The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘Oh, yes, Dunbar!’ Dr Housman agreed with hangdog haste. ‘I expect he’s had a rough time of it. My fault as well – he never should have had to answer for me –’ He shut up guiltily.

  Ellen put her knife back in her creel.

  Mild-mannered Euan, enjoying his first taste of authority, told Dr Housman, ‘Stop quaking, man. The daft dog’s more likely to hurt you than I am. Come away.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see the headline in the Mercury,’ Jamie said cruelly. ‘“Narrow Escape for Drowned Man.”’

  I chummed Dr Housman along as we made our way back to the Big House, with Pinkie at our heels being very forgiving now that we were all heading in the same direction.

  ‘Lovely creature,’ Housman said. ‘Tan Border collie? What’s she called?’

  ‘Pinkie. She’s not mine. She belongs to her.’ I pointed towards Ellen. ‘A gift from the late Earl of Strathfearn.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, surprised at the combination of tinker lass and purebred hound.

  ‘Perhaps you’d prefer brandy to tea!’ I suggested winningly, at my most devious. ‘You must have had a rough time of it too. I don’t understand why you’ve been hiding! If you saw the Water Bailiff knock me out, why didn’t you just tell someone right away? Francis Dunbar, or Mary Kinnaird, for example? I was off my head for three days and nobody knew who I was!’

  ‘I … well … I was fishing for pearls when the – what did you call him?’

  ‘The Water Bailiff.’

  ‘Yes. No.’ Housman added hastily, ‘I didn’t see him hit you. But I saw him carrying you. And he saw me. He threatened that if I gave him away he’d haul me in for assaulting you. And it could have easily been me. I couldn’t prove … I was afraid …’

  Irritatingly, he let that sentence go unfinished.

  I forced myself to be patient with him.

  ‘That’s why you didn’t tell anyone,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t understand why you hid.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He was panting a little; we were walking at a youthful pace and he was not young. And of course, he’d been living on stolen sandwiches for a month.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated sheepishly. ‘Who are the others with you?’

  I thought, Oh, don’t you try to change the subject, you wee weasel of a man.

  I answered his question, but I wasn’t going to be so familiar as to give him our names. Let him wonder.

  ‘The short fair one is my brother; the tall ginger ones are friends of ours who stay here in the summer. They took me to the hospital after the Water Bailiff hit me.’

  ‘I-I’m sorry,’ he stammered for the third time. ‘I didn’t see him hit you.’

  It was almost as though he was trying to tell me Henderson hadn’t hit me.

  Fleetingly, I wondered if Housman could possibly have hit me himself.

  But as he rabbited on, I couldn’t believe he was remotely capable of committing an act of violence against anyone.

  ‘When Henderson left me there with you, I realised I truly might get blamed for the attack,’ Housman said. ‘I thought you were going to die. And then it would look like I’d killed you. And I panicked. So I hid. I didn’t really know what to do when the lifeboats first started searching for me … I hoped it would all blow over if I didn’t turn up.’

  ‘You perfect coward,’ I sympathised patronisingly. ‘Please don’t tell me again that you’re sorry. Scavenging sandwiches and newspapers from the workers at the Big House! And was that also you pawing through the McEwens’ things while they slept? You’re a disgrace to academia.’

  It took every fibre of my being not to scream at him: WHAT ABOUT MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS’ PEARLS, YOU SNEAKING WEASEL?

  ‘Why didn’t you just run away back to England and make up some scholarly excuse?’ I asked. ‘To stop everyone thinking you’d drowned yourself?’

  He fell abruptly silent. The rest of what he’d told me was probably true – it fit the jigsaw properly. But the answer to this particular question was: ‘I wanted to go back for those three hundred and twenty-seven pearls I hid in the river’, and he wasn’t going to tell me that.

  He hadn’t given up on going back for them.

  And with Solange still in prison …

  Greedy, treacherous little coward! I thought. Go and see if you can find them now. Good luck to you.

  17

  THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH

  The morning after we discovered Hugh Housman hiding in Aberfearn Castle, Ellen telephoned me from the Inverfearnie Library to tell me I must come to see her at once.

