The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘Ah. That was the last you saw of him, was it?’

  At this point Solange lost control of her carefully maintained hauteur, and burst into loud tears, and began theorising rather hysterically as to what might have happened to me, which really did not count as factual information pertinent to a precognition. And her interview came to an end.

  Then it was Mother’s turn.

  She was queenly in a different way to Solange. She had none of Solange’s frost or magnificence; Mother was simply in control. She stood up and let Sergeant Henderson escort her next door without the least fuss or drama. Jamie and I had our ears pressed to the glass tumblers against the wood panelling the second the door to the passage had closed behind her.

  ‘Please sit, Lady Craigie.’ Inspector Milne was as dry as ever. This time, irritatingly, it was Mother who spoke in such a low voice that we couldn’t make out her answers. Of course that was because she was wise to us. After quite a lot of unintelligible mumbling from them both, Jamie rolled his eyes at me and put his tumbler down on the floor.

  So I was the only one who was listening when the inspector, quite clearly, asked my mother an absolutely outrageous question.

  ‘Is your daughter intact?’

  It was like being brutally smacked across the face. I felt myself burning with indignation. Just the asking of it made me feel filthy, and I wasn’t even in the room.

  Mother’s voice went up too. ‘Really, Inspector Milne, I fail to see what such a thing has to do with Housman’s death.’

  ‘Your daughter was the last to see him alive. She recalls that he was fully unclothed when she met him, alone on the riverbank, and she can remember nothing of the night she then spent in the company of the travelling tinkers. What happened to her in those hours, or what she did, is surely of relevance to this investigation. I want to know if you are aware of any misfortune she may have encountered that is not yet on record. Was she not examined in the hospital?’

  Mother didn’t say anything for a moment.

  She thought Jamie was listening, which was partly why she was embarrassed about answering the question.

  But something in her absolute silence made me aware that yes, medical staff had checked me over very carefully in the two days I’d been unconscious, and Mother knew what they’d been looking for and what they’d found, and hadn’t told me.

  I tried to imagine my senseless anonymous stripped self in that hospital bed behind the rail curtain, being examined for signs of assault. And felt violated even though I hadn’t been.

  ‘It’s a delicate question,’ the dry man acknowledged, prompting her. ‘Was there evidence of an attack of a sexual nature?’

  Mother spoke with the presence of an advocate defending a case. ‘Notwithstanding his courtship with Mam’selle Lavergne, Dr Housman was a respectable and temperate man and I have no reason to believe he would have assaulted my daughter.’

  ‘I was not thinking of him. I was thinking of the tinker family with whom she spent the night.’

  I felt my face go incandescent with embarrassment, and no small amount of horror at how the inspector’s mind was painting the McEwens.

  But Mother never lost her sangfroid.

  After a moment, she said loudly and clearly, in a voice of frost pitched for me to hear because she knew I was listening, ‘Whatever Housman may have had in mind when he removed his clothes for the last time, Inspector Milne, you will never hear me speak ill of Jean McEwen’s people.’

  ‘It’s possible that young Euan is the one who struck her,’ said the policeman.

  ‘I positively don’t believe it,’ Mother said firmly.

  Inspector Milne went back to muttering and mumbling, finishing with: ‘Perhaps your daughter interrupted a rendezvous.’

  The next thing I heard was Mother saying explosively, ‘Of course it wasn’t Solange who struck her!’

  Milne raised his voice in response. ‘We have to take into account that your lady’s maid admits to relations with Dr Housman, and to doing him violence,’ Milne pointed out drily. ‘And she has no alibi.’

  WHAT HAPPENED

  11TH–23RD JULY 1938

  7

  WE DON’T KEN HALF WHAT’S BURIED IN THE PEAT

  The rain continued, rather unbelievably, for some two weeks. Solange was not arrested for anything but she was sure she was going to be, and spent so much time sniffing into Mémère’s endless supply of lace-edged handkerchiefs that she spread a cloud of gloom everywhere she went. The uncertainty was hard to live with.

  Jamie attempted escape.

