The Firebird

She looked now at the wide blue eyes that watched her from beside the bed, and said again, ‘Hello.’

The little girl did not smile back, but asked her in a hopeful tone, ‘Can you catch a bird without hurting it?’

Anna was fully awake now. She raised herself up on her elbows and focused more fully on the child who stood beside her bed – a pretty little girl with white-blonde hair still tightly plaited down her back, and in her nightshift. She could have been no more than five or six.

Anna said, ‘I have never attempted it. Why?’

‘There’s a bird in our room.’

Anna blinked. ‘Is there?’

‘Yes. It flew in through the window and it won’t go out,’ she said. ‘None of the servants will help, only Ned, and we can’t fetch Mama because she’s lying down. She lies down in the mornings, she doesn’t feel well in the mornings because of the baby inside her, so Michael and Ned have been chasing the bird, but they’re going to hurt it.’

Anna sat up. ‘You say none of the servants are helping?’

‘Just Ned. Da’s already gone out, and the rest said that having a bird in the house was bad luck.’

‘Nonsense. Rather worse luck for the bird,’ Anna said, as she rose and shrugged into her coloured silk morning gown, wrapping it closely around her long nightshift and tying the sash before holding her hand to the child. ‘Show me where.’

The child led her down the empty corridor. The general and his wife had bedchambers downstairs, and Anna was grateful for that, since the noise spilling out from the children’s room could not have helped but disturb Mrs Lacy if she had been trying to rest closer by. There were scuffling sounds and a high girlish shriek and the clatter and thud of an overturned chair, and a man’s voice cursed lightly in words that should not have been said before children.

She opened the door on a scene that she might have thought comic if not for the worry that showed on the varied young faces all fixed on the grey-and-black crow flapping panicked from window to wall. There were four other children besides the one holding her hand, and all still in their nightclothes. The eldest, a boy, was already quite gangly and tall, on the brink of abandoning childhood, and clearly his father’s son down to the feature; the next eldest would have been either the girl with the ringlets of gold or the boy at her side, who both looked to be nine or ten years of age, although the boy was a little bit smaller, all elbows and knees and continual motion. The youngest child, younger than even the girl who had come to fetch Anna, sat huddled on one of the beds with the blankets drawn tightly around her head, not looking up as the bird swooped and fluttered.

‘Now, drive it to me, Michael, just like before,’ said the man who could only be Ned, the one servant who’d come to the aid of the children. Anna hadn’t expected that he would be Irish, although she supposed it was not such an odd thing for men such as Lacy to want to employ their own countrymen. Vice Admiral Gordon had once had a Scottish valet, and a coachman from Scotland besides, but they’d both been much older than this man.

She judged him to be not yet thirty, a lean man but broad-shouldered, with dark-brown hair fastened back at the nape of his neck and his jaw darkly roughened with the morning’s beard that he had not yet shaved. He wore neither waistcoat nor coat, only his unlaced shirt half-tucked into his breeches, and from the rapid rhythm of his breathing and his look of set determination Anna guessed that he’d been at this for some time.

The bird swooped once more and he dove for it, swearing again.

Anna said, ‘Will you please mind the use of your language in front of the children?’

He looked at her then, for the first time, his dark eyebrows lifting a little before he turned back to the task at hand, keeping his eyes on the bird in its flight.

The small girl at her side urged her into the chamber and shut the door firmly behind them before she announced, ‘I have brought Mistress Jamieson.’

Not looking round, the man said, ‘Aye, she’ll be a grand help, I can see that.’

Anna, stung by his sarcasm, found herself in the uncommon position of not knowing how to reply. The servants of her own house, and Dmitri in particular, had sometimes given voice to their opinions, but they’d never shown her open disrespect.

She felt her temper rise, and when the man had tried and failed twice more to grab the crow as it flapped past, she told him archly, ‘You will never catch it that way.’

‘Will I not?’ His last great lunge had winded him. He stood now half-bent over with his hands braced just above his knees, and turned his head to look at her. His face was not unpleasant, and might even have seemed handsome to some women, but she only saw the challenge in it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It is too badly frightened.’

At her side the little girl looked up and let out a small cry. ‘It’s hurt! It has a hurt leg, look!’

The crow was trying now to perch and settle, but no matter where it came to rest it could not seem to grasp the surface and its one leg dragged so awkwardly it threw the bird off balance, sending it flapping to the ceiling once again.

In calm tones Anna told the child, ‘Go to your little sister, now, and tell her not to be afraid. ’Tis but a bird, and does not mean you harm.’

It was, in fact, a hooded crow, with black wings and a vest of ashen grey, and had she shared the superstitions of the servants she might well have shared their fears as well, for hooded crows were widely seen as heralds of ill fortune. But she did not hold to superstitions, and she only saw a wounded and exhausted creature, losing strength.