The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  Still, I couldn’t decide. “What if somebody sees us?”

  “And what will they see? Were ye planning to spin around widdershins, chanting or something?”

  “Rob.”

  “Well, then. You’re only walking on the pavement, aren’t ye? Surely they’ll recover from the shock.” I caught the teasing glint in his blue eyes, and this time I could not mistake the dare.

  “All right,” I said.

  He held the paper bag toward me so that I could take the last croissant before he folded it and put it in his pocket. “Fine then, lead the way.”

  I looked in both directions, not quite certain whether I should go toward the central square or back toward the roundabout. The mourning dove was calling once again, and Rob was watching me.

  “You’re ower-thinking,” he said. “Trust your feelings.”

  So, because I didn’t want him knowing that I wasn’t feeling anything, I gave a nod and headed for the roundabout.

  The narrow road curved gently past the Albion Hotel, an older building on the corner with red doors underneath a brightly hanging Union Jack, and tidy topiary trees that flanked its entrance. As we passed, a woman came out with a broom and started sweeping down the steps and gave a smiling nod to Rob, who shot a smile back and said, “Good morning.” Then to me, a few feet farther on, he said, “You see? It’s not so difficult.”

  I wanted to believe him. I tried stretching out my feelings. Just like dowsing, he had told me. “Do you dowse, Rob?”

  “Aye, from time to time. You want a well dug, I’m your man. Quit sidetracking, and concentrate.”

  It wasn’t any use, I thought. I wasn’t getting anything. I led him all the way down to the roundabout in silence. When we stopped, he told me, “That’s all right. Go back again, but slowly, and you’ll find it.”

  I heard the tone of certainty behind his words and turned on him. “You know exactly where it is. You see it, don’t you?”

  Rob ignored me. “Back again, but slowly,” he repeated.

  I sighed, and started back up on the other side, past all the ancient-looking doors of all the old brick houses. There were cars parked in a tight line all along the street on this side, leaving less room on the pavement. Rob fell into step behind me, uncomplaining, while I tried to persuade him to give me some sort of a hint.

  “It’s a big building.”

  “Thanks very much,” I said drily.

  “You asked.”

  “We’ll be doing this all day, you know, if you don’t—” Suddenly I faltered and stopped walking. We hadn’t come very far up from the roundabout, just to the point where a lane angled off to the right between houses whose only remarkable feature was that they looked modern. The next few houses up along Sint Jacobsstraat were modern, too, their high flat fronts and staring windows livened only by a burst of unexpected color in the one house at the center of the row whose stuccoed walls were painted an alarming shade of orange, with a deep pink trim.

  I wasn’t even sure why I’d stopped walking, till the breeze blew and I felt it for a second time: the tiny mental tug, like someone tapping on my shoulder.

  Turning, I saw Rob too far behind me to have touched me, and I asked him, “Was it here?”

  The slight curve of his mouth was all the answer that I needed, and I felt a rush of sudden childish pride. I tamped it down with practicality. “I still can’t see it, though.”

  “Well, I can help with that.” He took a thoughtful look around us. Ypres was waking up—the sound of traffic could be clearly heard now, and a car came speeding down the narrow curving street beside us, closely followed by another one. Rob nodded at the lane. “Let’s try down here.”

  The lane was short, and offered little shelter. At its other end, the smooth brick paving changed to rougher cobblestone with moss and puddles in between, and opened to another narrow street with houses only on one side, and a green tangled mass of trees all down the other, like the edge of some great park.

  From my map I guessed it was, in fact, the park along the river walk that marked the margins of the old town walls. A line of cars was parked here, too, and yet it was a quiet place, and peaceful.

  Rob found a spot where we could sit on sloping grass beneath an overhanging tree, and shrugged his jacket off to spread it out so we’d have something dry that we could sit on, and he asked me, “Are ye ready?”

  “I don’t have to do this by myself, too, do I?”

  With a flash of his warm smile he held his hand out, and I gave him mine.

