The Firebird (33 page)

This was the Winter Canal, spanned up ahead by two bridges – the small one at ground level, and above that the old gallery that ran high over it, a graceful curve built to connect the upper storeys of the Hermitage Theatre on our side of the canal and the even older building on the other, all enclosed with rows of windows that looked lovely in the daylight but at night gave me the feeling I was being watched.

‘The Winter Palace used to stand right there,’ I said, and pointed up ahead to the pale walls we were approaching. ‘There are drawings of it in my grandfather’s book … well, drawings of all the Winter Palaces built on this site, actually. The second one, the one Peter the Great died in, was just sort of absorbed into the next, then eventually all that was torn down to put up this theatre.’ I gave him a short history of how the theatre had come into being in the late eighteenth century, and how it had fallen into disuse in the Stalinist years, and how it had recently been lovingly restored. ‘And while they were restoring it, they found bits of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace preserved underneath where the stage is, and all along here. There was part of the original courtyard, and several rooms, and all that’s been restored as well, inside,’ I said. ‘And here, just here, is a bit of the palace’s old façade. See how this section of wall is a different design?’

The piece of the old façade was maybe four feet wide, rising two storeys and painted a colour that would, in the daylight, be rich butter yellow in place of the pale green that plastered the rest of the theatre. The windows here were old and framed in oak, with metal sills that sloped to shed the rain, and all the simple mouldings had been painted white. In at least two places I could see, the architects had left a bit of brickwork bare, to show the structure underneath. And at the pavement level was a deep well, like a cellar entrance, running the full width of that old section of façade and covered by a low, protective, sloping box of Perspex set within a metal frame.

Rob stopped, and gave my hand a squeeze. ‘All right then, go to it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m letting you drive for a change. Like I said.’ Not put off by the look on my face, he went on, ‘You’ve been watching me do it for days now. Just give it a go.’

‘You
are
drunk. I can’t do what you do.’

‘But you’ve not truly practised, now have ye?’ His gaze touched my face in the shadows. ‘Are you not the slightest bit curious to learn the limits of what you can do?’

I looked away. ‘I know my limits.’

‘Is that a fact? Well, I’ve ten pounds says you might just surprise yourself.’

‘Rob.’

‘What?’ He let go of my hand. ‘You were willing to come on your own to St Petersburg. Willing to try to do
this
on your own.’

‘Yes, well. Willing and able are two different things, aren’t they?’ I said that lightly, but he wasn’t having it.

Whether because of the lager or some more inscrutable reason, he’d turned serious. ‘When you first got on that train to Dundee,’ he reminded me, ‘when you first made the decision to go help your Margaret by holding the Firebird, surely you thought, deep inside, that you could?’

‘But I didn’t. I couldn’t.’ My voice had dropped low. There was no one around us to hear, but I did it instinctively, faintly surprised at the fierceness with which I defended my actions. ‘I knew that I couldn’t. That’s why I got off that train, Rob.’ I looked at him. ‘That’s why I came to find you.’

‘Aye, I ken why you did it. But using my gift’s not the same thing as using your own, is it?’ He, too, had lowered his voice; maybe even stepped closer, I wasn’t completely sure. ‘I think,’ he said to me slowly, ‘this makes you feel safer, just being a bystander. Coasting along letting me do the work, as though we were on holiday someplace ye no ken the language.’ His mouth curved so briefly it might have itself been a shadow. ‘Like me here in Russia. I no ken the language here either,’ he said, ‘but I’ll not let it stop me from ordering meals for myself. I can learn. So can you.’

I shared none of his certainty. ‘Rob.’

‘Aye?’

I shook my head, breaking away from the steady blue hold of his gaze, because there was no way I could hope to explain.

‘Would it really be so terrible,’ he asked me, very quietly, ‘to be like me?’

I paused before I said, ‘That isn’t it.’

‘Then why are ye so feart of what you are?’

I’m no feart.
The words in Anna’s voice, a memory at my shoulder, made me lift my own chin higher and reply, ‘I’m not afraid. I just … I can’t, that’s all.’ And when he would have argued, I explained, ‘I can’t just start a vision cold, like you. It’s not the way it happens, for me. I need to be touching something.’

Rob considered this, and gave a nod towards the wall. ‘So that should do. You said yourself it’s the original façade of the old Winter Palace that was here when Anna was.’

‘Well, yes, but it’s been plastered over since, and painted. I don’t think—’

‘The bricks are there.’ His tone, while quiet, held a challenge. ‘Will you try?’

I measured his resolve against my own with a long look, and sighed. ‘And if I can’t?’

‘You want to have some faith.’

The problem wasn’t faith, I thought, so much as finding some place I could stand where I could reach that section of the wall. The wide glass box, like a low greenhouse, that covered the well in the pavement in front of the wall jutted out for at least a full metre, and rose past the height of my knees at its highest point. Climbing on top of it, or even sitting, was out of the question – I wasn’t about to trust glass, even Perspex, to hold my weight. It was too deep to lean across, also, which meant that I’d have to position myself to one side of that section of wall, and reach over to touch it.

