The Pearl Thief

‘This one …’ Her tone was matter of fact, but her voice was quiet. ‘Your grandad said it was put there long ago by a wee girl playing about with them like marbles.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I stared back at her in amazement.

  ‘He must have meant me.’

  ‘Likely he did,’ she said drily. She didn’t ever seem to get excited about anything.

  But I hadn’t made those pearls up. I hadn’t imagined them. They’d been real.

  I closed my eyes, my finger resting on the cool surface of the pearl I could never play marbles with again. And even though I knew now that the Reliquary pearls had been real, it was still like an image from a dream: the black cup brimming with milky pearls, dove-grey and dove-pink, all different sizes, a little galaxy of gleaming planets in a small shadowy celestial sphere.

  *

  I woke up in the middle of that night feeling haunted. The clouds had temporarily cleared and there was a round silver moon sailing high in a bottle-blue sky and bathing everything with otherworldly light. The moonlight fell right across my face and once I was awake I couldn’t go back to sleep. I padded very silently to Mémère’s dressing table and found a nail file, and then sat on my bed in the fairy glow of the moon for a while, giving myself a manicure and thinking of all the people who had lived and died in that house in its hundred years. Grandad was born and died in that very room.

  But I wasn’t feeling haunted by Grandad – or even by the miserable Dr Housman. I was suddenly, sharply, overwhelmingly aware of all Strathfearn’s quiet, hidden, ancient past: my vanished medieval great-grandparents who left behind the empty, towering halls of Aberfearn Castle, and their vanished great-grandparents, who carved the starey-eyed fish on the standing stones that were already old; and the folk before them who left nothing but strange green mounds and iron blades; and those who built the buried boat and raised the walking stones.

  I thought: Their blood runs in my veins. They are alive in me.

  But that made me feel even creepier, as though my very self were part ghost. I could just imagine how Ferdinand felt, shipwrecked in The Tempest, where the isle is full of noises.

  All those people who lived here before us – their ghosts belong here. But Hugh Housman’s doesn’t. It is surely an unquiet ghost.

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes –

  Mémère interrupted my rhapsody by asking me crossly, in French, to stop filling the isle with noise (the very quiet noise of buffing my nails), so I put on my school blazer over my nightgown and went downstairs.

  I opened the French doors to the glorious moon. But I also switched on the lamp to banish the ghosts, and after a while it started to get buggy. The moths battering against the lampshade were both annoying and a bit spooky. I put out the light and sat in the dark for a while longer with the doors open, to give the insects a chance to leave. Then I closed the doors and went back upstairs.

  And then I lay awake for another twenty minutes wondering whether or not I’d bolted the doors.

  This was wholly irrational. What in the world was I worrying about? Bolts don’t keep out ghosts, and dead men won’t come in on their own!

  If you’re scared, do something, Julie, I told myself. Go back down and check the bolts if you think it matters!

  So, back into my school blazer and back down the staircase bloodied by the strange dark wines and indigos of moonlit stained glass, back along the inky oak-panelled corridor to the morning room. It was entirely still apart from one imprisoned moth fluttering vainly against an upper windowpane. I stepped into the room.

  The French doors suddenly shuddered as if they’d been caught in a tempest.

  It would have been startling even if my nerves hadn’t already been stretched to snapping. I didn’t scream – I dived under the legs of the Queen Anne settee and cowered there in absolute mindless terror like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.

  The door handle rattled with the sound of a skeleton dancing on a tile floor.

  I had my brain back, though my heart was galloping, and I knew it wasn’t a ghost. But what in the world –

  The noise scared me nearly out of my skin. I’d thrown myself on the floor as if I’d been caught on the moor in a hail of gunshot. Now I didn’t dare stand up. It was that kind of instinct: protect yourself, Julie.

  I peeked out under the settee between its legs and I could see the shadow at the door – bulky and shapeless – and the door handle rattled again, but indeed I had bolted it after all and it didn’t open.

