The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  It sounded more a challenge than an invitation when I read it through the first time, and in some ways I supposed it was, but there was something oddly comforting as well in knowing I could find him anytime I wanted. First, though, there were other practicalities, like eating what he’d left for me, and showering, and going down to settle our account with the hotel.

  The same waitress who’d served us last night was on breakfast room duty. She greeted me brightly. “Good morning. Ye’ve got a fair day for your walk. Have a seat by the window, I won’t be a moment,” she said. “Will you have tea, or coffee?”

  “I’m not having breakfast,” I told her, “but thank you. I just need to pay for the room.”

  “Nae bother, he’s already done that. Your man,” she said helpfully, as though it needed explaining. “He paid at the front desk afore he went out, said you wanted an early start.”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.” I couldn’t honestly be irritated with him, and I should have known he’d be too much a gentleman to let me pay. I smiled and asked her, “Can I change my mind about the coffee?”

  When I stepped outside the hotel I had two hot steaming takeaway cups, one of coffee, one of tea, a welcome insulation for my hands against the morning chill. I paused a moment on the gravel, turned my face toward the breeze and closed my eyes, and sent my thoughts out. Rob?

  The answer came back clearly. Here.

  I saw the play of white-ridged waves against a wide deserted crescent curve of sand, and gave a nod, not caring that he couldn’t see me. He was on the beach.

  I likely could have walked across the golf course, but despite the early hour I could already hear the crisp metallic chink of clubs and balls and didn’t fancy getting knocked unconscious first thing in the morning by a drive gone wide, and so instead I walked the long way round, along the road and down the gently sloping street of terraced shops and houses with a rushing stream that chased beside the pavement I was walking on, the whole way down to where a white wood footbridge crossed above it to the broad, fawn-colored beach.

  I had to round a ridge of sand dunes that rose high like proper hills, with tufted marram grass that flattened when the wind blew. Rob was sitting halfway up one, with his crossed arms resting on his upraised knees, his steady gaze directed not toward the endless sea and the horizon, but the nearer line of waves that rolled to shore and foamed to nothing on the sand.

  I climbed to join him. It was harder than I’d thought, to climb that deeply shifting dune, and I did it ungracefully, but Rob seemed too absorbed to take much notice. He did shift aside, though, in the level spot where he was sitting, to make room for me as I collapsed beside him. We were in a sheltered hollow with the wind-shaped sand and blowing grasses rising gently to each side of us and shielding us behind.

  Rob took the cup of now-cooled tea I handed over to him. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” I cradled my coffee and looked to the beach as well. “What are you looking at?”

  “Just what you see.” When he lifted the takeaway cup for a drink, I could see a faint smile touch his mouth at the corners. “But afore you came,” he told me, “I was watching Margaret’s Anna.”

  I still found it difficult to tell if he was teasing me. I had to ask, “You’re serious?”

  “Dead serious. Just there.” He gave a nod toward the empty beach. “I’d no idea it was her at first, ye ken. It was the woman I was watching.”

  He had lost me, now. “What woman?”

  “Sorry.” I could see the effort that it took for him to organize his thoughts into an order that allowed him to explain.

  He started at the moment when he’d woken with the sunrise to a pressing sense of restlessness. Not wanting to disturb my sleep, he’d fought it for a while, but when the urge to get outdoors had overwhelmed him he’d gone down himself, alone.

  “I left you breakfast.”

  “Yes, I ate it. Thanks.”

  “No problem. I was thinking,” he admitted, “I might walk up to the castle, have a look around.”

  “Without me?”

  “Well, I would have gone again, when you had wakened. But the pull that I was feeling was so strong. It didn’t take me to the castle, though,” he said. “It brought me here.”

  I looked along the ridge of dunes, deserted but for us. “What did it feel like?”

  “I no ken.” He sifted sand between his fingers with a shrug. “A kind of longing, like, if that makes any sense.”

