The Firebird

She raised her chin and said, ‘I ken fine who my father was.’ There was no trace of insolence in how she spoke the words, nor yet a tone of argument, but simply an assertion of the fact.

Her Uncle Maurice stared a moment, then the corners of his mouth turned upwards slightly. ‘I perceive you do not have his looks alone,’ he told her, ‘but also his temperament, God help ye.’ Softening, he said more gently, ‘God help ye,’ and rose to his feet.

‘I shall write,’ he told Sister Xaveria, ‘if you’ll permit it.’

‘Of course.’

And they blessed him and wished him Godspeed.

His first letter arrived three weeks later, addressed not to Anna herself but to Sister Xaveria, and saying nothing of any importance, but Sister Xaveria read it out loud to her anyway. ‘Tell my niece,’ he’d written, ‘that her father loved to read, and I do hope she will apply herself most diligently to her studies, that she may do likewise.’

Anna tried.

She had a gifted ear for languages, and soon could understand and follow much of what the Flemish-speaking lay sisters were saying while they worked, but printed words were something altogether different. Through the long heat of the summer and the early autumn she applied herself as diligently as she could, and still each time a letter came to Sister Xaveria from Uncle Maurice in Paris, the nun without asking would read it aloud, as though knowing the effort would bring Anna frustration.

Perhaps, Anna thought, that was why Captain Jamieson had never written a letter yet to her, from where he had gone. He was waiting until she could read them.

The thought made her try all the harder, until her hand ached in the evening from copying out the full alphabet, over and over, and she slept too soundly to hear the mysterious woman who wept still, but rarely.

And then, at the start of November, she took out the song sheet the captain had given her, as she did every day, and traced the bold slanted handwriting, and for the first time the lines and the loops formed themselves into shapes with a meaning.

She held her breath, not daring to believe it as her eyes raced downwards … there it was, her favourite of the verses, and she read – she truly read – the words the wandering maiden’s steadfast lover sang:

‘… cease thy weeping,

now listen to me,

For waking and sleeping,

my heart is with thee;’

Anna’s tight chest could scarcely contain all her fullness of joy and of pride, and so eager was she to reveal her discovery to Sister Xaveria that she was practically running when she reached the classroom.

The nun turned from the window. ‘Anna! You are very early.’

Anna caught her breath. ‘Aye, Sister Xaveria. I—’

‘You must try to say “yes”, Anna.’

‘Yes, Sister Xaveria. I—’

‘It is just as well that you are here, for we’ve received another letter from your uncle.’ As the nun withdrew the letter from her habit, she asked smiling, ‘Shall I read it to you?’

Anna would have said that she could read it for herself, but she knew well how rude it was to interrupt an elder, and Sister Xaveria had already begun to read aloud. As with each letter that had come from Uncle Maurice, there were several references to Anna and her studies, and to facets of her father’s life, as though her uncle sought to piece together for her sake a whole and rounded image of his brother by revealing him in parts, in minor words and deeds and preferences that only someone close within their family would have known.

She’d learnt so far that, like herself, her father had not liked to sit for long without a useful occupation; that he’d valued honesty; that books had been his solace, and that he could charm a wild bird into his hand – a rare accomplishment, in Anna’s view, and one she had been trying since, without success, to copy.

In this latest letter, Uncle Maurice wrote: ‘… if Anna seeks to calm her temper, she might use her father’s trick of counting backwards from one hundred, all in silence, which he claimed had never failed him.’

Anna smiled at that, as did Sister Xaveria, who set the letter down a moment as Sister Scholastica came in to ask a question of her. While the two nuns spoke within the doorway of the classroom, Anna picked her uncle’s letter up and gloried in the fact that she could read it for herself.

And then she frowned. She was still frowning when Sister Xaveria came back to finish the letter. ‘Why, Anna, whatever is wrong?’

Anna’s glance was a deep accusation. ‘My name is not in there,’ she said to the nun. ‘I have learnt how to read, and my name is not written at all in that letter.’

A light of astonishment mingled with something like pride brightened Sister Xaveria’s eyes. ‘You have learnt how to read?’

‘Aye, and what you have read me is not what my uncle has written.’

The nun asked, ‘Would you then believe I could tell you a falsehood?’ She looked down at Anna and thought for a moment, and then she went on, ‘Do you know what a cipher is, Anna? No? Well, read through this again, if you would. And then tell me what name he does mention, more often than others.’

Obedient, Anna read slowly once more through the letter, and said, ‘Mrs Avery.’

‘Correct. Mrs Avery is you, my dear. And where it speaks of your foxhound, that means of your father.’

‘But why would he not use the proper words?’

‘Well,’ said the nun, ‘when a person writes something they wish to keep secret, they sometimes make use of a cipher that alters the meaning of words, as your uncle has.’