The Firebird

She wasn’t meant to hear them. She was meant to still be sleeping, huddled warmly in the long bed with her brothers and her sisters, for in truth it was but first light and the day had not yet properly begun, and it was plain from how her father and her mother and the colonel and his friend were talking, quietly and low, with care, that what they spoke of was not for the children’s ears.

Her mother seemed distraught. ‘So close?’

The colonel nodded. ‘Half a day behind us, and perhaps by now much less than that.’

Her father raked his hair back with one hand, the way he always did when forced to think more rapidly than was his wont. ‘The King?’

‘Is safe,’ the colonel said. ‘We saw him off ourselves.’

‘He’d scarcely landed,’ was her father’s comment, edged with bitterness.

The colonel didn’t offer any argument, which made her father bold enough to follow with, ‘How can he now abandon all who’ve fought and bled this winter in his cause?’

The colonel’s steady gaze held something like a challenge. ‘Would ye now abandon him?’ When he was met by silence, he went on, ‘The King must play upon a larger board than you and I. Sometimes a piece must fall so that the rest of them survive, but I assure you he does feel such losses keenly, and his leaving of this shore was yet the hardest choice that I have seen him make.’

‘Aye, ’twill be very hard to watch our ruin from the safety of his ship.’

‘The sea,’ the colonel said, ‘is never safe. Have not ye learnt the truth of that in all these years, lad, that ye’ve been a fisherman?’

Her father met the colonel’s gaze, but grudgingly. ‘Why did you not go with him?’

‘The King has other men to keep him safe, and with that devil Argyll’s army in pursuit along this coast mere hours behind us, there are others more in need of my protection.’

Anna huddled in the blankets as the sharp wind struck the cottage walls and wailed outside as though it wanted entry. She knew little of the battles that had occupied her parents’ talk since harvest time, except a cousin of her father’s had been killed at Sheriffmuir, wherever that might be, and from what Colonel Graeme had just said it seemed that death had been the devil’s doing. Pressing closer to her sleeping brother’s side for warmth, she tried to shut her ears to all the shrieks of winter wind; tried blotting out the vivid image of the devil and his army drawing nearer by the minute.

She could hear her mother speaking. ‘We are grateful to you, Colonel, for the warning. And to you,’ she told the other man, who’d waited all this time in patient silence, ‘Mr … ?’

‘Jamieson,’ the colonel gave the answer. ‘Captain Jamieson.’

The man within the doorway gave a brief nod to her mother, and from deep beneath her blankets Anna peered at him more closely. He was younger than the colonel, near to her father’s age, but rougher-looking with his bearded face.

Her mother told him, ‘You are wounded, sir.’

His leg above the knee was slowly leaking red into the brown stains of the bandage now, but with a shrug he told her, ‘I can travel.’

‘So must you,’ the colonel told her parents. ‘Gather up the children, there are French ships waiting just offshore to carry us.’

‘And English ones to keep them there, no doubt.’ Her father’s voice was grim. He shook his head. ‘I’ll take no ship, nor risk my children to the English guns. I’ll take my family overland to Slains. The castle walls are thick enough for safety, and I’ll warrant even Argyll will be like to tread with care upon the Earl of Erroll’s property.’

‘A man like Argyll,’ said the colonel, ‘cares not where he treads. And when he comes, with his dragoons and all his hired band of foreign soldiers who have never heard the Earl of Erroll’s name, what then?’

‘You’re saying I cannot protect my family?’

‘I am saying,’ said the colonel, ‘that a fox that goes to ground may be dug out.’

Her father stood more straight. ‘And one that makes a dash across an open field risks just as much.’

The two men faced each other down with level stares and stances, neither willing to give ground. At length her father glanced away and finished stubbornly, ‘My family goes to Slains.’

The colonel held his tongue a moment longer, then he gave a nod. ‘If ye will not be swayed, sir, then that surely is your right. But understand that I must guard my family as I will.’ Her father frowned as though he did not fully understand, and so the colonel spelt it out for him: ‘Ye take your children where ye must, but Anna comes with me.’

When the captain, at his shoulder, shifted slightly on his feet as though to protest, Colonel Graeme said, ‘She is my nephew’s daughter, and her blood is bound to mine, and for the love I bore her father and the love he bore her mother I’ll be damned if I will ever let the lassie come to harm. She comes with me.’

The captain glanced towards the bed where Anna and the other children lay, and Anna was so fascinated by the hardness of his face she did not look away, but met his eyes. If it surprised him that she was awake and listening, he gave no outward sign of it. He only held her gaze a moment, studied her, and finally said, ‘Good morning.’

All the others turned to look at her as well, and since there was no point in hiding in the blankets any longer Anna sat up fully, straightening her back as her own gaze slipped to the colonel and she asked him, ‘Is the devil really on his way here?’