The Firebird (26 page)

The nearest of the Englishmen was staring at the monk, now, with bold eyes that sought to measure him. ‘And
you
were once a swordsman?’

Father Graeme smoothed his beard against his robe as he looked down. ‘Well, Mrs Ogilvie mistakes her facts a little.’ As he raised his eyes again he met the other’s look of satisfaction and, to Anna’s joy, extinguished it. ‘I carried a musket in all my campaigns, not a sword.’

‘In Catalonia,’ the Englishman repeated, as though disbelieving that fact also.

‘Aye.’

‘And on whose side, sir, did you fight?’

For a moment Anna thought she glimpsed a flash of Colonel Graeme’s mischief-loving nature in the monk’s mild eyes, but it was gone before he answered, ‘On the side that God did choose to favour.’ With a humble nod he asked them, ‘Do excuse me,’ and releasing Anna’s shoulder moved alone along the bar to where the landlord now stood.

Anna held her place with the invisibility accorded children in such gatherings, and watched the woman and the men with open interest, noting how the men had straightened in their stances and appeared to be competing in their efforts to appear their very best for Mrs Ogilvie.

The woman, if aware of it, pretended not to be, and merely asked them, ‘Are you both recovered from your passage over, also?’

‘More or less,’ the one man answered, looking round. ‘Where is your other fellow countryman and friend this day?’

‘If you do refer to Captain Thomas Gordon,’ she said lightly, with a roll of her expressive eyes, ‘he is no friend of mine. In fact, ’twas his fault I was nearly drowned in crossing, for he was in such a haste he would not wait, but did insist upon us going halves to hire that wretched packet boat.’

‘And Captain Gordon is his name?’ the nearest of the Englishmen enquired. ‘Another soldier?’

Mrs Ogilvie corrected him, ‘A sea captain, till lately. Yet remove him from his wooden world, and truthfully he knows no more of travelling than does a child of six. ’Twas a relief,’ she said, ‘to get him off my hands.’

‘He left this morning?’

‘Yes. He is in a prodigious hurry to be at Dunkirk,’ she told the men, ‘by Saturday. I wish to God he may be so soon wanted.’

Anna’s gaze had narrowed thoughtfully upon the men, suspicious of their questions, and she might have pointed out to Mrs Ogilvie that Englishmen were never to be trusted, and that telling information to them was not over wise, but she knew well that it was not her place to speak till she was spoken to, and no one seemed inclined to even notice her, much less deign to speak to her. And so she watched, and held tight to the parcel of her things that she had carried out of Ypres, and waited.

Father Graeme soon returned. ‘I wonder, Mrs Ogilvie,’ he said, ‘if you would join myself and Anna in our meal.’

She looked at Anna then, and smiled in her bright way, and said, ‘Of course,’ and taking leave of the two Englishmen crossed over with the monk and Anna to a table set in the far corner of the room.

Once out of earshot of the others, Father Graeme told her, low, ‘I wish to ask a favour of you, if I may.’

‘You’ve but to ask. You know that I could not deny you anything.’ She teased him to begin with, but in glancing at his face again she cast aside the light demeanour and grew thoughtful. ‘What is it you need?’

‘It is a favour I can only ask of one I trust,’ he said. ‘My father wrote that he would meet us here, but either he has not yet come, or else he is mistaken in our meeting place. I need you to stay here and guard the child, while I go to make sure my father is not waiting for us at my house.’

The woman’s eyes touched Anna’s face. ‘Does she need guarding?’

‘Aye, she does. ’Tis why my father makes this journey, for he is intensely fond of Anna.’

Mrs Ogilvie remarked, ‘Your father’s good regard is not an easy thing to win.’ She seemed impressed, the fine arch of her eyebrows growing more pronounced as her regard of Anna grew more keen. ‘Good morrow, child. How are you?’

Anna’s head still ached, and she was hungry, but she knew that it was not polite to make complaints. ‘I am quite well, I thank you, madam.’

Mrs Ogilvie contained a smile. ‘Such lovely manners, Father Graeme.’

‘Aye, she was but lately with the Irish Dames at Ypres.’

‘The Abbess Butler?’

Father Graeme gave a nod. ‘And she would be there still, had I not received a summons from my father to go fetch her hence without delay, and bring her out of danger.’

