The Pearl Thief

  The going got harder and harder. Euan came up last, behind me, and I grew aware of him having to wait for me.

  ‘I’m going to stop for a minute,’ I told him, pressing my back against one wall of the chimney shaft with my feet braced against the other wall and my legs across the empty air so I could take the weight off my arms. ‘I think you can squeeze past.’

  He climbed up to where I was and wedged himself alongside me.

  ‘I’ll bide wi’ you.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a pipe? This is the perfect place for a smoke.’

  Euan laughed, but answered ruefully, ‘No, Ellen’s got it.’ His long legs seemed awfully bunched up next to me.

  ‘You’d make a terrible chimney sweep,’ I said.

  It wasn’t as though he could carry me down, or catch me if I fell. But being packed so tight actually did make me feel safer.

  We heard the rush of wings as Jamie and Ellen emerged in the attic above us and startled the wood pigeons away.

  After a minute or two Ellen called down the murky shaft after her brother, ‘Sproul kinchen!’

  I laughed. ‘Wee brother?’

  Euan laughed too. ‘Or wee sister.’ He cried back, ‘Sproul kinchen yourself! Our Davie’s having a rest.’

  ‘Our Jamie’s getting worried,’ she told us. ‘Have a rest at the top.’

  I gritted my teeth and fought my way up. Jamie reached through the broken chimney wall to help pull me out on to the solid floor of the lost room.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘My shoulder hurts. Bother.’

  ‘It’s easier going down.’

  ‘I know.’

  As a consolation for my being pathetic they let me be the one to free the pearls.

  Ellen had brought along polishing equipment in her fisherman’s creel: soft puffs of cotton wool and a jar of baby oil and a swathe of elegant fabric to tip the treasure out on. ‘Mam says pearls look best on black velvet,’ she said.

  They looked marvellous on black velvet – all their subtle hues more vivid. We played with them as if we were babies playing with alphabet blocks.

  ‘These aren’t just the Reliquary pearls,’ Ellen said. ‘There’s too many.’

  ‘I know. Grandad must have collected some of them himself,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a shame they’ve been mixed. We’ll never know which are the oldest.’

  Ellen lined up the big grey Tay pearl beads, the ones that matched. Against the black velvet they seemed to glow silvery white as moonlight. Against the black velvet they looked like …

  Ellen and I gave a unified shriek of excitement and disbelief.

  ‘The library pearls!’

  ‘They’re the same as Mary Queen of Scots’ bracelet.’

  We had to explain it to our baffled brothers.

  ‘They’re a match with the pearls on display in the Inverfearnie Library –’

  ‘An exact match!’

  ‘They’re from –’

  ‘The same set!’

  ‘It must have been –’

  ‘A necklace. A necklace to match the bracelet.’

  Jamie let out a soft and fervent oath.

  Euan breathed quietly, ‘Mary Queen o’ Scots’ own necklace? How?’

  ‘The ones in the library were a gift to the Murrays,’ I reminded him.

  Half the birds had come back to roost grudgingly in the top dove holes. They settled into their soft chirruping murmur, a sound as timeless as the river, yet alive and warm. They warbled in the background as I enthusiastically constructed a plausible history for Mary Stuart’s lost pearls. ‘Maybe she gave the Murrays the necklace and bracelet together, but then the necklace broke and someone put the pearls in the Reliquary with the other pearls, and they forgot about them, and a hundred and fifty years later when the donation was made to the library only the bracelet was left –’

  Ellen interrupted suddenly, ‘I smell smoke.’

  We had our backs to the hole in the wall we’d come in by. Ellen turned around. She said, ‘The chimney’s smoking!’

  We all spun round to look.

  A soft roll of cloud was spilling out of the broken chimney wall and over the old wooden floor like haar mist. It was opaque, a pale and milky grey, the same colour as the Tay pearls in the shadow of a fold of cloth.

  ‘That’s torn it,’ Jamie said. ‘We’re stuck here!’

  We couldn’t get back down a chimney filled with smoke.

  All of us started to chatter at once, like the wood pigeons, trying to keep our voices low.

