The Firebird

Anna nodded, and she felt the roughness of his shirt against her cheek. ‘Because the people hunting for my father might have used my mother ill to make him do the things they wanted.’

‘Aye. And when your father was away and fighting and ye were a bairn, why did your mother hide ye with another family?’

‘So the bad men widnae find me,’ Anna said.

‘Exactly.’ Colonel Graeme’s voice was a deep rumble in his chest that offered comfort. ‘They were very brave, your parents. If the agents of Queen Anne had ever chanced to catch your father, he’d have stood through any torture they’d have tried to use upon him, and he never would betray his King. But if they’d learnt ye were his daughter, if they’d ever taken ye or threatened ye with harm … well, then.’ The colonel did not specify what Anna’s father might have done then. All he said was, ‘Men can bear most hurts, lass, but there’s few of us can bear to see the ones we love best made to suffer for our sake.’

‘But Queen Anne’s dead,’ said Anna, ‘and my father, too. So who is left to do me harm?’

‘Your father still has brothers, lass, and they still serve the King. And so do I.’ His hand felt heavy on her hair. ‘Those men who sought your father would be happy to lay hold of any one of us and turn us to their cause, and they’d use any means to do it.’ Still more plainly, ‘They’d use anyone to do it, any person we did love. They’d try their best to capture ye, to hold ye hostage. Maybe worse. And that is why,’ he said, ‘I cannot take ye with me.’

She was not persuaded. ‘You’re a soldier, you could guard me.’

‘No, ye will be safer here. But I would never leave ye undefended. Here.’ He set her slightly back from him so he could tuck his book back in his pocket and exchange it for another, smaller item. ‘This,’ he told her, ‘was your father’s.’

Anna did not try to hide her curiosity. She reached to take the necklace Colonel Graeme held towards her, and she stared. ‘It is a stone.’

A little black stone with a hole worn in its middle, through which somebody had strung a leather cord.

The colonel said, ‘My grandmother would tell us children always, if we chanced to find a wee stone with a hole in it, we ought to wear it round our neck to keep away all evils. And your grandmother, my sister Anna, telt the same tale to your daddie when he was a lad himself, and all his life he kept his eye out for a stone like that, until …’

‘He found it?’

‘No.’ The colonel smiled the smile that warmed his eyes. ‘Your mother found that stone for him, one day while they were walking out together on the long beach close by Slains.’

The same beach, Anna thought, where she herself had run so freely and so fast that sometimes she had felt she might take flight and leave the ground to hang upon the sea wind, like the wheeling gulls whose shadows raced across the sand. She touched the stone with one small finger, wonderingly, and felt its smoothness, warm from Colonel Graeme’s pocket.

‘When your father went away from Slains, to come back here to fight,’ the colonel said, ‘your mother gave that stone to him to wear around his neck, to keep him safe.’

The corners of her mouth drooped, just a little. ‘Then it does not work. Not truly.’

‘Ye’ll believe what ye believe,’ said Colonel Graeme, with a fatalistic shrug. ‘But Malplaquet was not the only battle that your father fought, and I did see him many times afore that day walk clear through cannon fire that would have made an end of any other man. So he believed it, and I daresay I believe it, too.’

He watched her while she gazed down at the stone, with faith and reason tumbling over one another in her heart, until she finally closed her fingers round the gift and held it tightly, and remembering her manners thanked the colonel.

‘You’re most welcome. As I said, I would not leave ye undefended. Anyway, ye’ll have the nuns to see ye do not come to harm.’

If Anna made no answer it was only because, privately, she did not think the Irish nuns of Ypres could be a match for Colonel Graeme and the captain when it came to taking care of her.

As if he’d read her mind, the colonel added, ‘And, of course, ye’ll still have Captain Jamieson awhile, for he’ll be biding in this house until his leg has healed to satisfy the surgeon.’

That cheered her. ‘Can I visit him?’

The colonel with affection brushed a curling strand of hair back from her eyes and shook his head and said, ‘He would not have ye see him lie abed. It makes him surly and ill-tempered. But one day, when he is better, he’ll come visit ye himself.’

Two weeks had come and gone since Colonel Graeme had left Anna at the convent and had handed to the Abbess the small parcel that he’d carried out of Scotland, with the nightdress and the lock of hair wrapped carefully inside it. ‘That is all the lass has left of her own mother,’ said the colonel, ‘and I pray ye guard it well for her.’

He’d bent to Anna then and said farewell and kissed her for a final time, and then he had been gone. The Abbess Butler had turned back her veil.

She’d looked much older and yet not as frightening as Anna had imagined, with a long face and plain features that were dominated by her nose and forceful chin. Her eyelids sagged, but Anna thought her hands were truly beautiful.

‘My child, come,’ she’d said, and held those lovely hands towards her, ‘let us show you how we live, and see you settled.’