The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  And she added schemingly, but without the accusatory tone I’d come to expect from her, ‘If Jamie’s shooting, Euan could load for him. He’s fast.’

  Feeling a bit awkward now, but not wanting to admit it, I said cheerfully, ‘I’ll volunteer him!’

  Then we came to Brig O’Fearn and I stopped talking so I could concentrate on driving carefully through the village again. But I had the hang of this now. The road to Glenmoredun Castle went haring away to the south, twisting around Pitbroomie Hill as though it couldn’t decide which direction it wanted to go, but I followed it anyway, picking up speed.

  ‘I don’t believe you know where you’re going,’ Ellen said.

  ‘Oh pish, there isn’t any other road! How could I possibly get lost here?’ (It is true I am hopeless at directions. I came down the wrong side of the mountain on that skiing holiday and had to be brought back to the chalet by a policeman. But the Pitbroomie Moor was familiar. Part of it used to belong to Strathfearn.)

  We were between stone walls and hedges on the way up, thorn and bramble, and couldn’t see where we were in relation to anything else. Then over cattle bars and there were no more walls. The thorn turned to gorse, still brilliant here and there with yellow blossom and heavy with bees.

  The pavement disappeared suddenly and we were on gravel just as the gradient increased dramatically. I had to slow down but I forgot to shift out of high gear and, horror, three quarters of the way up, the Magnette stalled with a tremendous lurch.

  Ellen made a little shrieking sound like ‘Eep!’

  I tried to start the motor again and found myself in neutral, slowly bumping backward down the steep hillside and gathering speed. I yanked on the handbrake and both of us nearly went flying out of the open car like a pair of jack-in-the-boxes.

  ‘God pity us.’

  I could hardly blame Ellen for that.

  We paused quietly in the middle of the track, catching our breath in safe and sudden stillness.

  After a few moments, I said, ‘Well, we can’t stay here.’

  ‘I might get out,’ Ellen whispered, ‘before you go anywhere else.’

  ‘You get out then. I’ll reverse back down to the pavement and turn around in the field gate just before the cattle bars.’

  ‘You can’t reverse!’

  ‘I’m good at reversing.’

  I couldn’t get the damned thing started though, because of the slope which made me keep stalling. Eventually I had the brilliant and simple idea of freewheeling backward – very, very slowly – down to where the road widened. Ellen knelt up on the passenger seat while I did this, gripping the back of it with both hands, and bawling directions at me like a banshee:

  ‘Stop, stop! There’s a bend and a CLIFF – almost a cliff – STOP! Oh, sweet heaven. Thank you. Turn, yes, just go slowly here … Aye, you’re around. Straight back a ways … Go … go … STOP!’

  I slammed on the brakes for the thousandth time.

  Ellen was doubled over laughing – out of mirth or hysterics I was not sure.

  ‘What?’ I demanded. ‘Another cliff?’

  ‘There was a …’ She was gasping with hilarity. ‘In the way! It was a …’

  On edge with the nerve-racking task of trying to reverse my mother’s car down a road about as wide as a bed and as steep as a staircase, where I wasn’t supposed to be, I found Ellen’s hilarity contagious.

  ‘A rockslide? A horse and cart? Another car?’ I craned my neck, trying to see as far as she could, tall Ellen riding up on the seat back like a figurehead turned around. ‘Oh help, not the bus coming?’

  ‘You just missed it!’ She was doubled over with laughter.

  ‘The bus? I missed the bus!’

  ‘A grouse, not the bloomin’ bus! There was a grouse ran under the car. Straight between the wheels and out the other side!’

  ‘That’s lucky, then.’

  It took us a while to manage the journey back down to the place where the road widened at a field gate, but we did manage it eventually without hitting anything, not even one of the suicidal moor birds. I was able to turn around and park with the Magnette squeezed on to the grass verge so that it was pointing in the right direction (back down hill).

  I had definitely overstretched myself, though I dared not admit it to either Ellen or Mummy. Feeling a bit limp with relief, I pulled on the handbrake and climbed up on the seat back next to Ellen.

  ‘Golly, what a beautiful day,’ I said appreciatively. ‘You can see all the way to Dundee from here!’