  The dark silhouette stood there, just quiet, not moving, for another minute. I counted how long and it seemed to take forever. Then I saw it put up a hand and scratch its head. It reached towards the door again, then changed its mind and edged away.

  I let out a little strangled laugh. There was something so very ordinary about the way this terrifying shadow had moved.

  I heard the rattle of the door to Frank’s office. Then there was no more noise.

  It couldn’t have been a burglar – he didn’t try to break in. It was somebody checking the doors to see if they would open or not, but I didn’t know why.

  If you’re scared, do something! I gave myself another fierce lecture.

  All in a rush, I ran at our door, unbolted it and threw it open.

  There was no one on the terrace. I stomped out into the moonlight and stood there defiantly in my nightgown and school blazer with bare feet cold against the damp stone, listening. I seemed to stand there for ages and heard nothing. Where on earth had he gone so quickly? Was he hiding below the steps to the lawn?

  I didn’t have the confidence to look. Words leaped into my head and I sang aloud, quavering and ridiculous:

  ‘My castle is aye my ain,

  An’ harried it never shall be,

  For I’ll fall ere it’s ta’en –

  An’ wha dare meddle wi’ me?’

  ‘Julia!’

  Mother had the French doors open in the room above. She was kneeling on my bed and leaning out of the window to scold me.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Julia, stop that racket and come to bed!’

  ‘There was someone rattling the door out here!’

  ‘There are watchmen all over the estate! You were down there with the lights on and the house wide open at two o’clock in the morning, waking your grandmother and all the rest of us right above you – of course they’re checking the doors!’

  ‘Well, it scared me,’ I said petulantly. ‘I thought he might still be about. I didn’t see him go.’

  ‘He’ll have gone around to the front of the house. You won’t frighten off intruders singing Border ballads! Come to bed!’

  I wished quite suddenly I was tucked up in my narrow iron cot in the crowded room my grandfather was born and died in.

  ‘But when I go back to the reception hall so I can come upstairs, whoever it is will be testing the front door …’

  My voice was still quavering a little. Thank goodness Jamie was upstairs in his servant’s garret; otherwise I’d never live down his mockery of my lack of fighting spirit.

  ‘I’ll come and get you,’ my mother said with resignation, as if I were ten years younger.

  ‘I’ll come myself,’ I said with dignity, bearing in mind the bold reputation of my glorious ancestors.

  What a thing to be afraid of, I scolded myself; but I stood on a chair to bolt the terrace doors behind me at the top too, when I came in. I didn’t hear anybody try the front door.

  I didn’t think the shadow I’d seen had the look of a nightwatchman. He’d been missing something watchman-like. Where was the torch, the inevitable cigarette, the peaked cap?

  But that wasn’t what was nagging at me; it had been something more fleeting.

  Where was the confidence?

  8

  RATHER A LOT OF GIVING AND TAKING

  The car conversation went something like this:

 
ME: Mother, would you let me drive your car, like you did at Christmas?

  MUMMY: I expect so. But I haven’t a great deal of time to teach you.

  ME: I could go around the grounds, like Jamie and I do at home in the big car.

  MUMMY: I expect so …

  ME: And if you thought I wasn’t too bad, I could take Euan to work. The Water Bailiff …

  (Here I inserted a list of unfounded grievances against the McEwens in general and Euan in particular.)

  ME: I wouldn’t be going far. Just back and forth on the Perth Road between here and Inchfort Field, through Brig O’Fearn.

  MUMMY: Hmmnn … you haven’t got a licence for being on the road, darling.

  ME: It’s only one road and almost all through country. It’s wide and flat all the way except the last bit of lane that leads down to the library, but that’s never got traffic on it. And it would save the McEwens ever so much time and trouble.

  MUMMY: I shall make you change the oil in it yourself to prove your commitment to the safety of my motor.

  So I twisted Mother’s arm enough to let me take her sedately up and down the drive in the Magnette the next day, in and out among the new dormitories, proving I was not a reckless idiot. It was still raining and we did not stay out for long, hurrying to get the open-topped car back under cover.