  I did not go rushing out there in a blaze of curiosity. The events of the past fortnight had left me wary and cautious of strangers. It sounded like Ellen on the ’phone, but it could have been anyone. I thought irrelevantly of Housman’s ‘damned unfeeling’ sister. After I hung up I sat on the bottom step in the hall swithering for ten minutes, and then rang back just to prove the call had come from the library.

  Mary answered. Yes, she’d let Miss McEwen use the telephone. Miss McEwen had paid her twopence to put the call through.

  ‘Do you think I should come?’ I asked, irrationally cautious.

  ‘What is the matter with you, Julia? Why wouldn’t you come to see her if she wants you to? I thought she was your friend.’

  *

  Ellen met me by the iron footbridge. She was carrying a large brown envelope.

  I thought of pearls.

  ‘What is going on?’ I asked.

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘Where’s Pinkie?’

  The envelope was flat. It couldn’t be pearls.

  ‘In Miss Kinnaird’s kitchen. Pinkie’s not let through to the other rooms, but Miss Kinnaird has fallen in love with that dog.’

  ‘She’s pure magic, our Pinkie.’

  ‘Come along,’ Ellen said, and strode ahead of me across the circular drive of the library, the gravel crunching beneath her feet. She moved with force and purpose and I had to keep making uneven little skips to keep up with her, because her legs are so much longer than mine.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘That flat rock by the Drookit Stane – I want to show this to you before I show Strathfearn.’

  She meant Sandy.

  ‘I want to see what you think,’ she added.

  When we reached the flat rock at the beachy place, she sat down and slid a sheaf of glossy paper from the envelope.

  ‘Come and look.’

  I sat beside her.

  ‘The photographer from the Mercury, that Catriona Lennox, sent us these this morning,’ Ellen said. ‘It just says “Strathfearn Log Boat Excavation Project” in the address, so I opened it because I took in the post. No one else has seen it.’

  They were the photographs Miss Lennox had taken during the morning we’d first begun our salvage operation. Ellen shuffled through them rapidly; I watched over her shoulder.

  ‘You ken what you’re looking at?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What’s this one, then?’

  ‘That’s looking close at the bit of cord tied to the boat.’

  ‘So what’s this?’

  ‘That’s it again.’

  ‘Is it?’

  I frowned. ‘Well, yes, or another angle – it’s the same bit of rope.’

  ‘Why?’ She held the two photographs up before me.

  The camera must have been very close, but it made the detail perfectly clear. ‘You can see that criss-cross woven pattern in it, there and there,’ I said. ‘This bit’s mostly crushed or decayed, but you can see they’re the same, can’t you?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said in an expressionless voice. ‘I can see that. I wanted to know if you could too.’

  She didn’t lower her hands, but held the pictures up, waiting.

  ‘But that’s not the boat,’ I whispered. ‘The rope’s the same, but that picture –’

  ‘The rope’s the same,’ Ellen echoed.

  The pho
tographer had accidentally included a picture of the rope that had strangled the murdered man. She’d shot it so close that his decayed skin beneath it was as dark and cakey as the wood of the Bronze Age boat.

  But the rope was the same.

  ‘He can’t have been killed with anything that old!’ I said. ‘You saw how fragile it was.’

  Ellen said softly, ‘Maybe it wasnae sae old when he was killed.’

  She let that sink in. She’d had a bit longer than me to get used to the idea. For me, it was as if a half-completed jigsaw had been flipped upside down and now I was looking at a completely unfamiliar picture.

  ‘You’re saying the dead man is as old as the log boat?’

  ‘All I’m saying is it’s the same rope.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Two ends of the same rope,’ Ellen suggested. ‘Maybe even one end tied to the boat, one end tied round his neck.’

  I had a wild vision of a person being dragged to death by a boat. No, of course not. ‘He was buried in the boat,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did people do that?’

  ‘Not in the Bronze Age. They’re mostly buried in wee chests, crouching. But the Vikings did it. People have found ship burials in Norway, and in England. And deep water was sacred to the Picts, who were here before the Christians …’

  ‘The burn’s not very deep at the mouth of the Fearn!’