  ‘If this place catches fire we are cooked,’ I hissed.

  ‘It’s a chimney,’ Jamie pointed out. ‘It’s supposed to smoke!’

  Ellen said through her teeth, ‘But who set the fire? Sergeant Henderson, trying to smoke us out?’

  We stared at each other with drained faces.

  ‘We might be able to climb down holding our breath,’ I said. ‘Or breathe through handkerchiefs. If we did it quickly –’

  ‘Could you?’ Ellen asked sharply.

  ‘I’d try,’ I said. ‘I could if I had to.’

  ‘We could have boiled a can of tea in the time it took you to get up. You cannae hold your breath so long.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s Henderson, and I don’t think he’s trying to kill us,’ Jamie said in a low voice. ‘Not by building a fire in a fireplace, even if it is five hundred years old. I think it’s the fellow who’s been camping here. I think he heard our voices and now he’s trying to trap us for a little while so he can clear off. He’s been here a long time without getting caught.’

  ‘So we bide until the fire burns out?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘Aye, we could bide …’ Jamie stuck his head out of the door to the empty stairwell where the stone spiral had long ago collapsed, knowing there wasn’t a chance of getting down there. Then he moved to the mullioned window. ‘I wonder though …’ He leaned out, then turned around to look at us. He stood silhouetted against grey sky.

  ‘Sandy said that he and Davie and Archie had a race once. Before you and I and Grant were born, Julie. Up this tower, along the wall of the keep and down the kitchen chimney. You have to do this first bit like you’re rock climbing, just hanging on with hands and feet. There’s no ledge till you get to the wall of the keep.’

  ‘We’ve climbed the kitchen chimney,’ said Euan. ‘But it’s not so narrow as this one. You have to climb it the whole way using hands and feet as you said. And it slopes in the way at the top. It’s no’ easy.’ He nodded towards me. ‘She couldnae.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to,’ Jamie said. ‘If I go, I can put out the fire.’

  ‘Or we could bide,’ I said.

  Jamie said forcefully, ‘I want to catch him at it.’

  Euan stood up. ‘I’ll go along wi’ you.’

  ‘Jamie Stuart,’ Ellen told him, ‘take my knife.’

  Euan went first. Ellen and I watched our brothers crawl one at a time through the mullioned window, cling like spiders to the stone wall as they inched their way from our window to the roofless wall of the ruined castle’s central keep, and begin the precarious journey across that wall, five flights up and with a sheer drop on either side.

  Then they had to scale the outside of the huge kitchen chimney. First Euan lowered himself inside, long-limbed but lithe and efficient, while Jamie sat perched on the topmost surviving stone of Aberfearn Castle, waiting his turn with his legs dangling down the chimney; then he, too, was gone.

  Now there wasn’t anything for me and Ellen to do but wait.

  I hugged myself, still reeling with the discovery we’d made. ‘We’re the Aberfearn Castle guardians,’ I said. ‘We’re the guardians of –’

  ‘Mary Queen o’ Scots’ jewels!’ Ellen finished.

  The smoke continued to billow blue and foul across the attic floor. It was coming out here and using the whole dovecote as a chimney because of the broken wall.

  Ellen added soberly, ‘Let’s be proper guardi
ans. We’d best get those pearls away.’

  In the time it took to scoop the pearls back into the jam jar we were both choking and weeping. The air of the little room was quickly turning poisonous. Ellen tore the black velvet swatch in half; I had to hold the cloth over her face and mine while she stowed the jar in her creel basket. Now my eyes and throat were burning and we were both wheezing, overwhelmed with the acrid smoke. The wood pigeons took off again.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I spluttered, as we stuck our heads back out of the window, gulping in fresh air, one of us on each side of the stone mullion.

  Smoke wreathed around us as it, too, found its way out of the broken room into the sky, so that there was no way for us to avoid it. My eyes were streaming as if I’d been rubbing them with pepper; I tied the velvet cloth fast over my nose and mouth.

  We squinted at the narrow stone parapet that led across the ruin to the kitchen chimney.

