The Firebird

There a man stood like no man she had ever met. He wore a long brown robe that brushed the floor and had a long hood hanging down behind, and at his waist his belt was made of simple rope. His beard was brown and long as well, though speckled through with grey, and he had cut his hair most strangely, with a short fringe all around and on the top no hair at all.

The Abbess Butler told her, ‘This is Father Archangel, and you must go with him, my child.’ There was a gate within the grille that Anna had not noticed ever, but the Abbess Butler swung it open now and herded Anna through it, careful not to leave the cloistered side herself. She pressed a parcel wrapped in rough cloth into Anna’s hands and told the brown-robed man, ‘’Tis all of her belongings – pray they are not lost to her.’

He gave a nod to show he understood, then came more close and bent to Anna’s level, taking her small shoulders in a warm and kindly hold. His beard and hair were strange and frightening to Anna, but his voice, when he did speak to her, was Scottish. ‘Anna, I am not a stranger, lass. Your father was my cousin.’

Anna blinked to clear the blurriness of sleep, and looked more keenly at his eyes. They were familiar to her.

Father Archangel. The name stirred something faintly in her memory. ‘Are ye Colonel Graeme’s son?’ she asked. ‘The one who was a soldier once?’

‘The very same. I’m sent to bring you to a place of greater safety.’

Anna did not move. ‘But Colonel Graeme and the captain said the nuns would keep me safe.’

Above her head the monk exchanged a silent glance with Abbess Butler, but he only said to Anna, ‘So they would, but for the danger that is coming there is little they can do. It is my father’s own instruction that you come with me.’

He smiled encouragement, and lightly squeezed her shoulder as he straightened with his hand outstretched, and told her, ‘Come. We must be on the road without delay.’

And still she did not move. ‘But Captain Jamieson is coming for me soon,’ she told them both, and to her own young ears her voice was small and powerless. ‘He’ll not ken how to find me if I leave.’

The monk looked once more to the Abbess. ‘Captain Jamieson?’

‘A travelling companion of your father’s,’ she replied. ‘The child was fond of him.’

‘He telt me I should bide here till he came,’ she said.

The Abbess Butler touched her hair. ‘I will be sure to tell the captain where to find you, child. Now go, and God be with you both.’

But Anna did not wish to leave. She looked again to Father Archangel, and tried to make him understand. ‘But I am safe right here,’ she told him. ‘I am safe.’

He looked at her with sympathy, and turning up his hood he took her hand. ‘Not any more.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Rob told me, ‘You’re getting attached to her.’

‘Why would you say that?’

He looked at me sideways. ‘Because you are.’

‘Yes, well.’ I turned from his too-knowing eyes as he opened the car door so I could slide in on the passenger side. ‘She’s a likeable child.’

‘Aye, no argument there.’ Shutting my door, he came round to his side and lowered himself to the seat a bit creakily, as though his legs were still stiff from the cold of the night before. He’d had only half a night’s sleep, and had not shaved this morning, but he was still easy to look at, the day’s growth of beard lending even more strength to his near perfect features. It just wasn’t fair, I thought.

Rob looked a question at me, and I realised I’d sighed, so I covered it now with a half-yawn and asked, ‘Are you certain they went to Calais?’

‘Aye. Not all of us fell asleep after the monk left with Anna.’ His glance was dry. ‘I heard the nuns talking. I ken where he took her.’

Calais wasn’t really an obvious choice, and I said as much. ‘I would have thought, in the wake of the 1715 rebellion, with all of those Jacobites coming across to escape persecution, it would have been crawling with spies.’

‘Very likely.’

‘Not really the safest of places to take her, then.’

‘I’m sure the monk had a plan. She could hardly have stayed here.’

He’d seen what I’d missed last night, after I’d fallen asleep on his shoulder. He’d stayed awake, sitting there on the grass, and he’d seen the arrival of two men in priests’ robes, with letters they’d claimed had come straight from Queen Mary in Paris.

‘She had a great fondness,’ the one priest had said, ‘for the child’s father, and she would have her kept safe at Chaillot.’

Abbess Butler had taken her time while she’d read through the letters. ‘I was not aware that the Queen knew the child was here with us.’

To which the priest had replied, ‘The child’s uncle did mention the fact, I believe, and the Queen at once ordered us here to escort her back safely.’

The Abbess had nodded, and read through the letters again while the priests stood and waited. And then she had said, ‘I regret you have wasted a journey.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, the child has already left us.’

The first of the priests had displayed a decidedly unpriestly show of frustration before he’d regained his composure. ‘With whom did she leave?’

When the Abbess pretended uncertainty, he’d asked more pointedly, ‘Girls of her age do not travel alone. Who did come to collect her?’