  ‘They buried him in the peat, below the riverbed. Places where rivers meet are sacred too. He was beneath the crossing of two rivers, downstream of the Drookit Stane. And that killing – the triple death – that’s a sacrifice.’

  ‘How d’you know all that?’ I exclaimed in disbelief. ‘Old Travellers’ tales passed down from Auntie Bessie?’

  Ellen gave her snort of scorn and answered coldly, ‘Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. But true enough, Auntie Bessie likely has a thing or two to say about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She put the photographs back in the envelope and got out her pipe and tobacco pouch.

  ‘Have a draw.’

  She gave me the matches. When she’d filled the bowl she let me light it myself, laughing at my incompetence. ‘Why have you no’ been practising?’

  ‘I don’t want to break the one you gave me. I want to take it to school to rag the other girls.’

  We smoked in silence for a couple of minutes, listening to the timeless voice of the burn as it chuckled past the Drookit Stane, thinking about our ancestors.

  ‘Those spear points,’ I asked suddenly, ‘the ones they keep finding in the pipeline trench. Are they part of it?’

  ‘Likely buried with him. I looked them up. They weren’t all bronze; the newest is iron, maybe fifteen hundred years old, not more than two thousand. Perhaps they buried him just before the Christians came in to Scotland.’

  ‘So the boat’s not as old as we thought.’

  ‘Well, I think the body’s older than anyone guessed. I dinnae think it’s as old as two thousand years, but there’s nae telling. The boat could be older – the folk who buried him could have kent it was there, like we did, and put him in.’

  ‘There’s no way ever to tell,’ I said. ‘Because we dug it up and chopped it in pieces and tossed them about as if it didn’t matter.’

  ‘We didnae do that,’ Ellen pointed out.

  ‘No one can ever prove any of what you just said.’

  ‘Yon mystified doctor will help. If Strathfearn asks him to consider whether the body’s ancient – well, then it’s a matter for the Society of Antiquaries instead of the High Court.’

  ‘It is,’ I breathed in agreement.

  ‘So you dinnae think it’s mad? You think I should tell Strathfearn?’

  ‘It’ll be the most wonderful, astonishing discovery of his entire life,’ I said. ‘Even if he lives to be a hundred! Of course you should tell Sandy. But all that digging about for a murderer – all for nothing!’

  ‘Best that way though, aye, Julie?’ she teased. ‘Look, I’ve made you a birthday present.’

  She drew it from her pocket in a fold of black velvet. ‘Of course you must gie it back after, but you can wear it to your ceilidh dance wi’ your new gown. You’ll be the first one to wear it since Mary Queen o’ Scots.’

  She’d strung together Mary Stuart’s matched Tay pearls to make a necklace. It was like a little strand of moonlight.

  ‘Crikey!’ I laughed hilariously, and for so long that Ellen started giggling too. ‘I can’t wear these. Do you know what a necklace like this would cost? Even if it weren’t … what it is?’

  ‘I ken better than you!’

  ‘Everyone will notice.’

  ‘But no one will recognise them. Jamie didn’t. Tell a story! You’re good at that. Say they’re on loan from the Murray Estate. That’s true. Hold still … turn around …’

  With cool, smooth-tipped fingers she tied the pearls around my neck.

  ‘I told you my folk don’t care much about keeping things. But it’s pleasure to give.’

  She rested her hands on my shoulders for a moment.

  ‘Let me see.’

  I turned to face her, feeling radiant.

  She laughed. ‘Och, they suit you, Queenie! Promise me you’ll wear them.’

  ‘I absolutely will.’

  I thought then that I’d give her my own pearl, the one I found in the envelope, the only one that didn’t get stolen. I’d give it to her whether she kept it or not. Because she’s right: it’s pleasure to give. I wanted to give her something that mattered. And I didn’t think she’d take anything else.

  With tragic dark rings around her beautiful dark eyes, holding her proud head high, Solange was released into our flood of embraces and floral offerings, which she accepted with grace and tears.

