The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  The first person I recognised was Sergeant Angus Henderson, the Water Bailiff whom Grandad sent for to take custody of the pearl thief we caught. Henderson was there with his bicycle, with his tall cromach across the bars as if he were about to do a high-wire act and needed a long stick to balance him. He was having a row with the driver of the steamroller.

  ‘I’ve told you before to keep your men off the path by the Fearn when they’re ditch-digging!’ the Water Bailiff roared. ‘Bad enough the place crawling with those dirty tinker folk camped up in Inchfort Field, in and out the water looking for pearls. That river path to the Inverfearnie Library is off limits to your men.’

  ‘Those men are digging the pipeline for the new swimming pool – how d’you expect them to stay off the river path?’ steamed the roller driver. ‘All the work is downstream of Inverfearnie. I dinnae want them mixed up with those sleekit tinkers anyway. Bloody light-fingered sneaks. You’d not believe how many tools go missing, spades and whatnot.’

  I did not want to get caught in the crossfire of this battle. The Water Bailiff is a terrifyingly tall and gaunt ex-Black Watch policeman. Grandad told us that in the heat of the Great War, Henderson allegedly shot one of his own men in the back for running away from a battle, and then strangled a German officer, an enemy Hun, with his bare hands.

  ‘I’m off down the Fearn path now, and if I catch any of your men there …’ Henderson let the threat hang, but gave his cromach staff a shake.

  The Water Bailiff had been known to thrash every single one of my five brothers for some reason or other in the past – guddling for rainbow trout out of the brown trout season, or swimming in the Fearn when the salmon were running, or just for getting in his way as he patrolled the narrow path along the burn on his bicycle.

  I stepped back so I was well out of his way as he set off along the drive ahead of me. When he’d become nothing but a dark beetling shape among the bright green beeches, I held tight to my small overnight case and set off after him, considerably more slowly. I was looking forward to getting out of my modified school uniform if I could. But the dark skirt and white blouse did give me a smart official air, like a post office clerk or a prospective stenographer for the Glenfearn School, and the men working on the drive paid no attention to me.

  My grandmother’s roses in the French forecourt garden in front of Strathfearn House were blooming in a glorious blazing riot of June colour, oblivious to the chaos throughout the rest of the grounds. There were people all about, hard at work building new dormitories and classrooms and playing fields. None of them I recognised. I let myself into the house – the doors were wide open.

  The whole of the baronial reception hall had been emptied of its rosewood furniture and stripped of the ancestral paintings. I felt as though I had never been there before in my life.

  I went straight to my grandmother’s favourite sitting room and discovered it was also in disarray; and my remaining family members were nowhere to be found. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming three days earlier than expected. So, like a hunted fox bolting to the safety of its den, I sought out the nursery bathroom high in the back of the east wing, and drew myself a bath because I had been travelling for three days and the hot water seemed to be working as usual.

  I didn’t have any clean clothes of my own to change into, but it is a good big bathroom, and in addition to a six-foot-long tub and painted commode there is a tall chest full of children’s cast-offs. I put on a mothy tennis pullover which left my arms daringly bare and a kilt that must have been forgotten some time ago by one of my big brothers (probably Sandy, who was Grandad’s favourite, his namesake and his heir, and who had spent more time there than the rest of us).

  I was David Balfour from Kidnapped again, the way I’d been the whole summer I was thirteen, to my brothers’ amusement and my nanny Solange’s despair. I plaited my hair and stuffed it up under a shapeless faded wool tam-o’-shanter to get it out of my face, and wove my way through the passages back to the central oak staircase.

  The banisters were covered with dust sheets because the walls had just been painted a modern cool pale blue – not horrible, but so different from the heraldic Victorian wallpaper. Light in shades of lemon and sapphire and scarlet spilled through the tall stained-glass window on the landing. As I turned the corner, the telephone in the hall below me started to ring.

