The Firebird
Page 48By the time that Captain Jamieson was well enough to visit, Anna nearly had adapted to the convent’s hours, and learnt to sleep and wake in keeping with the pattern of the prayers. She’d started at her daily lessons, too, but on this morning now, when she was shown into the parlour by her teacher and she saw the captain sitting close beside the bars, she instantly forgot what she’d been taught and rushed towards him with a happy cry.
He looked a bit surprised, but still he stood and held the hands she thrust towards him through the bars, and when her teacher, Sister Xaveria, tried reminding Anna of the bounds of ladylike behaviour, Captain Jamieson assured the nun he did not mind.
‘It has,’ he told her, ‘been a long time since I’ve had so fair a welcome.’
Sister Xaveria nodded, and took a step back. She was one of the nuns Anna liked best. Beneath her black veil she had light-coloured eyes and a pleasant soft face with a mouth that, while frequently serious, had not forgotten how to smile, and Anna fancied that the nun was smiling now as she replied, ‘She has been hoping for your visit for some time. She’s talked of little else.’
‘Indeed.’ That seemed to please him. Keeping hold of both of Anna’s hands, he asked, ‘And what have ye been learning?’
Anna found she could not answer him, for suddenly she felt the clutch of something in her throat, and felt the heat rise in her face as unshed tears pressed stinging just behind her eyes. She had no voice.
The captain bent, and looked more closely, and his voice turned gentle. ‘Anna’.
And that gentleness undid her. Two great tears squeezed out and trickled down her burning cheeks, and Anna’s vision blurred with more as she looked up at Captain Jamieson, and still she could not speak.
She shook her head.
‘Are they unkind to you?’
She thought of saying yes, because he might then take her with him, but the nun and Christ upon his cross were watching her, and so she told the truth. She shook her head again, and this time managed words: ‘No, they are kind.’
His one hand let hers go so he could smooth the hair back from her cheek, and with his thumb he brushed a tear away, his own eyes growing shadowed. ‘D’ye miss your home? Did we do wrong to take ye from it?’
‘No.’ The word surprised her when she said it, for she realised that she meant it, but the misery welled up from somewhere deeper still inside her till the captain asked her, ‘What, then?’
Anna could not put a name to it. She could not find the way to tell him how she felt inside, the way a bird must feel, she thought, when it was caged; that she was weeping because she could no more walk where she might wish to walk, or say what she might wish to say, and that there was no beach where she could run.
The captain looked at her, and looked to where she held his hand, and in his eyes there grew a quiet light of understanding.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The convent church had bars as well, that ran the whole width of the altar, severing the space into the part within the cloister and the part where public worshippers could come and pray in peace. Until this morning, Anna had remained behind that screen and joined the nuns in their devotions at the designated hours. She and the other students were not roused within the night for matins, but they shared the sunrise prayers of lauds; the ‘little’ prayers throughout the day; and best of all, the peaceful evening vespers.
But as lovely as the prayers were, her attention had been commonly distracted by the flags hung in the choir, the captured colours of the enemy once taken in a nearby battle by a regiment of exiled Irish soldiers who’d stayed loyal to King James, and who had carried those flags here to be preserved as an example of their victory.
Quite often, while the nuns were at their prayers and Anna should have been as well, she found her gaze diverted upwards to those banners, while she, dreamy-eyed, imagined them a-flutter on the battlefield above the clash of men, her father in amongst them, and in her mind it was his own hands that tore the banners down …
There was less room, here in this austere space outside the choir, to harbour Anna’s daydreams, but she did not mind this morning, for she had the captain here to keep her company.
He seemed to limp more heavily upon his wounded leg, she thought. Or else perhaps she noticed it more keenly now. She tried to keep her own steps slow, and used as an excuse the nuns’ own teaching that she should not walk too quickly.
‘We are not to run,’ she said, ‘or make much noise.’
‘There are four of us.’ The other girls were older, she explained to him – her sister Mary’s age – and while she’d seen them at their lessons, she had never really spoken to them. ‘Sister Xaveria says we should try to be silent.’
‘Oh aye? Why is that?’
‘I think so we can better hear God talk to us,’ said Anna. ‘But I’ve never heard him yet. I’m no sae good at keeping silent.’
‘No?’ His mouth curved slightly.
‘We are allowed to sing,’ she told him, ‘and the nuns sing often at their prayers, although their songs are not so lovely as the cradle song ye sang about the maiden and her love.’