The Firebird (55 page)

And now I stood in the beautiful Great Hall upstairs in the Menshikov Palace, a full and untouched glass of wine in my hand, and tried taking an interest in what everybody was saying, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.

‘Hey.’ Wendy Van Hoek nudged my shoulder. ‘Are you OK?’

With her striking looks and a pair of truly amazing
high-heeled
shoes, she managed somehow to make a plain
cream-coloured
pantsuit look more glamorous than my black cocktail frock. Even though my wine was white, I held it with new care, remembering Sebastian’s disaster.

I forced a smile. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good. Your timing was perfect, you’ve missed all the speeches,’ she said with a smile. ‘We’ll be heading downstairs in a moment, to tour the exhibit.’

Terrific, I thought. I
did
drink the wine, then, if a little too quickly.

Downstairs, Yuri took his turn giving the guests several insights into the selected works, slipping from Russian and French into English with laudable ease so that everyone there had a chance to appreciate what he was saying.

‘This was a great strength of the
Peredvizhniki
– their portraiture. They moved it from the realm of privilege, the family portrait or the portrait of great persons, to the universal, yes? Their art was not for private viewing, it was for the public, and their subjects were the ordinary Russian people. This was very new, very exciting. Here you see it, in this study from a mural done by Surikov.’ He stopped, to my dismay, in front of the one painting in the whole room I’d been doing my best not to look at. ‘When he painted this, Surikov was just beginning, just from the Academy, but you can already see what will come in his portraits. This face, this is not done for anyone’s vanity, is it? It’s real.’

Rather too real, I thought. Bishop Gregory, reading his famous oration at Constantinople, in front of the people who’d shunned what he had to say. Bishop Gregory, who’d told the council, when he had resigned, that he would gladly be another Jonah, bringing news that nobody was keen to hear, like Jonah in the Bible – the unlucky prophet who had chosen not to give the message God had sent him with, because it was too difficult to tell. And who had suffered for his choice.

I heard Rob telling me in anger, ‘It’s a choice. We choose most things in life …’

And standing here right now in all my misery, I knew I’d made the wrong one.

Breaking into Yuri’s speech before I could think better of it, I said, ‘It’s a forgery.’

You could have heard a pin drop. If I’d never felt a fool before in all my life, I felt one now. But still I pushed ahead, with all eyes on me, and continued, ‘It was never done by Surikov. A forger made it, sometime in the 1960s, I would say.’

Beside me, Wendy turned and arched an eyebrow, looking not at all impressed. ‘My father had this piece authenticated.’

‘Then he was misled.’

‘And how,’ she asked me, ‘would you know a thing like that, when all you’ve done is look at it?’

I drew a breath, and said, ‘Because I touched it.’

‘And?’

‘I see things about objects, when I touch them.’

I heard the French guests speaking low to one another, no doubt trying to translate my words, and then I heard a laugh.

‘What, like a psychic?’ Wendy asked me.

I could see what she was thinking, but it struck me at that moment, as I stood there, that it didn’t matter all that much what anybody thought about me any more. I’d lost the only person whose opinion truly mattered. So I told her, ‘Yes, exactly like a psychic. It’s a kind of ESP that’s called “psychometry”.’

Wendy stared. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

Yuri, who through all of this appeared to be assuming that he must have heard me wrong, asked me in Russian to repeat it, which I did, and then he stared at me as well as though I were a sideshow oddity.

I said, ‘I know it sounds a little strange …’

‘A
little
strange?’ asked Wendy.

‘But,’ I finished, ‘it’s the truth.’

Her eyes were searching on my face. ‘You touch an object, and you see things?’

‘Yes.’

A moment passed. I really could have used another glass of wine, but then again, my face was already so flushed from the effects of both embarrassment and alcohol that likely it was just as well I didn’t have a second drink.

‘All right, then.’ Wendy pointed out another painting hanging nearly opposite the Surikov. ‘Touch that one. Tell me what you see.’

