The Firebird

And then he’d unexpectedly been brought back to the present by the nudgings of a small dog and the feeling of a tennis ball pressed wetly to his hand. The dog, a little flop-eared spaniel spotted brown and white, had seemed entirely unrepentant for the interruption. Dropping the wet tennis ball, well caked with sand and slobber, in Rob’s lap, it had backed off a step and crouched, tail wagging fiercely in encouragement.

A young man on the beach below had called up an apology. ‘He’s not my dog,’ he’d told Rob, ‘he’s my brother’s. I’d have taught him better manners. Angus, come on now.’

But Rob, dog-lover that he was, had reassured the other man it was no bother, and he’d made a fuss of Angus, throwing out the ball along the beach a few times while exchanging comments with the other man about the weather and the quickest way to reach the castle.

‘Just mind how you go, after all of this rain,’ had been the man’s advice. ‘The path will be pure mud, and there are places you’ll come too close to the edge to wish to slip.’

He’d called the dog back and they’d headed off towards the row of houses waiting on the far side of the footbridge while Rob, left alone once more, had turned his mind again in search of little Anna.

‘But,’ I asked him, playing sceptic, ‘how can you be sure that it was Margaret’s Anna? Anna would have been a common name, in those days, both in Russia and in Scotland. We don’t know that she was Scottish.’

‘True enough.’ He admitted he hadn’t been sure. ‘But she felt right.’

Not really the kind of hard proof we could offer to experts, I thought.

Rob said, ‘Experts be damned.’ He glanced round at me. ‘Surely ye’ve felt at least once in your life, simply felt it, that something was right?’

It wasn’t only that he’d read my thoughts so easily. He was sitting too close, and his eyes were too blue, too distracting. I dragged my gaze free and looked back at the water and asked, ‘Did you find her again, then?’

‘Oh, aye.’ At the edge of my vision I saw his head angle away once again and I knew he was looking towards the strip of sea-wet sand that glistened in the sun. ‘Not as she was when I’d left her,’ he said, ‘but I found her.’

She’d been older by a few years, maybe seven now, he guessed, or eight. But even so he’d known her by her brown curls, blowing wildly in the wind, and by her laughter.

As before, she’d been with other children, only three others this time, the eldest practically a teenager and hanging back to walk beside the woman Rob had taken for their mother, while the youngest boy and Anna ran ahead.

The boy was chasing seagulls, only chasing them at first and charging at them when they sank from flight to settle on the sand, so that they rose again and shrieked and wheeled to ride the wind above the little family.

Anna screamed at him in her turn, ‘Stop it, Donald! Leave them be!’

The boy had grinned, and being slightly older and a full head taller than the little girl, had kept his distance easily. But when he’d stooped to pick a bit of driftwood from the sand and taken aim at a young seagull that had not been quick enough to fly away, the girl had closed the space between them in a lunge that knocked him over.

Anna, for all her small size, had the best of the brief fight that followed, refusing to be dislodged till Donald’s swinging hand caught her a blow on the side of her head.

‘Donald!’ That was their mother, advancing to put a swift end to the battle. ‘Stop that! What sort of a mannie are ye, taking your hand off your sister’s face?’

‘She took her hand offa mine!’ Donald, scrambling upright, looked fiercely defiant. ‘And fit wye are ye allus taking her side of things? I’m your own son! She’s not even a Logan.’

Anna, still rubbing the side of her head, stopped abruptly. The air had gone suddenly still. The two other children, a few feet away, traded glances as Donald himself seemed to wish the words back, shifting guiltily under his mother’s incredulous gaze. Then all eyes swung to Anna.

She rose to her feet in the silence, a little bit shakily, seeking reassurance in her mother’s face and finding something else, something that looked more like apology.

Her lower lip began to quiver. ‘Are you not my mother?’

‘Anna.’

‘Am I not a Logan, truly?’

‘Anna,’ came the pained reply, ‘I love you as my own, I always have, I—’

‘No!’ The shout was meant to shut the explanations out, to shield the girl’s emotions from a new assault.

The woman reached her hands towards the little girl, a shine of tears beginning in her own kind eyes, but Anna wrestled free and shouted ‘No!’ again, and ran, as though the devil and his army of dark angels were pursuing her.

Rob paused to drain the last bit of his tea, which must by now have been as cold as ice, and told me, ‘She ran there.’

I looked where he was pointing, to the headland by the harbour, and the line of cliffs beyond it. ‘To Slains Castle, do you mean?’

‘I think so, aye.’

I was surprised he hadn’t followed her, but when I said as much he only gave an offhand shrug and said, ‘Well, that was when you called me, so I reckoned I should wait for you.’

Always the gentleman, I thought.

If Rob read me that time he didn’t respond, he just rolled to his feet like an athlete and stretched out his shoulders before reaching down with his free hand to help me up, too. ‘Let’s go find her,’ he said.