The Firebird

Rob stretched his shoulders too, and while he rubbed his neck he shot a quick glance skywards. ‘Well, it’s likely just as well he rang. We’re going to get rained on, from the look of it.’

I looked as well, and saw the massing darker clouds that had come slowly creeping underneath the sunless stretch of grey, pushed into place by that cool breeze that now had risen so it bordered on becoming a light wind. I knew that if it rained we couldn’t sit here any longer. There were thick leaves on the branches of the tree that arched above us, but the breeze itself was blowing from the side; we’d have no shelter. I tried hard to hide my disappointment.

Rob turned. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Sorry?’

Patiently he said, ‘It’s nearly lunchtime. Are you hungry?’

There was no way it could be so late, I thought. We’d only just got done with breakfast, we’d had coffee, and …

‘It’s half past twelve.’ He turned his wrist to let me see his watch, as proof. ‘We could have lunch, and wait till this blows over, try again a little later.’

It took too much effort, thinking, so I told him, ‘Fine.’

Rob looked at me a moment, then he smiled and said, ‘Come on, then,’ and he walked with me across the narrow street and back along the little alley leading to Sint Jacobsstraat.

The first fat drops of rain began to fall as we came round that corner. By the time we reached the pink-and-orange-painted house a few doors up, the clouds let loose with vengeance and Rob laughed and turned his collar up as best he could against it, and he caught my hand in his and pulled me after him into a private covered driveway cut into the ground floor of the nearest house, just wide enough to let a car pass through into the little courtyard I could glimpse behind.

With dark brick walls, their bottom edges green with moss, and a low, wood-planked ceiling that muffled the noise of the rain, the space had a secluded feel, safely confined.

Rob shook aside the strands of dark hair dripping water in his eyes and said, ‘So much for lunch.’

‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘Were ye not?’ The brick walls cast his voice back in an echo, deepened with good humour. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a bar of chocolate here.’ I heard the rustling as he rummaged for it in his pocket. ‘If we split that, and you promise that you’ll feed me well tonight, I’m game to have another go.’

‘Right now?’ I looked at him with hope. ‘You’re sure?’

He answered me by snapping off a section of the chocolate bar and passing it across while he took stock of our surroundings with a practised eye. ‘We’re right within the convent walls, ye ken. It should be easier to see things.’

‘Was it harder, looking in from the outside?’

He shrugged. ‘I’d not say harder, not exactly, but it takes a bit more energy.’ He’d found the place he wanted, and he moved the few steps over to it, pressing back against the rough brick wall. He held his hand out. ‘Ready?’

For a single moment I considered what it was that I was doing, and how silly it would look to someone passing, and how dangerous it might be if the owners of the house came home and drove in with their car, and the hundred other ways that it was crazy.

Then I pushed it all aside, and took my mobile out, and turned it off, deliberately, and went across and took Rob’s hand and told him, ‘Ready.’

And I closed my eyes.

She wasn’t meant to hear.

She’d heard them say so, when they’d carried Captain Jamieson into the other room. She’d heard them say that it would frighten her to hear, that it would give the captain more pain if he thought that she could hear, so they had kept their voices quiet, and she’d kept her own eyes shut so they would not know she was listening, because she did not wish to cause the captain yet more pain.

He’d only groaned the once. She’d heard him through the wall, and she’d curled deeper in her bed and closed her eyes more resolutely, till his restlessness had seemed to pass.

The colonel had been in the kitchen talking to the surgeon then – a younger man whose voice and accent marked him as an Englishman, and who had come so hastily in answer to their call that he had taken several minutes to restore his breath.

He said, ‘For all they scarified the wound when he received it, there remains only one opening, and that is at the highest point so matter may not drain. The wound must slough and grow inflamed before it heals, and this it has not done, and so you have this problem of the discharge and the fever.’

‘Is there any of the musket ball remaining in the wound?’

‘I cannot say. The only remedy,’ the surgeon told the colonel, ‘is to make a second opening below the first, and probe it well, and then to draw a seton through the whole length of the wound.’

She did not know then what a ‘seton’ was. It would not be till morning when she saw the large, broad, evil-looking needle with its knife-like tip, and saw the strip of silk with which they’d threaded it, as wide as her own thumb, that she would understand why Colonel Graeme had exhaled so heavily.

His footsteps had been heavy, too, as he had crossed the floor to where the table stood, and lifting something from it that had clinked and sloshed like wine within a bottle, he had said, ‘Then he’ll have need of this.’

The sounds that she’d heard after that had been the worse because she’d known the captain did not mean to make them; that whatever they were doing to him tore the noises from him through clenched teeth, and that he strangled any sound he made before it could be fully formed.