The Pearl Thief

I took the three long steps that brought me next to him, snatched his hand in mine and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the chin – it was as high as I could reach.

  ‘How can it possibly be your fault?’

  He tilted his face carefully away from mine, but didn’t let go of my hand. God. I felt traitorously disloyal to my Murray bloodline. Dunbar’s palm was cold and dry. Mine, I thought, must feel like a quiet flame against his. Better not try to kiss him again.

  After a moment he turned back to look down at me, his eyebrows lowered in a faint frown of baffled unhappiness, and said, ‘If nothing had happened – nothing at all, none of this –’

  ‘Something would have.’

  He changed course so fast it was dizzying.

  ‘There’s a variety playing at the City Hall in Perth. The trustees gave me a pair of tickets – worrying now that I never stop working. I thought …’

  He paused to let me fill in the blank. To let me choose.

  Oh, glory, I was tempted. Because why not – why not? If I was a decent, ordinary girl working in a hat shop – if we’d been introduced at a dance or a shoot or a village-hall concert, if we’d played golf at the same club – wouldn’t it have been perfectly all right for him to ask me out? It wouldn’t have to end in marriage, for goodness’ sake. I wouldn’t have minded going to a music-hall variety show in Perth with Francis Dunbar.

  But I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t the age difference, or my being the daughter of an earl, or the fact that I hadn’t yet finished school, though Mother and Father might have pointed to any of those as reasons. It was more … the way the summer had started. Solange’s sad affair shadowing everything. My virtue being in question behind my back. I had to walk the tightrope without drink.

  I think he knew it too.

  At any rate I was damned if I’d give away my game by finishing his sentence. If he wanted to take me to a show he could jolly well ask me himself.

  He sighed. He didn’t let go of my hand; I got the impression he’d forgotten it was there, or felt so comfortable holding it in his that it didn’t occur to him he shouldn’t really be doing it.

  He said, ‘I thought you and Jamie might like to go.’

  ‘But they’re yours!’

  ‘I’d like to give them to you,’ he said quietly. ‘I owe you something.’

  And remembering what Ellen had said about giving, I had to take them.

  14

  THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES

  Sandy press-ganged me and Jamie out to the riverbank with him at dawn the next morning armed with trowels loaned us by Francis Dunbar, so we could try to salvage pieces of boat. Mother brought us breakfast – bread and jam and a flask of coffee – in a willow basket that I’m sure she bought from Jean McEwen.

  The work was messy and dispiriting. Being the one with the smallest hands and the lightest touch, I was supposed to move the clammy slabs of decaying wood at Sandy’s direction; Jamie was required to draw pictures. But everything I touched seemed to crumble. Pinkie lurked some distance away panting and sulking on her belly, unwilling to come anywhere near this project.

  By about nine o’clock the sun was high and a few reporters had turned up again, along with a small crowd of intrigued citizens from Perth and Brig O’Fearn village who’d seen last night’s papers. I spotted the photographer from the Mercury whom I’d admired, and waved her over.

  ‘Can you take close photographs of these bits and pieces? Can you do a lot of them – not for publication but to record it before it falls apart?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Do you really –?’

  She glanced at Sandy, mud-streaked and carrying with him an air of weary gloom as though he’d already been on his feet for a solid day. ‘Show me what you need.’

  There was also more than one terrifically annoying urchin who wanted very much to nick bits of archaeological treasure. I tried to keep a wary eye on the crowd. There was someone at the back trying awkwardly to get a bicycle past everyone else standing gawping on the river path; the bicycle had a wide basket attached to the front handlebars and a great tin washtub strapped over the rear wheel. Pinkie suddenly exploded in joy like a demonic buttery rocket and launched herself at the bicycle.

  I mean, at the person in charge of the bicycle.

  It was Ellen.

  I recognised her myself a moment later. Jamie said I looked just as excited and silly as Pinkie as we leaped to greet her. Perhaps he was jealous that I got there first.

  Ellen had to lower the laden bicycle into the undergrowth so she had her hands free to manage both me and the dog.

  She’d only been gone three days, I realised later – it felt like I hadn’t seen her for a month.

