The Firebird

This vision wasn’t clean, like that. It came on as a random flash, the same as I had felt when I had held the wooden Firebird, the same as I’d so often felt in childhood, but the end result was much the same: I saw a glimpse of Margaret Ross’s life.

I saw loneliness, drawn in her silent and dreary surroundings, a chair by a window that looked on a small narrow garden with walls, and a clock ticking somewhere, relentlessly counting the slow-passing minutes. In all that drab room I could only see one bit of colour – a travel brochure from a cruise line, the white ship enticingly set on an ocean so brilliantly blue that it dazzled the eyes.

And then that scene grew smaller as another rose to take its place: a window and a desk … a doctor’s surgery, I thought. And Margaret Ross herself, much as she’d been this morning, sitting in a chair, her shoulders sagging with dejection. I could hear the doctor speaking, and I caught my breath because it seemed so cruel, and so unfair.

I pulled my mind back, made an effort, and the visions stopped, but there was no way to unsee what I had seen, or to ignore what I’d learnt.

It was still very much on my mind the next morning.

I met Vasily early for breakfast at his favourite restaurant, the St Pancras Grand, on the upper concourse of the train station. He liked the retro English menu, and the elegance of the place with gold leaf on the ceiling and dark wood and leather bistro-style seating. We had a lovely chat about the Surikov, the painting he was keen to have me buy for him while I was in St Petersburg, but it was what he said as he left me that changed the whole course of my day.

He ordered a takeaway meal at the end of our breakfast, another whole plate of eggs Benedict, and so I teased, ‘You’ll be putting on weight, if you start eating two breakfasts.’

‘It’s not for me,’ he said, ‘it is for the old man at the end of my street. He has no one to live with him, so he eats poorly some days. I have seen it. Whenever I come here, I bring him eggs Benedict.’

‘You’re a good man, do you know that?’

He shrugged it aside. ‘It’s not good. It is right. When a person needs help, then you help them. What else would you do?’

I thought about that, after Vasily left. From my handbag I took out the envelope that I’d brought with me to post back to Margaret Ross, and I looked down at the address for a long time, and then I walked from the restaurant and round to King’s Cross and I bought a return ticket up to Dundee.

Because he’d been right. Margaret Ross needed help. I could help her. The truth was, I couldn’t not help her. I’d never have lived through the shame.

What Sebastian had told her was perfectly true: there was really no way, by conventional means, to determine her Firebird’s provenance. But if I were to hold it again, and to concentrate, I might find some information imprinted upon it to help me know where I should look for the proof that the carving had once been the gift of an empress. In less than a week I would be in St Petersburg, there on the ground, where the first Empress Catherine had lived, ruled and died, and where Margaret’s mysterious ancestor, Anna, had most likely been in that flash of a vision I’d seen. I’d have time, then, to dig around, learn what I could, ask my colleagues who worked in the Hermitage … there were a number of ways I could try to help.

Starting with holding the Firebird.

Nobody needed to know, I assured myself. Not if I simply asked Margaret Ross if I could look at the carving again, maybe study it privately, just for a moment. She’d see me holding it, no more than that. No one needed to know.

And secure in that reasoning, I started north on the train.

The doubts didn’t start to creep in for a couple of hours. I had been going over the plan in my mind when I’d suddenly noticed a hole in it, and having noticed that hole it had seemed to grow larger until it was all I could see.

Empress Catherine and Anna, I suddenly realised, had lived nearly three hundred years ago, and since that time countless people would likely have handled the carving, obscuring those earlier imprints with later ones, clouding my readings.

The vision I’d seen had been something spontaneous, something I hadn’t controlled. If I wanted to be any help at all to Margaret Ross now, and given I might only have one chance to hold the carving, I’d have to be sure I could sift through the levels and layers of time to arrive at the right one.

And that was why, when my train slid into Waverly station at Edinburgh, I didn’t change to the train for Dundee, as I ought to have done. I stepped right off the platform, and walked up the ramp from the underground dimness to daylight, with Edinburgh Castle set high on its unyielding rock just ahead of me. It was why I walked the busy length of Princes Street, and turned towards the river, and was heading down the hill now to the one place I’d been certain I would never go again.

CHAPTER THREE

The house looked like all of the rest of the old Georgian houses that ringed the small private park, making a circle around the tall trees that were fenced in and gated and rimmed by a hedge of dense holly. The houses rose four storeys tall, all with similar rows of large white-painted windows set into their grey stone façades, and high steps leading up to their similar doors with arched transoms above.

No one would ever have guessed that the house I was standing in front of was one of the foremost centres for the study of the unexplained: the Emerson Institute of Parapsychology, named after J. Norman Emerson, the Canadian archaeologist who’d pioneered the use of psychics in his expeditions in a quest to study what might lie beyond the limits of man’s current scientific understanding.