  I felt an edge of it myself, I thought, and found my own gaze drawn far out toward the distant line where sea met sky, as though there might be something there for me to see, that I’d been waiting for. But what, I didn’t know.

  Rob said, “And then I saw the woman. She came down that hill, just over there.” He pointed to the headland by the harbor to our left. “And at the bottom of the hill she stopped a moment, as if she were feart to take another step, but then she finally came across, and passed just underneath here, and I realized what she was.”

  I had a sense of that, as well. “A ghost?”

  He gave a nod.

  “And did you speak to her?”

  “There’d have been no point, she’d not have heard me.”

  “But,” I said, “your Roman ghost, your Sentinel—you talk to him.”

  His glance slid sideways to me as he raised his tea to drink again. “The Sentinel’s a spirit. All that made him what he was in life, he has that still, it’s just that he no longer has a body. But this woman, she was nothing like the Sentinel. She was more of a shadow,” he said. “A residual ghost, is the way they’re described, I think. Something happens in a place, ye ken, that carries deep emotion, and it leaves such an impression that the shadow of the person keeps repeating it forever. If you have the eyes to see.”

  She’d been an older woman, so Rob told me, with an almost regal grace that had intrigued him, and her clothes had clearly marked her as a woman of another time, her long gown dragging heavily across the tide-wet sand yet leaving no trace of a trail, just as her feet had left behind no footprints.

  And because he’d been intrigued, he’d set his focus on her, trying to see back in time to when she’d been a person, not a shadow.

  I still wasn’t sure how Rob saw things, when he looked back, but from what he was saying I gathered that, while I could only see a narrow window on the past, he saw the whole of it.

  He’d seen the older woman walking past. She’d walked a little farther on before she’d stopped and, looking up, began a conversation with a younger, bright-haired woman sitting partway up the dunes. He might have listened in, had his attention not been stolen at that moment by a burst of childish laughter from the beach.

  “There were five children,” Rob said. “All one family, from the look of it, though not a one was over ten years old. And the youngest of them, she’d have only been this high.” He held his hand above the sand to show me. “Small, ye ken, still walking on her toes, the way they do. But she could run.”

  He painted me a picture with his words till I could see her, too: the tiny girl with windblown brown curls running with her brothers and her sisters and a giant mastiff dog who seemed to take delight in teasing her to try to take the stick he carried in his mouth. But when she’d run too closely to the waves in her pursuit, both of the women who were playing with the children had gone after her, and one of them—her mother, Rob assumed—had called her: “Anna!”

  When the little girl had failed to stop, the woman had put on a burst of speed herself and caught the child and, lifting her, had swung her in a wide and joyful arc of skirts and water spray, and in delight the little girl had laughed with such abandon that it made Rob smile himself, though he was watching from a distance of some centuries.

  And then he’d unexpectedly been brought back to the present by the nudgings of a small dog and the feeling of a tennis ball pressed wetly to his hand. The dog, a little flop-eared spaniel spotted brown and white, had seemed entirely unrepentant for the int
erruption. Dropping the wet tennis ball, well caked with sand and slobber, in Rob’s lap, it had backed off a step and crouched, tail wagging fiercely in encouragement.

  A young man on the beach below had called up an apology. “He’s not my dog,” he’d told Rob, “he’s my brother’s. I’d have taught him better manners. Angus, come on now.”

  But Rob, dog lover that he was, had reassured the other man it was no bother, and he’d made a fuss of Angus, throwing out the ball along the beach a few times while exchanging comments with the other man about the weather and the quickest way to reach the castle.

  “Just mind how you go, after all of this rain,” had been the man’s advice. “The path will be pure mud, and there are places you’ll come too close to the edge to wish to slip.”

  He’d called the dog back and they’d headed off toward the row of houses waiting on the far side of the footbridge while Rob, left alone once more, had turned his mind again in search of little Anna.