And that was a problem as well, since to one side, the theatre’s wall jutted out sharply and made it a tricky affair to reach round it. The other side wasn’t much better. It had a great drainpipe that ran from the gutters above and left only a tight space for me to squeeze into. It wasn’t a comfortable spot.

But I tried.

With my hand pressed against the cold plaster, I tried. Closed my eyes and reached out with my thoughts. Something flashed very briefly, but I couldn’t hold it. The images simply refused to take shape, floating past me and through me and into the darkness.

My arm started aching from being held out at that angle and finally I let it fall, backing away in frustration. ‘You see?’ I told Rob. ‘I can’t do it.’

He’d stood back through all of this, giving me room, but I saw him take stock of the wall now, his chin tilting up as he followed the course of the drainpipe before moving in himself. Turning, he leant back and settled his shoulders so one rested firmly against the long wall where the newer part met the façade of the old Winter Palace. The drainpipe pushed him outward at an angle, yet he looked at ease, relaxed against it with the air of someone who could stay like that all night.

‘Come here,’ he said.

I eyed his outstretched arms warily. ‘Why?’

‘Just come here.’

I might have been crossing a chasm, I went so reluctantly; but of the things that I might have forgotten, I hadn’t forgotten the feel of his long body pressed against mine when he held me – the solidly sheltering warmth of his chest and the weight of his arms round my waist. Loosely linking his hands in the small of my back, he said, ‘You need support, that’s all.’ Shifting again so his thighs were braced strongly round mine, his boots firm on the pavement, he told me, ‘I’ll not let ye fall. It’ll be like that time that you telt me about, when your brother was talking you down from that tree.’

This didn’t feel
anything
like that, I wanted to tell him, but I went for humour instead. ‘What, you’ll boss me around, will you? Tell me where to put my hands and feet?’

Rob gathered me closer, and I felt the quick laugh that lifted his chest. ‘Well, your hands, anyway.’ He nudged my left arm. ‘Put your arm,’ he said, ‘over my shoulder.’

His shoulders were muscled and hard like his chest, but his jacket provided a padding that cushioned my wrist as the back of my hand came to rest on the wall just behind him. The wall of the old Winter Palace, that I had been trying to touch in the first place.

He said, ‘There. How’s that, then?’

‘It’s good,’ I admitted. My arm and my hand were supported and comfortable, and with Rob holding me there was no way I could fall. In fact, if I just leant in a little …

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Put your head down on my shoulder, and concentrate.’

Easy for him to say, I thought. But strangely, it did make it easier, having him hold me. I rested my cheek on the weave of his jacket and let his strong heartbeat compete with the echoing sounds of the night and the quiet canal as my eyes closed.

The noises began to recede, and his heartbeat grew muted, and out of the blackness the filmstrip of images flickered and grew and began to run backwards. I watched the blur, waiting as I always did, until Rob’s voice within my mind gently advised me,
You’ve gone too far back. Stop, and make it run forward.

I can’t do that. You need to—

Concentrate,
was all the help he would give me.
Just will it to stop.

It resisted my will with astonishing ease for the first several seconds, but finally, when I applied all of my effort, the images started to slow.

Rob? Is that me or you?

It’s all you.
Good,
he said when it stopped.
Now, you want to come forwards, but slowly. One frame at a time, almost.

That was no easier. It took a few tries before I could manage it, and even then I whizzed past where I should have been and had to roll the frames back with an effort. My attempts were as unlike Rob’s smooth way of scrolling through time as an elephant’s moves were unlike a ballet dancer’s, but he was patient.

You’re close, now,
he told me.

But how will I know … ?

You’ll ken the right place, when you’ve found it.

I slowed the frames further, not wanting to pass it again, drawing strength from this new-found control over what I was seeing. Then one of the images, black as the night, seemed to pulsate a little, the smallest vibration. It drew my attention, my focus, and started expanding until it had grown to the size of a cinema screen. I saw Anna, and somebody walking beside her, approaching what must be this very canal, looking more dark and lonely than it did tonight, even.

Why are you keeping back?
Rob asked.

I’m not. This is just how I see.
From the outside, the way I saw everything. From a safe distance. No more than a … what had he called me? A bystander.

Go closer.

Rob.

He was deep in my mind now, and nudging me forwards. I felt it as surely as though he were pushing me. Wanting to show him I wasn’t the same, I deliberately tried to move nearer the image. It broadened. I tried again. And then again, till I stood at the brink of it, hesitant.

Not ready yet to believe.

Go.
He nudged me again, and I gathered my focus and pushed through the image itself, and then I was inside it, incredibly, soaring above what I saw, rising wildly and spinning with little control, till I suddenly felt him right there with me, catching me, holding me steady, and bringing me down to the ground again, safely, as Anna passed by.

Dmitri was grumbling. He usually grumbled, and being called out of the warmth of the kitchen to walk in the dark and the cold to the palace had blackened his mood even more. He was a Siberian, one of the great brigade of peasant labourers who had been forced by decree to come help build St Petersburg, spending his days hauling timber and stones for the houses and churches and wharves that had risen by sheer force of will from the marshes. The men who’d been dragged here from all over Russia had been given freedom to leave once their term of hard labour was done, but Dmitri, with no means to make his way back to Siberia, had, like so many, stayed on as a servant, his old life for ever discarded.

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.