The Firebird

They were deep in play when someone knocked upon the door, and Anna’s Aunt Kirsty stepped into the room, her worried expression dissolving as she saw the two of them sitting there playing. She said in relief, ‘Colonel Graeme, ye’ve found her.’

‘She found me, in fact,’ said the older man. ‘And I’ve been glad of the company. Faith, I’ve not faced such a clever opponent since I taught her mother to play this game.’

Kirsty asked, ‘You taught her mother?’

‘I did,’ he said, lifting his gaze very briefly to hers as though telling her something in silence before adding, ‘here in this very room, and with these men.’

Anna looked at him keenly, intrigued that her aunt had addressed him as ‘Colonel’. She asked, ‘Were you a soldier, like your father and my own?’

He smiled and admitted, ‘I’m soldiering still, lass. ’Tis why I am now come to Slains, as it happens. And since ye’ll be burdened with me for the rest of the summer at least, ye’ll be able to have your revenge on me.’

‘What for?’ she asked him.

‘For this.’ With a move of his aged hand, he moved his white knight to capture her queen. ‘Checkmate.’

Anna indignantly reached out to lift her king out of harm’s way. With the painted piece clear of the chessboard and clutched to her chest so that only the top of his black head showed in her small fist, she said, ‘No, you’ll not have him.’

The Colonel sat back in his chair for a moment, then traded a look of amusement with Anna’s Aunt Kirsty. ‘Aye, lass,’ he said warmly to Anna, approval at war with another emotion in his smiling eyes, ‘ye’ve the heart of a Jacobite.’

CHAPTER TEN

He was walking her home.

It felt strange to be following people I couldn’t see, but I had faith that Rob, walking behind me, saw clearly enough for the both of us, so when he said Colonel Graeme and Anna were just up ahead I believed him. They were, from the angle at which he was watching them, slightly more inland and not quite so close to the cliff’s edge as we were, but they were three hundred years in the past where no fenced fields impeded them, blocking their access and forcing them onto the coast path.

I saw them as Rob was describing them: Anna on restlessly dancing feet leading the weathered old soldier along.

Rob said, ‘He’s not a tall man. He’s not all that old, either, not by our standards. He’d be in his sixties, I’d guess. And he’s not walking now like an old man at all, but like someone who’s spent his life marching – his back’s straight, his head’s up except when he bends it to listen to her. He’s got grey hair, combed back and tied here,’ Rob said, putting one hand at the nape of his neck, ‘into one of those, what d’ye call them? The wee braided tail things.’

‘A queue?’

‘Aye, that’s it. It goes well with the cape and the sword.’

I glanced over my shoulder. ‘He’s wearing a cape? In the summer?’ I couldn’t quite picture that.

‘Only a short cape,’ said Rob. ‘It’s attached to his coat at the back, at the shoulders, and hangs to his knees. And his coat’s a bit shorter than that again, maybe to here.’ His one hand brushed his leg at mid thigh. ‘It looks more like a really long waistcoat, without any sleeves, and he’s wearing a plain white shirt underneath that, and a plain pair of breeks, and high boots.’

‘In the summer?’

‘I’m not the one dressing him.’ Rob’s voice was dry.

‘Is he really her uncle, then?’

‘Great-uncle, aye. Anna’s father was his sister’s son, if ye work it all out.’

I was thinking. ‘If he was a colonel, I wonder if there’d be some record of him somewhere, then? It’s a fairly high rank, colonel, isn’t it?’

Rob shrugged and said, ‘He’d have been in the French army, likely, if he was a Jacobite. I no ken what kind of records they kept.’

‘He said that his father was somebody famous. “Black” somebody.’

‘”Black Pate”,’ Rob said. ‘As in “black head”, so I’m guessing that his hair was black. And, aye, I mind his name getting a mention or two in the history books.’

‘Maybe the history books mention his sons, as well.’

‘What would that prove?’

‘Well, for one thing,’ I said, ‘it would prove Colonel Graeme existed.’

Rob countered with logic, ‘I ken he existed. He’s walking right there.’

‘But no one else can see him, Rob. And knowing something’s not the same as proving it. I mean, right now we can’t even prove Anna Logan existed,’ I pointed out. Stumbling over a rock in the path, I stopped walking and sighed. ‘This is probably hopeless, you know, what we’re doing. A fool’s errand.’

Rob had stopped walking as well, and was standing a half-step behind my right shoulder, from where he could easily keep me from tumbling over the cliff if I slipped. ‘How’s that, then?’

‘It just is. We can’t prove anything, this way. How can we?’ With a sigh, I tried explaining. ‘All I really wanted was for you to hold the Firebird so you could tell me something of its history – who had made it, and how Empress Catherine came by it, and when and why she’d given it to Anna, or at least where Anna lived, there in St Petersburg, and those would have been things I could investigate. But this …’ Lifting one hand in the general direction of where Colonel Graeme and Anna had gone, I said, ‘We’re following a little girl, Rob, and you said yourself she can’t be more than eight years old, which means it might be ages yet until she gets the Firebird. Besides which, we’re in Scotland, not in Russia.’