The Pearl Thief

  Jamie and I took her with us on the Sunday to smuggle our stolen pearls into Aberfearn Castle.

  We’d both been clever enough to wear trousers and leather shoes. The path that leads through the gate arch in the curtain wall was overgrown with nettles and bramble all in flower. Grandad’s groundsmen used to keep it mowed – I remembered coming here on a very elegant picnic with Mémère, which we ate on tartan blankets on the bare stone floor of the tiny sixteenth-century stone summer house overlooking the River Fearn. In my childhood memory we crossed a wide green swathe of lawn, so truly velvet that I pulled off my sandals and ran barefoot on it; I could feel the cool, worn stone of the summer house steps beneath my feet when I thought about it.

  But now Jamie and I had to trailblaze our way through a thicket that felt like the Briar Wood surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle, except that all around us you could hear the roar of engines and the thump of diggers.

  ‘Dunbar says they’re going to fence this off from the school grounds,’ Jamie said. ‘If they can’t keep the boys out of the castle they’ll have to pull it down.’

  ‘I hate the ruin of things,’ I mourned. ‘I like that they’re fixing things, making the house useful. I can see the good in it. But why the castle has to be fenced off and Inchfort Field made private … I just hate it.’

  ‘You sound like Ellen. She should run for Parliament.’

  ‘That’s even less likely than Sandy being elected to the House of Lords.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Jamie said. ‘You’ll just end up cross.’

  Nettles didn’t seem to bother Pinkie. She bounded ahead of us up a narrow trench through the undergrowth.

  ‘See, someone’s used this path this summer,’ Jamie said.

  ‘But it’s all springing back,’ I pointed out. ‘None of it’s newly trodden. They probably came to take a look at it when they started dredging the pipeline for the swimming bath.’

  ‘You can get in through the eastern wall too though, through the river gate. They’ll have to block that off as well if they want to keep the boys out.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have just one last summer picnic with Mémère here?’ I said wistfully. ‘But she’s too frail to march through these weeds.’

  ‘She could if she had to,’ Jamie said, and we both laughed.

  The stout medieval wooden door that I remembered was gone. It was doubly weird to think that this forlorn place was no older than our own solid and beloved Craig Castle in Aberdeenshire. The wreck of Aberfearn Castle seemed to belong to another geological age.

  We left Pinkie sniffing about in the kitchen cellars and tiptoed up the grand stone spiral stair to the Great Hall. The place required silence. It was so … so grey and still within and so green without.

  The floor of the Great Hall was covered with bat and pigeon droppings and moss, but still mostly solid. We negotiated the gaps and made it across to the Earl’s Chamber, without needing to speak to each other about where we’d go next, and I followed Jamie up the chimney. I could still do it. It was even easier than it was when I was little: all the handholds and footholds were there, but now I was taller and could use my body to brace myself between the chimney walls in places where I used to have to hold my own weight with just my fingers and toes. Jamie had more trouble than me, bumping about like a bear in a heffalump trap, but I tried not to be smug about it because he was carrying the pearls in their big stoneware jar in a leather cartridge bag over his shoulder.

  We emerged through the collapsed chimney wall into the wonderful little attic dovecote under the roof where the wood pigeons still roosted. They had not noticed that the place was in ruins. Only me and my brothers and Ellen and hers, and possibly our mothers when they were children, had been up here in the past two hundred years. The pigeons all went rushing out in a panic of disturbed wings as we crawled out on to the solid (and rather mucky) floor.

  ‘You could hide something here forever and no one would know,’ Jamie said.

  ‘Till the floor falls down, and then you’d never get it back.’

  ‘Let it fall,’ he said fiercely, and I knew he felt exactly the same way about it as I did.

  Jamie climbed up on the window sill so he could reach the lowest of the nesting holes of the dovecote, and we stowed the jar of pearls deep inside. Then he jumped down and we stayed a moment looking out over our lost demesne, field and river and wood and sky, through the mullioned window of what used to be a chamber below the dovecote. The floor between these rooms was gone so it was high and narrow, a bit like a chimney itself, lit by the windows at our level and the round holes in the wall above for the pigeons to use as doors. The endless hum of building works seemed distant, like the hum of grasshoppers. They were working even on Sunday to make up their lost time.

