The Firebird by Susanna Kearsley Page B

still ducked his head under the long-vanished lintel as he crossed the threshold, and I felt a curious urge to do likewise. I envied him, envied the things he was seeing, and I think he must have been fully aware of that, too, because he started taking more care with his verbal descriptions, more time with the details, until he was painting the picture so vividly I, too, could see the flagged floors and the broad open hearth and the women who turned from their work in surprise as young Anna ran by with her face streaming tears.
    Following Rob as he followed the girl through the twists of the corridors, I wasn’t seeing the deep roofless passages open above to the cries of the gulls, where the wind off the sea became suddenly stilled and the shadows fell thickly. Instead, in my mind, I was seeing what Rob was describing: the warm plastered walls and the ceilings and floorboards, and doors leading off into storerooms and sculleries. This was the servants’ dominion, this ground level, but Anna didn’t stay here.
    She ran up, to the rooms that no longer existed because all the beams and the floorboards had long ago fallen away, leaving shells of the walls with their great gaping windows, and even if I’d climbed the crumbling circle of stairs that remained, I could never have followed her.
    Rob could, though.
    Stopping a moment, he looked up as though he were getting his bearings, then with his gaze fixed on a place in mid-air he changed course and walked till he was under it, leaning his shoulders against the high wall that was all that divided the room we were in from a dizzying drop down the cliffs to the sea.
    With a nod of his head he said, ‘She’s in the library.’
    I asked him, ‘What’s she doing?’
    And he told me.
     
     
    Slains was not her home, and yet she knew its corners well, from trailing after her Aunt Kirsty while she did her work. The earl had always treated her with kindness, and she’d always found a comfort in this corner of the library – her hiding place, tucked safely out of sight behind the tallest, broadest armchair that sat angled to the fireplace. There was no fire now, it being summer, yet the corner kept its warmth and sheltering appeal, and Anna curled herself within it, arms wrapped tightly round her knees.
    She heard the voices rise and fall downstairs, her mother’s voice among them.
No
. She caught the thought and changed it. Not her mother. Donald’s mother, but not hers. Not any more.
    Her breath snagged painfully within her chest, and then she held it altogether as she heard firm steps approach along the corridor. A handle turned, the door began to open, and she pressed her face with eyes tight-closed against the leather chair back, crouched as quiet as a beetle in her corner.
    The door swung shut. She couldn’t see the person who’d come in, but she could tell it was a man because his boots made a distinctly heavy sound against the floorboards. He walked straight towards her chair and she shrank smaller still, and when the chair back moved she squeezed her eyes more tightly shut as though that might somehow prevent her being seen, but no discovery came, and no recriminations, and she realised he was merely sitting down.
    The armchair shifted as he settled in it. Anna braved a peek beneath the chair and saw his booted feet stretched out towards the unlit hearth. And then she heard a scraping as he pulled the little table closer to him, singing lightly to himself. It was a pleasant tune, although she didn’t understand the words as they were in some foreign language, like the strange words of the fishermen from France who sometimes called upon her father in the night.
    No, not her father, she corrected herself. She was not a Logan. She was—
    ‘Curse this blasted palsy,’ said the man all of a sudden, as the sound of something falling interrupted Anna’s thoughts.
    Peering underneath the chair again, she saw that several painted wooden pieces from the chessboard on the