The Pearl Thief

  I heard Jamie’s far-off voice say, ‘Pardon? Speak up!’

  ‘M’lady wants a wrap.’ Ellen spoke through her nose, giving her best impression of landed gentry. ‘The mink or the ermine will do –’

  ‘Oh, stow it, Ellen McEwen!’

  We wrestled again for control of the receiver.

  Jamie was laughing down the line on the other end. ‘Which sweater?’ I heard him ask, and the warning pips clicked on to let us know our last penny was about to run out.

  I was beset with a host of afterthoughts. ‘Bring coffee! Bring roses for Mrs McEwen! Bring Sandy!’ I cried just before the line went dead.

  A mournful dirge on the pipes came skirling up the lane as we sloshed back towards Inchfort Field, laden with the cans of water from Boatman’s Well.

  ‘That’s Euan,’ Ellen said grimly. ‘Let’s see if we can change his tune.’

  It wasn’t a nice evening. The air was close and damp, with low cloud hanging sullenly overhead, as if it wanted to burst and had been told not to. We’d only been back a minute or so before Jamie and Sandy came lurching out of the mist down by the Salmon Stane, Sandy carrying what was obviously a workman’s paraffin lamp from the estate in one hand and an armful of red roses in the other. All the kiddies came pelting up for the safety of the tents, and everyone else froze in suspicion because they couldn’t tell who it was at first.

  Then another thought occurred to me: I suddenly worried it might be awkward to have so many Beaufort-Stuarts from the Big House descending on the McEwens’ camp. I tried to swoop in to the rescue.

  ‘My brothers … Ellen, you know Jamie. This is Sandy.’

  ‘Sandy Beaufort-Stuart,’ he introduced himself, distributing his burdens and shaking hands all round. ‘Thought you might appreciate this last offering from the Earl of Strathfearn …’ And he produced, from inside his tweed jacket, not only a packet of French coffee but also a dusty bottle of Grandad’s favourite single malt, aged well beyond the thirty-six years the label boasted.

  Ellen suddenly remembered a thing I’d told her about Sandy. ‘That’s you, aye?’ she said. ‘The Earl of Strathfearn.’

  Sandy looked surprised, then laughed. ‘Why, yes! I suppose it is. But the drink is thanks to the late Earl.’

  Sandy went round pouring a dram for anyone who had a cup, chatting amiably.

  ‘Aye, I’m cataloguing the Murray Collection now. I understand there’s quite a few fine pieces contributed by yourself, Mr McEwen? No, I don’t get a penny to call my own, nor any of the land, but if I’m lucky they’ll elect me as a representative peer for Scotland some day, and I’ll get a vote in the House of Lords. Imagine being able to shake things up down in London! What new legislation is troubling you at the moment?’

  There was a little bit of an uproar as everyone started to offer opinions at once.

  Later, laughter, and Sandy drinking with Alan McEwen and the Cameron men, and Aunt Bessie scolding Euan for his mournful piping. The roses, which the McEwens would never be able to take with them when they left, got divided up by the little girls who stuck them in their hair and behind their ears. The skirly got served up along with oatcakes and sweet new boiled potatoes and a great slab of butter that Jamie had liberated from the icebox at the Big House.

  In the blue-white gloom of the misty North Sea haar, one of the Camerons joined in with Euan on a fiddle, and there was a woman I didn’t recognise playing an accordion, and Sandy and Jamie and Ellen and I ended up in a foursome reel, skipping and skidding over the damp grass.

  ‘See, you didnae need your mink after all,’ Ellen said in between tunes as I abandoned my sweater. ‘This’ll keep you warm.’

  And the fiddle and pipes launched into ‘Strip the Willow’. It was so damp and misty that you couldn’t even see the Salmon Stane at the bottom of the field, but I wasn’t chilly at all.

  I think my most constant dance partner was Alan McEwen! Gallantly polite and formal, he reminded me of Grandad. Euan was stuck on the pipes. I’d have danced with Euan McEwen. I don’t suppose he’d have been brave enough to dance with me. He hadn’t Ellen’s bold streak and there were plenty of friends and cousins to fill in the gaps, though not so many of our own age set.

