The Firebird

Yet to Anna, there seemed nothing plain in the face she was looking at now, with its soft, rounded features and warmly intelligent eyes and the arching black eyebrows that echoed the black of the Empress’s artfully curled and massed hair, which was dressed with small pearls like the ones on her gown.

And the smile of those bowed lips was full of the kindness that Anna had seen in the smiles of the blessed Madonna, on icons.

The Empress asked, ‘What are you called, child?’

‘I’m Anna,’ she said. ‘Anna Jamieson.’

‘But here in Russia, you must use your father’s name also, like Sergei Ivanovich. What was your father’s name?’

Anna was going to answer the truth, and say ‘John’, till she realised that even so small a thing, seemingly harmless, might somehow endanger the uncles and family that she still had living, the family she’d sought to protect when she’d run from Calais in the first place. The world, she had learnt, was not always as large as it seemed, and if Vice Admiral Gordon had known Colonel Graeme when they were in Scotland, he might also once have known Colonel Graeme’s nephews. She could still remember how he’d asked her in Calais if she were truly Anna Moray, as the priests had called her, and she’d always fancied there had been a sense of recognition in his eyes, as though the name were known to him. For her family’s sake, and for his own, she could not let him draw connections between her and her true father.

So she told the Empress only, ‘I do fear I could not say.’ Which, she thought, so phrased was not entirely dishonest. And she added more truth: ‘I am sometimes called “Anna Niktovna” by the people of our street.’

The Empress Catherine looked at her, and echoed, ‘Anna Niktovna?’ She gave it the pronunciation Anna had: Neektova, from the word neektoh, for ‘nobody’. Nobody’s Anna. No one’s child.

‘They mean no offence, Your Imperial Majesty,’ Anna explained. ‘The other children whom I played with called me that, when I first came to live here, and they did it more because I am so headstrong and would take no one’s advice, than from the fact I have no father living.’

She was chattering. The Empress could not possibly be interested in how the other children had regarded her, thought Anna, but because she could not call the foolish words back she could only drop her eyes again, her cheeks now warmly flushing.

Empress Catherine told her kindly, ‘It is not always a bad thing to be headstrong, Anna Niktovna.’ Her lovely skirts were moving, rustling lightly on the floor as she began to turn away. ‘But pray that you do never tell His Majesty the Tsar I have so counselled you; for men,’ she said, ‘are always to be managed.’

And with that, she made a graceful exit through the room where, somewhere out of Anna’s line of vision, a fine mirror lay in shattered bits, and was no longer beautiful.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Rob looked well rested, at least, when he opened the door of his room to my knock the next morning. He had showered and shaved but was still shrugging into his shirt when he stepped to one side to invite me in. ‘I’m nearly ready,’ he told me, then noticed my outfit and said, ‘You look smart. Am I underdressed?’

Adjusting the weight of my necklace against the bright folds of the top that had cost rather more than I cared to admit, I said, ‘No. It’s only that I have my meeting at eleven, and I wasn’t so sure I’d have time to come back here and change clothes beforehand.’

‘That’s very prepared of you.’ He said that straight-faced, but when he met my eyes he seemed unable to keep back the smile. ‘No, really. I admire your ability to plan ahead.’

‘Says the man who’s had his Russian visa since last May.’

He let that pass, and asked, ‘So what’s the plan this morning?’

‘Well.’ I had in fact been giving this a lot of thought. ‘I think it’s fairly obvious, from what we saw last night, that Anna hadn’t ever met the Empress Catherine till that moment, so I—’ Suddenly distracted, I broke off to stare. ‘Is that a jacuzzi?’

He turned, too, to follow the line of my gaze to the tub sitting plainly in view in the room. ‘Aye, it is. I’ve a sauna as well.’

‘How do you rate?’

He finished buttoning his shirt. ‘You have to smile at the management a certain way,’ was his advice.

‘I guess so. Anyway,’ I pulled my thoughts back on their former track. ‘I thought, since we know Anna’s only just met Empress Catherine, then it stands to reason she won’t have the Firebird yet, will she? So our best bet is to follow her around a bit from this point on – not day to day, of course, but in a general sense, because if Catherine did give her the Firebird, it’s going to have to happen in the next two and a half years.’

‘How d’ye figure that?’

‘Catherine,’ I said, ‘died in May of 1727. And what we witnessed last night must have happened in November of 1724, because that argument between the Tsar and Catherine was about Willem Mons, wasn’t it? I mean, they never mentioned him by name, but didn’t you get that impression?’

His indulgent glance told me I was missing something.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘I got no impression at all,’ he said, as though I ought to have figured that out for myself. ‘They were speaking in Russian.’

‘Oh.’ Feeling embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of that, I offered Rob an apology and filled him in on what everyone last night had said to each other, so far as my memory allowed. ‘And Mons,’ I said, ‘according to the Internet, was thrown in prison on 8th November, and executed eight days later, so if Peter and Catherine were arguing about Mons last night, then what we saw must have been happening sometime between those two dates.’