The Firebird

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 honour, 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 saviour. 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 favoured 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 practising, 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.