  The grown-ups were trying to soldier on as usual and were pestering me about clothes that evening after the driving lesson with Mother. Solange in particular, trying to recover from her sordid past, wanted to see me looking like a respectable young lady again.

  ‘We ought to buy Julia some everyday things, at least. Yours are too big for her, Madame,’ she told Mother.

  ‘She has clothes!’ Jamie said. ‘I brought all her favourite things down from Craig Castle!’

  ‘The Schiaparelli blouse Lord Craigie will not allow her to appear in at dinner!’ Solange exclaimed. ‘It is sheer. She has nothing to wear beneath it. O, seigneur … Imagine, in this house, with the workmen coming and going! And there is the Vionnet frock with the silver thread all down the front.’

  ‘I do love that one though,’ Mother said. ‘It’s modest, but it makes her look very grown up.’

  I put in: ‘It would make her look silly on the river path if she wore it to visit Mary or the McEwens.’

  Really, did we need to argue about getting me some decent clothes? When did we become so frugal?

  ‘I bet the McEwens could get me something to wear,’ I said. ‘They do a trade in old clothes.’

  Mémère suddenly spoke up. ‘I have made you an appointment with my seamstress in Perth, Julia.’

  ‘You need a party frock,’ Mother reminded me. ‘For your birthday. Mrs Menzies has very kindly offered to hold a ceilidh for you at Glenmoredun Castle after the grouse shoot on the Twelfth. It’s only a month off now. It won’t be big, but your father will come down – he’s going to let Davie manage the Craig Castle shoot, and I can’t be in two places at once organising things – and we must do something for your sixteenth. It’s always awkward your birthday falling on Opening Day.’

  ‘Mother, whose fault is that?’ Jamie teased.

  It was awkward. I rarely got decent attention on my birthday, since everyone was always so focused on killing birds. A birthday dance at Glenmoredun Castle would be marvellous, especially after the gloom that had been shadowing us all summer – even if everyone was exhausted after tramping about on the moors all day. Very nice of Mrs Menzies and her husband the Laird of Moredun, though I am sure it was partly out of respect for Grandad and sympathy for Mémère. I had been looking forward to a grown-up frock without tartan ruffles on my sixteenth birthday, and sweeping my hair up in a French chignon like Mémère’s, since forever.

  Oh blast it, I thought, remembering. My hair. Blast and drat.

  Well, there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, for although I was determined to be a good girl when they took me into Perth to be measured (and I was looking forward to demanding powder-blue silk), the following day again I did something I ought not have done (and it had nothing to do with Mummy’s car).

  That was the morning it finally stopped raining: the morning when Euan would start going to work digging on the pipeline for the new Glenfearn School swimming pool. The sun was out for the first time in glory knows how long, and it was a stunningly and unexpectedly beautiful summer’s day, everything sparkling. There was only room for two in the Magnette, so Jamie couldn’t come along when I went to collect Euan. Instead, Jamie gallantly offered to help Mother escort Mémère and her entourage to Edinburgh again. I did not envy him that job.

  My maiden voyage alone in my mother’s car was actually so banal it is almost not worth mentioning. I crept so very carefully down the drive I never even dared shift out of low. Nor did I gather much speed on the Perth Road heading for Brig O’Fearn village. The lane to Inverfearnie Island comes off the main road and goes past Inchfort Field on its way to the library, and I passed Ellen McEwen on her way to the Boatman’s Well, laden with one of the big milk cans the McEwens use to fetch water. She had to stand pressed up against the hedge to let me pass, her almost-always hostile stare full of disbelief.

  I felt triumphant, but the lane was so narrow there I didn’t dare let go of the driving wheel to wave. I drove all the way down to Inverfearnie Island so I could turn around in the wide gravel drive in front of the library. I wasn’t sure if Mary saw me but I was still so mad at her that I didn’t care.

  When I parked by the field gate at Inchfort and climbed out of the car, Pinkie the dog came galloping to greet me.

  ‘My own girl!’ I cooed as she showered me with kisses.

