The Firebird

With a flourish he drew from behind his back something that looked like a cushion, all oblong and soft. It was only when Anna had taken it into her own hands that she realised it was a bolt of new fabric – a lovely, brocaded silk woven with white leaves and softly blue flowers and small sprays of berry-red blossoms surrounded by curving gold fern fronds that ran like a delicate lace in the background, and all on a pale field of frosted sea-green that looked quietly grey in some places when caught by the light.

Anna caught her breath. Something so beautiful could only come from France, and she knew well enough from helping to balance the household accounts how expensive such a fabric must have been. Eyes full, she looked at him. ‘I cannot take this.’

Mary, reaching out to stroke the silk, said, ‘Nonsense, Anna. Surely it was meant for no one else – it is the very colour of your eyes. Wherever did you find it, Father?’

Gordon shrugged. ‘It was gathering dust at the Custom House. One of the merchants who came in last autumn had brought several like it from Paris, but had to depart before all of his goods were released, so they’ve now come to Mr Wayte, and he suggested that, since I had daughters who liked pretty things, I might do well to choose a few pieces to please them.’ He smiled down at Mary. ‘There’s silk for you also, and Nan, in your chamber. I chose blue for Nan, since Sir Harry does favour that colour, I hear.’

Nan was used to his teasing and only blushed lightly before she, like Mary, rose up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, thanking him warmly before dancing off with her sister to see what their own French silks looked like.

Still smiling, the vice admiral looked down at Anna and said, ‘I did think you could make a fine gown of that.’

Anna shook her head. ‘You are too generous. I have gowns already. And as Mary said, I can wear nothing else but mourning for a while yet.’

‘Then you will have ample time to sew your gown.’ His tone, she knew from past experience, was not about to yield an inch of ground to any argument. ‘The mourning will not last for ever, and the general is more sociable than I am. He does keep a lively dinner table, and who knows but you may meet a young man there more suited to your temperament,’ he said, ‘than Mr Taylor.’

Anna sighed, and told him, ‘Mr Taylor is a good man.’

‘That he is.’ His eyes held fatherly affection. ‘But not good enough for you. I would have all my girls make matches that are worthy of their rank.’

She found it endearing he worried so much about finding them husbands. He’d worried more when they’d first come here, so much so that on his wife’s death he had briefly thought of sending poor Jane back to Scotland to her mother’s own relations, for he’d feared she’d have no future in St Petersburg. But Jane had begged him not to, had implored him, in a letter Anna knew Vice Admiral Gordon still kept tucked within his letter book, to let her stay close by him and not send her back to live with those who had been so unkind to her own mother, and from whom she could expect naught but neglect. And so he’d let her stay, and seen her cared for, as he cared for Nan and Mary, and for Anna, and for Charles and Charles’s mother, and his older daughters living still in Scotland – reckless Jean, with her unhappy marriage and her brood of bairns, and gentler Betty, both of whom he yet supported with the payments he sent over. Jane had once remarked that the vice admiral likely viewed them all much as he viewed the crews of his own ships, and having spent so many years a captain and commander could do nothing less than feel himself responsible for how they fared.

Anna smiled at Gordon now and said, ‘You need not worry for my match. I have no rank that is my own.’

‘Then you may borrow mine and raise yourself above what you might otherwise have been. This is a country in which such things may be possible, if one presents themselves the proper way. And wears the proper clothes.’ With that, he reached to take the silk from her and placed it with precision on the top of the plain items she had packed into the trunk. ‘What of your treasures? Will they go in here as well?’

He gave a nod towards the parcel that lay lonely on the bed – the same small parcel she had carried from Calais, and from the convent before that. He’d never asked to look inside it. Anna wondered what conclusions he would draw were he to see the Holland nightgown her Aunt Kirsty had embroidered long ago to give her mother, and the lock of bright hair tied with the blue ribbon that had once been hers, and with them both the sheet of paper softened now by frequent reading, bearing words that once had seemed to her a promise, in the writing of a man whose name she’d taken for her own to ease the heartache of her giving up the life she had once dreamt of. If Captain Jamieson in truth had ever returned to the convent, he’d have found that she had gone, and if the nuns had sent him onward to Calais, he would have lost her there as well and gone no further, for she’d left no trail behind to let him follow her to Russia. But at least he would be safe, she thought. She hoped that he was safe.

She could feel Vice Admiral Gordon’s keen eyes watching her, and waiting for her answer.

Anna shook her head, and picking up the parcel said, ‘I’ll carry these myself.’

‘Are you then done with this? Good.’ Lowering the hinged lid of the trunk he latched it firmly. ‘I will have Dmitri take this over on his sledge, and after dinner I shall walk you to the general’s house myself.’

Their dinner was a quiet meal, with little said, and afterwards both Nan and Mary saw them to the door, with Mary hugging hard as though the general’s house were in another country altogether, and not only in another street.