The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  That amused him. “Bless ye, no. ’Tis nothing so improving. No, this book is an account of Mr. Lawson’s daring voyage to the colony of Carolina, and his own adventures with the Indians and settlers there. When I was but a lad, I dreamt of making such a journey for myself,” he said, “but now I’ve grown too old for it.”

  “Is it so far?”

  “America? It is, aye. Clear across the world. My eldest son, my Jamie, went to settle in the colony of Darien around the same time Mr. Lawson first set foot in Carolina,” said the colonel, with a nod toward his book, “but I lost him afore he could tell me any of his own tales.”

  Anna thought it odd that both the colonel and the captain should be careless with their children, for they both seemed to be careful men. She asked, “Where did you lose him?”

  Colonel Graeme looked confounded by the question for a moment, but her meaning must have penetrated for his eyes showed understanding. “He was sailing for the Company of Scotland when he died.” He dropped his gaze again and took a keener interest in the pages of his book. “It happened years ago. I’ve lost two sons, for all that, but the two that I have living are a comfort to me.”

  Anna hadn’t known that “lost” meant “dead.” She was absorbing this when something struck the colonel, and he said, “Ye may meet one of them, in fact, while ye are here, for he’s a monk and though he’s not of the same order as the nuns he’s yet been known to pay a visit to the Lady Abbess now and then. They call him Père Archange,” he told her, “meaning ‘Father Archangel,’ though some will simply call him Father Graeme. Ye may ken him by his face, he looks like me. He was a soldier once, as I am.”

  Anna frowned. “But if he was a soldier, why did he become a monk?” If she could live a soldier’s life, she thought, with all of its adventure and its travel, she would never give it up to pass her days in dull and silent prayer.

  The colonel closed his book. “He had a friend, a good friend, in his regiment. As close as brothers, so they were, but they fell out and quarreled and they fought a duel, and Patrick won the contest. But in winning, he had killed his friend, and that was something he could not atone for in his mind, nor in his heart, except by laying down his weapons altogether. There are times,” he said to Anna, “when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.” His gaze fell kindly on her face. “You are too young to understand that, lass, but hold it in your memory so ye’ll mind it if ye ever do have need of it, so ye’ll not make my son’s mistakes.”

  She nodded. “But I could not be a monk,” she told him. “Only men are monks.”

  “Aye.” He was smiling. “And I reckon with your father’s blood and all the Graeme in ye that ye’ll never make a nun.”

  Her heart rose hopefully. “So then ye’ll take me with you, and not leave me here?”

  His smile faded. “Anna.”

  She had finished dressing and was standing close enough to him that he could take her shoulders in his hands, and draw her to him in a comforting embrace. “I cannot take ye where I’m going, lass. The dangers are too great, the now.”

  She told the collar of his shirt, “I’m no feart of the danger.”

  Colonel Graeme lightly kissed her hair. “I ken well ye’re no feart. But it is not yourself alone who’d be in danger if I took ye into Paris.” He sighed the way he did when he was trying to explain something, and did not have the words to hand. “Ye mind the day we met?” he asked her finally. “When we sat there in the Earl of Erroll’s library and played the chess, and spoke about your mother and your father, and I telt ye why it was they had to keep their marriage secret?”

  Anna nodded, and she felt the roughness of his shirt against her cheek. “Because the people hunting for my father might have used my mother ill to make him do the things they wanted.”

  “Aye. And when your father was away and fighting and ye were a bairn, why did your mother hide ye with another family?”

  “So the bad men widnae find me,” Anna said.

  “Exactly.” Colonel Graeme’s voice was a deep rumble in his chest that offered comfort. “They were very brave, your parents. If the agents of Queen Anne had ever chanced to catch your father, he’d have stood through any torture they’d have tried to use upon him, and he never would betray his king. But if they’d learned ye were his daughter, if they’d ever taken ye or threatened ye with harm… well, then.” The colonel did not specify what Anna’s father might have done then. All he said was, “Men can bear most hurts, lass, but there’s few of us can bear to see the ones we love best made to suffer for our sake.”

