The Firebird (25 page)

‘Wouldn’t that be against his vows, or whatever?’

‘He was a soldier first.’ Ignoring the grand, impressive town hall building we were passing on his side, Rob glanced across and out of my window at a tall stone column that appeared to be some kind of war memorial, carved round with sculpted images of sacrifice and valour. ‘Whatever vows he took, I doubt he could stand by and not take sides.’

A little further on we crossed a broad canal and at the far side of the bridge Rob slowed, and swung us through the roundabout, and in a sudden moment of decision made a right turn at the corner of a park onto a very narrow street that ran along the park’s north edge. On my side of the car, a rather uninspiring row of flats stood solidly in line along the pinkish pavement, some with weathered balconies that overlooked the trees and greenery stretching to the right of us. The flats gave way to a low red-brick building, and Rob reverse-parked at the kerb just across from it.

I looked at the sign on the building, and then at Rob. ‘The Musée des Beaux-arts? Are we going in?’

He shook his head.

Glancing past him to the park, I guessed again. ‘We’re having a picnic.’

‘No.’ He grinned, and opening his door got out and stretched his shoulders. We’d been on the road for just under two hours – not that long, by Rob’s own reckoning – so I assumed the stiffness he was showing came from having sat outside for half the night, with me asleep against his shoulder, more than from this morning’s driving. He recovered quickly, though, and by the time I got my own door open he was there to hold it for me.

Of all the men I’d ever dated, he remained the only one who’d ever done that.

‘Well,’ he said, when I remarked on it, ‘you’ve led a sheltered life. As I recall, you said you’d only had two boyfriends afore me. Unless you’ve had a couple since …’

I turned to look at him, expecting that his blue eyes would be teasing, and instead found they were nonchalantly guarded, and a bit too unconcerned.

I said, ‘I haven’t.’

And then, because I couldn’t hold his gaze, I looked away. There had been moments when I’d wondered whether Rob was seeing anyone, because it seemed a bit too unbelievable that after these two years he’d still be unattached, but when he’d come to Ypres with me I’d known without a doubt he wasn’t seeing anybody at the moment. He was far too much a gentleman to spend this kind of time with me alone, if he already had a girlfriend. He’d have counted it as being disrespectful to the both of us.

He swung my door closed and walked round to lean against the bonnet, and although the sun was too high now to catch him in the eyes, he took the dark sunglasses from his pocket, put them on, and settled back to look more keenly at … well, at whatever he was looking at.

I couldn’t tell, from watching him, if he was seeing things as they were now or as they had been, but I had the sense that he was standing with one foot in each reality, a bridge between the present and the past.

I let a moment pass in silence before prompting him with, ‘Well?’

‘Well, it’s a fair-sized town, Calais. We’re in the old part of it now, the part that stood within the town walls, with the moat all round it, back in Anna’s day. But even so, there were a lot of streets and houses then, and it was busy all the time with people, so there’s not much point in wandering round,’ he said, ‘to look for her. Like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

I had no doubt, having seen him work, that he could have found one of those, if he had set his mind to it. But clearly he had settled on a plan.

I prompted, ‘So?’

‘So, Calais was a guarded town. With walls. If Anna had been coming from the Channel side, by boat, with Father Graeme, they’d have had to use the harbour to the north. But when they left the convent, back in Ypres,’ he told me, ‘they were on the road. And if they travelled overland, as we did, they’d have come straight through that gate.’

I came around to lean beside him on the car, and looked. ‘Where is it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Rob, I can’t—’

‘You’re away off to Russia the morn,’ he reminded me. ‘When were you planning to practise?’ He had me there. Fully aware of it, he said, ‘I ken that you do things by touch. I’m not thinking you’ll see it the same way that I do, but you should be able at least to sense where the gate
was
, like you did with the convent.’

I gave it my best shot.

It took a few minutes. It wasn’t a small mental tug at my sleeve this time, as it had been in Ypres; more like a settling sensation of certainty, knowing without knowing why. ‘There.’ I pointed. ‘I think it was there. Am I right?’

For an answer, he draped an arm over my shoulders. ‘Let’s see.’

