The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  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 neighbor 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 good night to one another, and an older woman who was not a nun appeared and led them out again and saw them safely to the neighbor’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 neighbor’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 palette 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 toward the hearth and saw that Anna was not sleeping, and instead of being angry he turned to their host and made a comment with a nod toward 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 leaned 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 defense 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:

  Cheer up your hearts, brave Cavaliers,

  For the Grahams are gone to Germany…

  “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:

  O’er hills and high mountains,

  long time have I gone,

  And down by the fountains,

  by myself all alone:

  Through bushes and briars,

  I walk without care,

  Through perils and dangers,

  for the loss of my dear.

  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, which 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:

  My love, cease thy weeping,

  now listen to me,

  For waking and sleeping,

  my heart is with thee;

  Love, let nothing grieve thee,

  and do not complain,

  For I never will leave thee,

  while life doth remain.

  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.”

  “’Tis past time someone healed it,” Colonel Graeme said, as low, and then the hills were gone and Anna was behind the sturdy convent bars surrounded by the black-veiled forms of women, and they closed around her till she could not see beyond the blackness, and she pushed against it.

  Something crashed.

  It startled her to wakefulness.

  She heard the murmured voices from the far side of the room, the captain saying he was fine, he’d only fallen, and the colonel asking questions, and the captain saying he should leave it be. “Ye’ll waken Anna.”

  “She’s asleep yet,” said the colonel. “Let me look at it.”

  “I’ve telt ye there’s no need.”

  But Colonel Graeme had already risen from his chair, a looming shadow in the room, made larger by the faint glow of the firelight. Stepping past Anna he borrowed a flame from the hearth with a candle and carried it back to the place where the captain half-sat and half-lay on the floor by the table.

  “Let me look at it,” the colonel said again, and this time though the words were hardly louder than a whisper they still sounded like an order.

  Anna’s eyes were mostly shut, but through the curtain of her lashes she could see the captain gingerly unwind the length of bandage from his leg, and Colonel Graeme took the candlestick more firmly in his hand and bent to look, and then he said a word she’d only ever heard her Uncle Rory say when he’d been pushed beyond his limits, for it was an ugly word.

  “How long,” the co
lonel asked the captain, “has it been like this?”

  When stubborn silence met him he glanced up and asked more forcefully, “How long?”

  “A week. A little longer, maybe.”

  This time Anna did not know the word the colonel used, but Captain Jamieson said warningly, “Mind what you say. The lass—”

  “—is sleeping,” Colonel Graeme said, and spoke the word again, with feeling. “How the devil did ye walk on that?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “On top of it, ye’re burning with a fever, lad. We need to fetch a surgeon.”

  “I thank ye, no,” the captain said. “I have been bled enough. I’ll heal.” He pushed the colonel’s hand aside and, reaching for the toppled chair behind him, used its sturdy side as leverage while he labored to his feet. “I’ve always healed.”

  “Some wounds,” the colonel told him, “are more complicated.”

  Or at least that was what Anna thought she heard him say… she wasn’t paying full attention, because suddenly the captain seemed to sway and lose his balance, and his shadow on the wall collapsed to nothing as he fell.

  Chapter 14

  Rob was rubbing his own leg, to work out the stiffness.

  I asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m just not used to sitting so long.” He was standing now, flexing his knee to restore circulation. He asked, with a nod at my mobile, “What did he want this time?”

  “He needed a letter I’d written to one of our clients.” Ordinarily I wasn’t all that bothered by Sebastian’s constant calling when I wasn’t in the office, but this morning I’d been less pleased by the interruption.

  Rob had heard the mobile ringing first, and he had smoothly switched the focus of his concentration back into the present from the past, and brought me with him. I had found the change more difficult. A part of me, a large part, wanted only to be back there in the dark warmth of that kitchen, to find out why Captain Jamieson had fallen, and what Anna had done next.

  Rob stretched his shoulders too, and while he rubbed his neck he shot a quick glance skyward. “Well, it’s likely just as well he rang. We’re going to get rained on, from the look of it.”

  I looked as well, and saw the massing darker clouds that had come slowly creeping underneath the sunless stretch of gray, pushed into place by that cool breeze that now had risen so it bordered on becoming a light wind. I knew that if it rained, we couldn’t sit here any longer. There were thick leaves on the branches of the tree that arched above us, but the breeze itself was blowing from the side, we’d have no shelter. I tried hard to hide my disappointment.

  Rob turned. “Are you hungry?”

  “Sorry?”

  Patiently he said, “It’s nearly lunchtime. Are you hungry?”

  There was no way it could be so late, I thought. We’d only just got done with breakfast, we’d had coffee, and…

  “It’s half-past twelve.” He turned his wrist to let me see his watch, as proof. “We could have lunch, and wait till this blows over, try again a little later.”

  It took too much effort, thinking, so I told him, “Fine.”

  Rob looked at me a moment, then he smiled and said, “Come on, then,” and he walked with me across the narrow street and back along the little alley leading to Sint Jacobsstraat.