  Contrary to whatever those stupid small-minded women in the hospital thought, the McEwens and their folk are all incredibly modest. Skirts down, legs together, blouses done up properly. The older women were watching me closely, I noticed. I was worried the eccentric clothes I had been turning up in all summer might have caused them to peg me as dangerously wanton.

  In a moment when we’d stopped for a swallow of lemonade and to catch our breath, I said again to Ellen, ‘I really am going to miss you. It will be very dull when you are gone.’

  She sang to me teasingly from Robert Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’:

  ‘And fare thee well, my only love!

  And fare thee well awhile!

  And I will come again, my love,

  tho’ it were ten thousand mile!’

  We had a good big fire going by the time it got dark, past ten o’clock still despite the cloud. The music just didn’t stop, and we kept on dancing till we were falling over each other (and the excited Pinkie, who thought she knew how to dance), because we really couldn’t see any more.

  Someone took me by the arm and bent to murmur in my ear. It was Sandy.

  ‘I’m going back to the Big House,’ he said. ‘I’ll stop at the library and let Mary know there’s no harm doing here. She doesn’t like a ceilidh much, and it’s half past eleven. Jamie said he’d like to stay a while later. But if you want to go now –’

  ‘I don’t want to go ever.’

  Afterwards I asked Jamie if he noticed anything between Mary and Sandy, and he told me not to be ridiculous.

  ‘What’s ridiculous about it?’

  ‘Sandy doesn’t notice women.’

  I felt my eyebrows leap up into what was left of my hair.

  Jamie laughed. ‘I mean, he doesn’t notice anybody. He’s thirty years old and I don’t believe he’s cast a glance of appreciation at anything under five hundred years of age since he left school. He’s celibate as a monk. Probably more so.’

  It was true; Sandy hadn’t even seen me when I picked him up at the station.

  And yet … part of me thinks maybe that is why he hadn’t noticed what Mary looks like, and why they can get along so well – the way he gets along with the McEwens and their folk – because he just doesn’t see people.

  In the end, Jamie and I didn’t go back to the Big House at all that night.

  We stretched the cover over the car in case it rained, and then Jamie and Euan and Ellen and I all sallied back up the lane through the dark and the haar to the post office telephone box. The silly thing was, it was nearly as far as it would have been to walk back to Strathfearn House – but this way we didn’t have to negotiate the river path, or worse, the swinging iron footbridge in the dark. You know what I mostly didn’t want to have to do – pass close by those flipping standing stones! I seemed to be more afraid of ghosts during the last summer at Strathfearn than I usually was.

  Mother was remarkably level-headed on the ’phone.

  ‘Jamie and I are going to stop at Inchfort overnight,’ I told her.

  ‘Thank you for ringing, Julia. Your grandmother was worried about you driving all that way around so late at night.’

  ‘Oh dear, she’s not still awake?’

  ‘Very much so, but she has used it as an excuse to listen to the whole of Lucia di Lammermoor on the wireless and it’s not yet finished. Sandy warned us you might stay. Try to be polite – it’s most kind of Jean McEwen.’

  ‘Och, nae bother,’ said Mrs McEwen, sounding like Euan, when I passed on Mother’s gratitude. ‘Your mammy Esmé was always in about the camps here when she was a girl. Just like her dad.’

  You see … you do lose track of people. Because the McEwens were here every summer since our mothers were children, and so were we, but our mothers
played together and we did not. Somehow Jean and Esmé went their separate ways and their paths swung so far apart that their grown children only just learned each other’s names. How long does it take? How do you ever hold on to anybody?

  ‘Where’s your gran going to live when you’ve packed up at the Big House?’ Ellen asked me as we made up the extra beds.

  ‘Well, with us, of course. She’s coming to Craig Castle. I won’t be there though; I have to go back to school.’

  ‘Will you go back there when you finish school?’

  ‘I think I’ll go to Oxford It’ll be like an extension of school. I like it.’

  ‘I thought only men went to university.’

  ‘Lots of women go. Mary went! You could go!’

  ‘Why would I want to?’

  ‘You could study archaeology.’

  ‘Huh.’ She sounded sceptical. ‘Would your folk let you do that?’

