The Firebird

Other men might have gone further, she thought, and remarked on the way that the frosted sea-green of the silk matched her eyes. Mr Taylor had done so. But Edmund O’Connor did no more than look her once over and tell her, ‘That gown’s an improvement by far on the black one. It makes you look less like a nun.’

‘That’s a good thing, then, is it?’

‘It is. Nuns are terrible creatures,’ he said with a mock shudder. ‘Always peering down their noses at you, smacking you with rods and such.’

‘If you were smacked, I’m sure you did deserve it. For my own part, I knew only love and kindness from the nuns that I did live with.’

‘Sure, you never lived with nuns, then.’ When her gaze assured him otherwise, he asked her, ‘When was this?’

‘When I was small.’ He seemed to study her so long she turned her head to him defensively. ‘You doubt me?’

‘No. I’m trying to imagine it.’ Whatever he imagined made him faintly smile. He looked away, and asked, ‘Which way, now?’ for the pathway lay divided just in front of them, in one direction angling through an avenue of sculptures, and in the other entering a double row of lime trees. To her eyes, the statues looked too much like people, a reminder of the crowds. She chose the trees, and was immensely pleased she’d done so moments later, when the fragrance of fresh lilac, newly blooming, trailed around them.

‘Could we stop?’ she asked, not caring if it sounded odd. ‘Just here, please, for a moment?’

Edmund stopped. ‘What is it?’

‘Lilacs,’ Anna said, and closed her eyes, and breathed the scent of them. They woke a memory, as they always did, of Scotland and of Slains, of childhood hours spent sitting underneath her favourite tree within the stone walls of the kitchen garden, with the lilac blossoms drifting down like snow upon her face and hair, the old tree’s branches shaken by the winds that blew forever from the sea.

It was a happy memory; something to be held, and when her eyes came open to find Edmund watching her, she shared it with him. ‘There was once a lilac tree I used to love,’ she told him, ‘growing close against the castle near the place I lived, when I was but a child. I still do love the scent of lilac.’

Edmund said, ‘So, you were raised beside a castle, and then placed with nuns. And is this commonplace, in Scotland?’

Anna, in her happy mood, was moved herself to mischief. ‘Aye. Are not you all raised likewise, sir, in Ireland?’

His glance held new appreciation of her wit. ‘Did you drink the wine,’ he asked her, ‘on the meadow?’

‘I did not. And if you’d have the truth of it, my first home was a cottage with one room and seven people in it, so you see my origins are humble.’

‘And what of it? I have patches on my sleeves and do not dance the minuet.’

She glanced at him in turn, and saw the way his jaw was set, and knew that he had overheard the cutting talk of Mrs Hewitt and her group of friends, and that for all his show of unconcern he had not been unmarked by it.

She had, herself, been fortunate in life to have Vice Admiral Gordon’s care and his insistence she be taught the necessary things to let her fit in with society. Not everyone, she knew, had that advantage.

Now she said, ‘As dances go, it is not difficult.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The minuet. It is a simple step to learn,’ she told him. ‘Shall

I teach you?’

‘Here?’

‘Why not?’

Unseen behind the trees and walls of living greenery, the practising musicians had begun a slower tune, in triple time, and Anna said, ‘The music even suits the dance. I’ll show you.’ And she raised her skirts a hand’s breadth from the ground so he could see her shoes as she began to demonstrate the simple pattern of the step. ‘Start with your right foot and step forward, rise and sink again, like this, and then the left, and then step quickly forward with your right and finish with your weight upon the left.’ It was an easy rhythm: right, and left-right-left, and right, and left-right-left, and right … a swaying, easy movement.

Edmund stood to one side, watching her. ‘You’re sure you did not drink the wine?’

She let the insult pass, still too contented in this place among the lime trees with their rustling, heart-shaped leaves and with the scent of lilacs strong about them, to allow him to provoke her into argument. ‘Are you afraid to dance, Mr O’Connor?’

Edmund looked at her a moment longer, and his mouth curved slowly to a smile. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he said, ‘of anything.’

‘Then come, I’ll teach you all of it, before the music changes.’

Accepting the challenge, he deftly unbuckled his sword and removed it, laying it down on the grass by the nearest tree as he came forward.

She told him, ‘Stand just there, that’s right, and I’ll start over here.’ The path was wide enough – not wide enough to make a proper dance floor in a ballroom, but sufficient to allow them space to start as though they stood in separate corners, as the dance demanded, facing on a line of the diagonal. ‘We start as with all dances,’ Anna said, ‘by paying honours to the top part of the room.’ She curtseyed, demonstrating, while he turned obligingly and bowed. ‘Now, do the same to one another.’ Which they did. He had a gallant bow, she thought, when he so chose to use it, and his hair gleamed very blackly in the shade as he removed his hat and set it on his head again.