The Firebird

With her head up she approached him calmly. ‘Truly he is risen,’ she replied, and took the egg from his scarred hand.

He did not bend for her, as he had bent for Katie. He stood straight and tall, his downward-angled gaze an open challenge. She had never let a challenge yet defeat her, so she raised herself on tiptoe and began the kiss.

She would have given all three kisses quickly and been done with it, but needing to stay balanced on her toes she had to slow her movements, and her senses then had time to notice things that Anna would have been more comfortable not noticing. Like how his skin smelt pleasantly of shaving soap. And how his jawline tightened when he … what? When he did what? She could not see what he was doing, and so she was unprepared when Edmund turned his own head slightly, at the last, as though by reflex more than conscious thought. She felt the feather of his breath against her own skin as the corners of their mouths just barely brushed.

She could not say which of the two of them was first to pull away from that brief contact, but they both stood rather stiffly for the moment that came afterwards, till Katie, from the bed, asked, ‘Do you have a third egg in your pocket, Ned?’

‘No.’ He cleared his throat and looked at Katie, and became himself again. ‘But if my princess does command me, I shall go back out into the town and kiss as many maidens as I can, to win you more.’

He bowed, as Katie nodded eagerly and answered him, ‘Yes, please.’

She had a heaping bowl of painted eggs beside her bed by supper time, and Anna had the fair beginnings of a headache.

Mrs Lacy, who had come to sit as well by Katie’s bed, said with concern, ‘I hope you have not also caught the illness.’

Anna had since set aside the Bible in exchange for a more adventurous book from General Lacy’s shelves, that being Mr Pope’s translation of The Iliad of Homer, but she could not seem to concentrate upon it, so she marked her place and closed the book and smiled at Mrs Lacy. ‘No, I’m sure that I have not. ’Tis but an aching head.’

The older woman, nodding at the bed where Katie lay now fast asleep, said, ‘Likely it was not helped by her chattering all afternoon.’

‘I’m pleased to see her well enough to chatter.’

‘I am, also.’ Mrs Lacy’s eyes grew serious. ‘I feared it was the smallpox, to begin with. We’ve been fortunate so far, to have escaped it, but each time one of the children does complain of feeling ill, or has a fever, I confess I fall to worrying.’ Her belly was no more than slightly rounded yet, but still she laid a hand on it protectively. ‘I could not bear to lose a child. In truth, I know not how the Empress Catherine has endured it.’

Nor did Anna. Of the dozen or so children that the Empress and the late Tsar had been blessed with, only three had lived above their first few years, if that long. And of those three, there were but two remaining, now that young Princess Natalya, only seven years of age, had sickened following the Tsar’s death and succumbed, and had been buried with her father. It had not been the Tsar’s coffin, with its host of sad attendants, that had tugged at Anna’s heart when she had stood upon the river’s ice and watched the long procession of the funeral passing by, but the much smaller coffin following behind it, for she’d known well that a mother’s hopes lay buried there.

Small wonder Empress Catherine had retreated from her social ways, and kept herself apart from those who earlier had freely gained her company.

‘The Empress is a very special woman,’ Anna said, in full agreement. And remembering what Colonel Graeme had once said about the sons he’d lost, she added, ‘I do pray she’ll find some consolation in the princesses yet living.’

Mrs Lacy gently said, ‘A living child may be a consolation, to be sure, but it cannot replace the child that was lost.’

Anna wondered if her mother thought the same, in her home far across the sea with her new husband, her new children. With her head bent she replied, ‘I have no children, so I cannot know.’

‘You will have children one day,’ Mrs Lacy said, and as though that reminded her of something she continued, ‘Mr Taylor of the English Factory greeted us this morning in the street. He is a nice young man.’

She could not contradict that. ‘Yes, he is.’

‘He’s asked permission of my husband to come pay a call to you, one day. My husband told him that, if you had no objections, he’d be welcome.’ Her sidelong glance held interest. ‘Do you have any objections?’

Anna raised her head and looked, she knew not why, towards the bowl heaped full of painted eggs that sat by Katie’s bed. And then she forced a smile and told the general’s wife she could not think of any reason why they should not welcome Mr Taylor, if he chose to pay a visit. ‘As you have observed,’ she said, ‘he is a nice man.’

Mrs Lacy sent another sidelong glance in her direction, but she merely gave a nod, and with the matter settled, moved the conversation on to other things.

‘I’ll tell you,’ said the general, full of charm as he upended a decanter of fine claret over Mr Taylor’s cup, ‘a merchant’s life is fine, I’ll grant you, but there is no occupation can compare with soldiering.’

The afternoon was grey, and in the drawing room the rush-backed chair that Anna had moved closer to the windows, for the light, was growing harder at her back and more uncomfortable to sit in. Had she been a child, she thought, she would have fidgeted. And had she been a man, she would have sat as Edmund now was sitting, all but lounging in his armchair with his legs stretched out at ease in front of him, his elbows propped so that his hands were linked across his stomach, making him the very picture of a man digesting dinner in contentment.