  He first went back to Inchfort Field to deliver Frank Dunbar’s (or rather, my) offer of a digging job to Euan McEwen, but Mother wouldn’t let me out with the river running so high and fast and the path so muddy and slippery.

  Then Jamie went every day.

  He’d always surreptitiously primp a bit before he set off, suddenly cleaning his teeth or running his fingers through his hair with a quick glance in Mémère’s dressing-table mirror.

  ‘What do you do up at Inchfort Field all day?’ I asked crossly. ‘Crouch in a tent in the rain weaving willow baskets?’

  ‘I talk to Ellen.’

  I was very jealous.

  But all I could do was sit with Mémère and Colette and the miserable Solange in the torrential gloom of the morning room, sorting china and table linen and three generations’ worth of French novels.

  My blasted trunk still wasn’t here, and the Schiaparelli blouse Jamie brought from home wasn’t really suitable for such dusty work, so I got him to fetch me all the frayed and faded summer clothing abandoned in the nursery bathroom. Sandy’s outgrown athletic shorts came down to my knees; his kilt had to be double lapped and pinned around my waist. I was quite desperate not to let Frank catch sight of me in drag as Davie Balfour – with my shorn hair I looked very like a Bohemian thirteen-year-old boy, and to be seen as such would have ruined all my credibility as an aspiring debutante.

  Jamie went back and forth to Inchfort so often that he and Ellen missed each other when she came to the Big House herself one morning.

  She first came to the front door, which would have been entirely inappropriate a year ago, but this year nobody even bothered to answer the bell. So then she came around to the terrace at the back – even less appropriate – and knocked on the French windows of the morning room.

  I leaped to meet her. ‘Come in! Oh –’

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t come in.

  I stepped outside into the drizzle. I hadn’t seen her, or any of the McEwens, since the terrible day at the library.

  We stood about a yard apart, looking at each other.

  ‘I’m sorry about Mary Kinnaird,’ I said. I hadn’t seen Mary since that day either; I didn’t know how to face Mary.

  ‘You’ve got your grandad’s eyes but not his say in matters,’ Ellen commented drily.

  ‘Is Euan all right?’

  ‘“Aye, nae bother” – so he says. He’s going to take the work you’ve offered him, helping to dig that pipeline in the riverbed for the Glenfearn School. But they’ve told him not to come till it stops raining.’

  ‘Come in and talk to me,’ I begged. ‘You talk to my brother all the time.’

  ‘I’m drookit. I’ll drip all over your gran’s fine carpet.’

  ‘I’ll go around to the front with you and you can go in there. It’s all painters and dust cloths in every room but this one. No one will care if you drip.’

  We walked around to the front of the house in silence. I wondered why she’d come.

  ‘Looking for Jamie, are you?’ I asked as we entered the reception hall.

  Out of the rain now, she pushed the damp hair back from her face and straightened her skirt. She gave a little laugh.

  ‘Are you jealous of your brother?’

  I frowned. I was, a little – of his healthy independence and maybe, a little, of his being able to sit and do nothing while I ran the supper dishes to the kitchen. But someth
ing about the way she’d asked the question gave a different twist to her meaning.

  ‘Well, are you looking for him?’ I asked impatiently.

  She gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Any of you will do. I wondered if you could mend things with the librarian a bit. Euan promised the Water Bailiff not to set foot on Inverfearnie Island, but that means he has to go round by the village at Brig O’Fearn to get here to the Big House for the work you’ve offered him.’

  ‘It’s ten miles by road that way!’

  ‘Isn’t it! I don’t suppose you thought of that when you were playing Lady of the Manor, finding him work?’

  ‘Look, he doesn’t have to do it,’ I said hotly. ‘I thought it might help. Why are you stopping here anyway? You won’t harvest the flax for another three weeks at least. Didn’t you all go to Blairgowrie for the strawberry picking while I was in the hospital? There are berries all over Perthshire just now. You could go away and come again in August. Maybe you should go away. Otherwise everyone will just work out a way to blame you for Dr Housman’s suicide somehow.’