  “But Queen Anne’s dead,” said Anna, “and my father, too. So who is left to do me harm?”

  “Your father still has brothers, lass, and they still serve the king. And so do I.” His hand felt heavy on her hair. “Those men who sought your father would be happy to lay hold of any one of us and turn us to their cause, and they’d use any means to do it.” Still more plainly, “They’d use anyone to do it, any person we did love. They’d try their best to capture ye, to hold ye hostage. Maybe worse. And that is why,” he said, “I cannot take ye with me.”

  She was not persuaded. “You’re a soldier, you could guard me.”

  “No, ye will be safer here. But I would never leave ye undefended. Here.” He set her slightly back from him so he could tuck his book back in his pocket and exchange it for another, smaller item. “This,” he told her, “was your father’s.”

  Anna did not try to hide her curiosity. She reached to take the necklace Colonel Graeme held toward her, and she stared. “It is a stone.”

  A little black stone with a hole worn in its middle, through which somebody had strung a leather cord.

  The colonel said, “My grandmother would tell us children always, if we chanced to find a wee stone with a hole in it, we ought to wear it round our neck to keep away all evils. And your grandmother, my sister Anna, telt the same tale to your daddie when he was a lad himself, and all his life he kept his eye out for a stone like that, until…”

  “He found it?”

  “No.” The colonel smiled the smile that warmed his eyes. “Your mother found that stone for him, one day while they were walking out together on the long beach close by Slains.”

  The same beach, Anna thought, where she herself had run so freely and so fast that sometimes she had felt she might take flight and leave the ground to hang upon the sea wind, like the wheeling gulls whose shadows raced across the sand. She touched the stone with one small finger, wonderingly, and felt its smoothness, warm from Colonel Graeme’s pocket.

  “When your father went away from Slains, to come back here to fight,” the colonel said, “your mother gave that stone to him to wear around his neck, to keep him safe.”

  The corners of her mouth drooped, just a little. “Then it does not work. Not truly.”

  “Ye’ll believe what ye believe,” said Colonel Graeme, with a fatalistic shrug. “But Malplaquet was not the only battle that your father fought, and I did see him many times afore that day walk clear through cannon fire that would have made an end of any other man. So he believed it, and I daresay I believe it, too.”

  He watched her while she gazed down at the stone, with faith and reason tumbling over one another in her heart, until she finally closed her fingers round the gift and held it tightly, and remembering her manners, thanked the colonel.

  “You’re most welcome. As I said, I would not leave ye undefended. Anyway, ye’ll have the nuns to see ye do not come to harm.”

  If Anna made no answer it was only because, privately, she did not think the Irish nuns of Ypres could be a match for Colonel Graeme and the captain when it came to taking care of her.

  As if he’d read her mind, the colonel added, “And of course ye’ll still have Captain Jamieson awhile, for he’ll be biding in this house until his leg has healed to satisfy the surgeon.”

  That cheered her. “Can I visit him?”

  The colonel with affectio
n brushed a curling strand of hair back from her eyes and shook his head and said, “He would not have ye see him lie abed. It makes him surly and ill-tempered. But one day, when he is better, he’ll come visit ye himself.”

  ***

  Two weeks had come and gone since Colonel Graeme had left Anna at the convent, and had handed to the abbess the small parcel that he’d carried out of Scotland, with the nightdress and the lock of hair wrapped carefully inside it. “That is all the lass has left of her own mother,” said the colonel, “and I pray ye guard it well for her.”

  He’d bent to Anna then and said farewell and kissed her for a final time, and then he had been gone. The Abbess Butler had turned back her veil.

  She’d looked much older and yet not as frightening as Anna had imagined, with a long face and plain features that were dominated by her nose and forceful chin. Her eyelids sagged, but Anna thought her hands were truly beautiful.