‘Danger? What could—?’ Breaking off, she fixed the smile again upon her face and sat back as the landlord came to bring them bread, a jug of wine, and broth that smelt of cabbages and onions. Mrs Ogilvie was generous with her thanks, and waited till he’d gone again before she leant in, speaking quietly herself. ‘What danger could there be at Ypres for such a child?’

It was a question Anna had been wondering herself, for Father Graeme had said nothing to her of why he had taken her away, apart from saying that the convent was not safe. She broke her bread with care, and listened.

Quietly the monk said, ‘This is Anna Moray, only daughter of my cousin John. My father took great pains to hide her safely, but there was an … indiscretion at the convent. A young woman who’d been staying there did somehow learn of Anna’s true identity, and passed that information to an English spy at Paris with whom she’d been keeping company.’

The jolt that Anna felt within her chest was so great she felt sure her heart had stopped its beating for that moment. It began again, but painfully, and sent a surge of warm blood upwards, pounding in her ears.

It was not possible, she thought, that Christiane could have betrayed her trust. Not Christiane. Her eyes began to sting.

‘My cousin Maurice Moray, Anna’s uncle,’ said the monk, ‘is now at Paris also, and has long been trusted by Queen Mary and the King. So when my father learnt, by secret channels, that the agents of the Prince of Hanover had set a plan in place to seize the child and use her as the means to turn her uncle’s loyalties, he sent to me at once.’

Across the table, Mrs Ogilvie agreed that Colonel Graeme had done wisely. ‘But where will she go from here?’

‘I’ve not been told,’ the monk admitted, ‘but my father never moves without a plan.’ He’d only eaten several bites of bread, and chased them down with a small tumblerful of wine, but now he added, ‘And he always minds a schedule once he’s set it, which is why I am surprised that he did not arrive ahead of us, and why I do suspect he may be waiting in some other place.’

He looked to Mrs Ogilvie, who nodded and assured him, ‘I shall stay with her till you return.’

He thanked her, and with one hand gave a lightly reassuring stroke of Anna’s bent head as he promised her, ‘I’ll not be long.’

She kept her head down, so that no one else would see her misery. Her guilt. In memory she heard Colonel Graeme saying how, if English agents had been sly enough to catch her father, he’d have stood through any torture without talking; and that clearly was a trait of all the men of Abercairney, for her Uncle Robert had now been in prison twice, they’d said, and neither time had he been broken. So the English would expect her Uncle Maurice to be just as strong.

Unless … unless the English captured
her
, and let her uncle know it.

‘Men can bear most hurts,’ the colonel had confided, ‘but there’s few of us can bear to see the ones we love best made to suffer for our sake.’

It went both ways, she thought, for nor could she bear to allow her Uncle Maurice to be turned against his conscience and his honour as a consequence of her mistake in trusting Christiane.

They’d warned her; they’d all warned her to be careful, but she simply had not thought that Christiane would ever …

‘So,’ said Mrs Ogilvie.

Remembering the nuns’ instruction that it was polite to give her full attention to an adult who was speaking, Anna clutched the little parcel of belongings on her lap with both her hands and raised her chin.

‘It has been a good while since I have dined with a young lady.’ Mrs Ogilvie was smiling. ‘You’ll forgive me if my manners do not equal those of Abbess Butler and her nuns at Ypres, for I fear I have been far too long in London, these past months. They do not share our Scottish ways in London.’ While she scooped a spoonful of the broth her light gaze took in Anna’s features, and again the eyebrows arched. ‘I must confess I am astonished I did not mark the resemblance before now. You are the image of your father, may God rest his soul. Has anybody told you this?’

‘Yes, madam.’ Anna’s voice was flat.

‘I met him several times at St Germain, although my husband would have known him rather better,’ Mrs Ogilvie remarked. ‘I did not know that he had married.’ She said nothing for a moment, while she ate, and then her thoughts changed course. ‘And is your Uncle Maurice well?’

She did not know. She hoped he was. But she could say no more than, ‘He was well last time he wrote to me.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Shall we have more bread?’

It seemed a little odd to Anna that the woman did not simply raise her hand to call the landlord over, but excused herself and went across to speak to him. Odd, too, that having done that, Mrs Ogilvie should stop again to speak to the two Englishmen, who’d taken their own table near the bar.

