The Firebird

I’d translated for him the essence of what both the women had said to each other, and thinking back now, I agreed. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Catherine didn’t know Anna had gone to the Lacys to live.’

‘So we’ve likely not missed anything.’

‘No.’ At least, not the scene I had glimpsed when I’d first held the Firebird; when Catherine had looked down at Anna and said, ‘You were never a nobody.’

‘So,’ Rob concluded, ‘we’re on the right track.’

It had been a long time since I’d walked in the Summer Garden. I could see the changes for the better made by recent efforts to restore it to its former grandeur, though it was much smaller now than it had been in Anna’s time. The meadow had long gone, replaced two centuries ago by the parade ground called the Field of Mars, where modern incarnations of the regiments we’d just been watching at the wedding still stood in their ranks and fired salutes for state festivities, and where St Petersburg’s eternal flame burned for the memory of the fallen.

Other things were lost to memory. Of the buildings that had stood around the gardens as we’d seen them on the royal wedding day – the stables and orangeries and sheds – only the palace now remained to stand as plainly as it always had, without pretensions, seemingly unbothered by the busy tourist boats that chugged past on the great canal called the Fontanka. Now, as then, the Summer Palace with its square walls and its rows of simple windows seemed to gaze across the ever-flowing Neva at the gold dome of the fortress, lost in dreams of grander days.

The gardens held a wilder kind of beauty now, the oaks and lime trees stretching high above us in this green and peaceful world of quiet solitude. The broad path we were walking on was lined on either side by statues, pale and white against the dark trunks of the trees, and in the fading light they watched us pass, like ghosts.

Rob walked beside me, uncomplaining, although I had kept him out and running round the city after Anna for some hours, and it was going on for sunset.

‘I enjoyed it,’ he said now, when I apologised. ‘I’m starting to like Edmund.’

‘So is Anna.’

‘Is she?’

‘Can’t you see it?’ How, I thought, could anyone not see it? There were just so many signs, how could he possibly have missed them?

‘I’m no good,’ said Rob, ‘at reading signs.’

I sighed, and said, ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Answering questions before I can ask them.’

‘You did ask,’ he countered with logic that was not about to face argument, because to Rob it made no difference whether I spoke with my voice or my thoughts. He looked up at the white marble figure of some smirking god we were passing. ‘These statues,’ he said, ‘must have tales they could tell.’

From his casual tone it was hard to tell if he were making an innocent comment or trying to prod me to use my gifts. ‘Yes, well, the problem,’ I said, ‘is that most of the tales wouldn’t be of St Petersburg, would they? They’d be about where all these statues first came from. Ancient Greece, maybe. Italy.’

‘France,’ Rob corrected me. ‘This one’s from France.’ He had finished his half of the orange, but I could still catch its strong scent as he said, ‘If it’s native impressions you’re after, though, some of these trees might have been here in Peter the Great’s time.’

I tipped my head back, looking up at the fine lace of leaves overhead, less distinct now that part of the sky had begun to turn blue-green as well, bringing shadows.

‘I wouldn’t know which ones, though, would I?’ I said.

‘Not unless you touched them, no.’

I glanced at him, and our eyes met for a moment, and I saw they held the same unspoken challenge that Edmund O’Connor’s had held when he’d asked Anna whether she’d walk with him, there on the meadow, or whether she feared to.

She’d taken that challenge and met it directly.

But I wasn’t Anna. I looked away. ‘Well, they’ll be locking the garden soon, anyway,’ I told him. ‘And we should eat. And tomorrow, I think we should start back at Lacy’s and see if we can’t pick up after the wedding, at some point.’

Rob didn’t judge me. Perversely, that bothered me more than if he had reacted, had called me a coward, had stopped being so … so forgiving. So calm. So damned brotherly. I didn’t want Rob to act like my brother. The force of that shook me so deeply I stopped on the path.

‘Right, then,’ Rob told me, ‘I’ll follow your lead.’

He was only replying, I knew, to what I had just told him – my plans for the morning, for where we should next look for Anna. I knew that. And yet, as I fell into step at his side once again and we walked through the gates of the old Summer Garden and onto the Neva Embankment, with twilight descending all round us, I had the same feeling that Anna had felt at the midpoint of that minuet – the same sense that the ground was beginning to feel much less solid beneath me than when I had started this dance.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Captain Hay had returned to St Petersburg. It had been slightly more than a year since he’d left the Tsar’s service and gone south in search of a climate that would more agree with his health, and Anna had missed him. He’d been such a regular visitor to the vice admiral’s throughout the whole time that she’d lived there, that truly he seemed like a favourite young uncle to her, and he greeted her that way when he came to dine with the general the last day in May.