  She did not put fresh roses in Dr Housman’s bedroom, nor greet him with forgiveness.

  Housman himself seemed none the worse for his misadventures. He slept them off upstairs in the room he’d been given when he first arrived here, avoiding Solange. He’d been immediately sacked by the Murray Estate, but as he hadn’t done any work for them since June anyway, it hardly mattered. His sister was supposed to fetch him back to England sometime soon.

  We did not treat the prodigal scholar kindly. Jamie, at Solange’s bidding, took the pearl earrings Housman had given her and used the box to wedge open the door to Housman’s room (I liberated the pearls first; we considered they were probably part of the Murray Hoard, but Solange didn’t need to know they were stolen). I delivered to Housman a copy of the Mercury each evening, carefully folded open to choice stories: the most recent update on the log boat, or on the ancient body discovered on the Murray Estate, or even just an occasional gossipy tale of domestic bliss gone sour. Housman was too much of a coward ever to complain about us to Mother.

  Frank Dunbar would not speak to him – they met once on the staircase while I was coming in the house, and Frank actually turned his back on Housman halfway down the stairs to avoid an encounter with him.

  Jamie and I took it in turns to be constantly in Housman’s way when he tried to get out of the house, thwarting his pathetic attempts to go after his stolen treasure, which he presumably thought was still hidden in the river at the foot of the Drookit Stane.

  It wasn’t, of course. We’d got Ellen to plant the pearls in their jar quietly back in the Murray Collection, where Sandy would discover them eventually and report them to the National Museum of Antiquities or the Murray Estate. He hadn’t noticed them yet and I couldn’t help thinking of them as our secret wedding present to him. I knew that just the discovering of them would make him joyful, even if he had to give them away in the end. It was true what Ellen had said about giving; and nothing of Strathfearn’s was ours any more except in spirit.

  Because now the Glenfearn School was ready to finish and furnish the Big House, and the other dormitories and the new classrooms, before the school term began. The grounds were not
ready but the house was nearly complete – as was the catalogue – and the plan was for the Murray/Beaufort-Stuart party to clear out north to Craig Castle in the week following the Laird of Moredun’s Opening Day shoot. I had only a fortnight of my holiday left anyway.

  The day before the shooting party (and my birthday), Father arrived in the landaulet from Craig Castle, so as to be able to transport those of us who didn’t fit in the Magnette. Sandy would stay on to finish the log boat excavation, but for the rest of us it was going to be goodbye to Strathfearn House for good.

  The day of the shoot was warm and bright.

  That was a blessing and a curse. I started out feeling brisk and happy but by mid-morning my blouse was sticking to my back and when I took off my tweed jacket Jamie grumbled at me, even if he was my favourite brother, because the white stood out against the heather; notwithstanding I was well hidden behind the sheltering wall of the butt and the birds couldn’t possibly care what I was wearing. And I couldn’t get my hair out of my eyes because of that vindictive nurse chopping it all different lengths so that it wouldn’t stay pinned. And I hadn’t held a gun since December, so I had to be womanly and be satisfied picking up other people’s dead birds with the dogs and beaters after each drive. And it was my birthday but even Euan and Jamie were too focused on loading guns and killing birds to remember to say anything about it. And when they were kind and offered me a gun during one of the drives, I couldn’t hit a single bird.

  I would have started to feel sorry for myself had not Mummy and Mrs Menzies arrived with the lunch at midday. They were accompanied by Jean McEwen leading ponies loaded with baskets stuffed to bursting. A couple of housemaids from the castle ran back and forth spreading white tablecloths over picnic rugs and laying out cold meats and Dundee cake, and, oh, lord, one of the maids was Florrie.

  My legs were decently clad in stockings and wellington boots, and I was in a proper tweed skirt of my own and not Sandy’s hitched-up kilt, but in a sweaty blouse with sleeves rolled up and hair standing in spikes in the Pitbroomie wind, the only things keeping Florrie from recognising me were my collection of useless hairpins and the fact that this time I was supposed to be a girl.

  I didn’t think I could count on the hairpins to disguise me, so I threw all my soul into Being A Girl.