The Firebird

‘It is nothing,’ he said, when he noticed her looking. ‘’Tis only an ache in my leg from the damp; it will pass.’

The boy with the lantern stopped walking as well, at a narrow arched door, and said something briefly that Anna could not understand. On the ship coming over she’d heard foreign languages spoken, and had learnt a few words of Spanish and Swedish from some of the crew, but what the boy spoke wasn’t either of those. Colonel Graeme understood it, though, and even gave a short reply before the boy departed with the lantern in his hand, a swaying light that swiftly shrank to nothing in the darkness and took all the shadows with it as the night closed in around them.

As she huddled at the captain’s side the colonel rang a bell hung in the entryway, and all at once the door was opened to them in a wash of warmly yellow light, and Anna shut her eyes against the unknown and the brightness as she passed across the threshold with the men. When she dared open them again, she saw the three of them were standing in a neatly austere parlour with a screen of wooden bars fixed down its centre to divide the room in two.

It had nothing of the grandness of the Earl of Erroll’s drawing room at Slains, nor of the comfort of the main room of the cottage that had been her home till lately, but from how it had been furnished, with its carved wood chairs and paintings and the polished silver sconces with their candles, something told her this was meant to be the finest of the convent’s rooms. A place for guests.

Beyond the bars she saw the painted Christ upon his cross and felt his eyes upon her, neither suffering nor joyful, only steady as though he could somehow see within her soul and know how much she did not wish to stay here.

She was bothered by those bars. The colonel had explained to her, in detail, what a cloister was, and how the nuns had chosen to live separate from the larger world, and how they did not freely mix with those from the outside, but she had not imagined bars.

And when the farther door swung open and two figures, robed in black with veils drawn down over their faces, entered into that barred section of the parlour, Anna shrank from them as though they had been creatures in a cage.

She pressed more closely to the side of Captain Jamieson, and felt the weight of his hand settle warmly on her shoulder, reassuring.

‘Colonel Graeme, may I say how pleased I am that Providence has spared you,’ said the foremost nun. Her pleasant voice had something of a song in it that sounded only slightly foreign, Anna thought, remembering the nuns had come from Ireland into Flanders, and so kept their Irish way of speech.

The colonel made a show of great respect, and yet his eyes were smiling. ‘Were ye praying for me, Abbess?’

‘I was praying for the King, and trusted you’d be standing close enough beside him that God’s shield would guard you also.’ Her head turned slightly to the side as she said, ‘Sister Xaveria, would you kindly bring those two chairs forwards so that we may sit, for neither of these gentlemen will take a seat till we ourselves have done so, and the colonel looks incapable of standing any longer.’ With her veiled face angled now to Captain Jamieson, she asked him, ‘Are you wounded?’

‘It is nothing,’ said the captain for a second time, but Anna noticed he seemed grateful for the chance to sit, his injured leg stretched out before him as though it had grown too stiff for him to bend. She took the smaller armless rush-backed chair between his own and Colonel Graeme’s, and sat waiting with her fingers tightly clasped together in her lap.

The nuns appeared not to have seen her while the captain had been standing, but she felt the gaze of both of them upon her now. The nearer one, the Abbess, said, ‘And colonel, surely this must be your daughter or your niece, she is so like yourself to look at.’

Anna hadn’t yet been told she looked like Colonel Graeme, but he gave a proud nod now and told the Abbess, ‘Anna is my nephew’s lass, my nephew John, who lies at rest within your abbey here. He was a friend to you, as I recall, and you to him, and it seemed only right to bring his daughter here to let ye have the care of her, with him no longer able to protect her, and myself and Captain Jamieson away to serve the King.’

The captain shifted slightly at the mention of his name and drew the veiled nun’s steady gaze a second time before she gave her full attention back to Colonel Graeme. With a nod she said, in tones more quiet, ‘Aye, I well recall your nephew, and he was indeed a loyal friend to all of us. We’ll guard his daughter well.’

‘Her name is Anna,’ said the colonel. ‘Anna Mary. She has sheltered with a family north of Slains these past eight years, and for her safety she has used their name of Logan as her own. I’d think it best if she were entered in your records by that name as well, for even with her father dead his living brothers risk much for the King, and ’twould be safer for the lass and them if none else ever learn she is a Moray.’

The Abbess gave a nod of understanding and agreed that these were troubled days. ‘The Lord knows best, and yet it sorely grieves me that his plan so often brings our young king such keen disappointment, and costs many other men their lives and liberty.’

The colonel asked her, ‘Have ye news of any that were taken these past months in Scotland?’

‘No.’ The black veil rustled slightly as she shook her head. ‘Your son will doubtless have heard much, for where he is there are men daily passing through as refugees. But we ourselves,’ she said, ‘have had few visitors of late. The Duke of Ormonde, my great cousin, may have brought an end to Queen Anne’s war in Flanders, but the treaty that he wrought has seen us traded since from France to Austria, and so we see no more the loyal regiments of Irishmen who served the King of France to serve King James, and who were wont to give us presents and their company when e’er they passed. Nor do we any more receive the pension that the King of France did grant us. You will find us much reduced,’ she told the colonel. ‘Poor and friendless.’