  I swithered on the landing, wondering if I should answer it. But then I heard footsteps and a click and the ringing stopped, and a harassed man’s voice said, ‘Yes, this is he … No, they’re not gypsies, they’re tinkers. Scottish Travellers. It’s tiresome, but they’re allowed to stay in that field till the end of this summer.’ The voice took a sudden change of tone and continued brightly, ‘Oh, you’ve sent the Water Bailiff up there now? My foreman thinks they’re pretty bold thieves – wants him to check all their gear for missing tools … Jolly good!’ His footsteps thumped smartly back the way they’d come.

  Goodness, everyone seemed to have it in for the Travelling folk.

  This Scottish traveller didn’t bother anybody. If the ditch-diggers were all downstream and the Water Bailiff was off bothering the campers at Inchfort Field, I could count on having the river path to the library on Inverfearnie Island all to myself. I thought I would go to say hello to Mary Kinnaird, who would not care if I was wearing only a kilt and a tennis pullover.

  I crossed the broad lawn, broken by men smoothing earth and digging pits and laying paths. In the distance by the edge of the River Tay, over the tops of the birch trees, I could see the ruinous towers of Aberfearn Castle. The Big House is new by comparison; it was built in 1840, before Grandad was born. Before the railway came through. It was hard to believe that none of this was ours any more.

  I passed into the dapple of sunlight and shade in the birch wood by the river.

  An otter slid into the burn as I started along the path, and I saw a kingfisher darting among the low branches trailing in the water on the opposite bank. For a moment I stood still, watching and breathing it in. The smell of the Tay and the Fearn! Oh, how I’d missed it, and how I would miss it after this last summer!

  See me, kilted and barefoot on the native soil of my ancestors, declaiming Allan Cunningham in dramatic rhapsody:

  ‘O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!

  When the flower is i’ the bud and the leaf is on the tree,

  The larks shall sing me hame in my ain countree!’

  I crossed from the west bank of the Fearn to Inverfearnie Island by the footbridge. It is a creaky old iron suspension bridge so narrow you can’t pass two abreast, erected in the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. I jumped along its span to make it sway, the way my brothers and I had always done when we were little.

  The library stood proud on the unnatural mound of Inverfearnie Island, which Grandad always told us might hide a Bronze Age burial beneath it. The oak front door of the library was locked, just as it had been three years ago.

  This time, knowing Mary much better than I did then, I went round to the kitchen door. It was standing ajar.

  ‘MARY?’

  I let myself in, hollering, because she can never hear you.

  The kitchen was tidy and empty. I went through to her study, yelling my friend’s name. She wasn’t there, either, and it was also tidy and empty, as if she hadn’t been in all day.

  I glanced into the telephone cupboard with its red velvet stool, in the dark little nook under the winding stairs. No one.

  I went through to the library.

  The library is two rooms on top of each other, the walls surrounded by shelves and scarcely a single book newer than before the Great War, apart from recent volumes of antiquarian journals and almanacs. But they still lend books to anglers and Scots language scholars and farmers trying to solve boundary disputes, and there is almost always someone or other studying in the Upper Reading Room.

  I spared a reverent glance for the pearl bracelet. It lay locked under glass on its bed of black
velvet, on permanent loan to the Perthshire and Kinross-shire Council for display in the library here. I couldn’t quite believe Mary had let me try those pearls on. They were beautiful fat Tay river pearls, so pale a grey they shone nearly like silver, the size of small marbles. Staring into the glass until it began to get fogged by my own breath, I could remember exactly how they’d felt against my wrist, cool and heavy with the magic of having been worn by Mary Stuart herself, whose surname I shared, as young as me and already Queen of Scotland.

  I wiped the glass and turned away to continue the hunt for my own living Mary. I took the narrow winding steps to the Upper Reading Room of the library two at a time.

  ‘AHOY, MARY!’

  And the Upper Reading Room was empty too.

