The Firebird

‘Ye liked that, did ye?’

‘Aye. Will ye sing it to me once again, so I can learn the words?’

‘Here?’ Glancing round he said, ‘’Tis hardly proper for a church. When I have pen and paper I will write the verses down for ye.’

She told him, ‘But I cannot read.’

‘Then ye will have to learn.’ He raised his head in thoughtful study of the window nearest them, its small panes letting light pass through to mark the floor they walked upon. ‘The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.’

‘Were you sent to school, when you were my age?’

‘Aye.’

‘And were ye made to hold your tongue?’

His mouth curved yet more broadly as he bent his head as though in contemplation of her problem. ‘’Tis a habit worth acquiring, keeping silent when ye can. ’Tis by their words that men betray themselves, and often by the smallest of their actions, which ye’ll rarely see unless ye hold your tongue and use your eyes instead. Ye’ll learn more of a man if ye look at his face when he’s looking at somebody else, than ye’ll learn any other way, but,’ he advised her, ‘ye have to keep silent to do it.’

She put this in practice by watching the captain’s face, seeing the way his mouth tightened whenever his left foot came down. But she could only keep silent a moment.

She said, ‘There’s a man who comes sometimes to Slains who was hurt in the same leg as you, only his surgeon took the leg clean off so now it just ends at his knee.’

‘Well, I’ve a mind to keep my own leg,’ he replied, ‘since the surgeon here shows no desire to have it.’

‘I do not like the surgeon,’ Anna said, and he looked down at her.

‘He is a good man.’ Then he faintly frowned and asked, ‘When did ye meet him?’

Anna frowned herself. ‘Why did he run that needle through your leg?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘What, the seton needle? How did ye … ?’

‘I saw it. They were cleaning it.’

The captain gave a nod, and looked away, and told her, ‘When a wound is festering and will not heal, it helps to use a seton. That’s the cloth. Ye saw that, too? This wide, and like a ribbon? So the surgeon threads his needle with the seton, and he pulls it through, and leaves a length of seton in the wound, with both its ends outside and hanging.’

Anna looked to where the barest outline of the bandaging around the captain’s thigh stretched out the fabric of his breeches. ‘Is it in there now?’

‘It is.’

‘Why?’

‘It acts like a wick in a lamp,’ he explained, ‘so the surgeon can introduce medicines, and so the festering matter can drain from the wound.’

Anna liked that he spoke to her as Colonel Graeme did, using the grown-up terms, as though he fully expected that she’d understand.

She asked, ‘Will ye have it there always?’

He shook his head. ‘No, when the surgeon decides, he will draw it back out.’

‘Will it hurt when they do that?’

He didn’t reply straight away. Then he angled his gaze down to hers. ‘I’ve had worse hurts,’ he promised her. ‘They heal.’

Still, she worried for his health between the times he came to visit her, and when two days had come and gone together with no sign of him, her worry grew to such a level that she could not concentrate upon her lessons or her meals. The Abbess Butler came herself to learn what had made Anna so distressed, and when she heard the cause, she sent a message to their neighbour’s wife, and made arrangements for that woman to take Anna from the convent for an hour to pay a visit to the captain.

He was sitting on the bed but fully dressed, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. ‘And what is this I hear?’ he asked her. ‘Pining for the likes of me? Ye want to have more sense.’ But he was smiling when he said it, and she thought that he looked privately as pleased to see her as she was to be there.

He looked paler than he should have been, more shadowed round his eyes, and she regarded the new bandage round his leg with some suspicion. ‘Did they take the seton out?’

‘They did. And straight away my leg became so melancholy from the loss,’ he said, ‘that it refused to carry me. ’Tis why I could not come to see ye these past days.’

His straight face did not fool her, and she told him so. ‘A leg can never tell ye what to do.’

‘Ye think not? Wait till you are my age, lass.’

That didn’t fool her either, because he was not so old. His hair was brown, still, and had not begun to whiten. When he saw how she was watching him, he flashed a sudden smile that made his face look even younger. ‘If ye want the perfect truth,’ he said, ‘the day they took the seton out I fell into a fever, and the surgeon would not let me leave my bed. But you can see he kept me occupied.’

Her own gaze followed his to where a small round table had been pulled up close beside the bed, a chessboard and its pieces set in waiting at its centre.

Captain Jamieson was watching her. ‘The colonel said it was a game ye like to play,’ he said, ‘and so I thought it best to practise.’

It was such a lovely chessboard that she could not take her eyes from it.

The captain told her, ‘Come,’ and with an effort moved his leg aside to make a place for Anna to sit on the edge of the bed, within reach of the table. ‘Will ye be white or black?’