The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘So you’ll stay here and drink it with us?’ Ellen said. ‘You’ll take anything, won’t you! Pennies for the telephone. Your own gifts given.’

  I shot her a look, but if she’d intended a double entendre she didn’t show any sign of it. Yet she’d managed to turn her own breakfast invitation into a challenge. Everything she said to me was a challenge.

  We stood in the chill mist at the water’s edge down by the little beach where I’d been hit on the head over a month ago. The Drookit Stane was a ghostly grey shape in the middle of the burn; it seemed to shift as the mist thinned around it, as if it were hopping from foot to foot to keep warm. You could see where the story about the stones walking to meet each other came from.

  I said, ‘You can get a penny for a jam jar, aye?’ I started to take off my shoes.

  Euan knew right away what I was up to. ‘You wee galoot. You’re no’ diving for rubbish.’

  ‘Your dad said there was all kinds of scrap in the burn here. I want to pay you back for the telephone.’

  ‘Let her fish about,’ Ellen said. ‘It’ll be a better show than a day at the pictures.’

  But her natural prudishness took over when I started to unbutton my dress in front of our brothers. ‘Shaness! You wee midden! Stop that!’

  Euan dodged behind one of the horses so he didn’t have to look. They were both honestly and genuinely shocked.

  Jamie intervened. ‘You crazy little idiot,’ he scolded. ‘Keep your clothes on. I’ll fetch your jam jars.’

  I think he just likes an excuse to go swimming.

  He took off his shoes and stripped efficiently down to his underwear – why is it all right for boys, but not for girls, to do this? He waded out into the stream, and I thought how many times we’d all been paddling just at this place in summers gone by. The mist made it magical. You still couldn’t see much of the opposite bank, but it was clearing around the Drookit Stane now.

  ‘I could do with one of those glass-bottomed pearl fisher’s jugs,’ Jamie complained over his shoulder. He was over his knees in the water already. ‘I can’t see anything but rocks. Wait a minute …’

  The burn got deeper around the Drookit Stane, and with one false step and a splash Jamie was suddenly up to his waist.

  ‘Oomph! COLD!’ he cried. ‘All right, I see now how Housman might …’

  He trailed off.

  ‘God pity us,’ Euan whispered superstitiously, because we all guessed what Jamie had been going to say and hadn’t said.

  ‘Do you see any jam jars?’ I reminded him determinedly.

  ‘There are mussels.’ Jamie stood balancing himself with one hand against the Drookit Stane, bent a little at the waist and peering into the swirling clear brown water.

  Wraiths of mist crept around him. I shivered, and Ellen hooked her elbow through mine.

  Euan said, ‘Come out the burn.’

  ‘I didn’t know these were here!’ Jamie said. ‘Rows and rows of them around the base of the stone! They’re as big as bricks!’

  ‘Aye, Daddy won’t touch them. Stone-grown, he calls ’em. Leave them be.’

  ‘Actually there is a jar! It’s wedged in a sort of nook, right at the foot of the stone.’

  Jamie suddenly plunged into the burn, like the heron spearing a fish, and came up a few seconds later spluttering and triumphant, holding aloft a large stoneware Keiller marmalade pot. The lid was sealed with an elastic band around cotton wool gone green with algae.

  My mouth dropped open.

  It was my jam jar. It was the one I’d drawn so idly, a month ago, alongside Housman’s broken glasses. It was the jam jar whose lid I couldn’t get right.

  I felt quite detached from myself, watching as Jamie came sloshing back to the bank. He held the prize out to me.

  I just stared. For a moment I couldn’t make myself touch it.

  And then I was angry, furious to think I’d never know what had happened to me that day, and the anger swept over me like the heat of a bonfire. It made me able to move and act and rise to the outrageous challenge of taking that dripping mysterious thing between my hands without them shaking.

  I said through clenched teeth, ‘This had better be worth a penny.’

  ‘It wasn’t you who had to get all wet for it,’ Jamie remarked.

  He sloshed back into the water, his hands on his hips, peering about in case there were more.

  Euan still hid between the drinking animals, holding their lead ropes, one hand resting on a pony’s back. Pinkie was sniffing about after foxes or badgers along the overgrown path. All of Ellen’s attention was on me and the jam jar.