  But here was a strange thing. The Upper Reading Room was empty, but unlike the rest of Mary Kinnaird’s domain, it was not tidy. The great big chestnut table was covered end to end in ephemera and artefacts. I identified these as what my brothers and I called ‘the Murray Hoard’: intriguing archaeological finds that our grandfather used to keep on display in the tower room at Strathfearn House. I guessed that this must be a grand sorting job, with Mary called upon to catalogue the priceless ancient pieces before they went to auction. Iron and bronze spear tips, all different sizes and shapes, lay in rows, with more waiting in cigar boxes; I recognised an iridescent Roman glass vial shaped like a leaping fish which was, Grandad told me, nearly two thousand years old; and the dark polished stone axe heads were eerily three times that.

  And there was my favourite item, a small round cup made of blackened wood set in silver filigree. I could picture it sitting in a back corner of a dusty glass case in the tower of the Big House, full to the brim with loose pearls like the ones on the bracelet downstairs. I had never been allowed to touch the cup, but Grandad had let me play with the pearls when I was very small.

  ‘My mother’s mother’s mother’s …’ he’d said they were. I can’t remember how many mothers back they went. All those pearls were found in Scottish rivers. I’d loved the way out of all the ancient artefacts in his collection, only the pearls didn’t look old. Like the royal pearls downstairs, they were as beautiful and ageless as the rivers where they’d been grown.

  Now the cup was empty. The pearls were gone. Another wave of sadness washed over me. I’d felt instinctively that they belonged in that cup. Grandad must have sold them, as he’d sold so many of his heirlooms and so much of his land, to keep the estate going during his illness.

  I was surprised that Mary would have gone out leaving a door open with all this valuable stuff lying about. She takes her job as the Inverfearnie Library custodian very seriously.

  I poked my nose into the other rooms, her bedroom and the bathroom, but Mary was nowhere to be found.

  I decided to leave her a note. I went back up to where she’d been working. There was paper everywhere, but all covered with lists and descriptions of artefacts. Finally I settled on an empty brown envelope addressed to my grandfather and postmarked Oxford from two years ago. The back was engraved with the name of a scholar I’d never heard of at the Ashmolean Museum. The envelope had been slit open with a knife or letter opener long ago, and whatever message it had once contained was not lying about in an obvious place. It didn’t seem important in any way, so I wrote to Mary on the back quickly to say that I was home in Scotland and staying at Strathfearn House for the next few weeks, and that I would stop in again to visit.

  Here was another odd thing. When I went to prop my message against a chipped clay pot of unknown origin, in front of the pushed-back chair where Mary would be sure to see it when she came back, a pearl fell out of the envelope.

  I thought it dropped off me at first – as if I’d been wearing it in my hair, or as an earring! It was the palest rose-petal pink, the size of a barley grain and perfectly round. It hit the green baize table cover with a sound like pip and lay still. It was intact and beautiful.

  I picked it up – it was so round I had to wedge it beneath my fingernail to get hold of it. It must have been part of the collection. I thought of dropping it into the black wooden cup. But afraid of disturbing the cataloguing system, I put it back inside the envelope it had fallen out of. I folded the envelope over so the pearl couldn’t fall out again and propped it against one of the jam jars.

  I went back outside, leaving the kitchen door a little open behind me, the way I’d found it.

  The hammering and drilling and tractoring going on at the Big House and further downstream was no more than a faint hum. I didn’t feel like going back to the Big House. I thought I’d go to look at the Drookit Stane and the Salmon Stane, the standing stones in the river and Inchfort Field, just to make sure the builders hadn’t knocked them down to make an access road or boat ramp or something. Maybe I’d just peek at the one in Inchfort Field without leaving the birch wood. I didn’t want to get mixed up with the Water Bailiff.

  I went down the gravel driveway, and crossed the humped bridge of moss-covered stone, as old as the seventeenth-century library itself, that leads to the opposite bank of the Fearn. Then I continued along the path on the other side of the river.

  Where the burn bends it has scooped out a little shingle beach on one bank, where we used to swim. There was a heron standing midstream near the tall Drookit Stane, absolutely still, focused on fishing. Its shadow was dark against the stone and its reflection rippled in the water. I stopped still too – but not still enough. It heard me and lifted off awkwardly, heading downstream with long, slow wing beats.