  ‘Pinkie, ye’re tiresome. All right, Jamie? Julie –’

  Her stormcloud-blue eyes danced.

  ‘I had to come back for the dog,’ she said.

  ‘You never,’ I accused. ‘You came back for the log boat!’

  ‘Daddy might have mentioned it to me. He was in the pub in Comrie last night and heard the men talking. And I did want Pinkie back, so I borrowed my uncle’s pushbike and came out here this morning.’

  ‘It’s thirty miles!’

  ‘It’s mostly flat. Well, for Perthshire. Straight along the Fearn Valley.’

  She got Pinkie subdued, left the bicycle where it lay and we all worked our way past the bystanders back to Sandy.

  I told him, ‘This is Ellen McEwen. She’s the one who did the spear-tip drawings for Grandad two years ago, when his eyesight got so bad.’

  He pushed back his cap, rubbed at his muddy forehead, and gave Ellen the ghost of a smile. ‘So it is. Of course, we were dancing at the weekend, weren’t we, Ellen, lass?’

  How could it be possible that so little time had passed since the ceilidh at Inchfort Field? It felt like …

  Sandy took advantage of Ellen’s archaeological drawing experience and put her to work immediately. He gave her the sketching block and pencils that he’d assigned to Jamie, freeing up Jamie to help lift away the crumbling slabs of prehistoric oak. You wouldn’t have thought it would be back-breaking work, but it was, squatting and bending and lifting. The closer we got to the bottom of the woodpile the damper, and consequently the more intact, the slabs became.

  We kept working. Catriona Lennox, the photographer, either felt that she was on to something or else was genuinely interested in the hopeless project, and she stuck with us stalwartly, changing films occasionally and asking Sandy lots of questions.

  We’d have forgotten to stop to eat, except that Mother conspired with Mary Kinnaird to bring us sandwiches while the library was closed for the midday dinner break. And it was brave of Mary too, knowing how many people were about – reporters and photographers and the pipeline workmen and the general summer holiday rabble, all of them staring (or trying not to stare) at her smooth, unfinished features, and her shining ear trumpet and her fearful determination not to acknowledge anybody as she passed.

  She pulled up short, then took a step backward, when she saw Ellen sitting there drawing, perched on a shooting stick with a leather seat, straight-backed and glorious with her long coppery hair falling down her back like licks of flame. Sandy was leaning over her, murmuring something in her ear with one hand on her shoulder, stabbing the forefinger of his other hand with emphasis at the shapeless block of wood Jamie was holding.

  I saw panic and hatred cross Mary’s face. It wasn’t intolerance this time. It was pure green jealousy. Sandy was hers.

  ‘Mary!’ I called.

  She was carrying a net bag of provisions in each hand. I took one from her and reminded her, ‘I told you about Ellen.’

  ‘Yes.’ The look in Mary’s eyes was wintry.

  ‘She only just arrived this morning. She came back to collect her dog. But we knew she’d done the other drawings, so …’

  I spoke without speaking aloud, moving my lips so that only Mary could hear me with her eyes. Sandy’s in love with the Bronze Age log bo
at and I think maybe with you, so please just be nice to Ellen because she is my friend.

  Mary stared at me. ‘You said … ?’

  I nodded silently.

  Then suddenly Mary pealed with laughter.

  ‘Whisht, away wi’ you, Julia. You were aye a wee sook!’

  I took one of her bags. ‘You’ll not be cross with her?’

  ‘If Sandy’s to work with her, I suppose I must as well,’ said Mary bravely.

  It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.

  *

  It was at exactly that moment that Jamie prised up what looked like the last slab of the pile. Beneath it was mud.

  ‘Sandy, I think they’ve buried a bit of it under this.’

  He scraped away damp earth with a trowel, his touch light and delicate as a musician’s. ‘Julie, give me a hand.’

  There was a catch in his voice that was excitement.

  I gave the net bag back to Mary and knelt down to join him. In five minutes we’d unearthed a smooth, flat plane of darkly polished oak that wasn’t in the least bit damaged.

