The Firebird

If the research that I’d done on Sunday night when I got back from Scotland was to be believed, it wouldn’t take me long. The convent of the Irish nuns had been on this same street.

The air felt cool when I went out, and once again I seemed to have just missed the rain, for on the narrow pavement all the bricks were freshly wet and when I crossed the street I had to place my feet with care to keep from slipping on the cobblestones. Rob’s car was where we’d left it, parked with others at the little low-hedged square of trees and greenery in front of the old church – St James’s Church, my printed map informed me.

Like the better part of Ypres, it had been levelled in the First World War and reconstructed afterwards. They’d done a brilliant job. From where I stood, the church appeared to be its proper age and looked authentically medieval.

The street, too, had the look of illustrations from my childhood book of fairy tales: the crowded curving line of old brick houses with their distinctively stepped gables and their chimney pots. On top of one, a lonely-looking mourning dove had settled and was calling rather plaintively across the steep tiled roofs.

Apart from me, the only creature that appeared to take an interest in the bird’s repeated crying was a little black and white cat that had stopped right at the pavement’s edge to prick her ears and listen. When she saw me, she arched herself up and came forwards on dainty white paws to investigate, while I looked at my map again.

There was no mark to tell me where the convent of the Irish nuns had stood. It, too, had fallen victim to the guns of the Great War and been reduced to rubble. I had found a faded photograph online that had been taken shortly after that, and it had shown a section of the ruined façade still standing, starkly black and white against the tumbled mounds of scorched and broken stones and bricks and tiles. I’d printed that as well, but looking at it now I could see nothing in the photograph, no landmark, that could give me any clue as to the spot where the photographer had stood to take that picture, so I couldn’t try to replicate the angle.

At least, I thought, my reading had assured me there would be a plaque.

It wasn’t till I’d walked the whole length of the street to the small tidy roundabout at the far end, then turned around and come back up on the opposite side, all the way past the hotel and up the short distance to where the street opened out into the main square of Ypres, that I realised I might have a problem.

I tried again. Winding up at the green square in front of the church for the second time, I faced the black and white cat, who had climbed to the roof of the car beside Rob’s and was watching me idly, as though I was giving her some entertainment. I told her, ‘Well, that’s odd.’

She blinked at me.

‘What’s odd?’

The voice wasn’t female – or feline – but that didn’t keep me from jumping a little as I spun to find Rob a few steps behind me, with two cups of takeaway coffee held warm in his hands. He had clearly been out and about. Wedged between his chest and bicep was a crinkled paper bag that smelt like heaven in a way that only came from proper bakeries, and my stomach did a rumble in response. ‘Are those croissants?’

‘I got a wee assortment,’ he said, passing me my coffee so he’d have a hand free to hold out the bag. ‘I go all shoogly in a pastry shop, I just take one of everything.’

I chose a chocolate-covered something, and was halfway through it when he asked again, ‘What’s odd?’

‘What? Oh. There’s meant to be a plaque that says exactly where the convent was, but I’ve been up and down the whole street twice and I can’t find it.’ Looking at him hopefully I asked, ‘You don’t see any ghostly Benedictine nuns about, I take it?’

He grinned and glanced round. ‘Sorry, no.’

‘Well, then. Maybe there’s a library in town that has old maps.’

Rob’s glance flicked to me, then, in that briefly shuttered way that made me think he knew something I didn’t. I asked him, ‘What?’

He shrugged his broad shoulders and made a great show of selecting a pastry. The cat, little traitor, had gracefully moved one car closer to Rob and was watching the bag with a great deal of interest.

‘We’ll not need a map,’ he remarked.

‘You can find it without one?’

His eyes said the answer was obvious. ‘I wasn’t thinking of me.’

‘Rob, I can’t. I can’t just … see things.’

‘You’ve no need to see it, you’ll feel where it is. It’s like dowsing.’

‘Yes, well, I can’t dowse, either.’

‘You’ll never ken half of the things ye can do,’ was his reasoning, ‘if you won’t try.’ He was stating a fact, not reproaching me. Nor was it really a dare, though I couldn’t not take it as one.

I felt torn. On the one hand, I wasn’t like Rob; I wasn’t nearly as gifted as he was, I knew that, and really, it suited me fine. I had no great desire to step out of my safety zone.

But on the other hand, I truly did want to help Margaret Ross. And in two days I’d be in St Petersburg, all on my own, and I might have no choice but to use my own gifts then, or else I might never find what I was hoping to find. I’d have wasted my one shot at chasing her Firebird.

Practising now, with Rob’s guidance, seemed logical.

Still, I couldn’t decide. ‘What if somebody sees us?’

‘And what will they see? Were ye planning to spin around widdershins, chanting or something?’