  I said, “You do realize that, assuming Margaret’s Anna even made it here to Ypres, and that you find her, it’s long odds we’ll find anything to tell us why she went to Russia.”

  Once again I got the slanting, shuttered look. “I like long odds,” he said.

  And closed his fingers over mine.

  Chapter 13

  She was cold, as much from nervousness as from the wind that chased along the dark length of the street, lit only by the lantern that the boy who led them carried. The wind chased that as well, and when the flame dipped to evade the gusts it threw black, grasping shadows on the brick walls of the houses and made Anna hold more closely to the coat of Captain Jamieson. He’d carried her the whole way from the riverside and had not set her down until the colonel made him do it. Even then, he’d said in protest, “She is tired.”

  “She is not wounded, and you are,” had been the answer Colonel Graeme gave. “And if ye lose that leg, ye’ll be no help to her at all.”

  She did not like to see them arguing. She’d told the captain, “I can walk, sir,” and obligingly he’d put her down, but she could tell he had not liked to do it.

  She had once asked Colonel Graeme, in their crossing on the ship, why Captain Jamieson refused to let her play about the decks without him being at her side. “I’m no a bairn,” she had complained.

  “Nor does he think ye one.” The colonel had been tucking her beneath the quilts that lined her narrow berth, set near his own, and for a moment he had seemed to think in silence. Then he’d said, “He had a wee girl once, about your own age.”

  Anna had frowned. “Does he not have her now?”

  “He lost her.”

  That was all the explanation she’d received from Colonel Graeme, and she had not dared ask Captain Jamieson himself. But that was probably, thought Anna, why he carried her as often as he did, because he’d lost his own girl once and did not want to lose another, not when Colonel Graeme would have held him fiercely to account for being careless.

  Even now, when she was walking at his side, he kept his one hand on her shoulder and he did not seem to care that she was holding to a rough fold of his coat to borrow courage.

  It was just as well that he was walking slowly. He’d been walking with more effort for the past few days, and often had to stop and rest, but Anna didn’t mind. Nor did she mind that this dark street seemed longer every step they took, because in truth she did not wish to go where they were being led.

  The colonel had explained to her, repeatedly and kindly, why the convent was the place where she must stay while he and Jamieson went on to Paris. Paris, he had told her, was too dangerous.

  “The nuns are loving women, they will care for ye and keep ye safe from harm. And they will teach ye.”

  “Teach me what?”

  “To read and write,” he’d said, “and how to be a lady.”

  “I’ve nae wish to be a lady.”

  Captain Jamieson, who’d sat nearby, had turned his head at that and she had watched the corners of his eyes grow slightly crinkled as they did when he was trying not to show a smile. “No? What would ye wish to be, then?”

  “I’m a Jacobite,” she’d told him, “just as you are. When I’m grown I’ll be a soldier, like my father was, and kill the men who killed him.”

  Captain Jamieson had raised his eyebrows then and looked to Colonel Graeme, who had said, “Did I not tell ye she was John’s own lassie, through and through?”<
br />
  “Ye did, aye.” Captain Jamieson had settled in his corner. “And in more than just the look of him, it seems. So tell me, Anna, when ye’ve killed the men that killed your daddie, and their children come to hunt for you, what will ye do then?”

  Anna had thought solemnly and said, “I’ll kill them, too.”

  “Ye’ll have the fighting never end, then, taking one eye for another. Do ye think your daddie’s soul will rest the better if ye do avenge it? I can tell ye it will not.” His gaze had found hers almost gently. “I’ve killed many men, and aye, a few of those were killed for vengeance, but I’m just as plagued by ghosts now as I ever was,” he’d told her. “Maybe more so.”

  “But you fight men still.”

  “I do.”

  She’d been about to ask him why when Colonel Graeme interrupted with, “A soldier has no choice. And nor do you,” he’d said to Anna. “Only lads and men can go for soldiers, never women.”

  “Why?” she’d asked.

  “Because that is the law. Which ye can read yourself,” he’d finished neatly, “when the nuns have taught ye how.”

