The Firebird

‘And all because they had no eyes to see what you were really doing,’ Edmund said.

‘Oh, they had eyes.’ The general settled back into his chair. ‘That’s how we managed to deceive them. They expected us to try to cross that river, in the same way you expected Mistress Jamieson to try to take your knight.’ He asked, as an aside to Anna, ‘Why was he expecting you to take his knight, do you think, Mistress Jamieson?’

She knew full well, from looking at the general’s face, that he had seen the purpose of each move of every piece upon the board, and so she did not bother, as she sometimes did with other men, to mask her own intelligence. ‘Mr O’Connor was trying to capture my own queen,’ she told him, ‘by setting his knight out as bait.’

Anna saw Edmund’s head turn at that; felt the weight of his stare.

General Lacy went on, ‘So you turned his own scheming against him. And you, Edmund, saw what you wanted to see. That was no more nor less than what happened,’ he said, ‘at Poltava. The secret to keeping one’s actions concealed from the enemy is, in most cases, to learn what he thinks you will do, and then seem to be doing it, for that is what he’ll believe.’

Anna saw the sense in that, and would have asked the general further questions if he had not been distracted by the movements of the younger man beside him, setting up the chessboard pieces once again.

‘And what,’ the general asked him, ‘are you doing?’

‘Putting your advice to use.’ He set the white king firmly on its square behind the pawns, and looked at Anna as a man might look when crossing swords with someone he considered equal to the challenge. ‘Let us see if Mistress Jamieson can learn my thoughts this time around.’ The dark eyes were an open dare. ‘Before I learn her own.’

‘You have impressed my husband,’ Mrs Lacy said to Anna the next afternoon. ‘He told me if you were a boy he’d have you in a uniform and serving in his regiment before the snow could melt.’

Anna smiled, and took her seat upon the stool behind the harpsichord. ‘In truth, when I was young I often wished that I could be a soldier.’

‘Oh, my dear, why ever would you wish a thing like that? It is a wretched life. I cannot count how many months my husband has been forced to live away from us, because he was away and fighting, sometimes for a year and more. It is a burden for the man,’ she said, ‘and for his family.’ With a look around the drawing room – the silk-lined walls, the Dutch tiled stove, the portraits and the curtains, she remarked, ‘My sisters told me I was mad, to come here with the children. Our estate at Loeser is much more … well, it is very grand, and comfortable. Nothing like St Petersburg. But this is better, all of us together here. Or nearly all.’ Her smile turned briefly sad before she forced herself to brighten. ‘I have an elder daughter, from my first marriage. Beata. She is living with her father’s family now, in Sweden. She is very near your age. You might be friends, were you to meet.’

The words escaped from Anna before she could think to hold them back. ‘Do not you wish to bring her here?’ she asked. ‘To have her with you?’

It was impudent, she knew, and she should not have asked the question, but the answer seemed of curious importance to her, as though Mrs Lacy could somehow help reveal what Anna’s own mother had felt those years ago. How she might still be feeling.

‘Yes,’ the general’s wife said, very quietly. ‘I wish it more than anything. But where my daughter is, the opportunities are greater. She will make a better marriage there, and have a better life.’ She looked at Anna as though not supposing she’d be understood. ‘It is the price of raising children that we must one day release them, sons to their own destinies, and daughters to the hands of others whom we hope will love and care for them. We can but try, along the way, to choose what we think best for them. And no choice,’ she told Anna, ‘is an easy one.’

In the silence following, it seemed to Anna that the other woman was about to ask a question of her own, and so to change the focus of their talk she put her fingers to the keyboard of the harpsichord and tried to do again what she’d been shown the day before.

‘That’s very good,’ said Mrs Lacy. ‘Only try to hold yourself as still as possible, and keep your fingers close above the keys. You do not need to give much pressure; you will feel the strings as they are plucked.’

She did. It was an odd sensation, but ladies of society were meant to be accomplished in such arts, and Anna knew that the vice admiral did desire that she become a proper lady, so she played the string of notes a second time, and then a third, trying to follow Mrs Lacy’s soft instruction not to hit the keys too forcefully, nor race too quickly over them.

The lesson lasted nearly a full hour, and by the end of it her back ached and her neck was feeling knotted from the effort. Still, she would have carried on had not the general’s wife confessed that she herself was growing weary, and would rest awhile.

‘Do as you will now with your time, my dear, and I will call you when I need you.’

Time alone was both a blessing and a curse to Anna. On the one hand, it was all her own, but on the other, there was little she could do with it. She could not leave the house without a purpose or an escort. She could only sit and work more on the flowered petticoat and gown, or seek escape through one of General Lacy’s many books, but an escape within her mind was not true freedom.