It threw me off balance, that casual touch. I’d grown used to the hand-holding, even though that on its own was an intimate contact, but this – with Rob’s arm a warm weight at the back of my neck and his hand resting loosely just over my sleeve – was the sensory equivalent of being hit by something like a brick, and it took all my concentration not to physically react.

But then I had to let that concentration lapse, to join my thoughts with Rob’s and see what he was trying now to show me. And that, too, was overwhelming.

I could see the old walls of Calais take shape, just there in front of us: tall, heavy walls of yellow stone, with crenellated battlements that rose above our heads and cast a deep and chilling shadow on the place where we were standing. And the gate was where I’d thought it would be, large and flanked by square protective towers, a great portal and portcullis with the carvings of what probably were royal coats of arms cut in the stone blocks set above the massive archway of its opening.

The size and scale and strength of those old walls was truly breathtaking, but that was not the thing that overwhelmed me. It was seeing all the people – soldiers walking round in blue coats with their swords and muskets, people dressed more plainly hauling merchandise of every kind, the chaos and the rolling wheels of carts and constant shouting doing battle with the sounds of clopping hooves and barking dogs and crying gulls. It was a full-on, no-holds-barred assault that left me reeling, and I had to pull away from it and come back to the present.

‘How on earth,’ I asked Rob, ‘are we going to find her in all that?’

‘With patience.’ When he took his arm away I found I missed the warmth of it. Perhaps he felt a little colder, too, because he folded both his arms across his chest and said, ‘She’s going to be moving, though, when we do find her, so the biggest challenge will be keeping up.’

‘You mean we’ll have to walk?’ I hadn’t thought of that. I looked around. ‘But Rob, these streets won’t all be in the same place, surely. Wasn’t Calais flattened in the war, and then rebuilt?’

‘Aye. But there were some bits still left standing, I can navigate by those.’

‘It’s not your navigational abilities I’m questioning. It’s …’

‘What?’

‘Well, what’s to stop us walking straight into a wall, or something? Or into the middle of a busy street?’

I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but I could feel the touch of faint amusement in the downward glance he sent me. ‘I’m not, ye ken, walking about in a trance. Did we go off the coast path and over the cliff up by Cruden Bay?’

‘No, but—’

‘Well, then. Have some faith.’ He turned his head away again and focused on the unseen gate. ‘I’ve been doing this a while,’ he reassured me. ‘I’ll no walk ye into traffic.’

There was something in the way he said that, something sure and confident that made me feel protected. Valued.
Safe
.

So when he straightened from the car and told me, ‘There she is,’ and held his hand to me and said, ‘Come on,’ I took his hand without a thought, and followed where he led.

Her head was aching. They’d arrived too late last night and found the great gates of the town already shut and locked and guarded, so the farmer who had carried them the last part of their journey in his wagon had found room for them within his own house in the lower town, and they had waited there till daylight and the bells that would ring out across the walls to say the gates would soon be opening.

She had not slept well, there in that strange house, nor had she slept well since they’d come away from Ypres, feeling the constant sense of something evil riding close behind them. Father Graeme had said nothing of the danger they were trying to outdistance, and he’d done his best to cheer her through the days with conversation, and he’d told her Colonel Graeme would be waiting for them when they reached Calais.

That last had cheered her most of all, so she’d been sorely disappointed when they’d found themselves shut out by those great walls last night.

She’d wished then for the patience and good temper she had seen in Father Graeme. She’d never heard him once complain, and somehow he had brought them all this way without her ever seeing coins exchanged, relying on his robes and his resourcefulness. ‘A Capuchin,’ he’d told her as he’d set her on the final wagon, ‘gives away the things he owns, and lives but by the charity of others, as our Lord did when he lived upon this earth.’

It seemed a most uncertain way to live, and she had told him so.

‘I disagree. There may be many things uncertain in this life, but ’tis for certain we were made in God’s own image, and I’ve not yet met a woman nor a man who does not carry God’s capacity for charity, however deep it hides. I seek the good within men’s hearts, and give them means by which they may express it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is in giving of ourselves and our possessions that we best please God – by actions, not by words. And all men do deserve a chance to earn God’s grace.’

