The Firebird (60 page)

The daughters who were living with him in St Petersburg, Mary and Ann (whom I nicknamed ‘Nan’ in this novel, to avoid any confusion with Anna), both married into the Jacobite community there – Mary to the merchant William Elmsall, and Ann to Sir Henry (Harry) Stirling, a match that Gordon wrote, in a letter to his cousin, was ‘the greatest satisfaction that I have on earth.’ Fittingly, Ann and Sir Harry’s granddaughter, another Anna, married into the Morays of Abercairney, thus continuing the interweaving of the families that seems to so dominate the lives of those I write about.

As of this writing, I don’t know what became of Sir Harry’s sometime secretary Mr Taylor, although I presume he remained active in the English Factory at St Petersburg, together with the merchants Mr Wayte and Mr Morley. Whether there ever was a Mrs Hewitt, I cannot say, but there certainly was a Mr Hewitt, with whom Thomas Gordon had a falling-out around this time, though they appear to have settled their differences a few years later.

The military exploits of General Pierce (Peter) Lacy are easy to follow, thanks in large part to his journal, but his personal life in St Petersburg proved more difficult to piece together, and I had to rely on the writings of others to fill in the gaps in his household. His wife, despite being a woman of quality and wealth, receives little mention anywhere, and depending upon which source one trusts, I may have left him short one daughter.

The birthdate of his youngest son, Francis, is recorded at St Petersburg in 1725, just after the events of this novel, and it is known that Michael was the eldest son, and Helen the fourth daughter, but I was forced to make my best guess as to the relative ages of the other children, based on the documents I had. I offer my apologies to them and their descendants if I’ve got them out of order.

The girls all married well, mainly to high-ranking officers, and little else seems to be known of what became of them. The boys all followed their father into military service with foreign armies. Michael became a cavalry officer and was killed in 1735; the younger Pierce served the King of Saxony and lived a long life, dying in Belgium in 1773. Francis (Franz) rose to the rank of Field Marshal in the Austrian army, and died well-respected in 1801.

As for General Lacy himself, his heroism at Poltava was eclipsed by his even greater victories in the Russo-Turkish wars of the 1730s. He remained a favourite of Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth, who became Empress in 1741. She allowed Lacy to return to his beloved Livonia, where he served as
Governor-General
and commander of the military forces there.

Lacy remained in Livonia for the rest of his life. When a fire broke out in a house dangerously close to the city of Riga’s stores of hemp and gunpowder, Lacy roused himself and, though in his seventies by this time, stood all night in the cold on the roof of the gunpowder store, directing the efforts to put out the fire. His bravery saved the city from an explosion, but he suffered a fever as a result, which in his doctor’s opinion was the cause of the steady decline of his health afterwards. Having fought from the time he was thirteen years old, he met death at last, not on the battlefield, but in his own bed, surrounded by his family, in April of 1751.

Edmund O’Connor, his kinsman, appeared at first glance a much less noble character.

From Edmund’s own statement (recorded by the secretary of the British spymaster Lord Townshend), we know the dates that he arrived in, and departed from, St Petersburg; that he brought letters from the Jacobites in Spain addressed to Gordon and Sir Harry, and on leaving, carried letters from those same men into Amsterdam where, as arranged, he met with Deane, and the letters were opened.

Edmund made a good impression on Townshend, who found him ‘plain in what he says’. Deane was less sure of his loyalties, and having examined the facts, I found myself siding with Deane.

The letters Edmund carried from St Petersburg, and that he showed to Deane, spoke of invasion plans, and Edmund himself, in some detail, related the Jacobites’ intent to purchase Spanish ships and lure the British navy into battle in the Baltic.

But the deeper I dug with my research, the more it appeared that those plans might be false, and be meant to deceive.

Although Townshend himself took them seriously, and seemed particularly bothered by the three ships Deane had seen leaving the Baltic, apparently headed for Spain, no one in Townshend’s far-flung web of European agents was able to find any evidence to back Edmund’s claims. Britain’s agent in Sweden went so far as to say, in a letter to Townshend that very October, ‘one would almost suspect the letters from Petersburg to be a fiction.’

