The Firebird

Anna, refusing to let him embarrass her, answered him calmly, ‘At least I did catch the bird.’

‘And I’d have caught it as well, had I used your technique, but I thought that removing my shirt, and in front of the children, might just be improper.’

She coloured a little beneath the raised eyebrows, although she perceived that the eyebrows were raised as much by the plain fact they were arguing as by the argument’s content.

The general’s wife, trying to hide her astonishment, looked at her husband. ‘Well.’

‘Quite.’ Exchanging a glance with her, he settled back like a spectator at an amusement, and said, ‘Shall we have some more wine?’

‘He delights in provoking me,’ Anna complained three days later when Mary, the vice admiral’s daughter, stopped in for an afternoon visit. Stabbing the seam of the sleeve she was piecing together with needle and thread, Anna said, ‘I can hardly request to sit elsewhere at dinner, for then he would triumph. And sitting across from him would prove no better than sitting beside him, and might be still worse, for I’d then have to look at him.’

Mary said, ‘I know of some who would claim ’tis no hardship to look at him.’

Anna’s eyes rolled. ‘He himself would be first to claim that, I’ve no doubt.’

‘He’s certainly more handsome than your Mr Taylor.’

‘Mr Taylor is not mine,’ said Anna, with great patience, as she drew the needle through the lovely grey-green silk. ‘And I should imagine whatever good looks God gave Mr O’Connor were merely to compensate for what he lacks in his nature.’

They were sitting in the small blue chamber next to Mrs Lacy’s, with the shutters of its windows fully open to the light. The door stood open, too, and Mary looked at it with meaning, before Anna said, ‘There’s no one who can hear me. Mrs Lacy is asleep now, and the boys are at their lessons, and the girls are with their dancing master.’

‘Not the same one who instructed us, I hope?’

‘No. This one comes from Holstein.’

‘Not the Terror from Vienna, then. It is a wonder that we learnt to dance at all,’ said Mary, with a shudder of remembrance. Picking up the dropped thread of their conversation, she asked, ‘What of Mr O’Connor, then? Is he not at home?’

‘He does not live here,’ Anna said. ‘He lives in lodgings, near Sir Harry’s house.’

‘Ah. That would then explain it.’

‘Explain what?’

‘Why he is suddenly become a favourite subject of the gossip of the merchants’ wives. They must observe him every day, if he does live so close to them.’

The next stitch wanted care, and Anna bent her head to concentrate. ‘And what is it they say?’

‘Well,’ Mary, always loving gossip, told her, ‘I did hear it rumoured he had little choice in leaving Spain; his friends there cast him out.’

‘And why was that?’

‘Some say he used a woman ill, and left her sadly ruined.’

‘Oh? And what do others say?’

‘That he did kill a man.’

She had no time for rumours. ‘With his sword, or with his tongue?’ she quipped. ‘They are both sharp enough.’

That drew a smile from Mary. ‘I confess I do not know. I’ll ask them.’

‘No, I pray you do not bother. You should keep clear of the merchants’ wives, at any rate,’ was Anna’s firm advice. ‘I wish that any man who views us as the gentler sex could spend an hour with Mrs Hewitt and her friends. He’d soon reform his views.’

‘If he survived,’ said Mary, with a laugh. ‘But I cannot, in all good conscience, speak ill of the merchants’ wives, when I may one day join their number.’

Anna glanced up. ‘Why? What merchant now has caught your eye?’

Mary had already furrowed her brow into one of her small but becoming frowns, and now deflected the question by musing, ‘So then Mr O’Connor has lodgings of his own, and yet he dines here every day? I wonder why?’

‘I should have said from laziness, except I now believe it is the sport of baiting me that he enjoys.’ She pricked her finger with an overzealous stitch, and rested both hands for a moment, asking Mary, ‘Am I truly so amusing to annoy?’

‘Well,’ Mary said, ‘in perfect honesty, you do rise rather well to any argument.’

‘’Tis hardly the accomplishment I wished to show the general and his wife.’

‘They must not mind,’ was Mary’s reasoning. ‘They’ve kept you this entire week without the least complaint. And General Lacy told Papa two days ago how very taken with you Mrs Lacy was, and that you’d been – and I do quote his words exactly, now – a welcome light around the house.’

She felt a wash of pride. ‘Then,’ she told Mary, ‘I shall bite my tongue more firmly, and endure Mr O’Connor.’

‘Put him in his place, more like. You are still ranked above him, after all.’

With a shrug, Anna bent her head over her work again, saying, ‘I’ve no rank at all. I am Anna Niktovna, and if I tried putting on airs there are those who would swiftly remind me of that. But,’ she said, ‘if I have no rank and he has no manners, then we are evenly matched.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

She had his queen.

The chessboard lay between them like a battlefield, its armies stripped and decimated, some reduced to standing at the edge and watching helplessly. She’d played the black men, as she always did. Edmund O’Connor, when they had cast lots and determined that white would move first, had advised her in his condescending way to choose again, but having spent these several years defending her own black-haired king she would not be persuaded now to change. And now her king stood proud behind the safety of his castle, with a bishop and a knight to guard him well.