  And that had been the end of the discussion, for a while.

  When they had finally, after many days, made landfall, Colonel Graeme had again begun to talk about the nuns. They were from Ireland, he’d told her, and had chosen to become God’s brides instead of any man’s, to serve him better and to help the poor and weak.

  Anna had said, “My Aunt Kirsty is married, and she helps the poor. She takes food from the kitchens of Slains every day to the village, to those who have need of it.”

  “Aye, your Aunt Kirsty has aye been a generous woman,” the colonel had said.

  “But then why can the nuns not be married to men?” had been Anna’s next question.

  The colonel had glanced at the captain, who’d grinned and remarked, “Are ye sure that her daddie was John, and not Robin?”

  The colonel had laughed out loud, and when she’d glared at him, wanting to share the joke, he’d said, “Your father had brothers, and one of them, Robert—or Robin, as we call him—trained as a lawyer. ’Tis certainly true ye’ve a rare gift for argument.”

  Anna had looked at the captain and said in a clear voice, “My father was Colonel John Moray.”

  He’d looked at her small upturned face, so indignant, and he’d smothered his smile then and reached down to brush one hand over her dark tumbled curls. “Aye, I ken who your father was.”

  Walking behind, and still keenly amused, Colonel Graeme had said, “He was aye asking questions as well, was your father, when he was a laddie. I tell ye now what ye should do, Anna. When we are come to the convent at Ypres, ye should ask the nuns there why they cannot be married to men.”

  That had set him off laughing again, and had made Captain Jamieson’s eyes crinkle up at the edges once more, though his face had been carefully sober when Anna had glanced at it.

  Now, as the captain stopped walking for the fourth time in the dim shadowed street of the old town, she studied his face and was troubled to see his mouth set in a hard, painful line.

  “It is nothing,” he said, when he noticed her looking. “’Tis only an ache in my leg from the damp, it will pass.”

  The boy with the lantern stopped walking as well, at a narrow arched door, and said something briefly that Anna could not understand. On the ship coming over she’d heard foreign languages spoken, and had learned a few words of Spanish and Swedish from some of the crew, but what the boy spoke wasn’t either of those. Colonel Graeme understood it, though, and even gave a short reply before the boy departed with the lantern in his hand, a swaying light that swiftly shrank to nothing in the darkness and took all the shadows with it as the night closed in around them.

  As she huddled at the captain’s side the colonel rang a bell hung in the entryway, and all at once the door was opened to them in a wash of warmly yellow light, and Anna shut her eyes against the unknown and the brightness as she passed across the threshold with the men. When she dared open them again, she saw the three of them were standing in a neatly austere parlor with a screen of wooden bars fixed down its center to divide the room in two.

  It had nothing of the grandness of the Earl of Erroll’s drawing room at Slains, nor of the comfort of the main room of the cottage that had been her home till lately, but from how it had been furnished, with its carved wood chairs and paintings and the polished silver sconces with their candles, something told her this was meant to be the finest of the convent’s rooms. A place for guests.

  Beyond the bars she saw the painted Christ upon His cross and felt His eyes upon her, neither suffering nor joyful, only steady as though He could somehow see within her soul and know how much she did not wish to stay here.

  She was bothered by those bars. The colonel had explained to her, in detail, what a cloister was, and how the nuns had chosen to live separate from the larger world, and how they did not freely mix with those from the outside, but she had not imagined bars.

  And when the farther door swung open and two figures robed in black with veils drawn down over their faces entered into that barred section of the parlor, Anna shrank from them as though they had been creatures in a cage.

  She pressed more closely to the side of Captain Jamieson, and felt the weight of his hand settle warmly on her shoulder, reassuring.

  “Colonel Graeme, may I say how pleased I am that Providence has spared you,” said the foremost nun. Her pleasant voice had something of a song in it that sounded only slightly foreign, Anna thought, remembering the nuns had come from Ireland into Flanders, and so kept their Irish way of speech.

