The Firebird (13 page)

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 just 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 towards 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 towards 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 towards 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 forwards, 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 defences 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, when gradually I realised 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 straight away. 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 grey 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 realised.

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 woollen 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 towards 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 towards 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.

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 favoured 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 learnt the truth of that in all these years, lad, that ye’ve been a fisherman?’

Her father met the colonel’s gaze, but grudgingly. ‘Why did you not go with him?’

‘The King has other men to keep him safe, and with that devil Argyll’s army in pursuit along this coast mere hours behind us, there are others more in need of my protection.’

Anna huddled in the blankets as the sharp wind struck the cottage walls and wailed outside as though it wanted entry. She knew little of the battles that had occupied her parents’ talk since harvest time, except a cousin of her father’s had been killed at Sheriffmuir, wherever that might be, and from what Colonel Graeme had just said it seemed that death had been the devil’s doing. Pressing closer to her sleeping brother’s side for warmth, she tried to shut her ears to all the shrieks of winter wind; tried blotting out the vivid image of the devil and his army drawing nearer by the minute.

She could hear her mother speaking. ‘We are grateful to you, Colonel, for the warning. And to you,’ she told the other man, who’d waited all this time in patient silence, ‘Mr … ?’

‘Jamieson,’ the colonel gave the answer. ‘Captain Jamieson.’

The man within the doorway gave a brief nod to her mother, and from deep beneath her blankets Anna peered at him more closely. He was younger than the colonel, near to her father’s age, but rougher-looking with his bearded face.

Her mother told him, ‘You are wounded, sir.’

His leg above the knee was slowly leaking red into the brown stains of the bandage now, but with a shrug he told her, ‘I can travel.’

‘So must you,’ the colonel told her parents. ‘Gather up the children, there are French ships waiting just offshore to carry us.’

‘And English ones to keep them there, no doubt.’ Her father’s voice was grim. He shook his head. ‘I’ll take no ship, nor risk my children to the English guns. I’ll take my family overland to Slains. The castle walls are thick enough for safety, and I’ll warrant even Argyll will be like to tread with care upon the Earl of Erroll’s property.’

‘A man like Argyll,’ said the colonel, ‘cares not where he treads. And when he comes, with his dragoons and all his hired band of foreign soldiers who have never heard the Earl of Erroll’s name, what then?’

‘You’re saying I cannot protect my family?’

‘I am saying,’ said the colonel, ‘that a fox that goes to ground may be dug out.’

Her father stood more straight. ‘And one that makes a dash across an open field risks just as much.’

The two men faced each other down with level stares and stances, neither willing to give ground. At length her father glanced away and finished stubbornly, ‘My family goes to Slains.’

The colonel held his tongue a moment longer, then he gave a nod. ‘If ye will not be swayed, sir, then that surely is your right. But understand that I must guard
my
family as I will.’ Her father frowned as though he did not fully understand, and so the colonel spelt it out for him: ‘Ye take your children where ye must, but Anna comes with me.’

When the captain, at his shoulder, shifted slightly on his feet as though to protest, Colonel Graeme said, ‘She is my nephew’s daughter, and her blood is bound to mine, and for the love I bore her father and the love he bore her mother I’ll be damned if I will ever let the lassie come to harm. She comes with me.’

The captain glanced towards the bed where Anna and the other children lay, and Anna was so fascinated by the hardness of his face she did not look away, but met his eyes. If it surprised him that she was awake and listening, he gave no outward sign of it. He only held her gaze a moment, studied her, and finally said, ‘Good morning.’