  “My child, come,” she’d said, and held those lovely hands toward her, “let us show you how we live, and see you settled.”

  By the time that Captain Jamieson was well enough to visit, Anna nearly had adapted to the convent’s hours, and learned to sleep and wake in keeping with the pattern of the prayers. She’d started at her daily lessons, too, but on this morning now, when she was shown into the parlor by her teacher and she saw the captain sitting close beside the bars, she instantly forgot what she’d been taught and rushed toward him with a happy cry.

  He looked a bit surprised, but still he stood and held the hands she thrust toward him through the bars, and when her teacher, Sister Xaveria, tried reminding Anna of the bounds of ladylike behavior, Captain Jamieson assured the nun he did not mind.

  “It has,” he told her, “been a long time since I’ve had so fair a welcome.”

  Sister Xaveria nodded, and took a step back. She was one of the nuns Anna liked best. Beneath her black veil she had light-colored eyes and a pleasant soft face with a mouth that, while frequently serious, had not forgotten how to smile, and Anna fancied that the nun was smiling now as she replied, “She has been hoping for your visit for some time. She’s talked of little else.”

  “Indeed.” That seemed to please him. Keeping hold of both of Anna’s hands, he asked, “And what have ye been learning?”

  Anna found she could not answer him, for suddenly she felt the clutch of something in her throat, and felt the heat rise in her face as unshed tears pressed stinging just behind her eyes. She had no voice.

  The captain bent, and looked more closely, and his voice turned gentle. “Anna.”

  And that gentleness undid her. Two great tears squeezed out and trickled down her burning cheeks, and Anna’s vision blurred with more as she looked up at Captain Jamieson, and still she could not speak.

  His brow was furrowed with concern. “Are ye unwell?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are they unkind to you?”

  She thought of saying yes, because he might then take her with him, but the nun and Christ upon His cross were watching her, and so she told the truth. She shook her head again, and this time managed words: “No, they are kind.”

  His one hand let hers go so he could smooth the hair back from her cheek, and with his thumb he brushed a tear away, his own eyes growing shadowed. “D’ye miss your home? Did we do wrong to take ye from it?”

  “No.” The word surprised her when she said it, for she realized that she meant it, but the misery welled up from somewhere deeper still inside her till the captain asked her, “What, then?”

  Anna could not put a name to it. She could not find the way to tell him how she felt inside, the way a bird must feel, she thought, when it was caged; that she was weeping because she could no more walk where she might wish to walk, or say what she might wish to say, and that there was no beach where she could run.

  The captain looked at her, and looked to where she held his hand, and in his eyes there grew a quiet light of understanding.

  Silently he raised his gaze from Anna’s face to that of the veiled nun who stood behind her. “Is there any place where we can walk together,” he asked Sister Xaveria, “where there are no bars?”

  Chapter 15

  The convent church had bars as well, that ran the whole width of the altar, severing the space into the part within the cloister and the part where public worshippers could come and pray in peace. Until this morning, Anna had remained behind that screen and joined the nuns in their devotions at the designated hours. She and the other students were not roused within the night for Matins, but they shared the sunrise prayers of Lauds, the “little” prayers throughout the day, and best of all the peaceful evening Vespers.

  But as lovely as the prayers were, her attention had been commonly distracted by the flags hung in the choir, the captured colors of the enemy once taken in a nearby battle by a regiment of exiled Irish soldiers who’d stayed loyal to King James, and who had carried those flags here to be preserved as an example of their victory.

  Quite often, while the nuns were at their prayers and Anna should have been as well, she found her gaze diverted upward to those banners, while she, dreamy-eyed, imagined them aflutter on the battlefield above the clash of men, her father in amongst them, and in her mind it was his own hands that tore the banners down…

  There was less room, here in this austere space outside the choir, to harbor Anna’s daydreams, but she did not mind this morning, for she had the captain here to keep her company.