  She said, ‘Och, that’s a big one. That’s worth twopence.’

  I was like Pandora. I was mesmerised by the sealed Keiller jar in my hands, and the terrifying but irresistible compulsion to unseal it and find out what was inside.

  I crossed the tiny beach to the flat rock where I’d fallen asleep guddling for trout the day I was hurt. I sat down on the rock, gripping the jar between my knees, and picked the elastic band away from the lid. The disgustingly perished slime of cotton wool came away with the elastic. I lifted the lid. There was another damp layer of cotton lining the top of the jar. I peeled it back.

  ‘Oh.’

  The horses were forgotten. In a moment Ellen was sitting tight against me, and Euan was crowding over my shoulder. Jamie came splashing up out of the water to see.

  ‘Hold Pinkie. Hold her back,’ Ellen commanded, and Jamie knelt on the bank with his arms full of fox-scented golden fluff so Pinkie couldn’t get in our way.

  The jar was full of pearls.

  ‘Oh,’ Euan breathed close to my ear, echoing me. ‘Oh, the beauties.’

  Ellen said, ‘Jamie, give us your shirt.’

  He tossed it to her in a ball. She spread the pale blue cotton over the flat rock, and I tipped the jar carefully out on to the soft cloth.

  The pearls made a sound like rain falling in the river, pattering against one another as they slipped into the pale light of the damp morning.

  They were grey and pink and salmon and buttery cream. A very few of them were as white as white, like Christmas cake icing. The biggest ones were a sort of dusty silky grey and exactly the same; there were three dozen of those at least.

  Ellen picked one up and rubbed it against her nose, then held it out on her palm. Polished that little bit, just from the natural softness of her skin, the grey pearl seemed to take on a rosy sheen. It glowed like a little planet in Ellen’s open hand.

  ‘No one’s sold them,’ she said quietly. ‘Here they are.’

  ‘I said there were pearls in the Murray Hoard,’ I cried in triumph. ‘I said there were pearls in the Reliquary!’

  ‘These need loving.’ Ellen was fierce. ‘Oil and cotton wool and rubbing. What a thing to do with pearls four hundred years old – chuck them back in the burn like that, all mashed together against that dirty crockery!’

  Ellen and Euan were like a couple of jewellers. Unlike me and Jamie, they knew exactly what they were looking at. It made me feel ignorant to listen to them.

  ‘These are from the upper River Fearn. Right up at the foot of the Trossachs. I ken Daddy showed me the like in MacGregor’s last year, this same fawn yellow. But did you ever see any such a size!’

  ‘And these Tay pearls, so close to white! And the big grey ones, all matched – how old can they be? There’s never so many this big. It would take years to match this many.’

  ‘It would take a lifetime.’

  They touched the pearls lovingly without picking them up, rolling them against the blue cloth of Jamie’s shirt beneath gentle fingertips, turning them over to see their whole shapes. Many of the pearls had tiny imperfections: a funny little bump on one end, a peculiar shape, uneven hues. But they were each individually beautiful. And there were so many of them.

  It was like finding pirate treasure.

  Of course after our first initial wonder and delight, it occurred to us that this was
actually treasure.

  ‘How much do you reckon they’re worth?’ Jamie asked shrewdly.

  Euan shrugged and faltered, ‘I dinnae ken. I truly dinnae ken. I’ve never seen so many.’

  Ellen said, ‘It’s like trying to count the stars.’

  ‘Oh come now, there’s only a couple hundred,’ said Jamie. ‘Say five pounds apiece?’

  ‘You cannae say that,’ Euan answered. ‘Because –’

  Ellen held up one of the big grey ones, the size of a healthy pea. ‘See the hole through it? Some of these are sets. Likely off a necklace, or more than one. It makes them more valuable.’

  She gave the grey pearl to me to look at.

  ‘Thousands,’ she said. ‘Thousands of pounds.’

  ‘How in blazes did they get in that jam jar in the middle of the Fearn?’ Jamie exclaimed.

  I thought the answer to that was most obvious.

  ‘Hugh Housman put them there.’

  ‘Oh now, Julie –!’

