The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  “What for?” she asked him.

  “For this.” With a move of his aged hand, he moved his white knight to capture her queen. “Checkmate.”

  Anna indignantly reached out to lift her king out of harm’s way. With the painted piece clear of the chessboard and clutched to her chest so that only the top of his black head showed in her small fist, she said, “No, you’ll not have him.”

  The colonel sat back in his chair for a moment, then traded a look of amusement with Anna’s Aunt Kirsty. “Aye, lass,” he said warmly to Anna, approval at war with another emotion in his smiling eyes, “ye’ve the heart of a Jacobite.”

  Chapter 10

  He was walking her home.

  It felt strange to be following people I couldn’t see, but I had faith that Rob, walking behind me, saw clearly enough for the both of us, so when he said Colonel Graeme and Anna were just up ahead I believed him. They were, from the angle at which he was watching them, slightly more inland and not quite so close to the cliff’s edge as we were, but they were three hundred years in the past where no fenced fields impeded them, blocking their access and forcing them onto the coast path.

  I saw them as Rob was describing them, Anna on restlessly dancing feet leading the weathered old soldier along.

  Rob said, “He’s not a tall man. He’s not all that old, either, not by our standards. He’d be in his sixties, I’d guess. And he’s not walking now like an old man at all, but like someone who’s spent his life marching—his back’s straight, his head’s up except when he bends it to listen to her. He’s got gray hair, combed back and tied here,” Rob said, putting one hand at the nape of his neck, “into one of those, what d’ye call them? The wee braided tail things.”

  “A queue?”

  “Aye, that’s it. It goes well with the cape and the sword.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. “He’s wearing a cape? In the summer?” I couldn’t quite picture that.

  “Only a short cape,” said Rob. “It’s attached to his coat at the back, at the shoulders, and hangs to his knees. And his coat’s a bit shorter than that again, maybe to here.” His one hand brushed his leg at mid-thigh. “It looks more like a really long waistcoat, without any sleeves, and he’s wearing a plain white shirt underneath that, and a plain pair of breeks, and high boots.”

  “In the summer?”

  “I’m not the one dressing him.” Rob’s voice was dry.

  “Is he really her uncle, then?”

  “Great-uncle, aye. Anna’s father was his sister’s son, if ye work it all out.”

  I was thinking. “If he was a colonel, I wonder if there’d be some record of him somewhere, then? It’s a fairly high rank, colonel, isn’t it?”

  Rob shrugged and said, “He’d have been in the French army, likely, if he was a Jacobite. I no ken what kind of records they kept.”

  “He said that his father was somebody famous. Black somebody.”

  “Black Pate,” he said. “As in black head, so I’m guessing that his hair was black. And aye, I mind his name getting a mention or two in the history books.”

  “Maybe the history books mention his sons, as well.”

  “What would that prove?”

  “Well, for one thing,” I said, “it would prove Colonel Graeme existed.”

  Rob countered with logic, “I ken he existed. He’s walking right there.”

  “But no one else can see him, Rob. And knowing something’s not the same as proving it. I mean, right now we can’t even prove Anna Logan existed,” I pointed out. Stumbling over a rock in the path, I stopped walking and sighed. “This is probably hopeless, you know, what we’re doing. A fool’s errand.”

  Rob had stopped walking as well, and was standing a half-step behind my right shoulder, from where he could easily keep me from tumbling over the cliff if I slipped. “How’s that, then?”

  “It just is. We can’t prove anything, this way. How can we?” With a sigh, I tried explaining. “All I really wanted was for you to hold the Firebird so you could tell me something of its history—who had made it, and how Empress Catherine came by it, and when and why she’d given it to Anna, or at least where Anna lived, there in St. Petersburg, and those would have been things I could investigate. But this…” Lifting one hand in the general direction of where Colonel Graeme and Anna had gone, I said, “We’re following a little girl, Rob, and you said yourself she can’t be more than eight years old, which means it might be ages yet until she gets the Firebird. Besides which, we’re in Scotland, not in Russia.”

  “Well, she obviously got from here to there,” said Rob. “If I can find her house, find where she lived, then I can skip ahead so maybe we can see her leaving.”

  When he stated it like that, so calm and practical, it almost made me think it was that easy. “And just how would we prove that, on paper? She’s a fisherman’s daughter, she’s not likely to have left a record of her life behind.”

  “She’s no fisherman’s daughter,” Rob reminded me. “Her father was the Laird of Abercairney’s son, the colonel said. Black Pate was her great-grandfather, and she herself can roam the Earl of Erroll’s castle as though she were part of his own family. For a lass so small, I’d say she had connections.”

  I turned so I could see his face, the faintly stubborn jawline. “Do you always see the positive in everything?”

  “I see the possibilities.” His eyes were narrowed slightly as he scanned the fields ahead. “They’ll soon be out of sight, if we stop here.”

  I turned again, and went on walking, taking more care with my footing as the path came very close now to the edge.