  He seemed to limp more heavily upon his wounded leg, she thought. Or else perhaps she noticed it more keenly now. She tried to keep her own steps slow, and used as an excuse the nuns’ own teaching that she should not walk too quickly.

  “We are not to run,” she said, “or make much noise.”

  “So you’ve companions then?” he asked her. “Other students?”

  “There are four of us.” The other girls were older, she explained to him—her sister Mary’s age, and while she’d seen them at their lessons, she had never really spoken to them. “Sister Xaveria says we should try to be silent.”

  “Oh aye? Why is that?”

  “I think so we can better hear God talk to us,” said Anna. “But I’ve never heard Him yet. I’m no sae good at keeping silent.”

  “No?” His mouth curved slightly.

  “We are allowed to sing,” she told him, “and the nuns sing often at their prayers, although their songs are not so lovely as the cradle song ye sang about the maiden and her love.”

  “Ye liked that, did ye?”

  “Aye. Will ye sing it to me once again, so I can learn the words?”

  “Here?” Glancing round he said, “’Tis hardly proper for a church. When I have pen and paper I will write the verses down for ye.”

  She told him, “But I cannot read.”

  “Then ye will have to learn.” He raised his head in thoughtful study of the window nearest them, its small panes letting light pass through to mark the floor they walked upon. “The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.”

  “Were you sent to school, when you were my age?”

  “Aye.”

  “And were ye made to hold your tongue?”

  His mouth curved yet more broadly as he bent his head as though in contemplation of her problem. “’Tis a habit worth acquiring, keeping silent when ye can. ’Tis by their words that men betray themselves, and often by the smallest of their actions, which ye’ll rarely see unless ye hold your tongue and use your eyes instead. Ye’ll learn more of a man if ye look at his face when he’s looking at somebody else, than ye’ll learn any other way, but,” he advised her, “ye have to keep silent to do it.”

  She put this in practice by watching the captain’s face, seeing the way his mouth tightened whenever his left foot came down. But she could only keep silent a moment.

  She said, “There’s a man who comes sometimes to Slains who was hurt in the same leg as you, only his surgeon took the leg clean off so now it just e
nds at his knee.”

  “Well, I’ve a mind to keep my own leg,” he replied, “since the surgeon here shows no desire to have it.”

  “I do not like the surgeon,” Anna said, and he looked down at her.

  “He is a good man.” Then he faintly frowned and asked, “When did ye meet him?”

  Anna frowned herself. “Why did he run that needle through your leg?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What, the seton needle? How did ye…?”

  “I saw it. They were cleaning it.”

  The captain gave a nod, and looked away, and told her, “When a wound is festering and will not heal, it helps to use a seton. That’s the cloth. Ye saw that, too? This wide, and like a ribbon? So the surgeon threads his needle with the seton, and he pulls it through, and leaves a length of seton in the wound, with both its ends outside and hanging.”

  Anna looked to where the barest outline of the bandaging around the captain’s thigh stretched out the fabric of his breeches. “Is it in there now?”

  “It is.”

  “Why?”

  “It acts like a wick in a lamp,” he explained, “so the surgeon can introduce medicines, and so the festering matter can drain from the wound.”

  Anna liked that he spoke to her as Colonel Graeme did, using the grown-up terms, as though he fully expected that she’d understand.

  She asked, “Will ye have it there always?”

  He shook his head. “No, when the surgeon decides, he will draw it back out.”

  “Will it hurt when they do that?”

  He didn’t reply straightaway. Then he angled his gaze down to hers. “I’ve had worse hurts,” he promised her. “They heal.”

  Still, she worried for his health between the times he came to visit her, and when two days had come and gone together with no sign of him, her worry grew to such a level that she could not concentrate upon her lessons or her meals. The Abbess Butler came herself to learn what had made Anna so distressed, and when she heard the cause, she sent a message to their neighbor’s wife and made arrangements for that woman to take Anna from the convent for an hour to pay a visit to the captain.