  ‘Could you?’ Ellen suggested dubiously, her voice harsh and grating. Euan said she’d climbed the kitchen chimney before.

  But I didn’t think I could. My shoulder wouldn’t support me.

  Ellen just seemed like her usual naturally grim self, so I didn’t want to show her that I’d never felt so frightened in my life.

  ‘We could climb out of this window and sit on the wall, I suppose,’ I choked, although I didn’t really believe I could manage to spider across to the wall of the keep without splattering myself among the stones and nettles five floors beneath us, either.

  A cascade of happy barks came pealing up from somewhere far below.

  ‘Well, they’ve found my dog,’ said Ellen.

  ‘Nell,’ I said, and took her hand.

  ‘Don’t fret, lass,’ she told me through her own soft black mask.

  ‘I’m not fretting. I just want to hold on to you.’

  ‘You look like a train robber!’

  ‘So do you.’

  Her defiant determination braced me a little.

  She sang softly:

  ‘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?’ I joined in.

  Our voices nearly twined together once more, but she broke off in a spasm of choking coughs.

  ‘Don’t sing for me,’ I told her. ‘Just breathe.’

  She let go of my hand so she could wreathe her arm around my waist from behind. When I wove my own arm beneath hers, she clasped my hand against her ribs on the other side. We clung to each other as if we were drowning.

  We were drowning.

  After what seemed like another very long time we heard Euan calling up the chimney to his sister, just as Ellen had called down earlier.

  ‘Sproul!’

  We glanced around quickly, and we couldn’t see a thing through the smoke that was still hanging in the tower room.

  It took us a long moment to realise Jamie and Euan must have put the fire out.

  I’m sure neither Ellen nor I noticed how tightly we were holding on to each other until we both went limp with relief. Then, after one last tearful hug, we tried to get back to the chimney.

  But the smoke hadn’t yet cleared enough for us even to turn around for more than a second or two, let alone cross the room, so we had to wait before we were able to hoarsely answer Euan’s call. Jamie said later that it was the most fearsome part of the whole afternoon, that silent ten minutes before the smoke cleared, when they called and called until their own throats were raw and got no answer from us.

  I am very glad that wasn’t something I had to do. If it were the other way around – me wondering if Jamie were alive or dead … Not knowing. At any rate …

  At any rate, we weren’t dead.

  It seemed ages before the chimney was sufficiently smokeless that we could climb back down. But we managed it at last, Ellen with the pearls stowed safely in her creel basket. The climb itself was easier than going up – gravity helps when you’re on your way down. Pinkie, yapping her encouraging love from below us, helped too.

  Jamie caught Ellen, then me, in the hearth of the Earl’s Chamber at the bottom. The entire floor was a mess of damp, half-burned scraps of reed and gorse and heather and birch, slippery and deceptively awash with what must have been a tiny amount of water from the stolen builder’s bucket Jamie had brought with him from the kitchen fireplace.

  We three knelt on the old hearth in a clinging, grateful huddle, like a bundle of kittens for a moment, with the frantic dog bouncing around us. Then Jamie untangled himself, stood up and pointed.

  ‘He says he’s not a killer. I rather believe him. He’s too scared to say anything else. We had to bully him a bit so he’d help us stamp out the fire though. He didn’t want to ruin his shoes.’

  The man they’d caught was cowering in a corner of the empty room with Euan standing casual guard nearby, and oh, this was surely Euan McEwen’s finest hour: he stood straight and impassive, making use of his full six-foot-two-inches or whatever it is, holding Ellen’s knife half-raised as if he were ready to toss it like a dart straight between the creeping villain’s eyes the second he made a false move.

  ‘Who is he?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘He won’t say.’

  ‘Oh, will he not?’ she murmured in her best Lady Macbeth.

  He was the very model of a tramp, with a full but badly barbered beard, wearing an unravelling tweed jacket, a stained shirt and an ill-fitting faded kilt with half the pleats let out of it to make it bigger.

  It was Sandy’s kilt; my kilt.

  It was the kilt that had disappeared from the Magnette the night they found Housman’s legs.

  ‘He’s the one who’s been nicking everything,’ I said.