  ‘I saw him do it,’ I said.

  I didn’t remember seeing him do it. But it was like a jigsaw in my head, and now I had all the pieces: Hugh Housman bending over in the middle of the river, the light off his glasses reflecting in the water, the jar I’d sketched, the missing pearls from Grandad’s cup, the last forgotten pearl hiding unnoticed in the empty envelope. Grandad must have shifted them out of the cup and perhaps into the envelope, probably just because it was convenient – nothing to do with the original letter it had held. Then he’d added a hundred others from somewhere else – maybe some he’d found himself – and they’d gone unremembered, unnumbered, without any recorded value, until Hugh Housman found them among the intellectually valuable antiquities of the Murray Hoard.

  And Hugh Housman had taken them, unnoticed, and hidden them. Presumably he’d meant to come back for them, maybe at the end of the summer when his work was finished and the Murray Collection was long gone. Then he could have gone away and sold the pearls without anyone knowing where they’d come from.

  Only he’d never be able to come back for them now.

  Those are pearls that were his eyes …

  Euan suddenly snatched his hand back as though the pearls beneath his fingertips had burned him. He and I had the same thought at the exact same moment: dead man’s hidden treasure, and stolen too. It was stained.

  ‘Put them all back,’ said Euan.

  ‘Dinnae be daft,’ said his sister.

  ‘I’ll not touch them.’

  ‘They need loving,’ Ellen repeated. ‘They’re … they’re like the spearheads. Someone cared about them. They need proper looking after.’

  ‘Who’s going to buy them?’

  Ellen leaned back, sitting up on her heels. ‘Well, nae doubt MacGregor’s in Perth would, for a start. Who’s going to sell them though? There’s a question.’

  We’d all backed off a little.

  ‘I suppose they ought to go to the police,’ Jamie said dubiously. He’d tentatively let go of Pinkie, who was sitting with pricked-up ears and watching with interest, completely baffled by our excitement over something that smelled not interesting in the least.

  ‘Are you going to take ’em in?’ I asked scornfully. ‘I’m not.’

  Because truly … Why did the flipping police need to know? The pearls were unremarked in the Murray Estate by everyone but me.

  ‘And they’re ours,’ I said fiercely. ‘They’re all of ours. The McEwens used them to buy the Strathfearn willow beds from the Murrays.’

  There was a little awkward silence. Of course they weren’t ours.

  ‘I expect they’re part of the Murray Estate along with everything else that’s having to be sold to clear the debt,’ Jamie said, puzzling over what to do with them. ‘If we took them to Mémère she’d have to turn them over for auction –’

  I said hotly, ‘Bother the Murray Estate. They belong here. Like Mary Queen of Scots’ bracelet. Let’s hide them again. I mean, not put them back in the burn, but let’s hide them like proper treasure. In Aberfearn Castle –’

  ‘Up the Laird’s chimney,’ said Euan.

  ‘The tower room at the top!’ Jamie agreed.

  ‘In one of the dove holes,’ I finished triumphantly.

  Ellen said, ‘I want to polish them first.’

  We were … My goodness, it was like being enchanted. We were bewitched.

  ‘Come on, Euan, if we take the horses back up we can get the baby oil and come back quick. Dinnae go anywhere, Julie!’ Ellen jumped to her feet and whistled to the dog.

  Pinkie sat giving her mistress a very silly grin. As long as I was sitting on the rock by the burn Pinkie wasn’t leaving except by force.

  ‘Oh, all reet, I’m coming back in a wee minute anyway.’

  Euan was already away up the path to Inchfort with the horses. Ellen followed with the ponies, and Jamie and I waited.

  After a moment I couldn’t resist playing a little with the pearls – beautiful miniature marbles – running my fingers over their silky surfaces.

  ‘That must have looked like the perfect crime to him,’ Jamie said softly, coming to join me on the rock.

  ‘He couldn’t have sold them all at MacGregor’s. Can you imagine going in there with this lot? They’d want to know where they came from. They would have suspected something. I’ll bet the pearls Housman gave to Nanny were from here. He never found them himself. But I’ll bet he had those earrings set at MacGregor’s to see what they were worth.’

  ‘Clever,’ said Jamie. ‘And careful too.’