  ‘You’ve mucked it up with your bountiful job offer. It’s not as easy to move on as it was: the Council authorities keep closing off old camping greens. You turn up and it’s all posted Keep Out with barbed wire all over. So Mammy wants Euan to do the work here. He’ll get three times as much as he would at a day’s berry picking. And that gives Dad one long last chance at Fearn river pearls.’

  Then Ellen made a sound like hnnph that rather stopped me being able to respond. I sat down on the bottom step of the old oak staircase.

  Ellen didn’t sit. She gazed down at me with that look of cold challenge and asked, ‘So how shall you mend it? I expect you’ll send your chauffeur round to collect Euan first thing the morning the rain stops.’

  I knew that was Traveller sarcasm, but I still found myself retorting defensively, ‘There isn’t a chauffeur at Strathfearn any longer. You know my grandmother had to let her staff go.’

  ‘And have you found other work for them too? No, that’s no’ your business. Or even hers. And why would she need a chauffeur when your mother drives her own car?’

  Her face suddenly lit with amusement.

  ‘Ask your lady mother to bring Euan round here when the rain stops,’ Ellen said. ‘Tell her it’s because of you he needs the ride and see what she says.’

  Blast her! She knew I couldn’t do that.

  Or … I could, of course. And Mummy would likely do it, quite graciously, out of obligation and apology. But it was blackmail. It wasn’t as if Mother hadn’t anything to do all day other than work on a matching set of needlework cushion covers for the twenty-four eighteenth-century dining-room chairs that were being auctioned at Sweet’s. She was closing down a country estate for her nearly-eighty-year-old mother, in the swift aftermath of her father’s lingering and debt-ridden illness.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with my mother,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ Ellen agreed. ‘Well, then, you do it. You bring Euan round in your mother’s car.’

  I sat silent, glowering at her. She returned my stare coolly. Of course the simplest thing to do would be to go and try to make peace with Mary. I wished that didn’t also feel like the hardest thing to do.

  Then Ellen said, ‘I expect you dinnae ken how to drive.’

  ‘I can drive,’ I said.

  Mummy had given me a handful of useful lessons in her racy little Magnette, but the last time was at Christmas.

  ‘She’ll test me before she lets me take it on my own. I’d need to practise …’ I spoke through my teeth, trying to piece together a plan that would put me behind the driving wheel of Mummy’s car – preferably without having to steal it – the next morning if necessary. ‘I haven’t been allowed out this week.’

  Ellen rolled her eyes. ‘You’re like a flipping princess.’

  I sat pouting, torn between feeling affronted and rebellious. Ellen got out her tobacco pouch and lit her pipe while she waited for me to come to a decision. There was no one about at that moment but it felt very clandestine. I watched her with envy – not at the pipe’s existence, but at her sure and casual confidence in lighting it. She wasn’t thinking about it, what it would look like as she smoked, or whether or not anyone would care. She was just being herself.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  Ellen blew out a slow stream of smoke and then laughed. ‘Just for a wee while, till we find some other way for him to get here. Our uncle has a pushbike he can borrow maybe. Or our cousins the Camerons might help; they’re coming to Bridge Farm to help with the flax, and they have a van. That’s how we got you to the hospital.’

  She smoked calmly, finishing her pipe.

  ‘Has your dad found any more trace of Dr Housman?’ I asked. ‘His clothes?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘And the police – have they been round again since Solange found that note?’

  ‘Oh yes. Wanting to poke through every piece of rag we have with us.’

  ‘I’m worried they’ll try to arrest somebody.’

  ‘Somebody? Euan? Aye. Mammy and Daddy have been raging about whether we should get away from that. But the police have no reason to arrest anybody – they stood right in front of us trying to find a reason, and they couldn’t. Mammy told ’em she’d haul the Water Bailiff into Sheriff Court herself for beating Euan. Of course she won’t – I dinnae think she could. But Euan bothering the librarian a wee while has nothing to do with the missing scholar, and that beating makes the hornies look bad. And if we pack up and leave the day, it’ll look like Euan did do something, when none of us has done a thing. And …’ She put the pipe away. ‘And Strathfearn will defend us. Your gran. Your mam. You and your Lady Bountiful play-acting. Mammy thinks we’re safer here than running.’