  We could hear Pinkie barking her head off somewhere far below us, so we climbed back down.

  She was gambolling in the kitchen and cellars, scrambling from room to room and carrying on like a demented thing.

  ‘What’s got into you, you ridiculous dog?’

  She leaped to greet me, but turned immediately and galloped into the kitchen. That was the biggest of the below-ground rooms, with barrel-vaulted windows and a fireplace the size of the ladies’ waiting room at Brig O’Fearn railway station, with a baking oven built into it. Pinkie bolted straight to one of the corners of the fireplace and, after a bit of excited snuffling, came back to us producing a jute sack whose contents she had clearly been worrying for some time.

  As far as we could tell from the remains, she’d eaten a Thing entirely wrapped in brown paper, possibly a loaf of bread, and another Thing that had been very greasy. Neither I nor Jamie wanted to get near enough to try to discover whether the latter had been of a Meat or Dairy nature. The bag clunked when Pinkie dragged it about the stone floor, and when we managed, gingerly, to get it away from her and dump it out, we found that the last Thing inside it was another Keiller marmalade jar – a small one. It rolled across the floor as it fell out of the jute sack, and Jamie and I jumped back as if it were a firework about to go off in our faces.

  Jamie prodded it with his toe.

  ‘Bloody coward,’ I said.

  ‘Language!’

  I grabbed the jar and uncapped it in one defiant movement. It was half full of marmalade. We both burst out laughing.

  ‘Someone’s been camping,’ Jamie said.

  In the darkest, innermost corner of the bread oven, which is a nice big flat ledge raised a good four feet above the damp stone floor, we found a bucket from the building site partly filled with water, a carefully folded mackintosh and a car rug. It would be a hard place to sleep, but safe and dry. Not so safe as the secret room in the attic, of course.

  ‘Maybe they’re still here,’ I said. ‘There’s no mould in the marmalade.’

  ‘Maybe it’s one of the workers from the school renovation. Anyone down from Highland Perthshire wouldn’t be able to go home easily. It’s never one of the McEwens’ folk – they’d make themselves more comfortable than this.’

  ‘But the Glenfearn School provides lodging,’ I pointed out. ‘There are lots of people staying on the estate.’

  ‘They take it out of your pay though.’

  We put the mac and rug back. The plundered jute sack was harder to replace.

  ‘Gluttonous dog,’ Jamie remarked. ‘D’you think we should restock the cold provisions?’

  ‘No,’ I said forcefully, feeling mean. ‘I think this chap’s been nicking sandwiches and cigarettes from the other workmen all summer, and they’ve been blaming it on Euan.’

  In the end good breeding overcame suspicion, and Jamie left a half-full packet of Craven “A” cigarettes and a matchbox on top of the depleted sack as an apology.

  We didn’t once, either of us, mention aloud the pearls we’d just hidden. It was hard not to imagine that the owner of this little stash might be listening somewhere nearby, and it was irritating to discover that Aberfearn Castle wasn’t quite as abandoned
as it ought to have been. But we both felt certain no one was going to climb up the chimney among the doves looking for pearls.

  ‘Come on, let’s leave by the river gate,’ said Jamie. ‘I want to see if that path’s been used recently.’

  It had. It had been used a lot more than the main path.

  ‘Well, there are a lot of people working on the pipeline,’ said Jamie.

  This was the first time I’d been down to the end of the path all summer, and the mouth of the River Fearn where it meets the Tay was a busy hive of frantic activity.

  Out in the Tay a Royal National Lifeboat was doggedly dragging for the rest of Hugh Housman. Along the pipeline trench they’d got hoardings and pumps working to keep the water out while they laid the pipes. The generators billowed clouds of coal smoke and made the most deafening racket I’ve ever heard; the men in the trenches nearest the noise were communicating with hand gestures, like mill girls. Pinkie sat down on the river path suddenly and refused to budge.

  ‘Oh, lord. This daft dog,’ I yelled. ‘Jamie, help me move her on.’