I began to agree with him. And if that were indeed the case, then in my view, it left only two possible options: either the Jacobites at St Petersburg had known that Edmund O’Connor was a traitor, and had deliberately given him false information to unwittingly deliver to the British, or Edmund was a willing participant in a very clever ‘sting’ operation.

I cannot know the motives of a man who has been dead more than two hundred years. I only know that, when he gave his information to the British, Edmund told them next to nothing about Gordon and Sir Harry and the Jacobites he’d lived with in close quarters at St Petersburg the past nine months, claiming he ‘never heard anything of Business from them.’ Perhaps he really did know nothing. Or perhaps he kept what he knew secret, to protect his friends. I chose to think the best of him. I’m happy with my choice.

At any rate, he got his royal pardon. I still hope to find some record of what he did after that.

As for the three ships that Deane had observed and that had so alarmed Townshend, they eventually arrived without incident in Spain, offloaded their harmlessly commercial cargoes, and reloaded with nothing more incendiary than oil, salt and raisins before sailing north again. Townshend, firm in his belief of the plot, continued to expend the government’s time, funds, and energy in gathering intelligence and trying to prepare for what he felt sure was an imminent invasion.

If the Jacobites had wanted to gain time to plan and regroup, while making the British waste valuable resources, they had succeeded.

I cannot claim to know what they intended. But I do know that, on August 8th, 1725 – the day before Edmund O’Connor left St Petersburg to carry his tale and the letters to Townshend and Deane – King James VIII himself sat down and wrote a somewhat different story to his trusted friend, Lord Atterbury. ‘By my accounts of the North,’ wrote the king, ‘I perceive the Czarina was willing to hear my proposals, and that the fleet was not like to undertake any thing this year; all which will afford time both for negociation [sic] and execution against the next; and I own I never had better hopes in general.’

These hopes stayed high till Empress Catherine’s death, just two years later. What she might have done to aid James in his efforts to regain his throne, we’ll never know. The next Tsar was not sympathetic to the Jacobites, and after a few more years of attempting to gain assistance from Russia, James and his followers were forced to turn their hopes westward again, to their older allies Spain and France.

But that is another story.

In addition to Alison Lindsay, Head of the Historical Search Section at the National Archives of Scotland; Sister Maire Hickey, OSB, of Kylemore Abbey, Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland; and my friend and fellow author Maureen Jennings, all of whom I’ve mentioned in my notes about the characters, and all of whom deserve a second mention here, I also owe thanks to the two researchers at the National Archives of Scotland who kindly took time to share with me the more extensive catalogue of records from the Stirling-Home-Drummond-Moray papers; to Charles Hind, FSA, Associate Director and H.J. Heinz Curator of Drawings for the British Architectural Library Drawings and Archives Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, who was my guide in St Petersburg; to the two women working at the Municipal Museum in Ieper, Belgium, on the day that I walked in, who helped me track down the location of the former convent of the Irish Nuns; to John G. Kruth, Executive Director, and Christine Simmonds-Moore, PhD of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, who vetted my details concerning the ganzfeld procedure and parapsychology research; to thriller writer Ian Kharitonov, for correcting my Russian; and as ever, to my editors and agents, and my mother – my most critical developmental editor.

Above all, I owe special thanks to Margaret McGovern, of Eyemouth, Scotland, my onetime landlady and longtime friend, who not only gave Robbie his byname but helped me make sure that his voice was authentic. I couldn’t have written his story without her, and wouldn’t have wanted to.

As a former museum curator, S
USANNA
K
EARSLEY
brings her own passion for research and travel to bear in her books, weaving history with modern-day intrigue in a way that, in the words of one reviewer, ‘tells the story of the past and illuminates the present’. She won the prestigious Catherine Cookson Fiction Award for her novel
Mariana,
and was shortlisted for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award for
Sophia’s Secret.

www.susannakearsley.com

Mariana

The Splendour Falls

The Shadowy Horses

Season of Storms

Every Secret Thing

(previously published under the name Emma Cole)

Sophia’s Secret

(also published as The Winter Sea)

The Rose Garden

The Firebird