  ‘Put it back!’ Sandy cried. ‘Don’t uncover any more – slap all the mud back on, keep it in the peat! No, wait, what’s that? Careful, Jamie, lad, give her a bit of room, don’t use your fingers.’

  I picked at the mud with the trowel tip. I was black with peat up to my elbows. (Jean McEwen’s words echoed in my head: Och, peat never hurt anyone.) Ellen was leaning over my shoulder now, sketching as fast as she could.

  What we’d found was a bit like the stern end of a punt – the corner of a flat ledge with six inches of rope still attached to a loophole bored through the wood. We’d found six inches of three-thousand-year-old rope.

  Sandy identified it. I uncovered it. Ellen drew it. Catriona Lennox photographed it, and Jamie covered it up again.

  When we turned to Sandy he was grey as a Tay pearl and sweating. He is in love with that boat – tragically in love.

  ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Leave it. I’ll ring the director of the National Museum. My God.’

  ‘Sandwiches,’ Mary told him firmly, and he laughed.

  ‘Oh, Mary!’

  He stood up and kissed her on the mouth, in full view of everyone and as naturally as if she were already his wife. ‘Yes, thank you!’

  After that we had to send Mary back to the library to telephone the Water Bailiff so he could come and chase away the crowd. He tried to chase Ellen away too, no doubt because he knows how much Mary dislikes the McEwens; but of course we wouldn’t let him. Then when he spotted all the gear Ellen had with her, he made up some non-existent rule about how only Alan McEwen is allowed to camp at Inchfort Field. Sandy coolly set him straight. Sandy’s blood was up and he was on fine form. I think he was ready to take on anyone.

  We went back the next day, and the next, as if we were criminals revisiting the scene of a robbery.

  The expert from the National Museum of Antiquities came out on the train and we had to show him to the site. Of course when we got to the boat there wasn’t much to see. Neither Sandy nor the chap from the museum dared to uncover the wonderful thing (‘Stern of Bronze Age log boat with tow line in situ’), but they talked and talked about it, planning how they’d uncover and preserve it and what the proposed schedule would be like and how they might get the Glenfearn School to cooperate with them, and Jamie and Ellen and I got bored.

  We were kicking our heels along the mouth of the Fearn where it meets the Tay, and the tide was down. The workers from the pipeline had disappeared overnight. There was one steam digger still parked in the water meadow, but the rest had vanished, and we took this to mean that they’d finished their work.

  ‘They’ve run that pipeline straight through the reed beds,’ Jamie said. ‘I bet we could walk along the line they’ve cut and cross to your willow banks on the other side of the Tay. I’ve never seen the tide this low.’

  ‘It’s a spring tide,’ Ellen told him. ‘That’s why.’

  Frank Dunbar had told me the same thing. He’d said that the river would be especially low at the end of July.

  ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ I said.

  So we set off along the course that the pipes for the new pool were going to take.

  The silt and mudflats in the Tay just beyond the mouth of the Fearn were all exposed, like a distant sandbar, and the water of the Fearn lapped in shallow waves against it. There was a delightful little breeze keeping off the midges. There was no one about but us and the birds.

  This summer the ground had been dug up and replaced and pipes laid down and hoardings put in and taken away, and Hugh Housman’s body had got cut in half somehow during all the activity. But it was all smoothed over now: finished.

  Jamie was critical.

  ‘Stupid how they did all the work underwater. If they’d just waited until today, or this week at any rate, it would have saved them a load of trouble.’

  ‘Well, remember that when you’re in charge!’

  We walked along the edge of the reed beds which rose like a jungle of giant grass, with blue sky and scudding clouds overhead. Reed buntings flashed and chattered. On the other side of the Fearn, the willows made a low smear of whitish green against the greener fields and the Lomond Hills rising behind them.

  Between us and the willows lay a strange riverine landscape of round humpy sandbars, mostly exposed, gleaming darkly in the sun like the backs of a shoal of wet seals. A heron stood motionless at the water’s edge, intent on fish.

  And the tide was still going out.