  I sat down on the flat sun-dappled rock slab where the wounded poacher had rested, and where Grandad had taught me and my brothers to guddle for trout. I wondered if I could still catch a fish using only my hands. No one was about, not even the heron, and I was overcome with a wave of sadness over my grandfather and his house and his things that weren’t ours any more, and all the summers that would never come back.

  So I lay down and slid my bare arm into the clear brown water.

  There. I was minding my own business, waiting for a fish to tickle. I suppose I didn’t really have any right to fish there because it wasn’t our land any longer. Julie the poacher!

  I thought about the pearls that I’d never see again, and all my grandmother had lost. I thought about picking an armful of her own roses for her. The plan improved: I would dig some up so she could take them with her when she had to leave the house for good.

  I’d not slept well on the trains across Europe. I’d been travelling for three days. I was lying in the sun and lulled by the sound of running water, and I fell asleep thinking about roses.

  I remember what it looked like when my head exploded with light and darkness, but I didn’t remember anything else until the moment I found myself in St John’s Infirmary in Perth three days later.

  2

  NO MODESTY AT ALL

  I don’t think I am capable of describing the headache with which I woke up.

  For a long time I lay very still, not daring to move, and wishing I would lose consciousness again. When it became clear that this was not going to happen, I opened my eyes.

  My friend Mary Kinnaird was sitting beside me, reading a book.

  She was wearing her usual tweed skirt and a powder-blue blouse and a dreadful prickly cardigan like the sheepskin in the story of Jacob and Esau. I had no idea where I was or how I’d got there. But if Mary Kinnaird was sitting next to me calmly reading, I knew I was perfectly safe.

  I said, ‘Hullo, Mary.’

  She didn’t hear me. I waved.

  She was so startled she dropped the book. Her smooth, broad brow crinkled with distress. Then she leaped out of her chair and landed on her knees next to me by the bed in which I’d been laid out, and grabbed my hands and exclaimed, ‘Oh, Julia! Julia, do you know me?’

  ‘Of course I know you, Mary,’ I said peevishly.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, you’re speaking into my bad ear.’ Flustered, she dropped my hands to hold up the beau
tiful brass horn. ‘Can you see? Can you hear me properly? What happened? Oh dear, now that you’re awake I really should go and ring your mother. Julia, can you speak? How do you feel?’

  I wanted to tell her to shut up or her blethering was going to kill me. I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter whether I could see or speak and that I didn’t care if she wanted to go and ring the King. I couldn’t possibly tell her what had happened because not only did I not know, but due to my fearsome headache I never even wanted to find out.

  I knew she could read my lips if I was facing her. I turned towards her on the pillow and said clearly, gazing into her eyes, ‘Please cut my head off.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ Mary Kinnaird said, and kissed me. ‘I don’t think anyone but me knows you’re here! The ward sister was rather run off her feet when I came in, and I haven’t had a chance to explain to her who you are. You were brought in here to the hospital two days ago by a family of travelling tinker folk, and they didn’t know who you are, either. Everyone thought you were one of them! There was a story about it on the front page of the Perth Mercury – “Tinker Lass Left for Dead on Riverbank”! Why aren’t your people worried about you?’

  ‘I came home early without telling them … I’m not supposed to get here till Saturday. Two days, you said? It’s Friday?’

  ‘Saturday. The tinkers kept you with them overnight when they found you. They brought you here the next day.’

  ‘Saturday!’ I gasped in disbelief.

  I’d been unconscious since Wednesday.

  It was the most tremendous thing that had ever happened to me.

  ‘But how did you know the person in the Mercury was me?’

  ‘Of course you’d left me a note, darling. Only I didn’t find it till this morning. The library’s shut all day on Wednesdays, so I can get the messages in the morning before early closing in the village, and I was out when you came in. And then when I found your note I guessed that the girl left unconscious on the riverbank might be you, and I was dreadfully worried – especially as it was a lad that found you, lying at the edge of Inchfort Field with a great dunt on your head. Did he … did he do something to you, darling?’