  I exclaimed suddenly, ‘What was that he said in his letter to Solange – all that guff about how he couldn’t give her any answers, no measure of his worth, only his promise? I’ll bet that wasn’t a suicide note at all! He was asking Solange to run away with him!’

  Jamie’s mouth fell open.

  ‘All that rot about returning to the river! He wasn’t exactly lying – he had to code it, in case she didn’t come with him and she showed it to Mother, or in case someone else found it. He didn’t want to tell her how he was going to get rich, but he wanted her to come along when he did! Only, if she didn’t, it wasn’t going to stop him – that’s what he meant about the river’s gifts being more eternal than flesh.’

  Jamie stared at me as if he’d never seen me before.

  ‘I think you’re right.’ He sounded as if he absolutely couldn’t believe I’d worked it out, but knew it made sense. ‘No wonder he was rude about Mémère managing the estate badly,’ he breathed. ‘Imagine everyone but him overlooking something so valuable!’

  ‘Well, I didn’t,’ I huffed. ‘I kept saying the pearls were missing.’

  Jamie swore. ‘Poor Mémère.’

  ‘And, oh, poor Nanny.’

  ‘Let’s not tell her.’

  It wasn’t long before the McEwens came back. The four of us sat in the steaming mist and polished and counted three hundred and twenty-seven pearls before we put them back in the jar, packed in clean cotton wadding.

  Then we all went up to Inchfort Field one last time, and Euan and Ellen went off away west with everybody else, waving wildly back at us till we couldn’t see them any more, and then I drove Jamie over to the Big House in Mother’s car. We hid our recovered stolen goods under my bed until we had a chance to take them to Aberfearn Castle.

  I was tempted to fill the little wooden cup with the pearls again, but it would have been too dramatic. And also – there were too many. Where did they all come from? But Mémère had never missed them, and for all the thousands of pounds they might have been worth, they would not bring Grandad back nor stop the inevitable conversion of Strathfearn House to the Glenfearn School. Nothing in the Murray Estate belonged to us any more. What would Sandy have done with them if he’d found them? Labelled the jar with a number and noted it in the catalogue? And they’d just have gone off to Sotheby’s in London to be auctioned with the rest of the Murray Hoard.

  Suddenly I felt rather sympathetic towards poor old
Hugh Housman. He knew what he’d found. I might have tried to run off with those pearls too, if I’d been him.

  WHAT HAPPENED

  24TH JULY–17TH AUGUST 1938

  13

  SEVERAL THINGS I CAN’T HAVE

  I missed the McEwens tremendously.

  All that weekend the lifeboats hunted for Hugh Housman up and down the Tay, although apparently the authorities didn’t think he’d have moved much from where the original bits of him were found. Even the fact that his lower half was so far downstream from where I saw him (and so were his clothes) suggested that he’d wandered down there, alive, before he drowned.

  It was amazing, and not very nice, either, how much the disappearance of Hugh Housman taught us about the science of drowning. I felt like we were all holding our breath, hoping and dreading some more of him would turn up.

  Hugh Housman was not in the pipeline trench. They checked and checked. They must have accidentally dug him out and tossed him aside when they were dredging. Frank Dunbar was finally given permission to lay the pipes and get on with it. The tennis courts were shaping up too; the whole estate was beginning to look properly academic.

  It was possible Hugh Housman’s upper half was part of the new tennis courts now.

  The night after the McEwens left we had another midnight visitor – Pinkie.

  The silly, wonderful creature. She abandoned Ellen and even Euan in favour of me. I was convinced she was very protective, and had it in her doggy head that I was naturally fragile. Indeed, I believed Pinkie was a reliable witness to whatever really had happened to me – if only she could speak. I’d called her faithless, but I thought now that was very unjust. She was relentlessly loyal. Only she wanted to be with the person she felt had the greatest need at any given moment.

  Here’s how she announced her arrival at Strathfearn House: rattling the door handles of the morning room at two thirty in the morning, just below my window, nearly frightening me out of my skin once again. I was the only person to awaken at first, and reminded myself sternly: Frank sends someone round to check the doors. But then Pinkie started howling and woke up everyone else. So of course we had to let her in.