Susanna Kearsley

by The Firebird

  I could hear the high whine of a hoover behind the front door as I rang the bell. At the second ring the hoover stopped and I heard footsteps coming slowly, almost cautiously, as though she wasn’t used to having visitors.

  She recognized me easily, but clearly hadn’t caught my name, so I supplied it once again. “It’s Nicola,” I told her. “Nicola Marter.”

  “From London.” She sounded perplexed.

  “Yes.” I held up her scarf, neatly folded. “You left this,” I said, “in the office. I thought you’d be missing it.”

  That only made her look more baffled. “Ye’ve never come all this way up to Dundee to return it?”

  Rob, who’d stayed two paces back, stepped smoothly in to rescue me with, “She was coming to Scotland already, ye ken, and since she didnae wish to trust it to the post, we thought we’d stop by and deliver it on our way north the day.”

  I guessed he’d slipped back into broadened Scots to put her at her ease, and it appeared to work. I introduced them, and she pulled the door more fully open, standing back and saying, “Do come in.”

  Rob followed me. He wasn’t hugely tall, but in the small space of the entry hall I felt his presence keenly and it came as a relief to move away, into the tidy front room with its drab green wallpaper and cold and empty fireplace. This was not the room I’d seen the afternoon I’d held the scarf, but still it had that same dejected feeling, like a girl at a dance with her back to the wall watching everyone else whirling by.

  Margaret offered me a stiffly upright chair beside the window as she asked Rob, “D’ye work in art as well?”

  He told her, “Aye, from time to time. I started off with archaeologists, identifying artifacts.”

  I glanced at him, but couldn’t see the slightest trace of anything to tell me he was lying. Taking up the reins, I said to Margaret, “Maybe Rob could help you learn a little more about your Firebird carving, now I think of it. He’s really very knowledgeable.” Turning to face Rob as though the thought had just occurred to me, I told him, “Miss Ross has this wooden carving, Rob, that’s come down through her family, and she needs to prove its provenance.”

  Rob said he would be pleased to have a look, but Margaret shook her head.

  “It’s kind of ye, but there’s no need. My neighbor, Archie, fetched me from the station when I came back up from seeing you, Miss Marter, and he said…” She looked embarrassed. “Well, he said I shouldn’t take one person’s word for it. That maybe Mr. St.-Croix was mistaken. Archie kens a man in Inverness who used to live in Russia, and he said he’d take the Firebird up to him, if I was willing. Archie’s daughter lives in Inverness, he’d planned to go and stay with her already for a visit,” she explained. “He left this morning.”

  I was trying to digest this. “And he took the carving with him?”

  “Aye. He’ll have it home in three weeks’ time,” she said to Rob, “so if you’re up this way again, I’ll gladly let ye see it then.”

  “I’d like that very much,” Rob said.

  She made us tea, insisted on it, serving it with scones so light and fresh they barely bore the butter’s weight. I pushed my disappointment down, and mindful of the loneliness I’d felt when I had held her scarf, I tried my best to make the visit stretch a little, making conversation where I could.

  Rob helped. “Ye have a taste for crime,” he remarked, with a nod at the barrister’s bookcase beside his own chair, every shelf crammed with hardbacks whose colorful jacket designs were pure vintage.

  She smiled and said, “Those were my father’s, aye. Loved a good murder, he did. And his spies. He was mad for James Bond.”

  “So I see.”

  While Rob studied the titles I nodded in my turn toward a framed sketch on the opposite wall. “That’s a beautiful picture. Are those ruins local?”

  “Och, no, that’s New Slains Castle, up to the north,” she said, “near Cruden Bay, where my mother was born. Her family goes a long way back there, all the way to the Anna who first brought the Firebird over here, ye ken, from Russia.”

  Standing, Rob crossed over for a close look at the sketch, head tilted. “Cruden Bay? Where’s that, exactly?”

  “Not far north of Aberdeen. They have a lovely golf course. Do ye play the golf?”

