The song was slow, as were the words, and touched with something close to weariness that made them seem to hang a moment in the room’s hushed air:
‘O’er hills and high mountains,
long time have I gone,
And down by the fountains,
by myself all alone;
Through bushes and briars,
I walk without care,
Through perils and dangers,
for the loss of my dear.’
He sang the last four lines again, the way the tune demanded, and the fiddle joined him for the final line and carried on with him through all the many verses that came after, till its pure and clear lament was interwoven with the captain’s voice that wrapped round Anna like the dark and soothing night.
He sang about a maiden who passed all her days in wandering and loneliness because she had been driven from the side of her true love, and wanted only to be near him once again.
Anna felt her eyelids growing heavy as she listened, and at length she let them close, but still she kept awake to hear yet more about the maiden, always wandering, in hopelessness and tears.
And when the maiden’s lost love finally heard her weeping and returned to bring her comfort, Anna smiled against the roughness of her blankets as the captain in his deep voice sang the man’s vow to the maiden:
‘My love, cease thy weeping,
now listen to me,
For waking and sleeping,
my heart is with thee;
Love, let nothing grieve thee,
and do not complain,
For I never will leave thee,
while life doth remain.’
Both voice and the fiddle repeated the last loving lines of that promise, but Anna was already drifting in slumber and heard nothing after ‘I never will leave thee’ because she could feel herself being pulled down like a weight into darkness.
Her dreams were a confusion of bright images and darker sounds, and once she felt that she herself was lost amid the hills and did not know the way to turn to find the path to lead her homeward, and she panicked for a moment till she heard the captain’s voice, not far off, saying quietly, ‘Ye’d salt the wound.’
‘’Tis past time someone healed it,’ Colonel Graeme said, as low, and then the hills were gone and Anna was behind the sturdy convent bars surrounded by the black-veiled forms of women, and they closed around her till she could not see beyond the blackness, and she pushed against it.
Something crashed.
It startled her to wakefulness.
She heard the murmured voices from the far side of the room, the captain saying he was fine, he’d only fallen, and the colonel asking questions, and the captain saying he should leave it be. ‘Ye’ll waken Anna.’
‘She’s asleep yet,’ said the colonel. ‘Let me look at it.’
‘I’ve telt ye there’s no need.’
But Colonel Graeme had already risen from his chair, a looming shadow in the room, made larger by the faint glow of the firelight. Stepping past Anna he borrowed a flame from the hearth with a candle and carried it back to the place where the captain half-sat and half-lay on the floor by the table.
‘Let me look at it,’ the colonel said again, and this time, though the words were hardly louder than a whisper, they still sounded like an order.
Anna’s eyes were mostly shut, but through the curtain of her lashes she could see the captain gingerly unwind the length of bandage from his leg, and Colonel Graeme took the candlestick more firmly in his hand and bent to look, and then he said a word she’d only ever heard her Uncle Rory say when he’d been pushed beyond his limits, for it was an ugly word.
‘How long,’ the colonel asked the captain, ‘has it been like this?’
When stubborn silence met him he glanced up and asked more forcefully, ‘How long?’
‘A week. A little longer, maybe.’
This time Anna did not know the word the colonel used, but Captain Jamieson said warningly, ‘Mind what you say. The lass—’
‘—is sleeping,’ Colonel Graeme said, and spoke the word again, with feeling. ‘How the devil did ye walk on that?’
‘I had no choice.’
‘On top of it, ye’re burning with a fever, lad. We need to fetch a surgeon.’
‘I thank ye, no,’ the captain said. ‘I have been bled enough. I’ll heal.’ He pushed the colonel’s hand aside and, reaching for the toppled chair behind him, used its sturdy side as leverage while he laboured to his feet. ‘I’ve always healed.’
‘Some wounds,’ the colonel told him, ‘are more complicated.’
Or at least that was what Anna thought she heard him say … she wasn’t paying full attention, because suddenly the captain seemed to sway and lose his balance, and his shadow on the wall collapsed to nothing as he fell.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rob was rubbing his own leg, to work out the stiffness.
I asked, ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I’m just not used to sitting so long.’ He was standing now, flexing his knee to restore circulation. He asked, with a nod at my mobile, ‘What did he want this time?’
‘He needed a letter I’d written to one of our clients.’ Ordinarily I wasn’t all that bothered by Sebastian’s constant calling when I wasn’t in the office, but this morning I’d been less pleased by the interruption.
Rob had heard the mobile ringing first, and he had smoothly switched the focus of his concentration back into the present from the past, and brought me with him. I had found the change more difficult. A part of me, a large part, wanted only to be back there in the dark warmth of that kitchen, to find out why Captain Jamieson had fallen, and what Anna had done next.