  “But,” I asked him, playing skeptic, “how can you be sure that it was Margaret’s Anna? Anna would have been a common name, in those days, both in Russia and in Scotland. We don’t know that she was Scottish.”

  “True enough.” He admitted he hadn’t been sure. “But she felt right.”

  Not really the kind of hard proof we could offer to experts, I thought.

  Rob said, “Experts be damned.” He glanced round at me. “Surely ye’ve felt at least once in your life, simply felt it, that something was right?”

  It wasn’t only that he’d read my thoughts so easily. He was sitting too close, and his eyes were too blue, too distracting. I dragged my gaze free and looked back at the water and asked, “Did you find her again, then?”

  “Oh, aye.” At the edge of my vision, I saw his head angle away once again and I knew he was looking toward the strip of sea-wet sand that glistened in the sun. “Not as she was when I’d left her,” he said, “but I found her.”

  She’d been older by a few years, maybe seven now, he guessed, or eight. But even so he’d known her by her brown curls, blowing wildly in the wind, and by her laughter.

  As before, she’d been with other children, only three others this time, the eldest practically a teenager and hanging back to walk beside the woman Rob had taken for their mother, while the youngest boy and Anna ran ahead.

  The boy was chasing seagulls, only chasing them at first and charging at them when they sank from flight to settle on the sand, so that they rose again and shrieked and wheeled to ride the wind above the little family.

  Anna screamed at him in her turn, “Stop it, Donald! Leave them be!”

  The boy had grinned and, being slightly older and a full head taller than the little girl, had kept his distance easily. But when he’d stooped to pick a bit of driftwood from the sand and taken aim at a young seagull that had not been quick enough to fly away, the girl had closed the space between them in a lunge that knocked him over.

  Anna, for all her small size, had the best of the brief fight that followed, refusing to be dislodged till Donald’s swinging hand caught her a blow on the side of her head.

  “Donald!” That was their mother, advancing to put a swift end to the battle. “Stop that! What sort of a mannie are ye, taking your hand off your sister’s face?”

  “She took her hand offa mine!” Donald, scrambling upright, looked fiercely defiant. “And fit wye are ye allus taking her side of things? I’m your own son! She’s not even a Logan.”

  Anna, still rubbing the side of her head, stopped abruptly. The air had gone suddenly still. The two other children, a few feet away, traded glances as Donald himself seemed to wish the words back, shifting guiltily under his mother’s incredulous gaze. Then all eyes swung to Anna.

  She rose to her feet in the silence, a little bit shakily, seeking reassurance in her mother’s face and finding something else, something that looked more like apology.

  Her lower lip began to quiver. “Are you not my mother?”

  “Anna.”

  “Am I not a Logan, truly?”

  “Anna,” came the pained reply, “I love you as my own, I always have, I—”

  “No!” The shout was meant to shut the explanations out, to shield the girl’s emotions from a new assault.

  The woman reached her hands toward the little girl, a shine of tears beginning in her own kind eyes, but Anna wrestled free and shouted “No!” again, and ran, as though the devil and his army of dark angels were pursuing her.

  Rob paused to drain the last bit of his tea, which must by now have been as cold as ice, and told me, “She ran there.”

  I looked where he was pointing, to the headland by the harbor, and the line of cliffs beyond it. “To Slains Castle, do you mean?”

  “I think so, aye.”

  I was surprised he hadn’t followed her, but when I said as much he only gave an offhand shrug and said, “Well, that was when you called me, so I reckoned I should wait for you.”

  Always the gentleman, I thought.

  If Rob read me that time he didn’t respond, he just rolled to his feet like an athlete and stretched out his shoulders before reaching down with his free hand to help me up, too. “Let’s go find her,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  I’d never seen a ruin so wildly beautiful as Slains. Rising in places straight up from the edge of the cliffs, with the spray of the North Sea exploding against the dark rocks far beneath it, the castle was a fierce reminder of what could endure against the elements and time.