  He was staring in the same direction as Pinkie, but with intelligence and comprehension that Pinkie has not got.

  ‘What is it?’

  Jamie narrowed his eyes like a rat’s – Mother’s intolerance-for-stupidity glare that we have all inherited. He stalked forward a few paces, then stopped and spun on his heels to face me. He yelled, ‘It’s the log boat.’

  ‘What?’

  He grabbed me by my arm and pulled me forward, pointing. ‘The bloody idiots!’ he gasped through clenched teeth. ‘They dug up the log boat!’

  ‘Grandad’s boat? The Bronze Age boat Sandy wrote about?’

  ‘Yes, that one, the one he got birched for poking about when he was a lad –’

  ‘– and Grandad left it buried in the peat so he wouldn’t damage it!’

  ‘Because it’s THREE THOUSAND YEARS OLD! Yes, THAT LOG BOAT,’ Jamie cried.

  It had been destroyed.

  They’d chopped it out of the riverbank in pieces. They must have had no idea what it was – just an old wooden boat in the way of their work. Maybe they didn’t even realise it was a boat; Sandy wrote that it had been carved out of a single log, from an oak tree the size of which hasn’t existed on British soil since before the Romans.

  When Jamie and I found the boat, the biggest chunks of it had been tossed up all anyhow on a pile in the brambles on the other side of the river path to get them out of the way of the pipeline. I don’t know if I’d have recognised that dried-up heap of mud and mould as the River Fearn log boat on my own, but once Jamie identified it, I knew without a doubt that he was right.

  I remembered something that Frank had said about Housman’s legs: once they dried out they decayed faster. I made my way into the briars and rubbed my fingertips over the topmost layer of millennia-old wood. It came away on my fingers like shoe polish, browny black as the peat it had been buried in.

  ‘The air’s disintegrating it,’ I said. ‘It’s damp now, but that’s because it rained last night. It’s been drying out.’

  I tried unwisely to shift the top piece of boat, and a chunk of it broke off in my hand. It was crumbly and brittle as fudge.

  ‘Bother. Bother!’

  ‘Don’t touch it again!’

  ‘I’m not going to!’

  Jamie gave me his hand to help me back out of the brambles.

  I said angrily, ‘Now I feel violated.’

  ‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘It’s … it’s like someone’s vandalised Grandad’s grave.’ He looked around for Pinkie. ‘What the devil is the matter with that dog?’

  Pinkie had flattened herself on the path again, cringing and making pathetic little whining sobs.

  ‘Whisht. All right, lass,’ Jamie said, long-suffering, and allowed Pinkie to bundle herself over his shoulder so he could carry her past the wreck of the Bronze Age boat. It made him look like he was wearing a lion’s-mane hood, like the warriors in the pictures of the Abyssinian Emperor’s coronation.

  ‘You are a hero,’ I told him.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it for any old dog. Only this one reminds me of you.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of boats.’

  ‘You are of ghosts.’

  ‘Ha-ha.’

  Jamie put Pinkie down again after thirty yards or so. We were all a bit bedraggled after the safari through the Aberfearn Castle jungle and climbing in chimneys and adventures with greasy Things in dungeons.

  ‘What I’m really scared of now,’ I said ominously, ‘is Sandy.’

  With good reason, as it happens. I have never seen him so volcanic with rage. I never realised he could be.

  It was all over the dailies the following day; in his outrage Sandy rashly rang both the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman, but of course it was the Perth Mercury who got there first. They sent a lady photographer, Catriona Lennox, and I was distracted by her brisk skill and competence from the outrage of this ‘rape of a national treasure’ (Sandy’s exact words to the reporters – he has never reminded me so much of Grandad). I envied Miss Lennox, not for what she was doing, but because she was able to do it so well. A bit like my envy of Ellen’s pipe-smoking! Incidentally she was the only one of the photographers who didn’t try to move about the pieces of the boat so she might get a more ‘boatlike’ picture.

  It was no longer very boatlike, poor thing.