This was a larger canvas, done by Ivan Shishkin, of a quiet forest path with fallen trees. I went across to it, aware I had become the party’s entertainment, seeing all the guests shift round to watch me, most amused. I closed my mind to them, and closed my eyes, and touched the canvas.

Thanks to Rob, and what he’d shown me how to do these past few days, and how he’d pushed me to do more, I didn’t only see a narrow scene this time, I was immersed in it, as I had been whenever I’d watched Anna.

I stayed there like that for several minutes, then I stepped away again, and turned to Wendy. ‘You won’t ever sell this one,’ I said.

‘And why is that?’

‘Because you bought this painting with your father at the first auction he ever took you to,’ I told her plainly, ‘in New York. It was November; you were maybe about eight. You wore a dress with pink stripes on the skirt, and you had a small butterfly pin here, just at the neckline.’ With a hand to my own collarbone, I showed her where. ‘It had a yellow stone in it. Your father gave you that, as well. He let you hold the auction paddle, told you when to bid, and you were so excited …’ I could see I’d said enough from how her eyes had changed, and so I gave a shrug and tried to smile and summed up with, ‘You’ll never sell this painting, it’s too special.’

Wendy stared at me in disbelief. ‘My God. There is no way … I mean
no
way at all that you could possibly have known …’ She blinked, and looked at me more closely and, incredibly, returned my smile. ‘That really is amazing.’

The mood had shifted in the room. The French guests murmured once again, and nodded, and looked on with newer interest now as Wendy moved towards the Surikov.

She looked at it, and then at me. ‘So tell me what you saw, when you touched this one.’

When I came out of the palace at the end of the reception, I was still a little wobbly from the wine. It was just six o’clock, still light, not really evening yet, but with the bank of clouds that had moved in to block the sun and raise the wind it felt as though the day had ended. I was glad my frock had sleeves, and that I’d thought to bring a coat. I hugged it round me now and started walking up the pavement to the bridge.

I nearly passed him.

He was standing close against the hedge that ran along the pavement here, his back set squarely to the wind, his head up. Waiting for me.

I stopped walking. Faced him with a mix of hope and hesitation.
Hi. I was … I’ve just been …

Aye. I ken what you’ve been up to.
He crossed the space between us with what seemed a single motion, strong and sure, and caught me hard within his arms and held me there, the cold wind a forgotten thing that could no longer touch me as he kissed my hair, my neck, my face.

I’m sorry.
I released it like a litany.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Rob.

I love you, Nick.
His mouth found mine then, and for several minutes after that I could not frame so much as a coherent thought, let alone answer him, but when he finally pulled away to breathe I found that I was smiling, though my eyes seemed wet with tears.

I love you, too.

He touched my face, his strong hands gentle. Wiped the tears away and bent to kiss my forehead before setting me away from him.
Right, then.
He gathered my hand into his, our fingers interlaced.
Let’s go and finish this.

‘I shall be very glad to see this summer done and over with,’ said Mrs Lacy. They were sitting in the drawing room, an hour after suppertime, and she was having difficulty finding somewhere comfortable to sit. ‘This child of yours will be a giant, Pierce, you mark my words.’

The general, midway through a game of chess with Anna, smiled. ‘It is a boy, I think. Both boys were big, like that, and made you most unsociable.’

His wife said, in complaining tones, ‘I wonder Edmund does not come to see us. He will leave soon, will he not?’

‘Aye,’ General Lacy said. ‘Tomorrow, or the next day, I believe.’

‘’Tis very bad of him to not come say goodbye.’

The general slid his queen across the board and glanced at Anna. ‘Check, again, my dear.’

She tried to concentrate. Two days had passed now since she had left Edmund standing at the river’s edge, and she was wrestling with her conscience, still, not able to tell anyone. She could not tell the general, to be sure, for Edmund was his kin. And the vice admiral was away at Cronstadt, so she had been told.

It hadn’t helped that she’d received a note from Edmund yesterday, delivered by a ragged boy who’d waited in the street for her. She’d thought to send it back to him unopened, but against her better judgement she had taken it and opened it, alone and in the privacy of her own room. It had been just a single sheet of paper, folded neatly round two playing cards.

