The Firebird

She drew a slightly shaky breath, and steadied it, and asked, without forgiving him, ‘What happened to the bird?’

‘Her leg had healed, so I released her.’

‘Did you never tell the children?’

‘They had lost all interest. Truly, they’d forgotten she was here.’

‘But you had not.’

‘’Tis not a thing I’m likely to forget.’

She thought on this a silent moment. Then she said, ‘I’m glad she flew away.’

‘Aye, so am I. Some things weren’t meant to live in cages.’ He paused, too, then said, ‘I’m truly sorry, Anna, that I so betrayed your confidence. I promise it will not be done again.’

She did turn, then, and faced him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it will not. I should never …’ Her voice, against all her best efforts, still broke on the words that were more about what she had done in the past and could never undo. ‘I should never have spoken.’

Edmund’s gaze searched her pale face. ‘This cannot be entirely my fault. You were upset by something long before I made my comment.’

She had wiped away the wetness from her eyes, and yet she knew she could not make them clear of shadows, so she told him with faint stubbornness, ‘I have a headache.’

‘Do you? Well, I have a cure for that,’ he said. ‘I’m sent to Vasilievsky Island, on an errand for the general. Will you come with me?’

She looked at him, to see if he were serious or teasing her. ‘Why should I?’

Edmund shrugged. ‘Because I’m sorry and you know it and you wish to show forgiveness. Or you’re sorry in your turn that I have none else who can bide me, and you wish to show me charity. Or maybe, Mistress Jamieson,’ he said, ‘because you need to.’

She’d have sworn that, when he looked at her like that, he saw her inner self stripped bare of its disguises and defences. Yet she did not know if he were speaking of her nature or his own, when he remarked a second time, with force, ‘Some things weren’t meant to live in cages.’

All she knew was, when he held his hand to her, she took it willingly, and went with him.

Rob grinned. ‘A sneaky way of getting ice cream for your breakfast.’

‘Well, he did say that his errand was on Vasilievsky Island, and we could hardly have just followed them across. There were no bridges, in those days. They’d have to cross by barge.’ With that justification, I leant happily against the waist-high granite wall that ran along the Strelka, and looked out across the Neva to the Hermitage, its windows brightly glittering with morning sunlight.

Clouds were hanging low off to the west, above the distant Gulf of Finland, past the far edge of the island, but the day so far was starting fair, and warmer by a few degrees than yesterday. I didn’t need my jacket.

Rob, his own ice cream in hand, and looking more awake than I was, leant beside me. ‘There’s your mobile,’ was his warning in the instant before it began to ring.

I told him, ‘Show off,’ and the crinkles showed a moment at the corners of his eyes as I took the call.

When I rang off, Rob had finished his ice cream.

I said, ‘That was Yuri. They’re hanging the rest of the paintings this morning, but Wendy Van Hoek won’t be there until three, so I’ll meet with him then.’

‘At the Menshikov Palace?’ he asked. ‘Which is where?’

‘Just down there.’

‘On this island?’

I nodded, and Rob said, ‘Well, that gives us plenty of time.’ In a casual voice, he remarked, ‘You’ve had no calls at all from your boss, in a while.’

‘No.’ I’d noticed that, too.

‘Does he ken that I’m with you?’

‘Of course not.’ I said that a little too quickly, then kicked myself, trying to make it sound less rude by adding, ‘Sebastian and I don’t share details about our own personal lives, as a rule.’

Rob accepted this with a brief nod. ‘Well, I guess he can manage without you, when he puts his mind to it.’

I tried to not try to read deeper meaning in that, nor to wonder if he spoke from his own experience. I only shrugged and said something about the new receptionist suiting Sebastian, and how we were none of us so irreplaceable.

‘Speak for yourself,’ Rob said lightly. ‘I’m one of a kind. You’ll find no other man who would work all these hours for so little food.’

I’d find no other man like him ever, I thought. Full stop.

‘Nick?’ He was watching my face. ‘Are you ready?’

It took me three seconds to realise that he was just asking me if I were ready to try to find Anna. I nodded, and turned so he’d not see me blush like an idiot.

Only a few steps behind where we stood there were white benches ringing the Strelka, beneath the clipped line of the trees, and we chose the one second along the curved path, with a lamppost beside it and little inquisitive sparrows that scattered around our feet when we sat down.

‘D’ye want to give this one a go?’ Rob asked.

I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘All new gravel and ground, all young trees … I’ve got nothing to touch.’

‘Have ye not?’ he replied. And then made me a liar by laying his arm on the back of the bench so it settled in warmth on my shoulders.

I had searched out the paintings and sketches and coloured engravings last night, in my grandfather’s book, that showed how different places had looked in St Petersburg in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, so I already expected to see the great Custom House, and the long warehouses, guarded by soldiers, that stood all along the exchange, where the merchants all met to do business each day. The exchange looked a lot like a very long, very wide promenade built all of wood, that extended out over the edge of the land so it served as a broad landing stage for the smaller ships moored all along it, their masts bobbing gently in time with the current, all waiting to take on new cargo or discharge the ones they had carried upriver.