‘Even the men who do bad things?’

He’d tucked a blanket fold around her and said, ‘Aye. Sometimes
especially
the men who do bad things.’

She’d remembered Colonel Graeme saying that his son had killed his best friend in a duel, and had then left his life of soldiering and so become a monk to serve his penance. She could not imagine Father Graeme killing someone.

Nor, this morning, did it seem he could have been a soldier.

He was walking, not with the bold, rolling strides of Captain Jamieson, but with his head bent humbly as he guided Anna through the morning bustle of Calais. The town made Anna think of Scotland, of the market day in Peterhead, for many of the tall and close-packed houses they were passing here were built of brick and in the Scottish style, with tiled roofs and windows set with glass. And of the women she could see, a number of them wore a green shawl like a plaid wrapped round their heads and shoulders, looking not unlike the women of the village close by Slains.

But the sense of familiarity was shattered when a raucous group of Englishmen pressed past them. Father Graeme gathered Anna closer to his side and urged her through a narrow archway in the nearest building, which delivered them into a little courtyard paved unevenly with stones that made her slip while trying to keep up. He slowed his steps to make her effort easier, and turning, led her carefully across a threshold.

Only once before had Anna been inside an inn, and that had been a year ago with Colonel Graeme and the captain, on their first night after being landed from the ship that had just carried them from Scotland. She’d been too exhausted then from all her travels to be much impressed with anything she saw, but now, despite her aching head, she looked around with interest at the low beamed ceiling and the roughened walls and trestle tables pushed beneath discreetly shuttered windows. The inn’s landlord, with his apron strings tied sturdily around his ample middle, was settling an account with two men standing at the bar, but when he turned and saw the monk he gave a nod of welcome and said something briefly in a language Anna recognised as French, but did not understand.

The two men turned as well, and looked at Father Graeme with distaste.

The nearest of them said, in cultured English, ‘Faith, another begging Capuchin. Get out your purse, Ralph, for we’ll have no peace from him until he’s had a coin.’

If Anna had been larger, she’d have struck them for their insolence, but Father Graeme took it in his stride. His face and voice stayed calm. ‘God’s blessings on you both,’ was all he said, ‘and it is certain that your charity will find a like reward, but if ye seek to give, give not that coin to me, but to our landlord here, that he may bring some broth and bread to feed this child.’

The man’s companion looked disgusted also as he said, ‘A begging child as well. May God preserve me from a papist.’

Anna’s blood ran warm with anger as the first man tossed a few coins on the bar before the landlord, but the monk laid a calm hand upon her shoulder, and the landlord, without changing his expression, pushed the coins back to the man and told him, ‘No payment is required for me to serve a man who serves the Lord.’

The Englishman appeared prepared to argue till a woman’s voice – a Scottish voice – said lightly, from the dimness behind Anna, ‘Come now, gentlemen, do not so soon forget your manners.’

Everybody gave the woman coming down the staircase from the floor above their full attention. She was somewhere in her middle years, yet pretty in her face and movements, and her gown, while simply cut, was meant to catch the eye. She showed a daring flash of ankle as she raised her skirts a fraction so as not to trip as she came down the final steps, and looking at the Englishmen she fixed them with a bright fair smile that gave her unlined face a youthful aspect. ‘Father Graeme is a good man, and besides, he’s not a man to trifle with. Before he wore those robes, he fought alongside my good husband in the wars in Catalonia, where I’m told his sword arm was the strongest in his regiment, and so it would be wise,’ she said, ‘to speak to him respectfully.’

She let her dark eyes twinkle at the monk, and held her hands to him in greeting. ‘Father Graeme. ’Tis a happy turn of fate to meet you here.’

He smiled back. ‘Mrs Ogilvie. Were you not lately in London?’

‘I was. And my stomach does wish I had stayed there, and not crossed the Channel at all,’ she said, putting a hand on the front of her bodice with feeling. ‘I have never been so tossed about as I was in that packet boat. Only our own light heads, I do believe, could have kept us from drowning, sir, in so prodigious a storm.’ With a laugh quite as bright as the rest of her, she said, ‘It seems drowning is not the way God has ordained for my exit.’