The Firebird

What that life had been, and what loved ones it might have contained, Anna hadn’t been able to learn, for he never would speak of it, but Anna sometimes suspected that, like Captain Jamieson, he’d had a daughter once, for there had always been something decidedly fatherly in his attachment to her.

Even now, as they made their way carefully over the small wooden bridge of the Winter Canal, the Siberian kept a firm hold of her elbow as though she were still the young girl she had been when she’d first come to live here, when he and the cook had helped care for her during the vice admiral’s sojourns at sea.

‘Fool idea,’ Dmitri was saying, ‘to send you so late in the day, in the darkness. You ought to be home getting warm, eating food. Does he want you to end up as ill as himself?’

‘I feel fine.’

‘You feel fine.’ He dismissed that idea, and said, ‘You feel frozen. These clothes, they are not made for warmth.’

Anna knew that Dmitri, like many traditional Russians, still deeply resented the loss of the old way of dressing, the robes and the boots and the great hanging sleeves that had now given way to the more Western styles that the Tsar himself favoured, and that he’d decreed all his subjects should wear. The waistcoats and close-fitting breeches and stockings that men of rank now wore were things that Dmitri despised. ‘In Siberia, men would not last through the winter in such clothes,’ he’d often complain, ‘and the women would freeze in their homes.’ But he stopped short of actually saying he wished the old ways would return, for the Tsar was the Tsar, after all, and in Russia the Tsar was as near a divine being as one could be without angering God.

Anna hugged her cloak more closely round her bodice, wishing she were able to wear breeches like a man, because the wind now swirling round her woollen-stockinged legs beneath her skirts was sharp as knives of ice.

She had her head tucked down, and so she did not see the dark bulk of the man who waited for them at the bottom of the bridge, until he spoke.

‘What is your business here?’

Dmitri, at her shoulder, looked the stranger up and down. ‘You are no guard,’ he threw the challenge back. ‘Our business can be none of your concern. Now stand aside.’

‘I am the watchman. And whomever passes here becomes my business.’ The voice was hard, as were the eyes that glittered darkly in the light cast upwards by the lantern that he carried. ‘Where is your light?’ he asked. ‘You are required to carry one when you are walking in the night.’

Dmitri said, ‘It is the evening, not the night. It was not even dark when we came out, and we’ll be home again by suppertime if you but step aside and let us do what we’ve been sent to do.’

‘And what is that exactly?’

The Siberian was trying to contain his temper. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be between my master and His Majesty, and I assure you both of them will see to it that this becomes their business if you interfere.’

The wind bit deep, and on the bridge the air grew colder.

Men, so Anna had observed, replied to threats in one of two ways, much like bears. They either dropped and turned and scuttled off, or else they stood their ground and bellowed back and tried to make themselves look larger.

The watchman was standing his ground. ‘Your insolence demands I interfere! I could lay hold of you for daring to come out without a lanthorn, at this hour,’ he said.

Dmitri laid his hand upon the long, old-fashioned knife he carried, and since Anna knew that knives like that were also not permitted, by the Tsar’s decree, she stepped in smoothly with, ‘Good sir, I do apologise. My servant has been drinking, he is not himself this evening. Pray, take no offence at what he says.’

Dmitri frowned, but from respect he did not contradict her as the watchman weighed her words. Her accent, when she spoke in Russian, was not perfect, but in this case Anna hoped that fact might help. Bravely moving forwards, she offered him one of the two silver roubles she carried, the ones the vice admiral had given her to pay the guards at the palace. ‘Here, take this for your troubles.’

He was wary. ‘In such a time, a man would be a fool to take a bribe.’

She did not need him to explain what ‘such a time’ was. Scarcely a week had gone by since the Tsar had ordered the arrest of the Empress’s favourite, the dashing Willem Mons, for his corrupt ways that had made it near impossible for anyone to speak to Empress Catherine without paying him a fee or favour. All of this – so it was said – was done without the knowledge of the Empress or the Tsar, and not two days ago a crier had gone through the town to spread the proclamation of the Tsar that any person who had ever paid a fee to Mons should step forward to give evidence against him.

No one truly thought that Mons would suffer death for his offence, for after all his elder sister had once been the Tsar’s own mistress, in the time before the Tsar had met and married Empress Catherine, and Willem Mons himself was such a handsome, charming fellow, of the sort that often knew the way to talk themselves out of the greatest difficulty. But the fact remained that, at the moment, he was fallen from his post and locked in prison, and most likely would stand trial for taking bribes.

Anna summoned a smile, and said, ‘This is no bribe. I do but seek to pay the fine.’

The hard eyes grew more wary still. ‘What fine?’

‘Why, sir, the fine for coming out without a lanthorn.’ She offered him the coin again. ‘It is a rouble, is it not?’