The Firebird (11 page)

I could, in fact, climb nearly any fence, of any height. It was a skill I’d learnt from following my brother, and I put it to good use now, scrambling up and over easily so that I was already on my feet when Rob dropped catlike at my side.

He grinned. ‘Can ye do that with trees, as well?’

‘Climb them, you mean? Only up,’ I admitted. ‘I’m a coward coming down in trees, the branches are too far apart and never where I need them. I got stuck in one for hours once. My brother Colin had to talk me down again.’

‘Oh aye? And how’d he manage that?’

‘He had me close my eyes, and then he told me where to put my hands and feet, and I just did it.’ I could still recall his patient voice, instructing me: ‘Six inches left. Now two feet down, that’s it, you’ve got it, I won’t let you fall …’

I turned, and caught Rob watching me. He smiled and looked away again, towards the soaring bit of castle wall that stood much closer to us now, its granite facing stones reflecting tiny scatterings of light.

Rob closed his own eyes, with his head held to the side a little as though he were listening, and then his eyes came open and I had the sense that he was seeing something very different from what I was seeing.

He was still aware of me peripherally, though, because he kept on talking even while he walked along the outer wall, describing as he went: ‘It’s like a garden here, walled in, with paths and trees.’ He stopped, inhaling deeply. ‘There’s a lilac tree, just here, that’s full in bloom.’

Which meant, I thought, that in the place where he was walking it was summertime, but only just – not at the season’s end, as it was now, but somewhere nearer its beginning. When would lilacs bloom up here, I wondered? Late in May, perhaps, or early June?

‘And there’s the kitchen door,’ he told me. ‘That’s where she went in.’

To me it was only a breach in the broken wall, but Rob still ducked his head under the long-vanished lintel as he crossed the threshold, and I felt a curious urge to do likewise. I envied him, envied the things he was seeing, and I think he must have been fully aware of that, too, because he started taking more care with his verbal descriptions, more time with the details, until he was painting the picture so vividly I, too, could see the flagged floors and the broad open hearth and the women who turned from their work in surprise as young Anna ran by with her face streaming tears.

Following Rob as he followed the girl through the twists of the corridors, I wasn’t seeing the deep roofless passages open above to the cries of the gulls, where the wind off the sea became suddenly stilled and the shadows fell thickly. Instead, in my mind, I was seeing what Rob was describing: the warm plastered walls and the ceilings and floorboards, and doors leading off into storerooms and sculleries. This was the servants’ dominion, this ground level, but Anna didn’t stay here.

She ran up, to the rooms that no longer existed because all the beams and the floorboards had long ago fallen away, leaving shells of the walls with their great gaping windows, and even if I’d climbed the crumbling circle of stairs that remained, I could never have followed her.

Rob could, though.

Stopping a moment, he looked up as though he were getting his bearings, then with his gaze fixed on a place in mid-air he changed course and walked till he was under it, leaning his shoulders against the high wall that was all that divided the room we were in from a dizzying drop down the cliffs to the sea.

With a nod of his head he said, ‘She’s in the library.’

I asked him, ‘What’s she doing?’

And he told me.

Slains was not her home, and yet she knew its corners well, from trailing after her Aunt Kirsty while she did her work. The earl had always treated her with kindness, and she’d always found a comfort in this corner of the library – her hiding place, tucked safely out of sight behind the tallest, broadest armchair that sat angled to the fireplace. There was no fire now, it being summer, yet the corner kept its warmth and sheltering appeal, and Anna curled herself within it, arms wrapped tightly round her knees.

She heard the voices rise and fall downstairs, her mother’s voice among them.
No
. She caught the thought and changed it. Not her mother. Donald’s mother, but not hers. Not any more.

Her breath snagged painfully within her chest, and then she held it altogether as she heard firm steps approach along the corridor. A handle turned, the door began to open, and she pressed her face with eyes tight-closed against the leather chair back, crouched as quiet as a beetle in her corner.

The door swung shut. She couldn’t see the person who’d come in, but she could tell it was a man because his boots made a distinctly heavy sound against the floorboards. He walked straight towards her chair and she shrank smaller still, and when the chair back moved she squeezed her eyes more tightly shut as though that might somehow prevent her being seen, but no discovery came, and no recriminations, and she realised he was merely sitting down.

