The Firebird

‘So that,’ he said, ‘wasn’t his doing, I’m thinking.’

‘No, that was built half a century later. It wouldn’t have been here,’ I told him, ‘when our Anna came to St Petersburg.’ Then, when his mouth curved, I prompted him, ‘What?’

‘She’s “our” Anna, now, is she? And you ask me what makes me think that you’re getting attached to her?’

I tried not to make my small shrug too defensive. ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘She’s a likeable child.’

‘She might not be a child when we find her,’ he pointed out. ‘Did ye not say that when you first saw Anna she was a young woman?’

‘Oh.’ I hadn’t thought of that. Frowning a moment, I conjured the image of Anna as I had first seen her, her head bent before Empress Catherine. It seemed such an age ago … could it honestly have been only last week? ‘So how will we know her, then?’

Rob didn’t make a reply. He was watching the river with eyes narrowed slightly as though against the wind, but I knew better.

‘Rob.’

I saw his eyes change focus. ‘Aye?’

My exhaled breath wasn’t exactly a sigh. Not exactly. ‘You see it all, don’t you? You don’t need me telling you which buildings were here and which weren’t, you see the whole thing.’ It was not a real question, and Rob didn’t treat it as one, didn’t bother to answer, because we both knew what the answer would be.

‘I was watching the ship,’ he said, ‘just over there. It’s a galley, I think.’

All I saw were the long and low sightseeing tourist boats, like glassed-in barges, that nosed their way upstream and under the bridge on their way to a leisurely glide through the city’s canals. And far down in the other direction, a cruise ship lay moored where the water was deeper; but that, I knew, wasn’t the ship Rob was seeing.

I must have sighed again, a proper sigh, because he glanced at me and looked away, amused, and said, ‘For someone so reluctant to let on you have the Sight, or use your gifts, you seem fair envious of mine. I wonder why that is?’

‘Are you to be my therapist as well?’

He turned his head, and met my eyes. ‘As well as what?’

It was a good thing, I thought later, that I’d caught the lightness of his tone and known that he was teasing, or I might have found it difficult to drag my gaze from his, and turn my fierce attention to the river’s passing current. ‘As my overworked and underpaid assistant.’

I had always liked the way he laughed, so deep and genuine. ‘Well, time I did my job, then.’

I was ready for the arm around my shoulders, this time. Ready for the feelings that went with it, as I closed my eyes and let my own thoughts drift and blend with his. And through Rob’s eyes I saw the river and the city as it had been in its infancy.

I’d known that it had risen quickly from the barren, unforgiving land that had, till then, been nothing more than swamp and scrub ringed round by thin birch forests where the wolves had prowled and waited. Peter the Great, being Tsar, had commanded this city be built to his plan, all its waterfront houses and palaces kept the same height, their grandness a testament to his own vision of Russia as part of a wider world, looking to Europe and not to the insular past.

He had made this his capital, ordered his court here, ‘invited’ the best of his subjects – the merchants, the tradesmen, the wealthy – to come and build homes here, along with the peasants, the slaves, and the workmen he’d needed to carry out all that construction. They, too, had built homes, and the city had taken its shape in a decade, though what Rob was showing me now was, I gathered, a decade beyond even that, in the 1720s.

I knew this because, on the opposite shore, I could see what must certainly be Peter the Great’s old Winter Palace – not the first one he’d had built, but the second one that had replaced it in 1721, and been rebuilt in its turn six years later. I recognised its homage to Palladian design, the ground floor faced with rough stone in a feature architects termed ‘rustication’, and two more storeys rising over that one, with a pediment and columns, looking just as I remembered from the old engraving in the book my grandfather had given me this morning.

The Hermitage, across from where we stood, had not been built yet. In its place were other houses, built of stone and very grand, in that same Flemish baroque style the Tsar had been so very fond of, having happy memories of his time in Holland.

And there were no bridges, either. Peter had been adamant about not wanting bridges on his river; he had wanted all his citizens to share his love of boats, and learn to use them. From the river I was seeing, it appeared to me the people of St Petersburg were giving it their best shot, for the Neva was alive with boats and vessels of all sizes, from what looked to be a ferry barge midway between the left bank and the right, to the great galley Rob had seen further downstream, with its line of oars lifted and clear of the water.

I’d always thought of galleys as a feature of the ancient world, of Greece and Rome, with slaves chained to their oars like in Ben Hur. I hadn’t thought to see one here, in Russia, in the eighteenth century, but galleys, to be honest, weren’t the chief of my concerns.

Just looking at the south bank of the city, at the size and breadth and scope of it, the movement on the river and the chaos of activity beyond, I felt a sinking sense of hopelessness. My concentration faltered, and my mind slipped clear of Rob’s. I felt his arm shift on my shoulder, and his keen gaze angled down to mine.