Something fluttered deep in Anna’s stomach, making her uneasy. She ignored it to begin with, because Father Graeme trusted Mrs Ogilvie. He’d said so. And he’d not have left her alone with someone who did not deserve his trust. She told herself that several times, and yet the fluttering continued, the uneasiness not helped when both the men turned round to look at her, then looked away again.

The landlord brought the extra bread, and Anna thanked him in a small voice, and when he enquired if there were something else she needed, she replied, on impulse, ‘Yes, I need to use the privy, please, sir.’

‘Use the … ? Ah.’ His face cleared, and he gestured to another doorway at the back. ‘It is just there.’

She thanked him once again, and sidled from the bench with care, her bundle of belongings clasped like armour to her chest. Across the room she saw the landlord pass by Mrs Ogilvie and tell her something, and then Mrs Ogilvie looked over with a nod and smiled at Anna in an understanding way. One of the Englishmen rose slowly from the table and began to walk towards the other door. But no one came to follow Anna.

Just outside the inn’s back door she found the privy standing close beside the building, and she crouched within the foul-smelling dimness of its confines for a moment while she tried to calm the thoughts that whirled in tempo with the racing of her heart.

She ought to stay, as she’d been told, and wait for Father Graeme here. And yet … the awful feeling would not leave her. She tried arguing against it. She was only being silly. Mrs Ogilvie was kind, she was a friend, and she was Scottish …

So was Christiane,
a small cold voice within her pointed out.

She screwed her eyes up tightly in that moment of decision, and then calling on each scrap of courage she could claim, she pushed against the privy door and fled into the courtyard as though every English spy upon the continent were at her back.

She had no destination in her mind but finding Father Graeme, and for that, the church spire soaring high above the tiled rooftops of the huddled, leaning houses seemed a beacon to her. Monks were men of God, she reasoned. God was in the church. So Father Graeme would be there, as well.

Except, when she had finally pressed her way through all the people in the alleys and the streets to reach the relatively open space surrounding the great church, she saw no sign of him. And when she tried to enter the church itself an old man chased her out again, reproving her in French.

She said, in English, ‘Please, I need to find my friend, the monk.’

The old man answered in her language, with a frown, ‘No monks live here,’ and waved her off towards the south. Which only brought her back to where they’d entered that morning, by the great gate in the high stone wall.

The gate, as it had been then, was still busy with the streams of people moving round and through it, while the soldiers standing near the heavy chains of the portcullis gave approval to the passports and the papers, and the searchers opened portmanteaus and trunks. The searchers now seemed very busy with the portmanteaus belonging to a gentleman who stood beside a carriage while the driver tried to hold the four impatient horses dancing on the cobblestones.

The gentleman, to Anna’s eyes, appeared to be the same age as the monk – not yet as old as Colonel Graeme, nor as young as Captain Jamieson, but somewhere in between, though Anna never found it such an easy thing to tell the age of any man who wore a wig. His shaven face was very handsome, and his clothes were very fine, and he stood tall and straight and calm, so that the hard set of his jaw alone betrayed his own impatience.

A heavier-set man with no baggage strolled past the carriage and, tipping his hat, said, ‘Good morrow, Captain Gordon. I had thought you’d be away by now.’

‘Aye, so had I,’ the handsome man replied, ‘but these men have developed quite an interest in my breeks and hose, and seem most disinclined to let me leave till they have counted every pair.’

He was a Scotsman, Anna realised, and a day ago his voice alone would have been cause enough for her to trust him. But today she only stood and stared, and did not dare approach him.

With a laugh the other man asked, ‘Have you paid them, sir?’

‘I have.’

‘Well, pay them more, and they will cease.’

‘I’ve paid already for my passage through this gate,’ said Captain Gordon, ‘and paid more again to get a pass to go to Dunkirk.’

‘Pay them more,’ the other man repeated, ‘else you’ll never get to Dunkirk, sir. It is the custom of this country.’

‘’Tis no less than robbery,’ the captain said, but taking out his purse he offered new coins to the searchers, who immediately stopped what they were doing and became more friendly, closing up his portmanteaus.

The captain grinned, and thanked the other man for his advice. ‘Will not ye share the carriage with me?’