  Mrs McEwen was out in front of their big camp tent, washing breakfast cups and plates in a white enamel tin tub. The baby – which I knew now to be Ellen and Euan’s very junior adopted sister, the child of a cousin who’d died giving birth to her – was chortling away in a little willow basket nearby.

  ‘I didn’t bring you a present last time,’ I said. ‘So I did this time.’ I’d cut an armful of roses for Mrs McEwen, the reddest reds and darkest pinks I could find. Knowing that we couldn’t take them with us made us rather free with the cut flowers.

  ‘The bonny things!’ Jean McEwen shook the water from her hands and buried her nose in the velvety, scented blossom. ‘What beauties! Are these out of Lady Strathfearn’s garden? Let me get the tea on – you’ll need a cup of tea after your ride in the motor car. We can put these in to soak when Ellen gets back – she’s just fetching another can of water. Euan’s away to the Big House.’

  ‘Oh! I wanted to give him a ride and spare him the long walk! Didn’t Ellen tell you I was coming?’

  I felt pretty sure she hadn’t really believed I’d manage it.

  ‘It’s nae bother for Euan this morning – he rode in the cart with his uncle Hamish who’s away to Perth peddling tin. We had a time getting the dog to stay behind, but it’s no place for her among those dredgers! How kind of you to think on Euan. We’ve told him to meet you by the Strathfearn garages at day’s end. No doubt he’d be glad of a lift home by then, and if you stop here the now you’ll catch our Nell when she comes back.’

  Another, separate plan hatched itself beautifully in my brain. Meanly, it didn’t include Jamie. Naughtily, it did include my mother’s car.

  ‘Maybe Ellen would like to go for a drive?’

  ‘I should think she’ll like that very much!’

  Shaness, Julie, you are a devious wee temptress.

  Of course she wanted to go for a drive. Who can resist a cherry-red two-seater open-top sports car?

  I was waiting for Ellen at the gate when she got back with the water. I was sitting in the car, ready to go.

  ‘I went to a lot of bother to come out here for Euan this morning,’ I said. ‘You might have told him to wait.’

  Her stony eyes glinted. ‘Oh, aye?’ she responded noncommittally.

  ‘Well, as I’m here anyway, you may as well come for a ride in
stead.’

  I could see she was ridiculously excited, and a little scared. I don’t think Ellen McEwen realises how obvious all her emotions are.

  ‘You can do the shifting, if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll put the clutch in and tell you when to move the stick.’

  ‘You’re a radge dilly. Horn moich.’

  ‘I know what that means, you know.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ she repeated.

  ‘A pure mad girl. So I am! Do you want to do the gears or not?’

  ‘Let me just give Mammy this can. Wait for me.’

  It was a good lesson for both of us: it made me have to think even harder about getting the timing of clutch and stick right. I let her do it all the way out to the main road, slowing down and speeding up on purpose so she could practise.

  Then I took over to drive carefully through Brig O’Fearn village and back to the gate lodge of Strathfearn House, and that was all I had permission to do. But …

  … But Mother was in Edinburgh and I had officially finished being convalescent and I was still a little jealous of all the time that Jamie had spent with Ellen and I hadn’t, and –

  Suddenly all the sorrow and uncertainty that entwined our lives with Strathfearn dropped away from us both. We were nothing more than two lucky girls on a jolly holiday in a motor car.

  I swung around neatly in the lodge entrance to the driveway and headed back towards Brig O’Fearn.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Ellen cried.

  ‘Over Pitbroomie Hill to Glenmoredun Castle!’

  It is only a little detour from Brig O’Fearn, only the next road over.

  ‘Madwoman!’ Ellen accused approvingly.

  ‘I want to see what the moor looks like. They’re shooting there soon. There must be grouse about – bet the car will scare the birds!’

  ‘Do they need beaters for the shoot? Or loaders? Our men used to work the Opening Day shoot for Strathfearn.’

  ‘I’ll ask Mother.’

  It occurred to me that Ellen and I must have had rather different views of Opening Day. Mine had always been: This frenzied killing of birds interrupts my birthday but can be rather fun. But to Ellen, it was just work.