagined made him faintly smile. He looked away, and asked, “Which way now?” for the pathway lay divided just in front of them, in one direction angling through an avenue of sculptures, and in the other entering a double row of lime trees. To her eyes, the statues looked too much like people, a reminder of the crowds. She chose the trees, and was immensely pleased she’d done so moments later, when the fragrance of fresh lilac, newly blooming, trailed around them.

  “Could we stop?” she asked, not caring if it sounded odd. “Just here, please, for a moment?”

  Edmund stopped. “What is it?”

  “Lilacs,” Anna said, and closed her eyes, and breathed the scent of them. They woke a memory, as they always did, of Scotland and of Slains, of childhood hours spent sitting underneath her favorite tree within the stone walls of the kitchen garden, with the lilac blossoms drifting down like snow upon her face and hair, the old tree’s branches shaken by the winds that blew forever from the sea.

  It was a happy memory; something to be held, and when her eyes came open to find Edmund watching her, she shared it with him. “There was once a lilac tree I used to love,” she told him, “growing close against the castle near the place I lived, when I was but a child. I still do love the scent of lilac.”

  Edmund said, “So, you were raised beside a castle, and then placed with nuns. And is this commonplace, in Scotland?”

  Anna, in her happy mood, was moved herself to mischief. “Aye. Are not you all raised likewise, sir, in Ireland?”

  His glance held new appreciation of her wit. “Did you drink the wine,” he asked her, “on the Meadow?”

  “I did not. And if you’d have the truth of it, my first home was a cottage with one room and seven people in it, so you see my origins are humble.”

  “And what of it? I have patches on my sleeves and do not dance the minuet.”

  She glanced at him in turn, and saw the way his jaw was set, and knew that he had overheard the cutting talk of Mrs. Hewitt and her group of friends, and that, for all his show of unconcern, he had not been unmarked by it.

  She had, herself, been fortunate in life to have Vice Admiral Gordon’s care and his insistence she be taught the necessary things to let her fit in with society. Not everyone, she knew, had that advantage.

  Now she said, “As dances go, it is not difficult.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The minuet. It is a simple step to learn,” she told him. “Shall I teach you?”

  “Here?”

  “Why not?”

  Unseen behind the trees and walls of living greenery, the practicing musicians had begun a slower tune, in triple time, and Anna said, “The music even suits the dance. I’ll show you.” And she raised her skirts a hand’s breadth from the ground so he could see her shoes as she began to demonstrate the simple pattern of the step. “Start with your right foot and step forward, rise and sink again, like this, and then the left, and then step quickly forward with your right and finish with your weight upon the left.” It was an easy rhythm: right, and left-right-left, and right, and left-right-left, and right… a swaying, easy movement.

  Edmund stood to one side, watching her. “You’re sure you did not drink the wine?”

  She let the insult pass, still too contented in this place among the lime trees with their rustling, heart-shaped leaves and with the scent of lilacs strong about them, to allow him to provoke her into argument. “Are you afraid to dance, Mr. O’Connor?”

  Edmund looked at her a moment longer, and his mouth curved slowly to a smile. “I’m not afraid,” he said, “of anything.”

  “Then come, I’ll teach you all of it, before the music changes.”

  Accepting the challenge, he deftly unbuckled his sword and removed it, laying it down on the grass by the nearest tree as he came forward.

  She told him, “Stand just there, that’s right, and I’ll start over here.” The path was wide enough—not wide enough to make a proper dance floor in a ballroom, but sufficient to allow them space to start as though they stood in separate corners, as the dance demanded, facing on a line of the diagonal. “We start as with all dances,” Anna said, “by paying honors to the top part of the room.” She curtseyed, demonstrating, while he turned obligingly and bowed. “Now, do the same to one another.” Which they did. He had a gallant bow, she thought, when he so chose to use it, and his hair gleamed very blackly in the shade as he removed his hat and set it on his head again.

  “And now,” she said, “we move directly to the dance, when the first note presents itself. You go round that way, I go this, and we meet at the top of the room. No, you don’t simply walk, sir, you do the step… there you are.”