  The colonel made a show of great respect, and yet his eyes were smiling. “Were ye praying for me, Abbess?”

  “I was praying for the king, and trusted you’d be standing close enough beside him that God’s shield would guard you also.” Her head turned slightly to the side as she said, “Sister Xaveria, would you kindly bring those two chairs forward so that we may sit, for neither of these gentlemen will take a seat till we ourselves have done so, and the colonel looks incapable of standing any longer.” With her veiled face angled now to Captain Jamieson, she asked him, “Are you wounded?”

  “It is nothing,” said the captain for a second time, but Anna noticed he seemed grateful for the chance to sit, his injured leg stretched out before him as though it had grown too stiff for him to bend. She took the smaller armless rush-backed chair between his own and Colonel Graeme’s, and sat waiting with her fingers tightly clasped together in her lap.

  The nuns appeared not to have seen her while the captain had been standing, but she felt the gaze of both of them upon her now. The nearer one, the abbess, said, “And Colonel, surely this must be your daughter or your niece, she is so like yourself to look at.”

  Anna hadn’t yet been told she looked like Colonel Graeme, but he gave a proud nod now and told the abbess, “Anna is my nephew’s lass, my nephew John, who lies at rest within your abbey here. He was a friend to you, as I recall, and you to him, and it seemed only right to bring his daughter here to let ye have the care of her, with him no longer able to protect her, and myself and Captain Jamieson away to serve the king.”

  The captain shifted slightly at the mention of his name and drew the veiled nun’s steady gaze a second time before she gave her full attention back to Colonel Graeme. With a nod she said, in tones more quiet, “Aye, I well recall your nephew, and he was indeed a loyal friend to all of us. We’ll guard his daughter well.”

  “Her name is Anna,” said the colonel. “Anna Mary. She has sheltered with a family north of Slains these past eight years, and for her safety she has used their name of Logan as her own. I’d think it best if she were entered in your records by that name as well, for even with her father dead his living brothers risk much for the king, and ’twould be safer for the lass and them if none else ever learn she is a Moray.”

  The abbess gave a nod of understanding and agreed that these were trouble
d days. “The Lord knows best, and yet it sorely grieves me that His plan so often brings our young king such keen disappointment, and costs many other men their lives and liberty.”

  The colonel asked her, “Have ye news of any that were taken these past months in Scotland?”

  “No.” The black veil rustled slightly as she shook her head. “Your son will doubtless have heard much, for where he is there are men daily passing through as refugees. But we ourselves,” she said, “have had few visitors of late. The Duke of Ormonde, my great cousin, may have brought an end to Queen Anne’s war in Flanders, but the treaty that he wrought has seen us traded since from France to Austria, and so we see no more the loyal regiments of Irishmen who served the King of France to serve King James, and who were wont to give us presents and their company when e’er they passed. Nor do we any more receive the pension that the King of France did grant us. You will find us much reduced,” she told the colonel. “Poor and friendless.”

  Colonel Graeme smiled, and told her, “Never that.” He slipped a hand within the lining of his coat and drew out a worn purse that clinked with shifting coins. “Here, this will be some solace to ye, and will pay the costs of Anna’s keep and education till I come again.”

  The abbess, as she took the money from him through the bars, raised one hand from the folds of her dark robes to make the sign to bless him, and she called those blessings down in words as well. “But you are weary, Colonel, and must rest. Come, let us lodge you with our neighbor, for he is a good and kindly man and will, I’m sure, have room for you.”

  The wave of desolation Anna felt then, when she knew the men were leaving her tonight with these strange women, was as forceful as the one she’d felt when she had glimpsed her last blurred view of her home on the snowy cliffs of Scotland; even more so, because then at least she’d had the colonel walking at her side, and Captain Jamieson to carry her, and now she would have neither.

  When she looked at Colonel Graeme she discovered he was watching her, and wanting to be brave for him she bit her lower lip to stop its trembling and blinked hard against the rising sting of tears.