  ‘I keep telling them I’m going to university. Two of my brothers have already gone and no one ever objects when I say I’m going too. Sometimes you just have to do what you want, even if they say no.’

  She laughed. ‘There you go again, taking the reins of the world.’

  ‘Isn’t it just taking the reins of myself?’

  The bow tent was set up so that there was a bit of living space in the middle and a sleeping space at either end. Ellen and I and some of the younger cousins were at one end and the older McEwens were in the other end with the baby. The lads went out to a different tent. There wasn’t quite enough bedding with me and Jamie unexpectedly there as well; I had to share with Ellen, and Jamie had to make do with a ground sheet.

  Auntie Bessie and the woman with the accordion were still cracking away by the fire out front as I crawled into the cosiest, most wonderful camp nest I’d ever imagined, on a mattress stuffed with straw and heather and well protected from the wet ground by troughs dug round the edges of the canvas for drainage.

  I really was tired, but my mind wouldn’t turn off. I was so delighted by the snugness of the camp.

  ‘Is this where I stayed when you brought me here after I got that dunt on the head?’ I asked, staring up into the dark, aware of Ellen warm and wide awake on one side of me, and her three little cousins already snoring gently on the mattress made up next to us.

  ‘Well, a bit. We’ve been and gone to Blairgowrie since then, so the camp’s come down and been put back up on other greens since. And we were further across the field before, but it’s muddy there now.’

  After another time of quiet, listening to the little girls’ trio of purring snores and sleeping sighs, I decided I was the only one still awake in our end of the tent, so I jumped when Ellen whispered suddenly at my ear, ‘I like your brother.’

  ‘Which one?’ I whispered back – to provoke her, as I knew perfectly well which one she meant.

  She gave her characteristic snort. ‘The one who’s not old enough to be me dad! Young Jamie. He talks to me like … like I’m one of his mates. I never met a lad who does that.’

  ‘They all do that. All my brothers do, I mean. I’m the only girl they’ve ever had to talk to, and the youngest, so they just treat me like another one of them.’

  ‘You’re lucky.’

  I considered.

  ‘I suppose I am. But it’s like being raised by wolves – you don’t realise you’re not one yourself until someone points it out to you. Sometimes it makes me so mad that not everyone treats me just like another wolf.’

  ‘Those lassies did, up on Pitbroomie Hill.’

  ‘When you said, “I like your brother”, just then, you sounded exactly like those lassies. I thought you meant you wanted Jamie to kiss you.’

  She laughed softly. ‘I wouldnae mind.’

  We lay very quietly for a minute or two, listening to everybody around us being quiet. Then Ellen pulled the covers up over our heads so we were in a little cocoon of privacy. She lay very still. I was just about to free my own nose to avoid suffocating when she whispered in my ear, so softly it was hardly more than her lips moving and carefully shaping words, as though she were talking to Mary Kinnaird – as if she’d do that!

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘What was what like?’

  All I could hear of her answer was a click and a hiss.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ I whispered back. ‘What?’

  ‘On Pitbroomie Hill. That kiss.’

  ‘Oh that.’

  I put one finger against her lower jaw and tilted her head towards me. And then I pressed my lips against hers, just softly, and kissed.

  ‘Like that.’

  She snickered silently, the ghost of her scornful snort. Then she cranked her whisper up a notch, so I could hear her.

  ‘You never. That’s all? And you fooled her, just with that?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s not how a lad gives a kiss. Not when he means it.’

  I am not entirely sure what possessed me, and that is the honest truth. It was part – yes, it was – curiosity, but partly anger at her constantly being so patronising, and also I wanted to call her bluff, to throw her challenge back at her. But … well, and it was excitement. I wanted to know.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘Since you know so much about it.’

  ‘Hush,’ she warned.

  ‘Go on.’

  Just as I’d done, she used the tip of her own index finger to turn my face back towards hers. Just delicately. And then she suddenly closed her mouth over mine, and –

  And there was strength in it, and hunger, and control, and it was like standing on the edge of a cliff in a gale, frightening but also marvellous.

  Ellen backed off. She lay silent, waiting for my reaction.

  I whispered at last, ‘Golly.’

  She gave her derisive snort.

  ‘Do you like it, when a lad does that?’ I asked.