  ‘He nicked Housman’s spectacles,’ Jamie told us. ‘Remember the broken spectacles? He had the rest. We nicked them back.’

  Jamie patted his cartridge bag, and the craven person in the corner suddenly protested, ‘Do be careful with those specs – I’m blind as a bat without them.’

  His voice was cultured and English.

  ‘Jamie,’ I said, ‘Give him back his specs.’

  ‘It’s quite useful keeping him blind as a bat,’ Jamie said. ‘He stopped fighting when we got them off him.’

  ‘Give them back. I want to see what he looks like when he has them on.’

  Jamie opened his bag and gracelessly passed the broken wire-rimmed glasses back to the prisoner, who sulkingly put them on.

  ‘Look down,’ I told him.

  Very cowed by whatever his encounter with Jamie and Euan had been, he obeyed.

  I took a step towards him.

  ‘Bend over.’

  With a frightened little gulp, again he obeyed.

  ‘Now look up. Look at me.’

  He raised his head, blinking at me over the top of the battered gold spectacles, and met my eyes.

  ‘You’re Hugh Housman.’

  Not dead.

  Not a ghost.

  Alive and cringing and criminal and bewildered.

  ‘Solange! What about Solange?’ I cried out in fury. ‘Waiting for trial like Mary Queen of Scots! You weasel! All those professions of love and you skulk here hiding while she’s been accused of your murder?’

  I could see by his expression that he wasn’t aware of this turn of events, but I couldn’t stop – the accusations and outrage came pouring out of me.

  ‘Someone’s dead! My God, who in blazes is that poor man they fished out of the river? Solange didn’t kill him – did you? Did Angus Henderson have anything to do with it?’ I stopped to breathe. ‘I say, did you see Henderson? Did you see Henderson hit me?’ Then I began to cough again.

  The man was now nodding his head tremulously, but it was impossible to know to which of my battery of questions he was responding.

  Euan had backed away, gaping.

  None of the rest of us would have known Housman – I was the only one who’d seen him before.


  I turned to Jamie, who was also gaping. ‘Can he walk?’ I demanded.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Let’s take him to the Big House and call the police.’

  The miserable Dr Housman suddenly leaped into life.

  ‘I’ve done nothing – at least I don’t think I have –’

  ‘Well, we have to call the police, because Solange is in prison,’ I snarled.

  ‘Because of me? But all I did was leave my post,’ he said plaintively. ‘I-I needed some time alone. I knew she’d be upset, but I thought she’d understand my message … I never thought …’

  Now we all gaped at him. I realised he was taking a gamble, guessing we didn’t know about the stolen pearls.

  ‘I left my post,’ he admitted again. ‘I’ve lost my position. I beg your pardon, young lady, but I think I did witness your … your accident last month.’

  ‘You saw the Water Bailiff hit me! You actually saw him hit me? You know! What happened? You know!’

  I’d advanced on Housman, which scared him back into confused and sullen silence. Jamie was right: the man was far too much of a coward to have killed anyone. Not on purpose, anyway. My God, I was ready to twist the details out of him with a corkscrew.

  But no – I could see that wouldn’t work. He’d been lurking here for over a month waiting for the dust to clear and a quiet opportunity to get those pearls back, and hadn’t once been brazen enough or devious enough to manage it.

  Maybe he hadn’t even thought it was possible to change his original plan to collect them at the end of the summer. There’d been too many builders and newspapermen and us coming and going, and the river watcher patrolling the path, and Sandy camped at the Inverfearnie Library and the McEwens camped in Inchfort Field, and the high water in the Fearn after all that rain.

  Hugh Housman was a scholar. He wasn’t a natural thug and he wasn’t naturally bold. He needed babying. I wouldn’t get anything out of him if the police whisked him away.

  ‘Och, Euan, give Ellen back her knife,’ I said. ‘What this Sassenach needs is a cup of tea. Let’s take him to the Big House and turn him over to Francis Dunbar.’

  ‘Aye, maybe it’ll give Dunbar a chance to do something right for a change,’ Jamie said.