The Firebird (23 page)

‘Ye’ve seen her, then.’

‘Of course. She’s lived here with us ten years now – of course I’ve seen her. So have you, I should imagine.’

‘I have not.’

‘We rarely see the things we don’t expect to see.’

Anna, not understanding, asked, ‘And did she lose her lover in that battle, truly? Is that why she shut herself up here?’

Sister Xaveria smiled. ‘We are not shut off from the world, my child. Not even here. We merely seek to live more fully in the world, without distraction, so we may more clearly hear God’s voice and do his bidding.’

Which did not answer Anna’s question, but she’d learnt that Sister Xaveria often preferred to ask questions rather than answer them, so it was not a surprise when the nun asked, ‘And where have you heard this sad tale of Dame Clare? Not from any of us, surely?’

‘No. From the other girls. Some of their parents, at court, heard the story, but I reckoned you’d ken the truth of it better than anyone.’

‘Oh yes? And why me, particularly?’

‘Because,’ said Anna, ‘your own sister married a man of that regiment.’

Sister Xaveria’s eyebrows rose up till they touched the smooth edge of her wimple. ‘And where did you learn of that? No,’ she said, raising a hand, ‘do not tell me. I can see I ought to teach tomorrow’s lesson from the Proverbs, starting with:
“qui ambulat fraudulenter revelat arcana qui autem fidelis est animi celat commissum.”’
She translated, for Anna’s sake: ‘“A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he who is of faithful spirit concealeth the matter.” Do you know what that means, Anna?’

‘Aye.’ Anna nodded.

‘And what does it mean, then?’

‘It means that what’s heard in the kitchen,’ said Anna, ‘should never be said in the hall.’

The nun’s mouth twitched. ‘Exactly.’

She might have said more, but at that moment Anna saw something that made her stop listening. Near the far wall of the chapel, beyond the dark bars of the grille, stood a man looking up at her father’s stone monument. A man with brown hair tied back over his collar, his hands clasped at a soldier’s ease behind him. With his back to her, he looked like …

‘Captain Jamieson!’ she called out in delight, and leaving Sister Xaveria’s side made a rush to the bars. ‘Captain!’

‘Anna,’ the nun warned, rebuking her for calling out so loudly in the sanctity of church, perhaps, or simply for behaving in a manner unbecoming to young ladies, but the shout had served its purpose.

Anna watched the man turn round, and with a stab of disappointment she saw it was not the captain, but a slightly younger man who peered towards her through the shadows of the church.

Unclasping his hands he strode forwards, relaxed at first, then as though being compelled, his gaze fixing on Anna’s small face with increasing amazement. His eyes lifted once, to the nun standing just behind Anna.

‘Sir,’ the nun veiled her face as she greeted him, ‘you are most welcome.’

‘Sister Xaveria.’ Dropping his gaze back to Anna, he asked in a low voice, ‘Whose child is this?’

Anna stared at him, not understanding the flash of emotion that twisted his features as though something pained him. ‘Her eyes … and her hair … she’s the image of …’ Pausing a moment, he gathered himself and then asked again, hoarsely, ‘Whose child is this?’

Anna felt Sister Xaveria’s hand on her shoulder, a gentle and steadying hold, reassuring. The nun told her, ‘Anna, this is Mr Maurice Moray, youngest brother to the Laird of Abercairney. And your uncle.’

Sitting in the parlour with the Abbess Butler and Sister Xaveria together with her on the one side of the grille, and looking at her Uncle Maurice sitting on the other, with the full grace of a gentleman, his back straight and his head up, proudly, Anna wondered whether her own father had once looked like that.

But no, she thought. Her uncle’s eyes were blue, and Colonel Graeme had been firm in saying that her own eyes were the colour of her father’s, like the sea in winter, mingled grey and green. The colour that her mother had so loved.

And her father’s face had surely been more handsome.

He was trying not to stare at her. ‘I did not know.’

The Abbess Butler gently said, ‘Nor did your brother. I believe his wife decided it was safer to conceal the child.’ ‘His wife?’ Reacting as though from a blow, he sat back in his chair. ‘Where is she now, this wife? Is she well cared for? Is she—?’

Gently interrupting him, the Abbess Butler said, ‘Your Uncle Graeme will, I have no doubt, tell all to you when next you see him.’

