The Firebird

Of all the men I’d ever dated, he remained the only one who’d ever done that.

‘Well,’ he said, when I remarked on it, ‘you’ve led a sheltered life. As I recall, you said you’d only had two boyfriends afore me. Unless you’ve had a couple since …’

I turned to look at him, expecting that his blue eyes would be teasing, and instead found they were nonchalantly guarded, and a bit too unconcerned.

I said, ‘I haven’t.’

And then, because I couldn’t hold his gaze, I looked away. There had been moments when I’d wondered whether Rob was seeing anyone, because it seemed a bit too unbelievable that after these two years he’d still be unattached, but when he’d come to Ypres with me I’d known without a doubt he wasn’t seeing anybody at the moment. He was far too much a gentleman to spend this kind of time with me alone, if he already had a girlfriend. He’d have counted it as being disrespectful to the both of us.

He swung my door closed and walked round to lean against the bonnet, and although the sun was too high now to catch him in the eyes, he took the dark sunglasses from his pocket, put them on, and settled back to look more keenly at … well, at whatever he was looking at.

I couldn’t tell, from watching him, if he was seeing things as they were now or as they had been, but I had the sense that he was standing with one foot in each reality, a bridge between the present and the past.

I let a moment pass in silence before prompting him with, ‘Well?’

‘Well, it’s a fair-sized town, Calais. We’re in the old part of it now, the part that stood within the town walls, with the moat all round it, back in Anna’s day. But even so, there were a lot of streets and houses then, and it was busy all the time with people, so there’s not much point in wandering round,’ he said, ‘to look for her. Like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

I had no doubt, having seen him work, that he could have found one of those, if he had set his mind to it. But clearly he had settled on a plan.

I prompted, ‘So?’

‘So, Calais was a guarded town. With walls. If Anna had been coming from the Channel side, by boat, with Father Graeme, they’d have had to use the harbour to the north. But when they left the convent, back in Ypres,’ he told me, ‘they were on the road. And if they travelled overland, as we did, they’d have come straight through that gate.’

I came around to lean beside him on the car, and looked. ‘Where is it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Rob, I can’t—’

‘You’re away off to Russia the morn,’ he reminded me. ‘When were you planning to practise?’ He had me there. Fully aware of it, he said, ‘I ken that you do things by touch. I’m not thinking you’ll see it the same way that I do, but you should be able at least to sense where the gate was, like you did with the convent.’

I gave it my best shot.

It took a few minutes. It wasn’t a small mental tug at my sleeve this time, as it had been in Ypres; more like a settling sensation of certainty, knowing without knowing why. ‘There.’ I pointed. ‘I think it was there. Am I right?’

For an answer, he draped an arm over my shoulders. ‘Let’s see.’

It threw me off balance, that casual touch. I’d grown used to the hand-holding, even though that on its own was an intimate contact, but this – with Rob’s arm a warm weight at the back of my neck and his hand resting loosely just over my sleeve – was the sensory equivalent of being hit by something like a brick, and it took all my concentration not to physically react.

But then I had to let that concentration lapse, to join my thoughts with Rob’s and see what he was trying now to show me. And that, too, was overwhelming.

I could see the old walls of Calais take shape, just there in front of us: tall, heavy walls of yellow stone, with crenellated battlements that rose above our heads and cast a deep and chilling shadow on the place where we were standing. And the gate was where I’d thought it would be, large and flanked by square protective towers, a great portal and portcullis with the carvings of what probably were royal coats of arms cut in the stone blocks set above the massive archway of its opening.

The size and scale and strength of those old walls was truly breathtaking, but that was not the thing that overwhelmed me. It was seeing all the people – soldiers walking round in blue coats with their swords and muskets, people dressed more plainly hauling merchandise of every kind, the chaos and the rolling wheels of carts and constant shouting doing battle with the sounds of clopping hooves and barking dogs and crying gulls. It was a full-on, no-holds-barred assault that left me reeling, and I had to pull away from it and come back to the present.

‘How on earth,’ I asked Rob, ‘are we going to find her in all that?’

‘With patience.’ When he took his arm away I found I missed the warmth of it. Perhaps he felt a little colder, too, because he folded both his arms across his chest and said, ‘She’s going to be moving, though, when we do find her, so the biggest challenge will be keeping up.’

‘You mean we’ll have to walk?’ I hadn’t thought of that. I looked around. ‘But Rob, these streets won’t all be in the same place, surely. Wasn’t Calais flattened in the war, and then rebuilt?’

‘Aye. But there were some bits still left standing, I can navigate by those.’

‘It’s not your navigational abilities I’m questioning. It’s …’