The Firebird (12 page)

‘Aye, I did, many times,’ he admitted, ‘for he was my father. And
your
father’s father did marry my sister, which makes me your uncle.’

She gave a slight frown, knowing no other way to accept this strange news of the loss of one family and gain of another within the same morning.

‘Your father,’ he informed her, ‘came from Perthshire, and his father was the Laird of Abercairney.’

She looked down again along the row of silent waiting pawns and something stirred again, but dimly, in her memory. ‘Was my father a soldier?’

‘He was. A colonel in the service of the French King and King James, upon the Continent. A Jacobite, as you are.’ His gaze softened as he said, ‘Ye have the look of him.’

‘I do?’

‘Oh, aye. He always was a handsome lad, was John. He was a favourite of the Queen, King Jamie’s mother. Thought the world of John, she did. It was in serving her that he first came to Slains, and met your mother. Her name,’ he continued, ‘was Sophia. She was of the Western Shires, a lass so beautiful that when they met, or so your father told me once, the very world stood still in that one moment, just for them.’

Anna closed her eyes and tried imagining the soldier and his lady and the whole world standing still around them both, and when her eyes came open once again the older man was watching her with quiet understanding and affection.

‘Aye, a rare fair thing it is, a love like that. And so they married, but they married all in secret for your father was a wanted man. The English and their allies had a price upon his head that made it dangerous for anyone he loved.’

She asked, ‘Why dangerous?’

‘Because the English soldiers, had they kent about your mother, might have taken her and threatened her with harm to make your father do their will. The strongest soldier cannot balance long upon the blade that does divide his honour and his heart,’ the man said, ‘and whatever way he falls, the cut will kill him.’

He had turned the chessboard round without disturbing any of the pieces. Now, with thought, he chose a white pawn from the centre of his row and moved it out two squares into the field of battle.

‘So,’ he said, ‘your mother kept the secret, when your father’s duty called him back again across the sea. You were already growing then within her belly, and she kept that secret, too, from all but those she trusted. But the English had their spies among us, then as well as now. One of the worst of them, a man of wealth and power, learnt the truth about your mother and your father, and she feared for ye, and rightly, for she knew the same men who would seek to do her harm to make your father dance their tune, would without conscience also harm his child. She sought to hide ye, and ’twas then your other mother and the father that did raise ye did a brave and loving thing, and said they’d keep ye as their own until your true father returned.’

She took this in, and turned the explanation over in her mind till it began to make some sense to her, and slowly eased a little of the hurt within her heart. She moved a pawn in her turn. ‘Then they will be coming back for me, my mother and my father.’

He took so long in answering she thought he had not heard her. Many older men, she knew, were hard of hearing, and in truth when she looked up she found him focused on the chessboard with the fiercest concentration. As he moved another pawn she said, more loudly, ‘They’ll come back for me.’

Again he did not answer straight away. He seemed to think a moment, then he said, ‘There was a battle, lass, five years ago, when ye were very small. A battle bloodier than any I have ever seen, or hope to see again. It happened in a place called Malplaquet. Your father fell there.’

He had said the words so evenly, as though they did not pain him, yet she saw the tightened lines around his mouth and when he looked at her again his eyes were like her Uncle Rory’s eyes had been when the old mastiff, Hugo, had slept on one morning in his corner of the stable without waking.

‘In a better place now, aren’t ye?’ she’d heard Uncle Rory tell the sleeping dog, and then she’d seen his shoulders rise and fall and heard his breath catch as though somebody had hit him, till he’d noticed she was standing there. He’d sharply looked away then, and gone out, but not before she’d seen his eyes.

Her father, too, must now be in that better place where Hugo was, she thought, and there would be no coming back from there. She swallowed hard to hide her disappointment. ‘And my mother?’

‘Well, by then ye were so settled in your family, with your brothers and your sisters, she had not the heart to take ye from the place where ye were safe and loved. She said it would have been a selfish thing to do, to risk your comfort for her own, and ’twas a measure of her love for ye that she did find the courage to go off alone and leave ye here, for of the choices that your mother made in life,’ he said, ‘that was the hardest of them all.’

She saw the flicker in her mind’s eye of a woman’s face, too pale and framed by brightly curling hair, and of a gentle voice no louder than a whisper that had said, ‘Go to your mother.’ Feeling once again that pressing sense of sadness, Anna asked, ‘Can I not go to her?’

‘She’s living far away, the now. ’Tis not a journey for a child to make. And how then would your other mother feel, to lose your love and so be left behind?’ he asked her. ‘Ye’d not wish to break her heart as well, now would ye?’

‘No, but …’ Anna’s voice trailed off, because she couldn’t think of how to set things right, to make herself and both her mothers happy.

‘See now, nothing that we do in life is easy,’ said the man. ‘Your pawn will capture mine in his next move, and yet that move will leave ye open to attack then from my bishop three moves hence. Each choice we make has an effect for good or ill, for all we may not yet perceive it at the time.’

Her little chin set stubbornly. ‘And if I do not take your pawn?’

‘Then my pawn will take yours, instead, and it will be my knight who moves to put your king in jeopardy.’

She said, ‘Then I will stop your knight.’

He laughed. ‘I do not doubt it.’

They were deep in play when someone knocked upon the door, and Anna’s Aunt Kirsty stepped into the room, her worried expression dissolving as she saw the two of them sitting there playing. She said in relief, ‘Colonel Graeme, ye’ve found her.’

‘She found me, in fact,’ said the older man. ‘And I’ve been glad of the company. Faith, I’ve not faced such a clever opponent since I taught her mother to play this game.’

Kirsty asked, ‘You taught her mother?’

‘I did,’ he said, lifting his gaze very briefly to hers as though telling her something in silence before adding, ‘here in this very room, and with these men.’

Anna looked at him keenly, intrigued that her aunt had addressed him as ‘Colonel’. She asked, ‘Were you a soldier, like your father and my own?’

He smiled and admitted, ‘I’m soldiering still, lass. ’Tis why I am now come to Slains, as it happens. And since ye’ll be burdened with me for the rest of the summer at least, ye’ll be able to have your revenge on me.’

‘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.’

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 grey 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”,’ Rob 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.’