You will hate me,
he had written,
and God knows you’ll have a right to, but in truth I had no choice.
He’d signed
Your Servant,
and his name, and that was all. She’d held the two cards in her hands, and looked at them: the ace of hearts, her card. And his, the knave.

And she had fought the tears again without success, and held the guilty knowledge to herself, and let it shrivel her inside so that she might have thought she had no heart at all remaining, had it not reminded her by sharply twisting every time she heard his name.

She breathed the pain away, and moved her bishop to protect her king. At least, she thought, he would be on the road soon and away from them, where he could do no further damage.

Mrs Lacy said, ‘And why must he away so soon? Did he not tell you?’

General Lacy smiled and told her, ‘Men, my darling, do not share their thoughts with one another in the same way that you women do.’

His wife rose, found another chair, and settled in it with a sigh. ‘Oh, well I know it. You men and your secrets. All your letters, and your meetings, and your visitors. Vice Admiral Gordon has brought back new visitors from Cronstadt just this afternoon, I’ve heard.’ She looked towards her husband. ‘Do you know them?’

General Lacy said, ‘I could not say. It is the first I’ve heard of it.’

His wife sighed once again, with feeling. ‘Secrets.’

‘Some, my dear, would call it privacy.’ He moved his queen another square and said to Anna, ‘Checkmate.’

So it was. She should have lain her black king on his side, admitting the defeat, but for some reason she could not, and so she took the king with care into her hand as General Lacy leant back in his chair.

He told his wife, ‘At least, for Gordon, and Sir Harry, Edmund’s leaving is convenient, for he can now carry letters for them.’

Anna looked up sharply. ‘Letters?’

‘Aye, there are few avenues to trust, out of St Petersburg, as well you know. Whatever Gordon and Sir Harry give to Edmund he can take directly to the right people at Hamburg, or at Amsterdam, wherever he might come ashore.’

‘And have they written letters, do you know?’

‘I know they meant to.’ General Lacy’s gaze upon her face grew curious, and thoughtful. ‘Why?’

She could not give an answer, for her mind was in a tumult.
You will hate me,
Edmund’s note had promised.
You
will
hate me.
In the future tense, and not the present.

With the black king still clutched tightly in her hand, she rose and mumbled some excuse to them, and left the room, and ran. She ran across the lobby, through the door, and out into the street, and ran down that as well, and did not care it was unladylike.

Dmitri answered to her urgent knock at Gordon’s door, and stood aside to let her in as though he’d been expecting her.

‘Of course he’s here,’ he told her when she asked, ‘He has come back this afternoon, and brought—’

She did not wait to hear about the vice admiral’s new visitors. She raced ahead and through into his chamber, so intensely focused on her purpose and on him that she paid no attention to the other man who rose to stand too, as she burst upon them.

‘Do not let him take your letters,’ she told Gordon breathlessly.

He steadied her with both hands on her shoulders. ‘Anna.’

‘Please, you cannot give them to him. He will—’

‘Anna.’ Gordon spoke more firmly, and his tone was the same one he’d always used to let her know that he would have her pay attention.

Anna paused, and did just that, as she had done from the first days that she had spent under his protection. Gordon’s eyes, grown older now, smiled down at her with an expression that she did not understand. He moved a half-step sideways so that she could see the man who stood behind him, past his shoulder in the corner of the room.

A man with brown hair and no hat, and eyes that would, she knew, have crinkled at their corners had he smiled. He was not smiling now, but stood there looking at her steadily, as though he held his breath and was not sure how she’d receive him.

‘Anna,’ said Gordon, ‘your father is come.’

Captain Jamieson stumbled a little beneath the full force of her running embrace, but he held to her tightly and did not let go. He was wearing a coat of fine brocaded silk now and not a rough uniform, but the hard sheltering warmth of his chest was the same, just the way she had fought all these years to remember it.

She did not think to correct the vice admiral, to tell him the captain was not her true father, because at this moment, in her mind, he was. He had promised her, all those years past, he would find her. And now he was here.