  ‘Depends on the lad,’ she whispered. ‘It definitely depends on the lad.’

  I tried to imagine who I’d like to kiss me like that. My Swiss ski instructor seemed very amateurish all of a sudden. I wondered, feeling the blood rising to my cheeks, what Frank Dunbar thought of me for the prudish little kiss I’d given him last month. I tried to push him out of my head but I couldn’t.

  Yes, I could imagine Frank Dunbar kissing me like that.

  I wasn’t sure I’d like it. But I couldn’t stop myself imagining it. I’d have to try it to find out whether I liked it or not.

  I shivered.

  I could feel Ellen laughing even though I couldn’t hear her.

  ‘Scared?’ she whispered.

  ‘Not of you,’ I answered.

  And then, to prove it, I kissed her back.

  When I absolutely had to come up for air or pass out I stopped.

  We lay breathless and shaking with suppressed and nervous laughter, both of us suddenly quite overcome with hilarity.

  ‘You said you’ve never!’ she hissed.

  ‘I haven’t!’

  ‘Then how –’

  ‘You showed me!’

  ‘Copycat.’

  We both shook with mirth again.

  At which point we’d become careless about the noise we were making, and Ellen’s mother suddenly told us from across the darkness, soft and sharp, ‘Whisht, Nellie, hush up and go to sleep. You are keeping Lady Julia awake.’

  ‘Lady Julia is keeping me awake,’ Ellen complained loudly, and I thought I would die trying to smother myself and not burst out laughing.

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

  And that was enough to shut me up, can you believe it? Being her conspirator like that – lying together in the dark, holding hands, not needing to talk, not needing to do anything else. Just knowing.

  Nothing else happened. But we were still holding hands when I fell asleep.

  12

  ENOUGH TO PAY FOR A ’PHONE CALL

  I was awake and restless less than five hours later, and Ellen chivvied me out into an ex
quisite pearly dawn of gleaming sun-tipped haar mist, grey at the foot of the field and rising to luminous pink overhead. It was burning off fast but still piled like cotton wool in the riverbeds. Jamie and Euan were already awake, and everyone else was stirring too, packing up to move on.

  Jean McEwen was red in the face. She and Alan weren’t arguing, but holding a heated discussion in undertones; she angry, he trying to calm her down.

  ‘I thought the police were finished with us!’ I heard her say. ‘Old clothes strewn halfway down the field – they’ve no business searching our things without asking! And to do it while we’re asleep – what cheek!’

  ‘It might not be the hornies. Maybe one of those scaldy workers from the Big House. Maybe just a fox –’

  ‘A fox looking for rags! Aye, that’s likely.’

  I’d been nonchalantly folding blankets but Alan McEwen saw me, all ears, and switched into cant.

  Mrs McEwen shook her head. ‘They’re no’ Nawkens, but the Strathfearn lad and lassie ken what you’re saying.’

  ‘Take the horses down to drink,’ Alan McEwen ordered us. Or ordered his children, at any rate, knowing that Jamie and I would follow along.

  Ellen and Euan shrugged off the mysterious night-time searching of the rag collection with the same stoic sufferance I’d seen in them so many times before when they met with injustice: in the hospital, in the confrontations with Sergeant Angus Henderson and with Florrie, in being denied high school exams. I tried to imagine Ellen’s lifetime spent enduring such an endless string of insult and violation. You’d have to have such certainty in your own self. You’d have to be so strong.

  ‘Are you stopping for breakfast?’ Ellen said as we negotiated the narrow path, leading the horses and ponies down to drink. ‘Or do you get poached kippers on silver platters up at the Big House?’

  ‘Only ever bread and jam,’ Jamie answered. ‘The old women are all French.’

  ‘And we don’t use the kitchen,’ I added. ‘We make coffee on a portable gas ring in our gran’s sitting room.’

  ‘Your coffee’s better than ours.’

  ‘Also because of us being French,’ I let her know. Suddenly, impossibly, I was happy – instantly, blithely, fleetingly happy. Happy for the wonderful ceilidh, for the strange and beautiful morning, for the Procurator Fiscal’s crabbit dismissal of the police inspector’s precognition, for Mary’s unexpected defence of Euan.