The Firebird by Susanna Kearsley Read Free Book Online Page B

coffee to bolster his system he wasn’t a match for the after-effects of his time on the lifeboat, and what must have been a long day. When he yawned for a third time, his mother said, ‘Och, away home with ye, Robbie. You’re dead on your feet.’
    ‘I am not.’
    ‘Away home, or I’m fetching the pictures of you as a bairn to show Nicola. I’ve got those good ones of you in the bath …’
    Rob conceded defeat with a grin. ‘Right, I’ll go.’ He stood, stretching, and said to me, ‘Don’t let them push you around. I’ll be back to collect you at eight.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘Eight in the morning?’ his mother asked. ‘Never. Let her waken when she wishes, and I’ll give you a phone when she’s finished her breakfast.’
    Rob knew better than to argue, from the look of it. Instead he bent his head and took an interest in his wristwatch. I walked with him to the door.
    ‘You’ll need your coat,’ I said, lifting it from the back of my chair to give to him.
    He took it with a question in his eyes.
All right?
    His father was watching us. I gave a nod.
    Rob unbuckled his watch strap and passed me the watch.
The alarm’s set for seven.
He smiled and stepped out, letting cold in behind him.
    Then Jeannie McMorran was there, spreading warmth. ‘You must be needing your sleep as well, after your travels. Come, let’s get you settled.’
    The cottage was not large – the kitchen, a sitting room with a piano, and two bedrooms, one with the door standing open and welcoming. Rob’s mother told me, ‘The bathroom’s down there, at the end. Take as long as you like – we’ve a lovely deep tub if you’re wanting a bath, and I’ve found you a pair of pyjamas.’
    She’d done more than that. In the bathroom, I found a thick stack of soft towels, and new soap and lavender bath salts, a hairdrier, toothbrush and toothpaste, all laid out with no questions asked, as though having young women show up on the doorstep with only the clothes on their back were an everyday thing here.
    I took the advice of Rob’s mother and ran a hot bath and sank into it gratefully, letting it soothe away some of my swirling, confusing thoughts. Rob was a part of the life I’d deliberately put in my past, and I had the irrational sense that it should have been somehow more difficult, this reconnection.
    It seemed half-surreal to be here in this house he’d grown up in, with his mum and dad drinking tea in the kitchen, and everyone simply accepting my presence as easily as they accepted the things I could do – things my own family virtually never discussed, or acknowledged. It had me off balance, a feeling that lingered long after the bathwater cooled.
    When I finally ventured back along the passageway and into the bedroom that I was to sleep in, I found Rob’s mum setting a water glass down at the bedside. She turned as I came in, and smiled.
    ‘Those pyjamas all right for you, then?’
    I assured her they were. They were navy-blue flannel, a little too large, and too long in the legs and the sleeves, but I’d rolled up the cuffs.
    ‘They were Robbie’s,’ she told me, ‘when he was a teenager.’
    He must have had the shoulders even then, because they hung from mine with loads of room to spare. I felt a sudden urge to hug the flannel to my skin, but I resisted it and simply said, ‘They’re comfortable.’
    ‘Oh aye, they were his favourites,’ Jeannie said. ‘I had a mind to make a quilt of them someday, ye ken, with some of his old T-shirts. Someone did that in a magazine I read once at the doctor’s – that’s what gave me the idea. But I’ve never yet got round to it.’
    A good thing, I decided. They were very warm pyjamas.
    And this room that she’d prepared for me was obviously Rob’s old room. Not kept the way it would have been when he was living here, of course. They’d used one corner of the room for storage – there were boxes neatly piled along the wall, and stacks of clothes that wanted