  ‘Well, my brother Sandy will defend you too. He’ll be here soon – you’ll like him.’

  ‘He’s the one got thrashed for nosing about the log boat, aye?’ Ellen said. ‘Runs in the family! You know, your grandad tried to dig that log boat out of the riverbank when he was a young man – my own grandad helped him. They had a team of men and horses working on it. But it goes too far into the peat and they were damaging it. So he left it there for the tide to work at.’

  She knew the damnedest things about Strathfearn.

  ‘I bet Sandy will want to look at the log boat again before we leave for good,’ I said. ‘Like you looking at the Reliquary. One last time. Just to make sure it’s still there.’

  ‘Och, there’s sure to be something else for him to find some day,’ Ellen said. ‘We don’t ken half what’s buried in the peat.’

  And as we spoke, it occurred to me that right now she knew more about the Murray Collection than anyone else in the house.

  I stood up. ‘It’s raining anyway and you’re not doing much, are you? Come with me and let’s see if they left anything behind when they moved the Murray Hoard to the Inverfearnie Library.’

  Ellen laughed. ‘Oh, aye, Lady Julia. Show off your estate.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  I was starting to see that she laughed and poked fun when she was actually quite interested.

  Selfishly pleased to have her to myself, I took Ellen all over Strathfearn House, nosing into every single room that we found wasn’t locked. It was a good deal more freedom than I’d ever had there before; of course my brothers and I hadn’t ever been allowed to nose into the guest bedrooms and the gunroom and the billiard room. There wasn’t anything of interest in any of them now; mostly bare except for the furniture and paintings marshalled together in unappealing ranks in the former drawing room and the Long Hall, all labelled for auction.

  We lingered in the tower room where Grandad’s museum had been. All his glass cabinets stood there empty, gathering dust and dead flies.

  By sheer coincidence Ellen and I spoke together, and we both said the exact same thing.

  ‘This makes me sad.’

  We turned to look at each
other. After a moment Ellen gave a single nod.

  We peered out of the cobwebbed windows. From this high room, there was a clear view of the ruined towers of Aberfearn Castle, soaring above the birches where the Fearn meets the Tay.

  ‘Did you work with Grandad here, in this room?’ I asked.

  ‘We mostly worked in his study when I was drawing. But I went up and down the stairs for him, fetching things from the cabinets sometimes.’

  ‘He gave you the keys?’

  ‘Aye, he did that,’ Ellen said with straightforward pride.

  ‘Gosh. You are lucky. Did he pay you?’

  ‘Och, I wouldn’t have taken money from him. He taught me all about typological dating. And he gave me Pinkie.’

  Ellen walked over to the cabinet that used to hold the wonderful little black and silver cup.

  ‘You asked about the pearls in the Reliquary,’ Ellen said. ‘Look here.’

  She knelt on the floor by the empty cabinet. The boards were old, wide planks of smooth dark wood. They didn’t quite lie flat against each other; in one or two places the cracks between them were nearly half an inch wide. Ellen laid her index finger against one of the gaps, pointing.

  ‘You can only see from here,’ she said, moving over to let me kneel beside her. ‘Get close to the floor and look along the gap where I’m pointing.’

  I bent over, pressed against Ellen’s thigh, and saw the hidden pearl.

  It looked like a little lost moon, wedged tight in the gap. It must have dropped in and rolled into place. I could just poke the tip of my pinkie finger in and feel its cool smoothness there. But it was stuck fast.

  ‘Strathfearn showed me,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s the last of the Reliquary pearls. I tried to pick it out with hairpins and whatnot, but it wants to stay.’

  ‘Did he tell you how it got there? Or what happened to the rest of them?’

  ‘He didn’t like to talk about them. They made him sad; I think he’d sold them, or was thinking about selling them … and then regretted not keeping them together with the Reliquary. I never saw the rest.’

  She turned her head to look at me.