  The Tay spread between us and the Sidlaw Hills, away from Perth out to the North Sea like a widening train of blue silk. Turnips and tatties, berries and flax grew green below us.

  ‘What a lot of ships going into Perth Harbour!’ I said. ‘And look, you can’t see the Big House because of the wood, but there’s Aberfearn Castle at the river’s edge.’

  ‘Euan and myself used to romp all over inside it when we were wee,’ Ellen said.

  ‘So did we! Playing at kings and queens! Did you climb up inside the chimneys?’

  ‘Aye!’

  We laughed in amazement at this improbable shared memory.

  ‘What a shame we weren’t ever there at the same time,’ I said. ‘We could have had proper battles.’

  We turned around. Behind us, the hillside climbed away, clad in heather almost ready to burst into purple bloom, hiding young grouse.

  ‘This moor used to be my grandad’s,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, we used to work it for him,’ Ellen said.

  ‘He sold the family jewellery so he could go to America for treatment, and he sold the moor to keep the house going. The land joins on to the Laird of Moredun’s, so now Moredun’s got one big grouse moor. He and Grandad always used to manage their shoots together anyway.’

  ‘Nice the land won’t change,’ Ellen said quietly.

  I turned to look at her. She was gazing across the fields and woodland of the Tay Valley, her face expressionless, her eyes hot.

  ‘Sometimes it makes me feel like I own it all, when I see it like this,’ I said. ‘Mine by right of me being here.’

  ‘I ken.’ She glanced at me sideways. ‘By right of keeping the willows and knowing where the Bronze Age boat is hidden in the burn. By right of climbing up inside the chimneys of Aberfearn Castle!’ She turned her head fully. ‘You don’t own any more of it than I do, do you?’

  ‘Not one twig of willow. Not one pearl.’

  Even as I said it, I remembered the pearl I’d stolen from my grandfather’s empty envelope. ‘Not a single thing in Strathfearn belongs to me.’ Not one forgotten pearl. ‘Not even the kilt I’m wearing!’ I finished, and we both laughed again.

  ‘I used to think Grandad was as rich as the King,’ I said. ‘But that was just me being little and ignorant. There were never bank vaults full of gold sovereigns and silver ingots. There wasn’t a family fortune; there was never much money. There was only Strathfearn, only the estate and its land, cows and flax and berries, grouse and salmon and a few river pearls. And now it is gone, and so is he.’

  Ellen was silent – because what was there to answer to that?

  ‘Sandy inherited the title by a complicated thing called Special Remainder,’ I added. ‘He’s not the eldest, but he’s my grandad’s namesake and his most special grandchild, and our big brother Davie will get our father’s title anyway. But even Sandy doesn’t get a bean to go with it. Not that he cares about land. He’s like an ostrich, head underground, digging up artefacts.’

  ‘He gets that from your grandad.’

  ‘We all do, a bit,’ I said. ‘Even you. Though I wouldn’t want Sandy’s job, stuck in a museum all day. I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.’

  ‘Will your folk let you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody ever mentions that I’m almost old enough to be married; but I’ll bet other
people mention it to them. And maybe my people discuss it behind my back.’

  I realised I would be forced to run away from home if someone tried to arrange a marriage for me. I didn’t want to think about it.

  I pointed at the Sidlaw Hills across the valley. ‘See King’s Seat? Just in front of it is Dunsinane, where Macbeth lived. He’s supposed to be one of Grandad’s forebears.’

  Ellen opened her mouth to speak.

  I beat her to the post. ‘Don’t you dare call me Lady Macbeth.’

  She laughed again. ‘I wasnae going to. I was going to say: we’re half the way up Pitbroomie Hill anyway, we may as well walk to the top. The motor car’s all right here for a wee while, aye?’

  So we got out and walked.

  It was a steep hike – for the same reason that the Magnette hadn’t made it up the hill, we found ourselves so out of breath we were unable to talk (I was, at any rate). But it was lovely once the hillside began to level out. Able to breathe again, I sang:

  ‘Now the summer’s in its prime

  Wi’ the flowers sweetly bloomin’

  And the wild mountain thyme …’

  ‘All the moorland is perfumin’,’ Ellen joined in.