‘God,’ he said, then caught himself, and rubbing one hand on his brow apologised for uttering profanity in such a holy place. ‘’Tis only that … I did not know.’ His gaze fell warm on Anna’s face and searched for something there, but what it was she could not fathom. ‘She does have his features, does she not? It is as if he were not … were not …’ Cutting off the final part of what he might have said, he sharply turned his head towards the window and developed a fierce interest in the plain unchanging view of tiled rooftops that it offered. Quietly he said, ‘He was the best of us.’

The room sank into silence for a moment, as though all the adults’ thoughts had merged in one sad place.

The Abbess Butler finally asked, ‘How fare your other brothers? Did you leave them well in Scotland, or have they come over with you?’

‘No, and no,’ was his reply. ‘They are not with me, and I did not leave them well.’ He exhaled, heavily. ‘My brother Robin has again been taken captive, and there’s none will give me word of how he does, though I do fear that, having entertained him now so many times, the English will be keen to see him suffer when he comes to trial. As for my brother Abercairney, he was with us all the time at Perth until the King came, but he sickened and became too ill to come away when we made our retreat. It was his wife who found us passage finally, in a ship sent from the South Firth.’

‘Us?’ the Abbess Butler asked. ‘Then you do have companions?’

‘Aye, Sir Thomas Higgons came, as did Sir William Keith and his son George, and Mr Graeme, Newton’s son. We had designed for Gottenburg, but found the winds too contrary, and then a Danish frigate did detain us several days at Copenhagen, but at length,’ he said, ‘we made Danzig, and there we took to land. The roads are wearying, but safer than the sea.’

‘Will not you let us host you here in lodgings for the night?’

He shook his head. ‘I thank you, no. I could not pass so near to Ypres without a visit to your church, to see John’s grave, but I did not intend to stop for long. The others have but gone to find a meal and fresher horses, and will soon return to fetch me. Then we must continue on to Paris,’ he explained, ‘for I am carrying a goodly sum of money for the King, and will not rest until I put it in the safe hands of his agents there.’ He seemed to think of something then, and focusing on Anna, asked the nuns, ‘Have you sufficient funds to care for her? I have not much that is my own, but what I have is yours, and I could surely borrow from the funds I carry if—’

The Abbess raised her hand. ‘Your Uncle Graeme has already generously supplied her needs.’

He gave a nod of understanding, and what might have been regret. ‘And were it peacetime, she would surely find a home at Abercairney, and a cheerful playmate in her cousin James, my nephew. Or with Robin and his family – he has several sons and daughters now.’ His smile was thin, and hardened against memory. ‘But these times are far from peaceful, and my family, for its honourable history, has no place where it can stand with any safety.’

‘We will keep her safe.’ The Abbess Butler did not look so old, thought Anna, when she spoke like that, in such a bold, determined tone. ‘And to that end, it would be better, sir, if you did not inform your other brothers of her being here, nor mention her to anyone in Paris.’

He agreed. ‘You may rely on my discretion. For my part, it is enough to know that something yet remains of John.’ His gaze searched Anna’s face a moment longer, then he looked her squarely in the eye. ‘Your father was the best of us,’ he said again, but with more force this time, as though he wanted to be very sure she understood. ‘He was a good friend, and a better brother, and a man of honour. Mind that, now.’

She raised her chin and said, ‘I ken fine who my father was.’ There was no trace of insolence in how she spoke the words, nor yet a tone of argument, but simply an assertion of the fact.

Her Uncle Maurice stared a moment, then the corners of his mouth turned upwards slightly. ‘I perceive you do not have his looks alone,’ he told her, ‘but also his temperament, God help ye.’ Softening, he said more gently, ‘God help ye,’ and rose to his feet.

‘I shall write,’ he told Sister Xaveria, ‘if you’ll permit it.’

‘Of course.’

And they blessed him and wished him Godspeed.

His first letter arrived three weeks later, addressed not to Anna herself but to Sister Xaveria, and saying nothing of any importance, but Sister Xaveria read it out loud to her anyway. ‘Tell my niece,’ he’d written, ‘that her father loved to read, and I do hope she will apply herself most diligently to her studies, that she may do likewise.’

Anna tried.