  Among the smooth humps, sections of the riverbed had been disturbed by the digging of the pipeline; great chunks of it had been lifted out and dumped back in by the diggers and dredgers.

  ‘We can’t walk across that mud,’ I objected. ‘We’ll sink!’

  ‘Don’t you do geography in whatever posh school they ship you off to?’ Ellen said scornfully. (They bloody don’t. We are made to take elocution lessons. The German language is the closest I can get to anything scientific.) ‘That’s peat,’ Ellen told me. ‘It doesn’t drift like sand or mud.’ She pointed to another mucky lump so we could see the difference. ‘That’s mud.’

  Pinkie started to whine.

  ‘Shaness, you daft dog,’ Ellen scolded. ‘What are you greeting for? It’s just tree stumps.’ She pointed again.

  The heron spread leisurely wings and flapped away from us, low over the drained riverbed, and disappeared among the reeds.

  Before us, where Ellen was directing us, one of the islands of peat erupted in twisted, curving tentacles, like half-buried dead branches. The strange smooth coils were the same colour as the uncovered river bottom. Another tangled eruption lay beyond the first, and then another. They seemed to be growing from the tidal flats, growing through them, the worn roots and stumps of a forest we’d never seen. They were the skeletons of trees.

  But no trees as large as once these were could have grown and died and disappeared in any living person’s memory. They were part of the Tay’s thousands of years of ebb and flow and drought and flood.

  Pinkie stopped whining, but slunk close about my legs, spooked.

  ‘How old are they?’ I asked. I had no doubt now that Ellen would know.

  ‘The peat’s maybe three thousand years old. Or older … or not so old. Anything stuck through it like that is older than the peat – the peat got laid down over it. Like the boat. The peat preserved these stumps.’

  ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘You’re saying those tree stumps are all three thousand years old?’ Jamie asked incredulously.

  ‘More or less,’ she agreed. ‘But now they’re uncovered, the air and tide will eat them away. They need to be wet and covered up. Every time the tide goes out this far it’ll wear them down some more.’

  Pinkie cowered, silently hugging my legs. Then she lay down beside me.

  She knew. The stubborn, beautiful yellow dog suddenly refuse
d to go forward another inch.

  Flat on her belly on the wet silt, Pinkie was focused on the disturbed mud pile just to our right, on the side of us that was the River Fearn as we crossed its mouth. She simply wouldn’t budge, and eventually I went to give the offending pile of mud a kick.

  It came to pieces beneath the toe of my tennis shoe and Ellen suddenly dragged me backward, away from it, holding me tightly from behind with her arms across my chest, and then Jamie clutched at one of my arms as well.

  For a moment the three of us stood staring in appalled horror at what we’d found: the top half of Hugh Housman.

  It wasn’t really a whole half of him. It was his head and neck and shoulder, and a bit of the other arm that hadn’t turned up before.

  It was indescribably awful.

  You wanted and wanted to look away, but for the longest time you just couldn’t. The only thing recognisable in the blackened, shredded face was the wire scrubbing brush of his whiskers. But the most truly horrific thing was the rope coiled close and tight around his neck.

  Jamie whispered, ‘That wasn’t suicide. You can’t strangle yourself and then go and jump in a river.’

  We all glanced at each other at last, released.

  ‘What do we do?’ I whispered back. ‘The water will cover it up again and there won’t be another spring tide for a month. It’ll fall apart. No one will be able to find it.’

  ‘The water preserves it,’ Jamie reminded me. ‘Remember how the doctor complained about them leaving his legs to dry out?’

  ‘It’s like the log boat,’ Ellen said. ‘We should cover it with mud again to protect it. And mark the spot so the lifeboats know where to look.’

  The thing was so far from being human it didn’t actually seem foul – it didn’t make me feel sick, not like the time we took the dead deer to the abattoir to see how they cut up the venison. This was different – it felt horrific but faintly unreal, the way you sometimes feel in a nightmare when you think you’re drowning or being buried alive. Your brain keeps insisting: THIS CAN’T BE REAL.

  ‘I’ll do the mud,’ I said through my teeth. Because I was very ready to hide it. ‘I’ll put the mud back on.’