  Rob let her lead the conversation off again, politely, but I saw his eyes returning to the sketch from time to time, and though he didn’t show it I could sense him growing restless.

  After twenty minutes more I set my empty teacup down and smiled and, thanking Margaret, said, “We really ought to go.”

  She stood and saw us to the door, and thanked me, too, for bringing back her scarf. “It was always a fancy of mine,” she admitted, “to own a designer scarf. Foolish thing, really, to waste so much money.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said and smiled. “We all have to indulge ourselves a little bit, I think.”

  She stood there in the doorway of her plain mid-terraced house, and smiled back at me, but sadly. “Aye, perhaps we do.”

  I shouldn’t have said anything, I knew, to raise her hopes, but I so desperately wanted to leave something she could hold to, so I told her, “I’ll be going to St. Petersburg myself, soon, on a business trip. I’ll see what I can learn about the Empress Catherine, shall I? And the British who were living there.”

  A small light flicked on briefly in her eyes. It satisfied me then, but when I got back in the car with Rob and drove away I felt less sure that what I’d done was kind. I sat and wallowed in my doubts until Rob spoke, his own voice quiet as though he were thinking, too. “Ye ken she’s dying?”

  “Yes, I know.” I looked away. “And so does she.”

  “This cruise she planned on taking. When…?”

  “It leaves in March,” I told him. “Sixty days, the whole way round the world.” A world that Margaret Ross had only dreamt of from her prison of a house.

  We’d reached the ring road that would take us back onto the Tay Road Bridge, and just ahead the rigged masts of an old tall ship rose up against the waterline: the RSS Discovery in its permanent display dock, the same ship that had once carried Scott and Shackleton on their first trip to search for the South Pole, only to spend two years trapped in the ice while the crew on the shore met with failure.

  We reached the ship and passed it. Reached the turning for the Tay Road Bridge, and passed that, too. I looked at Rob.

  He looked at me. “Nice day,” he said and glanced toward the sky for proof before he brought his gaze back to the road ahead. “We could be up to Cruden Bay by teatime.”

  “Cruden Bay.” So I’d been right about his interest in the sketch, and its effect on him.

  “Well, given that your Firebird carving’s up in Inverness,” he said, “I thought we might look elsewhere for those details that you need.”

  “Oh yes? And what’s in Cruden Bay?”

  He swung the Ford through one more roundabout and took the turning north before he answered me. “Slains Castle.”

  Chapter 8

  We lost the sunshine as we crossed the River Ythan north of Aberdeen, and minutes later it began to rain. Not hard at first, but steadily. The road we were on hugged the coast, but the change in the weather had flattened the light to a dull gray outside and the clouds pressed so low there was little distinction between sea and sky.

  Rob was looking ahead with the faintest of frowns, and I knew he was searching for the jagged line of castle ruins we’d seen in the sketch that hung on Margaret’s wall.

  I asked, “What is it that you feel, about the castle?”

  He couldn’t put it neatly into words. “It’s like…” He exhaled hard, his mouth a stubborn line. “It’s like I’ve someone tugging at my sleeve, ye ken, and wanting my attention. I can feel it just like that, like I’m supposed to come and see.”

  “Well, you’ll be lucky to see anything in this.” I looked with doubt beyond the thudding wiper blades that seemed to barely pass before the windscreen was awash a
gain. “It’s getting worse.”

  It really was. Rob had to slow his speed because of lack of visibility, and by the time we reached the outer edge of Cruden Bay he’d conceded that, even if we found the castle, we couldn’t explore it in this weather. Not that it mattered.

  I’d already mentally altered my plan for the day to allow for our coming this far up the coast. There was no way that I would be able to catch the last train down to London tonight; that was obvious. And it was even more obvious there was no way we could ever have driven the whole distance up here, and looked round Slains Castle, and driven back down again, all in one go. Rain or no rain, we’d have to find somewhere to stop for the night.

  I had known this when we’d headed north from Dundee. I’d accepted the logic. But now it felt suddenly close in the car.

  I said, “Rob.”