The armchair shifted as he settled in it. Anna braved a peek beneath the chair and saw his booted feet stretched out towards the unlit hearth. And then she heard a scraping as he pulled the little table closer to him, singing lightly to himself. It was a pleasant tune, although she didn’t understand the words as they were in some foreign language, like the strange words of the fishermen from France who sometimes called upon her father in the night.

No, not her father, she corrected herself. She was not a Logan. She was—

‘Curse this blasted palsy,’ said the man all of a sudden, as the sound of something falling interrupted Anna’s thoughts.

Peering underneath the chair again, she saw that several painted wooden pieces from the chessboard on the table had been tumbled to the floor to lie there scattered in disorder, and the black-haired king had fallen to his side upon the carpet and was gazing at her mournfully with darkly painted eyes.

‘I apologise, my lads,’ the man said gently to the chessmen as he bent to pick them up, ‘my hands do shake these days, and show my age.’ He leant and moved his foot a fraction and his boot heel caught the black-haired king by what seemed sheerest accident and kicked it further underneath the chair, much closer now to Anna’s hiding place.

The man continued picking up the other scattered pieces, and she heard the clicks as each was set again upon the board. ‘Where is your king, lads? For of all of you, he is the one I should not like to lose. Where is he?’ Shifting in his chair again, the man seemed to be searching. ‘Gone,’ he said at last, ‘and lost. Ah well, that is unfortunate.’

From underneath the chair, the painted wooden king looked up at Anna and she looked at him uncertainly.

The man went on, ‘’Tis likely that the Earl of Erroll will not let me use his hospitality again, if I do so misplace his treasures.’ And he gave a sigh so sorrowful that Anna could not help but feel an answering regret in her own heart, and reaching out she closed her hand around the errant king and crept out of her corner to return him to the playing board in silence.

She could see the stranger now. He was a man much older than her father or her Uncle Rory, older even than the earl who kept this castle, and his hair had greyed to match the whiteness of the close-trimmed beard that edged his lean and kindly-looking face. His smile cut crinkles round his eyes.

‘I thank ye, lass. ’Tis a great kindness ye have done me.’

When she gazed at him, not answering, he gave a nod towards the armchair facing him and asked her, ‘Will ye sit and keep me company awhile, or will your mother be expecting ye?’

She felt the swell of tears begin to burn again and pushed them back and said, ‘I have no mother.’ Bravely sitting in the chair, she watched him set the painted pieces in their places on the board.

He asked her, ‘Do ye play the chess?’

She shook her head.

‘It is the grandest game,’ he said, ‘for those who have the patience and the wit to learn it.’

Anna saw him set a small piece on a square and frowned as something deep within her memory turned and tugged. ‘What’s that?’

‘The pawn? Well, he’s the smallest soldier, yet the game would be for naught without his efforts.’

In behind the lines of pawns the taller rows of varied chessmen stood – the kings and queens and horses’ heads and castle towers, but it was the little pawns who most caught Anna’s fancy, and she heard a woman’s voice repeating in her memory, ‘That one is my favourite, too,’ and felt a sense of sadness that she did not understand, although it mingled with her own and made her ask, ‘What does he do?’

The man was watching her. He smiled again and said, ‘Well now, I’ll show ye.’

She had always had an easy time of learning things, and this game had a structure to it that she found appealing, and a challenge that was made more real by how the stranger chose to introduce the players and their parts, as though they were real men upon a battlefield.

‘But fit wye can the—’ she began, to be corrected by the man.

‘Say “why”.’

‘Fit wye should I say “why”?’ she asked.

‘Because it is more ladylike.’

She frowned. ‘Why can the pawn not kill a man who’s standing right in front of him?’

‘His shield gets in the way,’ the man explained. ‘He has to lunge his sword arm to the front and side, like this.’ He demonstrated, and his skillful motion had a strength that deepened Anna’s frown until he asked her, ‘What?’

She answered with the full directness of her seven years, replying, ‘You were telling tales, afore. You do not have the palsy.’