She had a gifted ear for languages, and soon could understand and follow much of what the Flemish-speaking lay sisters were saying while they worked, but printed words were something altogether different. Through the long heat of the summer and the early autumn she applied herself as diligently as she could, and still each time a letter came to Sister Xaveria from Uncle Maurice in Paris, the nun without asking would read it aloud, as though knowing the effort would bring Anna frustration.

Perhaps, Anna thought, that was why Captain Jamieson had never written a letter yet to her, from where he had gone. He was waiting until she could read them.

The thought made her try all the harder, until her hand ached in the evening from copying out the full alphabet, over and over, and she slept too soundly to hear the mysterious woman who wept still, but rarely.

And then, at the start of November, she took out the song sheet the captain had given her, as she did every day, and traced the bold slanted handwriting, and for the first time the lines and the loops formed themselves into shapes with a meaning.

She held her breath, not daring to believe it as her eyes raced downwards … there it was, her favourite of the verses, and she read – she truly read – the words the wandering maiden’s steadfast lover sang:

‘
… cease thy weeping,

now listen to me,

For waking and sleeping,

my heart is with thee;
’

Anna’s tight chest could scarcely contain all her fullness of joy and of pride, and so eager was she to reveal her discovery to Sister Xaveria that she was practically running when she reached the classroom.

The nun turned from the window. ‘Anna! You are very early.’

Anna caught her breath. ‘Aye, Sister Xaveria. I—’

‘You must try to say “yes”, Anna.’

‘Yes, Sister Xaveria. I—’

‘It is just as well that you are here, for we’ve received another letter from your uncle.’ As the nun withdrew the letter from her habit, she asked smiling, ‘Shall I read it to you?’

Anna would have said that she could read it for herself, but she knew well how rude it was to interrupt an elder, and Sister Xaveria had already begun to read aloud. As with each letter that had come from Uncle Maurice, there were several references to Anna and her studies, and to facets of her father’s life, as though her uncle sought to piece together for her sake a whole and rounded image of his brother by revealing him in parts, in minor words and deeds and preferences that only someone close within their family would have known.

She’d learnt so far that, like herself, her father had not liked to sit for long without a useful occupation; that he’d valued honesty; that books had been his solace, and that he could charm a wild bird into his hand – a rare accomplishment, in Anna’s view, and one she had been trying since, without success, to copy.

In this latest letter, Uncle Maurice wrote: ‘… if Anna seeks to calm her temper, she might use her father’s trick of counting backwards from one hundred, all in silence, which he claimed had never failed him.’

Anna smiled at that, as did Sister Xaveria, who set the letter down a moment as Sister Scholastica came in to ask a question of her. While the two nuns spoke within the doorway of the classroom, Anna picked her uncle’s letter up and gloried in the fact that she could read it for herself.

And then she frowned. She was still frowning when Sister Xaveria came back to finish the letter. ‘Why, Anna, whatever is wrong?’

Anna’s glance was a deep accusation. ‘My name is not in there,’ she said to the nun. ‘I have learnt how to read, and my name is not written at all in that letter.’

A light of astonishment mingled with something like pride brightened Sister Xaveria’s eyes. ‘You have learnt how to read?’

‘Aye, and what you have read me is not what my uncle has written.’

The nun asked, ‘Would you then believe I could tell you a falsehood?’ She looked down at Anna and thought for a moment, and then she went on, ‘Do you know what a cipher is, Anna? No? Well, read through this again, if you would. And then tell me what name he does mention, more often than others.’

Obedient, Anna read slowly once more through the letter, and said, ‘Mrs Avery.’

‘Correct. Mrs Avery is you, my dear. And where it speaks of your foxhound, that means of your father.’

‘But why would he not use the proper words?’

‘Well,’ said the nun, ‘when a person writes something they wish to keep secret, they sometimes make use of a cipher that alters the meaning of words, as your uncle has.’

‘So the bad men cannae read it?’ guessed Anna. She studied the letter a third time, with new eyes, and slowly came to realise, ‘He does mention me so many times.’

‘He does. And what does that reveal?’ Sister Xaveria was speaking like a teacher, now. ‘It is as I once told you, Anna: that which we do not expect to see, we rarely notice.’

Anna thought about this afterwards. It was the same thing that the nun had said when they’d been speaking of Dame Clare, and how although the lady lived within the convent as a pensioner, and surely ate and went to prayers, she went about unseen and unremarked by those who did not think to look for her.