  “Aye?”

  “I’m sorry for making you do this.”

  His frown of concentration softened as he watched the road. “Ye’ve not made me do anything. I volunteered.”

  “For a trip to Dundee. Not a full weekend excursion.” I tried to see beyond the thudding wipers. “Margaret said they had a golf course here, which means there ought to be at least a couple of hotels.”

  Steering from the road into a little car park sheltered by high hedges on two sides and on the other by the watery dark outline of what looked to be a pub, Rob switched the engine off and stretched his shoulders, leaning back into the seat. “How’s this one?”

  Peering out my window, I could just make out the sign: The St. Olaf Hotel.

  “This looks fine,” I said.

  Rob held his coat over our heads as we made a run for it over the waterlogged gravel and round to the door on the far side, but with the wind gusting sideways the rain still attacked us, and I was half-soaked by the time we blew into the entryway, pushing the door shut behind us.

  The narrow entry hall served double duty as the hotel’s lobby, warmly elegant with paneled wood and carpets and a small desk. Doors stood open on each side to what appeared to be a breakfast room and, opposite, a dining room, and at the hall’s far end a staircase climbed to a half-landing on its way to the first floor.

  A woman came to welcome us, dark-haired and tall, with friendly eyes.

  We were in luck, she said. They had a room.

  I asked, “Only the one?”

  “Aye.” The look she gave me after glancing at Rob seemed to question my sanity for even thinking of sleeping alone. “But it does have two beds.”

  It was a large room done in burgundy and white and restful green, with a dark mirrored wardrobe that filled one whole wall and a beautiful window that took up one half of another. I dropped my handbag and my borrowed jacket on the smaller bed so Rob would not be moved by chivalry to claim it for himself. He was bigger than I was, and the larger double bed would give him room to sleep more comfortably.

  Right now he was standing at the window, looking out. The view was fogged with rain and mist, but I could still make out the green expanse of what must be the golf course with a ridge of dunes beyond it, and the fainter smudge of headlands to the north and south.

  His gaze had angled north and I could feel again the waves of his impatience and his restlessness.

  “You can’t go out in that,” I said and nodded at the rain.

  He turned as if he had forgotten I was even there, and then I saw the tension leave his shoulders as his mouth curved slightly. “I could try. The castle’s only over there.”

  I couldn’t see it. “Where?”

  He closed his eyes briefly and sent me the image—a towering ruin of red stone that seemed to rise straight from the sea-battered rocks.

  I pushed it aside with a shiver. “Yes, well, I don’t want to have to explain to your mother how I lost her son over the cliffs, so forget it.”

  The curve of his mouth deepened slightly, but he didn’t argue, and I took advantage of that to suggest we go down and have dinner.

  “The sign downstairs said they serve evening meals starting at five,” I said, “and I’m starving.”

  The dining room of the St. Olaf Hotel had a lovely warm feel to it, dark wood and red and gold tones and the brass shining bright on the fireplace below a high ceiling with elegant crown moldings. At one end of the long room stood the bar, with polished bottles in behind, and at the other end, a tall bow window jutted out to form a bay just large enough to set a table. Mirrors reflected the soft light of lamps, and the walls were a gallery of old framed pictures and prints.

  Watching Rob study the specials board, I said, “It’s my treat, I’m paying, so order whatever you like.”

  “Why should you pay? It was me who suggested we come further north.”

  “I’m paying.”

  He gave a shrug, letting me choose where to sit. “Well, all right. But I’m not inexpensive. I’m having the sirloin steak, with battered mushrooms to start.”

  It was wonderful food. I had brie wedges followed by crisply fried haddock, and white wine that warmed me so thoroughly from the inside that I ceased worrying about the storm still flinging rain against the window.

  “It’ll pass,” our waitress told us, her tone sure. “The forecast calls for sun the morn.” She took our empty plates in hand. “Are you up for the golf?”

  I shook my head. “We were hoping to walk up and look round the castle.”

  She assured us it was worth the walk. “You’ll have to get through the fence, but that’s not so much bother. It’s pulled down in places.”