  The first fat drops of rain began to fall as we came round that corner. By the time we reached the pink-and-orange-painted house a few doors up, the clouds let loose with vengeance and Rob laughed and turned his collar up as best he could against it, and he caught my hand in his and pulled me after him into a private covered driveway cut into the ground floor of the nearest house, just wide enough to let a car pass through into the little courtyard I could glimpse behind.

  With dark brick walls, their bottom edges green with moss, and a low, wood-planked ceiling that muffled the noise of the rain, the space had a secluded feel, safely confined.

  Rob shook aside the strands of dark hair dripping water in his eyes and said, “So much for lunch.”

  “I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Were ye not?” The brick walls cast his voice back in an echo, deepened with good humor. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a bar of chocolate here.” I heard the rustling as he rummaged for it in his pocket. “If we split that, and you promise that you’ll feed me well tonight, I’m game to have another go.”

  “Right now?” I looked at him with hope. “You’re sure?”

  He answered me by snapping off a section of the chocolate bar and passing it across while he took stock of our surroundings with a practiced eye. “We’re right within the convent walls, ye ken. It should be easier to see things.”

  “Was it harder, looking in from the outside?”

  He shrugged. “I’d not say harder, not exactly, but it takes a bit more energy.” He’d found the place he wanted, and he moved the few steps over to it, pressing back against the rough brick wall. He held his hand out. “Ready?”

  For a single moment I considered what it was that I was doing, and how silly it would look to someone passing, and how dangerous it might be if the owners of the house came home and drove in with their car, and the hundred other ways that it was crazy.

  Then I pushed it all aside, and took my mobile out, and turned it off, deliberately, and went across and took Rob’s hand and told him, “Ready.”

  And I closed my eyes.

  ***

  She wasn’t meant to hear.

  She’d heard them say so, when they’d carried Captain Jamieson into the other room. She’d heard them say that it would frighten her to hear, that it would give the captain more pain if he thought that she could hear, so they had kept their voices quiet, and she’d kept her own eyes shut so they would not know she was listening, because she did not wish to cause the captain yet more pain.

  He’d only groaned the once. She’d heard him through the wall, and she’d curled deeper in her bed and closed her eyes more resolutely, till his restlessness had seemed to pass.

  The colonel had been in the kitchen talking to the surgeon, then—a younger man whose voice and accent marked him as an Englishman, and who had come so hastily in answer to their call that he had taken several minutes to restore his breath.

  He said, “For all they scarified the wound when he received it, there remains only one opening, and that is at the highest point so matter may not drain. The wound must slough and grow inflamed before it heals, and this it has not done, and so you have this problem of the discharge and the fever.”

  “Is there any of the musket ball remaining in the wound?”

  “I cannot say. The only remedy,” the surgeon told the colonel, “is to make a second opening below the first, and probe it well, and then to draw a seton through the whole length of the wound.”

  She did not know then what a “seton” was. It would not be till morning when she saw the large, broad, evil-looking needle with its knifelike tip, and saw the strip of silk with which they’d threaded it, as wide as her own thumb, that she would understand why Colonel Graeme had exhaled so heavily.

  His footsteps had been heavy, too, as he had crossed the floor to where the table stood, and lifting something from it that had clinked and sloshed like wine within a bottle, he had said, “Then he’ll have need of this.”

  The sounds that she’d heard after that had been the worse because she’d known the captain did not mean to make them; that whatever they were doing to him tore the noises from him through clenched teeth, and that he strangled any sound he made before it could be fully formed.

  “Brave lad,” the colonel’s voice came very gently through the wall. “Brave lad. ’Tis nearly done.”

  But still the sounds went on and on till Anna pressed her hands against her ears to block them out, and squeezed her eyes more tightly shut so God Himself would see she was not listening and let the captain know she could not hear him, for she knew that he had pain enough and could not suffer more.

  At length the
house descended once more into silence, and she slept, and when she woke the little room was filled with sunlight and the colonel was beside her, sitting comfortably and reading the small book he always carried in the pocket of his coat.

  She pushed herself up till she sat among the tangled blankets, and was rubbing at her eyes when Colonel Graeme set his book down on his knee and said, “You’re up, then. Good. I was becoming bored with my own company.”

  The details of the night before began to trickle through her memory and she looked toward the empty chair behind the colonel, at the table, as she asked him, “Captain Jamieson?”

  “Is sleeping still.”

  She frowned. “Are ye done hurting him?”

  The colonel’s smile was faint. “Ye heard that, did ye?”

  Anna shook her head, and Colonel Graeme let it pass. He only said, “The captain’s leg was very badly hurt while we were fighting, lass, in Scotland, but the surgeon’s set it right again. Now up,” he said, “and get ye dressed. There’s water in that basin by the hearth, that ye can wash with.”

  The air outside the blankets had a bite to it, and Anna quickly washed and tugged her outer clothing on again while Colonel Graeme read his book.

  She’d often seen him reading it before. The leather cover was well worn and gleaming smooth from all the hours spent in his hand, but still it did not have the rich look of the books that lined the high shelves of the Earl of Erroll’s library at Slains. It looked more like the only book she’d ever seen in her own cottage, so she asked, “Is that a Bible?”