  Rob followed silently at first, then unexpectedly he said, “I was a lad of six, ye ken, when I first saw the Sentinel. Kip saw him, too—my collie, Kip—and they’d be walking side by side out in the field, and every time the Sentinel came close to me he’d smile and try to speak, except he’d speak in Latin and in those days I’d no way to understand him. But I saw him. Saw the camp as well, or bits of it. And when the archaeologists came looking for the lost Ninth Legion, I could tell them where a wall had been, or where they ought to dig. They had no proof,” he pointed out, “afore they started digging. Even when they found the wall, the camp, they really had no proof the Ninth had been there. Not at first. It came in pieces, so it did, and never where they’d been expecting it. An edge of broken pottery, a coin, all scattered pieces, yet together it was proof enough to satisfy the academics.”

  I was far too focused on my feet to turn around again. I asked, “Is this your way of saying I should have more faith?”

  “I’m saying proof may not be lying in plain sight, all neat and tidy, as ye say. And aye, it may be that we never find a document that helps, but if we dig enough we may just find enough of those small pieces to convince whoever needs convincing.”

  I felt the warmth of reassurance, less because of what he’d said than from the fact he’d used the pronoun “we” while he was saying it. I found I liked that “we.”

  “Mind how ye go,” said Rob. I felt his hand against my elbow as he guided me a half-step further from the cliff’s edge. “There, that’s safer.”

  Up ahead I saw a square of closely pressed small cottages. “Where are we now?”

  “At the Bullers of Buchan.”

  I glanced at the curve of the cliff, and the white spray and foam of the water below, but it didn’t look anything like the framed photograph hanging above us at dinner last night. I was going to say so when Rob said, “The actual Bullers, the sea cave, is just a few steps past those cottages, see where the sign is? But we’re going this way.” His arm brushed my own as he pointed along the short track that connected the cottages to the main road.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Aye, of course I’m sure. D’ye not trust me?”

  “It’s only that last night I thought you saw something to do with the Bullers of Buchan.”

  “I’m not sure of what I saw last night,” Rob told me, “but jus
t the now I’m seeing your Anna legging it up the road there. We can stop on the way back,” he promised, as I took a final look over my shoulder.

  Rob moved to the front when we walked at the side of the road, so that any approaching cars had to go round him first. I tried to look at the scenery. I did. We were close to the sea, still, and watching the changeable clouds chase their shadows toward the horizon should really have been more diverting, but always my gaze was pulled back to the roll of Rob’s shoulders, and the dark curl of his hair against his collar, things I had no business noticing.

  Of course I found him physically attractive. I had always been attracted to him, but that didn’t change the deep divide between our lives. Up here, with nobody around, it was an easy thing for me to talk with Rob about the things he saw and heard, and let him lead me after phantoms from the past, but in public it would be a different story—I’d be too embarrassed, too afraid of everybody judging me and thinking me a fool, or worse. And Rob could never be less than he was, I knew, or hide his gifts. It wasn’t in his nature.

  It would never work between us, but the logic of that knowledge didn’t stop me watching him so closely that time telescoped so when he left the road’s edge and turned off toward the cliffs again, it took me by surprise to see how far we’d come.

  I could no longer see the jagged shape of Slains behind us, nor the houses at the Bullers, though farther up ahead along the coast I saw what looked to be a large town or small city.

  Rob identified it. “Peterhead.”

  But Anna and the colonel hadn’t gone the whole way there. They’d stopped, as we had, at this little sloping hollow near the road. I saw the scattering of granite stones that still stood at right angles to each other in one corner and I guessed before Rob told me that this once had been a cottage.

  Rob built the walls again for me with words, their heavy sturdiness topped with a low thatched roof and pierced by little unglazed windows with their shutters left unfastened to the daylight. It was hard to think a family could have lived here, all five children and their parents, in what Rob said was a single open space inside, with swept dirt floors and whitewashed walls, no room at all for privacy. And yet I felt the comfort they had felt here, and the happiness. It resonated round me like a singing voice heard faintly on the wind, from far away, and without meaning to, I placed one hand upon the stone beside me and I closed my eyes and stretched my mind toward that distant feeling.

  I found nothing. Only silence.

  When I opened my eyes I saw Rob with his back to me, shaking his dark head as though he were puzzled. “It’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The cottage,” he said. “It’s not here. I only went a short while forward, not too far, to see if I could find her as a teenager, but all of this”—he nodded at the cottage walls that he alone could see—“is gone. It’s all in ruins.”

  He turned. His gaze dropped briefly to my hand, still resting on the stone, and with that damnably quick way of adding two and two, he asked, “Did you see anything yourself?” Like that, so normally. As though I could.

  I felt the small smile twist my mouth, and raised my hand to push the wind-whipped hair back from my eyes again. “Of course I didn’t. I don’t… I can’t see the way that you do.”

  Rob’s expression grew more thoughtful, as though he’d heard something in my tone I hadn’t put there by design. He crossed the ground between us, thinking. Sitting on the stone beside me, he asked, “Would you like to?”

  There was no good way to answer that. My envy of Rob’s gifts was so at war with my own yearning to be normal and the warnings of my grandfather that I could only shake my head and say, “It doesn’t matter. Really. This is working fine, with you describing things.”

  He gave an absent nod, as though agreeing, and then studied me in silence for a moment before asking, “Can I try something?”