  When they had met, Edmund looked down expectantly, waiting for his next instruction.

  “Now offer your right hand,” said Anna. “Up higher, that’s right.”

  Her own hand, though not tiny, felt small when resting in his larger one. His hard palm rasped her skin, but the touch was more gentle than she’d have expected, the weight of his thumb resting over her knuckles deliberately careful.

  “And now we dance this way,” she said, “in a line. Some men here do a hop, or a bound…” Edmund angled his dark gaze to hers, only briefly, and Anna conceded, “And some men do not.”

  As directed, he let go her hand at the place where she told him, and both slowly danced to their opposite corners and back again, passing each other by twice at the center of their makeshift dance floor.

  The proper form, dancing with partners, she knew, was to keep your face always toward them, so that you looked always toward your left shoulder, thus giving a graceful and eye-pleasing line to the dance for the spectators watching; because, when two people were dancing the minuet, everyone else cleared the dance floor and stood round to give them an audience.

  But there was nobody watching them, here. And a good thing, she thought, because dancing with Edmund O’Connor was having a most strange effect on her. Maybe it came from the scent of the lilacs, or from the air softening round them as twilight came on, or the spell of the music, or simply the way that he looked in his blue velvet coat, darkly elegant. Dangerous. Anna was not sure of anything, really, except that the ground was beginning to feel much less solid beneath her than when they had started the dance.

  He danced well, with an easy grace, naturally turning in time with the motions, his steps crossing over when custom required, but with none of the flourishes some men employed. When his hands moved they did not bend soft at the wrists but remained always strong, as did he, and when she led him into the circling approach that would see them both meet at the middle, she felt unaccountably nervous.

  He did as she’d told him and lifted his arm as a warning that he was about to present his right hand, which he did in one motion, extending his elbow and taking her own hand and holding it as they completed the turn.

  Some men removed their hats at this stage, smoothly with their left hands, and replaced it all in rhythm with the dance. He left his on, so that its shadow fell across his eyes, but still she saw them, and her world for that one moment seemed reduced to their brown depths. In time with the dance he let go of her hand and their arms fell again to their sides, leaving only their eyes locked upon one another’s as their turning steps brought them closer than they’d been before.

  Anna faltered, forgetting to give him directions for what to do next,
but he told her, “I think I remember the rest of it.”

  And with a wink he swung round again, moving without her instructions, too expertly for this to be the first time he had danced this particular dance. When they met in the middle again and he offered his left hand, she tried to rebuke him.

  “You lied to me, sir.”

  “How is that?”

  “You said you could not dance the minuet.”

  His eyes were darkly warm on hers. “I said I did not dance it. Never that I could not.”

  They were separated by the dance’s steps again, and for those moments Anna sought to gain her inward balance, only to lose it again when they met at the middle the final time. This time he held both her hands as they turned, and then stopped, without warning, and stood looking down at her.

  Anna said, “Mr. O’Connor…”

  “The music has stopped.”

  So it had. She had not even noticed, but now, in this part of the garden, the silence seemed suddenly thick with unspoken things. Anna would have tugged her hands free, but he held them fast.

  She raised her chin and said, “You cheat, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “When it suits my needs.”

  “What need could you have had,” she asked, “to dance with me?”

  He smiled a little in the shadows. Then as he was wont to do, he turned her own words back at her, replying as she’d done when he had asked her why she’d searched him out that evening in the Meadow. “Truly, I have no idea. But,” he added, “when I’ve got it sorted, you will be the first to know.”

  He loosed her hands, and let her pull them free this time, and Anna took a step back, gaining breathing space as she heard someone coming down the path behind them. Several someones, actually, men’s muffled voices mingling with the rustle of a woman’s skirts.

  She saw the change in Edmund’s face and turned herself, uncertainly, then dropped into her deepest curtsey as the woman leading the procession stopped, and smiled.

  “Good evening, Anna Niktovna,” said Empress Catherine.

  Chapter 36