The Firebird

Edmund O’Connor frowned, and leaning forward rested both his elbows on the table’s edge as he surveyed the board. He’d shed his coat when she had captured his last knight, and sat now in his plain black woollen waistcoat and his shirtsleeves, with the cuffs rolled up his forearms in the manner of a working man.

The general, who had pulled his own chair round and brought it close to better watch the game, smiled faintly but said nothing. There were only the three of them left in the drawing room now. Father Dominic commonly took to his bed early, and Mrs Lacy had gone up herself not long afterwards, and now the candles had burnt an inch lower in all of the great round brass sconces that hung on the walls of the room, like gold mirrors reflecting the warmth of the light.

That same light caught the angle of Edmund O’Connor’s black eyelashes and slanted shadows across the hard line of his cheek as he looked for an opening … looked for it …

There, Anna thought. He had seen it.

He lifted the one pawn he hadn’t yet moved from its starting position and set it with confidence two spaces forward, so that it came level with her own black pawn on the next square.

She smiled. Her own pawn slid forward and on the diagonal, taking the empty square his pawn had crossed as she captured his piece with a satisfied hand.

He objected. ‘Now, see, you can’t do that. My pawn can go two spaces on its first move, so it didn’t set foot on that square.’

‘I assure you it did, sir. It may not have stopped on that square, but the rules do assume that it crossed it, and so my own pawn is permitted to capture it as it goes by. It is called,’ she said, ‘capturing en passant, and is a fair move.’

‘Is it, now?’ He sat back, and his dark gaze fell somewhere between irritation and grudging respect. ‘And you’d know about fair, would you?’

Smiling more broadly, the general said, ‘She drew you in, my boy. She knew you’d want your queen back, so she cleared you a path and you took it. Mind you, ’twas a greater mistake when you gave her your queen to begin with.’

‘She only got my queen because I thought she meant to take my knight.’

‘She did that very neatly, I did notice. It can be a useful military tactic in the field, to misdirect the enemy.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘It is,’ the general said. ‘We did the same thing at Poltava.’

The younger man gave a mock groan. ‘Oh, it’s never Poltava again, is it?’

‘It was a great battle. One of my greatest, in fact. I was wounded. That gives me the right to repeat the tale daily, should I have a mind to.’ His voice and his eyes were both rich with the sly humour Anna was growing accustomed to. ‘I do feel sure Mistress Jamieson, with her fine martial mind, would not find my tale dull.’

‘Mistress Jamieson,’ Edmund O’Connor remarked, ‘could most likely relate it herself, if she’s lived here in Russia since she was a child. I myself have been here but a handful of months, and already I know more than any man needs to about that one battle.’

That battle, as Anna knew well, had been Russia’s own Battle of Bannockburn – a turning point many believed would long echo in history, the better to savour because the invading Swedes had been defeated on Russia’s own soil.

Anna told the general, ‘I was but a babe in Scotland then. And I have never heard the story but from men who simply did as they were ordered, not from anyone who had a larger part in it. Pray, tell me all you like about Poltava.’

Smiling, he decided, ‘Well, perhaps not all. But how you captured Edmund’s queen was not unlike the way we got our men across the Vorskla. Here, I’ll show you.’ Reaching forward, General Lacy started rearranging pieces on the chessboard, over Edmund’s dry objection.

‘We were not yet done with that.’

‘Of course you were. Surrender was your only option, lad, there is no honour in denying it. I’m saving you embarrassment.’ He made a neat square of the rooks, directly in the centre of the board. ‘We’ll say this is the village of Poltava, under siege,’ he said, and set the white king with a small force just below it. ‘Charles, the Swedish king, was here, encamped with all his troops. Our armies had assembled on the far shore of the Vorskla River, opposite the Swedes.’ A tight line of black chessmen gathered down the board’s one edge. ‘We had to get across, but they outnumbered us, and in the water all our men and horses would be vulnerable. So what to do?’ He looked from Anna’s face to Edmund’s, waiting for an answer.

Edmund said, ‘You cross at night, and choose a place where they won’t see you.’

‘But they knew we had to cross, and so they always watched us. They were waiting for it. We could not surprise them.’

He had looked again to Anna, and she tried, but in the end confessed, ‘I know you said this has to do with how I took the queen, but I cannot connect the two events.’

‘I’ll help you, then. If you did seek to capture Edmund’s queen,’ the general asked, ‘why did you send your bishop to the far side of the board?’

‘Because I wanted his attention to be there, and not upon his queen.’

‘Precisely.’

She began to see his purpose. ‘Did you draw the Swedish sentries off, then, with a ruse?’

‘We did exactly that. We feigned a crossing of the river here, downstream, below the village, and that brought the Swedes out in response, as we had hoped it would, to fire at us and hold us back. Or so they thought. Because while they were shooting at a small part of our forces here,’ he said, ‘the whole remainder of our army secretly swung north, and crossed the Vorskla all unnoticed.’ As he moved the black chess pieces in an illustration of the tactic, something else occurred to him. ‘And furthermore, the King of Sweden, who was also fooled by our false crossing and had ridden south himself to hold us back, was shot so badly in his foot that day he could not lead his troops upon the final field of battle.’ With a movement of his hand, he toppled Edmund’s white king. ‘There are many who will say he lost Poltava, and the Northern War, because of it.’