  It would have been a great imposing structure in its day, or so I judged from what was left of it: the jagged sprawl of ruined rooms and arches with the crumbled stairs that led to nowhere now, and hollow windows gazing silently toward the ever-changing sea. The stretch of ruins farthest from me might have been the stables once, and closer still—so close that I was standing in its shadow—one tall, square-walled, roofless tower rose above the rest in what, if it were living and not made of brick and stone, I might have taken for defiance.

  Standing there, I tried in my imagination to rebuild the castle as it once had been, to give the walls and tower back their proper form, and set a roof on top to keep the weather out, and glaze the gaping windows with glass panes to block the wind. What I came up with was most likely a fair semblance of Slains Castle in its prime.

  I knew that Rob, beside me, probably saw everything more clearly, but he seemed right now to be more focused on the fence that stood between us and the ruins. Built of chain link, it stood higher than his head and had been staked the whole way round to cut off access.

  With his head tipped to the side he told me, “Easier to climb it near the posts, it’s not so wobbly.”

  “Can police constables trespass? I’d have thought it was unethical.”

  “And who’s trespassing? I’m only after saving a wee girl who’s up here somewhere on her own.” His face was admirably straight but for his eyes. “You need a hand with this?”

  I could, in fact, climb nearly any fence, of any height. It was a skill I’d learned from following my brother, and I put it to good use now, scrambling up and over easily so that I was already on my feet when Rob dropped catlike at my side.

  He grinned. “Can ye do that with trees, as well?”

  “Climb them, you mean? Only up,” I admitted. “I’m a coward coming down in trees, the branches are too far apart and never where I need them. I got stuck in one for hours once. My brother Colin had to talk me down again.”

  “Oh aye? And how’d he manage that?”

  “He had me close my eyes, and then he told me where to put my hands and feet, and I just did it.” I could still recall his patient voice, instructing me: “Six inches left. Now two feet down, that’s it, you’ve got it, I won’t let you fall…”

  I turned, and caught Rob watching me. He smiled and looked away again, toward the soaring bit of castle wall that stood much closer to us, now, its granite facing stones reflecting tiny scatterings of light.

&nbs
p; Rob closed his own eyes, with his head held to the side a little as though he were listening, and then his eyes came open and I had the sense that he was seeing something very different from what I was seeing.

  He was still aware of me peripherally, though, because he kept on talking even while he walked along the outer wall, describing as he went: “It’s like a garden here, walled in, with paths and trees.” He stopped, inhaling deeply. “There’s a lilac tree, just here, that’s full in bloom.”

  Which meant, I thought, that in the place where he was walking it was summertime, but only just—not at the season’s end, as it was now, but somewhere nearer its beginning. When would lilacs bloom up here, I wondered? Late in May, perhaps, or early June?

  “And there’s the kitchen door,” he told me. “That’s where she went in.”

  To me it was only a breach in the broken wall, but Rob still ducked his head under the long-vanished lintel as he crossed the threshold, and I felt a curious urge to do likewise. I envied him, envied the things he was seeing, and I think he must have been fully aware of that, too, because he started taking more care with his verbal descriptions, more time with the details, until he was painting the picture so vividly I, too, could see the flagged floors and the broad open hearth and the women who turned from their work in surprise as young Anna ran by with her face streaming tears.

  Following Rob as he followed the girl through the twists of the corridors, I wasn’t seeing the deep roofless passages open above to the cries of the gulls, where the wind off the sea became suddenly stilled and the shadows fell thickly. Instead, in my mind, I was seeing what Rob was describing: the warm plastered walls and the ceilings and floorboards, and doors leading off into storerooms and sculleries. This was the servants’ dominion, this ground level, but Anna didn’t stay here.

  She ran up, to the rooms that no longer existed because all the beams and the floorboards had long ago fallen away, leaving shells of the walls with their great gaping windows, and even if I’d climbed the crumbling circle of stairs that remained, I could never have followed her.