  And then my loyalties were torn to shreds, for Sandy and Frank Dunbar had a terrific row. Right in the reception hall of the Big House with half a dozen workmen and me and Jamie and Colette all gaping at them.

  ‘You have no control whatsoever over this project!’ Sandy raged at the harassed site manager. ‘You don’t know who’s working out there. You don’t know where they are or where they’re staying. When they disappear you don’t think to follow up until they’ve been gone for a solid week. When you find –’

  ‘I know what I haven’t done!’ Dunbar interrupted in fury. ‘Do you think I don’t know what I’ve failed to do?’

  They faced each other like boxers, shoulders squared and heaving as they fought to control their breathing. Sandy was a good deal shorter than Francis Dunbar. But Sandy was sturdier, they were about the same weight, and they must have been near each other in age, though the silver showed in Frank’s brown hair and not in Sandy’s strawberry blond.

  ‘You’ve been here one week,’ Dunbar accused Sandy. ‘You’ve been here one single week, sitting cosy and quiet on that island making lists and being served cups of tea by the librarian –’

  This made Jamie and I both suddenly aware that Colette was manfully maintaining the burden of steaming china she’d been carrying through to Mémère. Jamie quietly took the tea tray from her.

  ‘How can you have any idea of what I’ve had to cope with in the past month?’ Frank cried. ‘What gives you any kind of authority to accuse me of negligence?’

  With fearsome loyalty, and freed of the servitude of carrying the tea tray, Colette sallied into the battle. She said frostily, ‘He is the Earl of Strathfearn.’

  It was a moment of extraordinary awkwardness.

  Sandy held up one hand, flapping it back and forth in a deprecatory way as if to clear the air of his inheritance.

  Dunbar recovered first.

  ‘With all due respect to your hereditary title, Lord Strathfearn …’ He paused, raised his chin with that direct and winning confidentiality and added apologetically, ‘It is Lord Strathfearn, isn’t it? With all due respect, the house and grounds of this estate belong to neither one of us. But I have the burden of maintaining them in trust. I understand why you’d feel I’ve failed that trust, but how was I to know – how were any of us to know –?’

  Sandy brandished at him his Exhibit A, last year’s Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in speechless agony.

  ‘It’s not exactly the Perth Mercury,’ said Francis Dunbar. ‘I don’t get a copy delivered to my door.’

  I let out a
choked and hysterical squeak of laughter.

  All of us watching had withdrawn into sides. Jamie and Colette and I stood in a huddle behind Alexander Lawson Murray Wallace Beaufort-Stuart, Earl of Strathfearn, and the six painters and paper-hangers stood uncomfortably lined up across from us behind Francis Dunbar, the project manager for the Glenfearn School renovation. It was like the Battle of the Clans on the North Inch in Perth, and I was Hal o’ the Wynd, not sure which side I was fighting for.

  Everyone glared at me when I giggled.

  And I caught Frank’s eye. He was silently imploring me to switch sides, to defend him.

  I pitched my voice as low and level as it would go, trying to sound like Marlene Dietrich, and said slowly, ‘Wouldn’t the Glenfearn School itself want to save what’s there of the log boat if it can be saved? Can’t you ask the trustees if they’ll help? Perhaps let Sandy direct a few men from the site, and see if any of the boat can be salvaged?’

  Sandy slammed the Proceedings flat on the table where the post gets left, a metaphoric gauntlet.

  ‘Yes, I can do that,’ Frank said gratefully. ‘I’ll ring tomorrow morning.’

  Sandy didn’t move.

  ‘I’ll ask if they’ll pay for any outside expertise you might need.’

  Sandy didn’t say anything. He nodded, turned on his heel and stalked back out through the front door, which stood open as usual; we could see him heading for the river.

  Heading, I felt sure, for Mary, who would understand, and who would never tell a soul if he wept over it.

  ‘Come, Colette, Mémère will be waiting for this and it’s getting cold.’ Jamie beckoned with his head, and Colette followed him away from the reception hall towards the morning room.

  The little audience of workmen slunk back to whatever it was they’d been doing, and – without expecting it – Frank and I were left on our own.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said softly. ‘It is my fault, I suppose …’