  We finished the verse together, and sang the whole thing at the tops of our voices, scaring birds. We walked side by side on the track over the moor that was ours by right of our being there, singing to the sky and the wind.

  I thought, just then and fleetingly, there wasn’t any place I’d rather be or any person I’d rather be with. If I could have chosen one moment of my life to go on forever, just then, it would have been that one.

  We came over the summit of Pitbroomie Hill and Ellen pointed towards the high mounds of East and West Lomond across the next valley. ‘Those are both Iron Age hill forts,’ she said. ‘There’s a big one on this side too, up the Knowes above Brig O’Fearn village. People have been here a long time. But now there’s nothing on top but birds and gorse and wind. A glen like this always makes me think: why did folk leave the hilltops?’

  ‘When exactly is Iron Age?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, two thousand years ago, give or take an odd few hundred either end. Hard to tell unless you dig things up. That’s why your grandad’s work is so important: they line up all those different blades and compare them, and then they can work out the dates. Like geological layers, but not so old.’

  Frank Dunbar had said the same thing about the Murray Hoard being important. He’d quoted Hugh Housman saying it, anyway.

  ‘I think it’s easier dating rocks than arrowheads,’ Ellen considered. ‘But maybe geology seems easier because I learned it in school, and I’ve kent the rest myself.’

  ‘Did you really learn geology in school?’ I asked. ‘How do you go to school when you’re moving about?’

  ‘We have to do a hundred days a year or they send Cruelty folk out after us – you ken, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. They’ll take a bairn away from a family if your school attendance card isn’t filled. We mostly go in the winter – we share a cottage by Aberfeldy with my cousins. I left high school last year. Euan left when he was fourteen, but I had a scholarship for science and history.’

  My heart stirred with a baffling jealousy. ‘Did you finish the course?’

  ‘I didn’t take the exams. They were arguing some rubbish about not being able to send the results to a proper address, but I don’t believe that. Dad collects his Black Watch pension at the post office wherever he is. I know it was really three scaldy lads making a fuss at having to share workspace with a lass – and a dirty tinker lass at that – and I left.’ She shrugged. ‘So no, I dinnae have a pass mark. But I still know what I learned.’

  We passed the upper drive to Glenmoredun Castle, with its ornate stone archway and gate lodge incongruously plumped all by itself in the middle of the moor. Below us, further down in a fold of the hillside, nestled the turrets of the castle itself.

  ‘Ready to turn back?’ I asked. ‘If we go further we’ll just have to march back up again to get back to the car, like the Grand Old Duke of York.’

  Behind us, a pair of voices suddenly chimed: ‘Hey, youse – tinkies!’

  Ellen spun round at the catcalls.

  I turned more slowly.

  ‘Tinkies, tinkies, carry bags, Go to the well and wash your rags!’

  ‘Got rags for us, tinks?’

  It was two girls. Two working girls from Glenmoredun Castle, in service as housemaids or kitchen staff maybe, on their afternoon off. They’d come out to the gate lodge since we first passed it and were waiting for the bus.

  Ellen was now one step ahead of me – and her steps were longer than mine. I could see the cords tightening in her wrists as she clenched her fists.

  ‘Going down to Glenmoredun, aye?’ asked one of the girls. She was round and rosy, with dark curls. ‘What are youse peddling? Needles? Wooden pegs?’

  ‘Or reading tea leaves?’ This with a self-conscious giggle from the other girl, whose brown hair was waved and fluffed.

  They both had on lipstick and little heeled sandals, and I reckoned they were younger than me – just done with school, working for the first time. The slim one with the crimped brown hair was somehow more self-assured, more worldly than her wholesome-looking friend.

  ‘Tell my fortune!’ was her next knowing suggestion.

  Ellen missed a step, and flinched, as though she’d stubbed her toe. She stopped, straightened her shoulders and faced the pair across the narrow unmade road.

  I drew up short at her elbow.

  The two other girls bent their heads together, black hair and brown, whispering and giggling. Then they looked up, and the cheeky, crimped-haired one called out, ‘What about your wee brother, would he tell my fortune?’