  “The fence?” I asked.

  “Oh, aye. It’s all been fenced off, Slains. It’s privately owned, and the plan is to have it converted to holiday flats.”

  I couldn’t remember if I’d seen a fence in the image I’d had from Rob earlier of that great ruin set right at the cliff’s edge, but holiday flats at the edge of a precipice sounded a little unsafe.

  “It was never a ruin until the last century,” our waitress said when I voiced my opinion. “There’s a picture there of how it looked afore the Earl of Erroll sold it from the family in 1916, and the later owners stripped it bare and had the roof removed so they’d not have to pay the taxes. That’s when Slains began to fall to ruin.”

  “Oh,” was all I could think of to say.

  “If you want to learn the history of the castle, we’ve an author here who wrote a book about it. Ye can buy it in the shops,” she told us proudly.

  Rob roused himself from wherever his drifting thoughts had taken him to ask her, “What’s that picture, there?”

  She followed his gaze to a large framed picture hanging just above my head. “That’s the Bullers o’ Buchan, and well worth the walk, if ye still have a mind to go up on the coast path the morn.” It looked like a large sea cave, only without a roof, leaving it open above to the sky.

  I saw Rob’s gaze return to it a few times while we drank our tea and shared a dish of sticky toffee pudding floating warmly in a sea of cream.

  I finally asked, “What is it that you’re seeing?”

  He glanced up one more time before admitting that he didn’t know. “It’s fuzzy, like. But I’m not at my best.” He fought a yawn. “We should try to go see it the morn, though, if we have the time.”

  His use of the conditional reminded me Rob’s time was not entirely his own. I didn’t work weekends, but Rob, between police work and the lifeboat crew, might not have that same luxury.

  “I’ve the day off,” he told me before I could ask, “but unless you’ll be taking the sleeper to London, the last train from Edinburgh leaves around suppertime, and we’ll be four hours at least, on the road going down.”

  Which meant we’d only really have the morning here, to tour around. And if we were to have another early start, I thought, we ought to have an early night. I caught the waitress’s eye again, but when I asked for the bill she said, “Nae bother. I’ll put it to your room. Which room is yours?”

  “Room 4,” I said.

  �
��Oh, aye. You’ll see the castle from your window when the sun comes out.”

  Rob didn’t need the sun to see the castle.

  Upstairs, he wandered over to the window once again, already wearing that distracted gaze that meant his mind had drifted far away. He seemed well rooted there when I went to take the first turn in the bathroom, but when I came out I discovered he’d shifted my things to the larger bed, and was now stretched out full length on the single one, eyes closed and quietly breathing.

  I’d never been in this position with him; never watched him sleeping in a bed. We hadn’t reached that stage in our relationship before I’d run away from it, so even though I tried hard not to stare I couldn’t help it. He was even better looking when he slept. My brother looked more boyish to my eyes when he was sleeping, and more vulnerable, but Rob looked every inch a man. The relaxation of his features only emphasized their strength. And when I tugged a blanket from my own bed so that I could cover him, I knew that I was doing it as much in self-defense as from concern he might get cold. It would be easier to sleep, I knew, if I weren’t forced to watch the steady rise and fall of Rob’s broad chest, or see his hands linked carelessly across the muscled leanness of his stomach.

  As it was, I had to turn my back completely when I got in bed myself, and face away from him. But even then, I still could hear the rhythm of his breathing, slow and deep and reassuring, like the waves I knew were rolling to the shore beyond our window, and at length I let them carry me to sleep.

  ***

  I woke alone in the hotel room.

  From the angle of the sunlight spearing in from the east-facing window, it was fairly early in the morning still, but Rob had neatly made his bed, and when I turned in mine I found the blanket that I’d covered him with tucked round my own shoulders.

  He’d been down to breakfast, too, it seemed. He’d left some kind of scone and a banana for me on the bedside table. And a note.

  Good morning, read the bold slash of his handwriting. Come find me when you’re ready.