‘Have I not?’ The crinkles formed around his eyes again. ‘Well, neither are ye motherless. In fact,’ he said as he leant forwards, giving his attention to the chess pieces, ‘it seems to me that ye have quite the opposite affliction. Ye’ve two mothers I can name, and both of them do hold ye dear, and if there is another lass in all the world can make that claim, I’ve yet to hear it.’

Anna eyed him doubtfully. ‘Two mothers?’

‘Aye. The mother who has raised ye as her own, and dried your tears when ye had need of it, and loved ye all your life. That’s one. And then there is the mother who gave birth to ye, and loved ye even more, if it were possible, so much so that she would not see ye come to harm, and left ye here at Slains to keep ye safe.’

She did not understand, and plainly told him so.

His eyes were patient. ‘No, I’d not expect ye to. Now,’ he said, returning to the board between them, ‘which of these two kings will ye lay claim to?’

Anna chewed her lip and looked from one king to the other.

The white king had the broader smile, but still she felt compelled to choose the black-haired king she’d rescued from beneath the chair.

Still thinking, she began, ‘Fit wye—?’

‘Say “Why”.’

‘Why did my mother leave me here at Slains?’ she asked him. ‘Did she die?’

‘No, she did not die. Why did ye choose the black king, and deny the other?’

‘He’s a proper king,’ was her excuse. ‘The real King has black hair.’

His mouth curved. ‘And who is the real King?’

‘Why, the king over the water.’ It surprised her that a man of his great age could be so ignorant. ‘There’s a prince in London claims he is a king, but he is not, he’s but a prince, and comes from Hanover and cannot speak in either Scots or English. And,’ she said, ‘he is a thief, besides.’

‘A thief?’

She gave a solemn nod. ‘He stole the crown he wears. The Earl of Erroll said so.’

‘’Tis a wicked thing to steal,’ the man agreed. ‘But to be fair, I would not think the Prince of Hanover a wicked man, so much as a misguided one.’ He set the white king squarely in the centre of his space, behind his line of white-painted defenders. ‘’Tis a fact he is no king and wears a crown that is not his, but he was not the first to wear it, nor the one to steal it from the rightful King, James Stewart. That deed was done when James was but a babe,’ the man revealed, ‘and ’twas his sisters stole the crown away, to pass it from their own hands to a foreign prince.’

‘His sisters?’ Anna’s eyes grew round. ‘Fit wye … why would they do that?’

‘Some will tell ye it was purely for religion, for the sisters, they were Protestant, and James was raised a Catholic, and the English and our Scottish Presbyterians can never abide a Catholic on the throne. But ’tis nearer to the truth,’ he said, ‘to tell ye it was done for the same reason most men steal, and women too: for riches, and for power.’

‘But it wisnae right for them to take the crown,’ said Anna, ‘and ’tis wrong the Prince of Hanover should keep it.’

‘Ye’ve the heart of a true Jacobite.’ The man was smiling.

‘What’s that?’

He said, ‘A Jacobite is one who would defend King James, our King over the water, as ye say, and fight to bring him safely home again.’

She gave a nod. ‘The Earl of Erroll’s one, then.’

‘Aye, he is. And so am I.’

She liked the fact that he conversed with her as though she were his equal and had wit enough to understand, and so she felt secure in asking, ‘Why are ye called Jacobites? The King is James, not Jacob.’

‘In the Latin, James is written as
Jacobus
, lass. Have ye not learnt the Latin, yet?’ He clucked his tongue. ‘And ye the daughter of one of the noblest families of Scotland.’

He was teasing her now, she thought, mocking the fact she’d been raised in a fisherman’s cottage, mocking the fact that her father …
no,
not her true father, she stopped to remind herself. And that meant it was just possible that he was telling the truth. She asked, ‘Am I?’

He nodded, his steady hands turning the chessboard round carefully so the black pieces were nearest to Anna. ‘Your father’s own grandfather was a great soldier – the Black Pate, they called him, for his hair was black as the King’s, and he rode with the greatest of heroes of Scotland, the Earl of Montrose. He was brave, the Black Pate. He’d a fire in his eye and a fire in his heart and there’s no man could equal his skill with the sword, and the people who saw him ride past kept the memory for ever.’

‘Did you see him ride past?’