  ‘I bet your wee brother would like to give me a kiss,’ squealed the rosy one daringly.

  ‘I’d like to give your wee brother a kiss!’ squealed her more experienced friend.

  In unison they broke into a cascade of giddy mirth.

  Now Ellen faced me again with her back to this brace of gleeful idiots, and she looked me up and down with an expression of vexed and bewildered astonishment.

  They went on as if we couldn’t hear them.

  ‘Florrie, you’d kiss anything that moves. You’d kiss my old grandad – you’d kiss a sheep.’

  Florrie chastised her friend by batting her on the arm, and they both rocked with hilarity.

  ‘Now that is how a well-bred young person speaks in polite company,’ I said to Ellen in a level voice, hoping my attempt at deadpan Traveller sarcasm would cool her down. ‘And aren’t they optimistic about your brother!’

  Ellen gave a jerk of her head in the direction of the two silly things, who were still chuckling like hens and staring at us with a kind of sideshow fascination, as if we were covered with tattoos.

  ‘They mean you,’ she answered quietly. ‘Wi’ your old kilt and bare legs. They think you’re a boy.’ She reached out and fluffed my Joan-of-Arc hair with one quick, rough hand, as if I were Pinkie. Or, indeed, as if I were her younger brother. As my older brothers have been doing to Jamie almost all his life.

  ‘Come on over here, laddie. Florrie is gasping for you!’ called the rosy one with the dark hair.

  ‘So I am. I’m all yours. Come over the road, wee man …’

  I took a step forward, very deliberately, hands on my hips, and with a wide grin that I couldn’t quite control. I let the girls take a good long look at me. They stared and elbowed each other in the ribs.

  ‘I wouldn’t kiss an old woman like Florrie,’ I told them.

  Ellen grabbed me by the back of my shirt. ‘Shaness, Davie, let them be.’

  I shook her off.

  ‘You waiting for the bus to Perth?’ I asked them.

  The rosy one answered, ‘Aye, we’re going to the pictures. We’ll –’

  More elbows and titters were exchanged between them.

  The bolder friend
finished for the other, ‘Brenda will take you along if you gie her a kiss!’

  ‘Ooh, I willnae. I’m no paying a tinker’s bus fare! It’s you that’s gasping for him.’

  Ellen didn’t try to stop me.

  ‘Come on, then, Florrie,’ I said.

  I crossed the road, still grinning like the Cheshire cat. Well, I’d practised on Frank Dunbar, hadn’t I? Florrie had a lot to learn from me about playing this game.

  She tried to dodge me. Brenda, tipsy with laughter, held her by the shoulders so she couldn’t escape. Florrie was a little bit taller than me, but not so tall I couldn’t reach her mouth when I stood on tiptoe.

  ‘You said you were gasping!’ I accused, as she turned her face away.

  ‘Go on, Florrie. He’s bonny as the day.’

  Florrie turned back very quickly, and gave me a peck on the lips.

  I didn’t move. ‘Call that gasping?’ I scoffed.

  Bold now, challenging, she did it again, and then let her mouth hesitate over mine. For a second the tip of her tongue explored the space between my lips, intimate and secretive.

  And this is so strange: it was just as nice as kissing Frank Dunbar.

  But in a completely different way.

  At this point the bus came rumbling over the hill.

  ‘Oh!’ Florrie cried, stepping back suddenly as if I’d stung her, and cracked me a bone-shaking wallop across the face with the flat of her hand.

  ‘Cheeky devil,’ she said primly, as I bent over one knee with my face in my hands, seeing stars.

  The bus pulled up in a cloud of dust and Ellen vaulted across the road in front of it to pinion me, instinctively guessing I’d turn murderous the instant I recovered from the shock of being attacked. As I straightened up she grabbed my arms from behind and clamped them to my sides as if I were about to be shot from a cannon. That snake Florrie was escaping, hustled on to the bus by her still tittering friend Brenda. I fought Ellen in fury, quite ineffectively.

  ‘Let me go!’

  Ellen held me in a grip of iron. She murmured softly in my ear, ‘Julie.’

  I stopped struggling, breathing hard.

  ‘Whisht. Hush. Now, Julie.’

  The bus pulled away, and she let me go.