The Firebird (17 page)

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 learnt 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 parlour with a screen of wooden bars fixed down its centre 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 parlour, 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 forwards 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 troubled 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 neighbour, 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.

His gaze grew softer. ‘Shall we keep ye one more night with us?’ he asked her, and she nodded, and he turned to tell the Abbess, ‘If your neighbour will allow it, then, we’ll have the wee lass with us one night longer. It will give ye time to make a proper place for her, and we can take our leave of her the morn.’

The Abbess nodded, and the adults bade goodnight to one another, and an older woman who was not a nun appeared and led them out again and saw them safely to the neighbour’s, but of all this action Anna only had a faint awareness. Her emotions had been raised to such a pitch that this reprieve, so unexpected, had left all of her exhausted. And yet, when they had been admitted to the neighbour’s house and met the man himself – a cheerful man the same age as the colonel, with a lively, smiling wife to keep him company – and Anna had been washed and settled in beneath a mound of woven blankets on a pallet by the kitchen hearth she did not want to close her eyes, because she knew that if she slept and woke it would be morning and the stay of execution would be over.

The colonel and the captain and their temporary landlord and his wife were sitting round the kitchen table not far off from her, all speaking in that same strange foreign language that she could not understand, but Anna focused on the sound of it to keep herself from drifting.

They were drinking wine from earthen cups, and talking. Sometimes one would laugh, and sometimes all, and other times the four of them grew sober and a pause would stretch as though they had mislaid the words they sought. It was in such a pause that Colonel Graeme glanced towards the hearth and saw that Anna was not sleeping, and instead of being angry he instead turned to their host and made a comment with a nod towards a corner of the room that Anna could not see, and with a slow smile and another nod to answer him, their temporary landlord rose and fetched a fiddle and a bow, and sat down heavily again beside the colonel, and began to play.

The music had a longing sound, a weeping sort of wildness to it that made Anna think about her cottage and the sea and all the gulls that wheeled and cried above the waves along the cliffs, but still she would not close her eyes.

She watched as Colonel Graeme leant in closer to their host and hummed a tune that danced its way onto the fiddle’s strings, a lively ballad that the colonel gave the words to in his richly rumbling voice, to sing the praises of the ‘worthy, gallant Grahams’ and their fight against the Campbells in defence of old King Charles. The verses followed one another in their rousing way, till Anna’s feet were all but dancing underneath the blankets, keeping time as Colonel Graeme sang:

‘Aye,’ said Captain Jamieson, ‘and she’ll be marching there as well, if ye keep on with that. She needs a cradle song.’

The colonel grinned. ‘For one with Graeme blood, my lad, that
is
a cradle song. What did your mother sing to you?’

‘I scarce remember.’

Anna, watching him, was trying to imagine Captain Jamieson a tiny bairn whose mother rocked and sang to him, but her imagination could not conjure it.

The colonel, leaning back, said, ‘When we met this past November marching down to Sheriffmuir, did not ye tell me that ye’d lived a settled life afore this winter, with your own bairns and your lady?’

Picking up his cup of wine, the captain eyed him warily and made no answer as the colonel carried on, ‘Well, surely now, your lady kens a cradle song or two.’

‘She does. And she’s the one to sing them.’

‘Did ye never sing a song to your own sons, or to your daughter?’

Captain Jamieson looked down at that, and Anna thought it cruel of Colonel Graeme to remind him of the little girl he’d lost, and yet she saw the colonel’s eyes were anything but cruel. In fact, as he sat waiting through the silence that fell in between the two men, the expression on his face was understanding, even kind. And finally Captain Jamieson took one long drink and set his wine cup down again and shifted in his chair, his injured leg stretched out before him.

Looking to their host he asked a question and received a shrug and shaking of the head in answer, so he started singing on his own, his voice as low as Colonel Graeme’s had been, yet more quiet, like the evening wind in summertime that calmed the waves along the shore and brought the seabirds home.

The song was slow, as were the words, and touched with something close to weariness that made them seem to hang a moment in the room’s hushed air:

He sang the last four lines again, the way the tune demanded, and the fiddle joined him for the final line and carried on with him through all the many verses that came after, till its pure and clear lament was interwoven with the captain’s voice that wrapped round Anna like the dark and soothing night.

He sang about a maiden who passed all her days in wandering and loneliness because she had been driven from the side of her true love, and wanted only to be near him once again.

Anna felt her eyelids growing heavy as she listened, and at length she let them close, but still she kept awake to hear yet more about the maiden, always wandering, in hopelessness and tears.

And when the maiden’s lost love finally heard her weeping and returned to bring her comfort, Anna smiled against the roughness of her blankets as the captain in his deep voice sang the man’s vow to the maiden:

Both voice and the fiddle repeated the last loving lines of that promise, but Anna was already drifting in slumber and heard nothing after ‘I never will leave thee’ because she could feel herself being pulled down like a weight into darkness.

Her dreams were a confusion of bright images and darker sounds, and once she felt that she herself was lost amid the hills and did not know the way to turn to find the path to lead her homeward, and she panicked for a moment till she heard the captain’s voice, not far off, saying quietly, ‘Ye’d salt the wound.’