The Firebird (18 page)

‘’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 colonel 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 laboured 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.

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 skywards. ‘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 grey, 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 humour. ‘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 practised 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 knife-like 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 towards 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?’

That amused him. ‘Bless ye, no. ’Tis nothing so improving. No, this book is an account of Mr Lawson’s daring voyage to the colony of Carolina, and his own adventures with the Indians and settlers there. When I was but a lad I dreamt of making such a journey for myself,’ he said, ‘but now I’ve grown too old for it.’

‘Is it so far?’

‘America? It is, aye. Clear across the world. My eldest son, my Jamie, went to settle in the colony of Darien around the same time Mr Lawson first set foot in Carolina,’ said the colonel, with a nod towards his book, ‘but I lost him afore he could tell me any of his own tales.’

Anna thought it odd that both the colonel and the captain should be careless with their children, for they both seemed to be careful men. She asked, ‘Where did you lose him?’

Colonel Graeme looked confounded by the question for a moment, but her meaning must have penetrated for his eyes showed understanding. ‘He was sailing for the Company of Scotland when he died.’ He dropped his gaze again and took a keener interest in the pages of his book. ‘It happened years ago. I’ve lost two sons, for all that, but the two that I have living are a comfort to me.’

Anna hadn’t known that ‘lost’ meant ‘dead’. She was absorbing this when something struck the colonel, and he said, ‘Ye may meet one of them, in fact, while ye are here, for he’s a monk and though he’s not of the same order as the nuns he’s yet been known to pay a visit to the Lady Abbess now and then. They call him “Père Archange”,’ he told her, ‘meaning “Father Archangel”, though some will simply call him Father Graeme. Ye may ken him by his face, he looks like me. He was a soldier once, as I am.’

Anna frowned. ‘But if he was a soldier, why did he become a monk?’ If she could live a soldier’s life, she thought, with all of its adventure and its travel, she would never give it up to pass her days in dull and silent prayer.

The colonel closed his book. ‘He had a friend, a good friend, in his regiment. As close as brothers, so they were, but they fell out and quarrelled and they fought a duel, and Patrick won the contest. But in winning, he had killed his friend, and that was something he could not atone for in his mind, nor in his heart, except by laying down his weapons altogether. There are times,’ he said to Anna, ‘when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee; when winning brings us loss.’ His gaze fell kindly on her face. ‘You are too young to understand that, lass, but hold it in your memory so ye’ll mind it if ye ever do have need of it, so ye’ll not make my son’s mistakes.’

She nodded. ‘But I could not be a monk,’ she told him. ‘Only men are monks.’

‘Aye.’ He was smiling. ‘And I reckon with your father’s blood and all the Graeme in ye that ye’ll never make a nun.’

Her heart rose hopefully. ‘So then ye’ll take me with you, and not leave me here?’

His smile faded. ‘Anna.’

She had finished dressing and was standing close enough to him that he could take her shoulders in his hands, and draw her to him in a comforting embrace. ‘I cannot take ye where I’m going, lass. The dangers are too great, the now.’

She told the collar of his shirt, ‘I’m no feart of the danger.’

Colonel Graeme lightly kissed her hair. ‘I ken well ye’re no feart. But it is not yourself alone who’d be in danger if I took ye into Paris.’ He sighed the way he did when he was trying to explain something, and did not have the words to hand. ‘Ye mind the day we met?’ he asked her, finally. ‘When we sat there in the Earl of Erroll’s library and played the chess, and spoke about your mother and your father, and I telt ye why it was they had to keep their marriage secret?’