  My voice turned wary. “What?”

  “Give me your hand.”

  “Rob.”

  “You said that you trusted me.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Then give me your hand.” His was outstretched, and waiting.

  Reluctantly, I slipped my hand into his and then raised my defenses as I felt his fingers close warmly round mine.

  “D’ye mind that first day at the Emerson,” Rob said, “when we did the ganzfeld? Try doing that now.”

  “Rob…”

  “It’s not so hard. Clear your thoughts, close your eyes, just hear the wind and the waves and the gulls now, and focus.”

  I tried. “It’s not working.”

  “Relax.” A faint squeeze of his fingers. “You’ve managed to find your way into my mind afore this.”

  A small warmth spread from his hand to mine and I strove to ignore it, while focusing all my attention on clearing my mind of its whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. At last I felt the calming sense of peace, as though I’d settled in a warm relaxing bath, and from the blackness that surrounded me the little moving images began their cinematic play, a filmstrip running in reverse.

  I wasn’t in Rob’s mind at all, I thought. This was how my own visions started.

  I waited for the moment when one image would project itself and grow to blot the others out, then gradually I realized that these images weren’t running at the speed I was accustomed to. The filmstrip slowed, and paused, and ran a few frames forward.

  In confusion I asked Rob, Is that you?

  Is what me?

  Doing that.

  He didn’t answer straightaway. He’d found the frame he wanted, and already it was growing and expanding as it took us in, but where my visions would have stopped and settled in their boundaries this one widened far beyond what I had ever seen before, so very swiftly that it flooded all my senses with a dizzying assault of scents and sounds.

  I felt, in that first moment, like a seagull hanging on the wind high over sea and shore, and looking down with a perspective only flight could give. I saw the gray horizon and the darkness of the waves, and felt the stab of winter’s cold as I looked down upon the little cottage, thatched and shuttered as Rob had described it, drifted deep with snow that showed two lines of dragging footprints leading to the door, which was half-blocked now by the figure of a man.

  These things I saw before my line of vision swooped and started lowering and raced across the snow until it reached a level just above the one it would have been at if I’d stood upon the ground. The line of vision of a man about Rob’s height, I realized.

  God. My voice, yet even I could not have said if I had meant it as a prayer or as a heartfelt exclamation.

  Rob responded with, You’re with me now? You’re seeing this all right?

  I gave a nod, or thought I did, and we went once around the cottage like a panoramic camera, past the man who stood within the cottage doorway with his back to us, his rough dark cloak of woolen cloth still caked in places from the snow, and smelling thick with smoke that seemed more acrid than a wood fire’s.

  It was so early in the morning that the sun still showed as glints of red and spreading gold behind the windborne clouds above the sea toward the east, and when that same wind blew it nearly robbed my lungs of breath.

  I couldn’t turn from it as quickly as I might have done, because I wasn’t in control. Rob was, so if he stood a moment longer looking out toward the sunrise, I could only wait and brave the wind until he turned away to face the cottage.

  Rob?

  Hang on.

  This time the movement didn’t feel like flight. It felt like we were running as we swiftly crossed the few feet of remaining ground and slipped straight through the cottage walls as though they had been made of mist, as though we both were ghosts.

  We were inside.

  Chapter 11

  The man behind the colonel filled the doorway of the cottage, with his great dark cloak that blocked the light and dripped with melting snow. His breath had frozen in his beard and left it white and ragged, so
to Anna’s eyes he looked like some fierce Highlander, like those she’d often heard about in tales but never seen, although this man did not wear Highland dress. Beneath the cloak his legs were tightly cased in breeks and boots, though one was wrapped above the knee in strips of cloth soaked through with brownish stains. He favored it, that leg, and put his weight upon the other as he waited in the doorway while the colonel talked.

  She wasn’t meant to hear them. She was meant to still be sleeping, huddled warmly in the long bed with her brothers and her sisters, for in truth it was but first light and the day had not yet properly begun, and it was plain from how her father and her mother and the colonel and his friend were talking, quietly and low, with care, that what they spoke of was not for the children’s ears.

  Her mother seemed distraught. “So close?”

  The colonel nodded. “Half a day behind us, and perhaps by now much less than that.”

  Her father raked his hair back with one hand, the way he always did when forced to think more rapidly than was his wont. “The king?”

  “Is safe,” the colonel said. “We saw him off ourselves.”

  “He’d scarcely landed,” was her father’s comment, edged with bitterness.

  The colonel didn’t offer any argument, which made her father bold enough to follow with, “How can he now abandon all who’ve fought and bled this winter in his cause?”

  The colonel’s steady gaze held something like a challenge. “Would ye now abandon him?” When he was met by silence, he went on, “The king must play upon a larger board than you and I. Sometimes a piece must fall so that the rest of them survive, but I assure you he does feel such losses keenly, and his leaving of this shore was yet the hardest choice that I have seen him make.”

  “Aye, ’twill be very hard to watch our ruin from the safety of his ship.”

  “The sea,” the colonel said, “is never safe. Have not ye learned the truth of that in all these years, lad, that ye’ve been a fisherman?”