The Pearl Thief Read online

  Euan took over the story. ‘And this year, Ellen went and borrowed a book from the library. She wore a tweed skirt and the librarian thought she was country hantle from Brig O’Fearn village. But when the librarian realised after a bit that Ellen was a Traveller lass, didn’t she ring the hornies straight away again! She sent a policeman out to us to collect a library book.’

  ‘What was the book?’ I asked.

  Ellen was silent for a moment.

  ‘Last year’s Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.’

  Somehow even Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland sounded like a challenge when those words got spat out by Ellen McEwen.

  My brother Sandy, who is a curator at the British Museum in London, has got an article published in that volume. I wondered what Ellen wanted it for.

  At this dreadful moment the officious nurse came back.

  ‘What is going on here?’ she thundered.

  And then she asked me what the blazes I thought I was doing, helping myself to the King’s own medical equipment, and how dare I? I told her the King didn’t own the city supply of drinking water, which I am not sure is technically true, but it is the principle of the thing – you can’t expect public infirmary patients not to drink. She accused me of cheek and of putting on airs again. Then she directed her venomous gaze on my visitors.

  Euan, still holding the drinking glass, turned magenta and shrank into his brown garments in fear and embarrassment under her blazing ire; Ellen blanched and stood fast with her arms crossed over her chest, gripping her sleeves.

  ‘And what do you mean by bringing these creatures into the women’s ward?’ the nurse bellowed at me. ‘How dare you keep your meetings here, you dirty fast wee midden!’

  With that, she seized the glass from the quivering hand of Euan McEwen and dashed the last unconsumed stolen King’s water straight into his blushing face. For a moment, he knelt by my bedside absolutely and damply astonished.

  ‘Get out!’ the nurse raged at him. She swung round to face Ellen, who was holding herself so tightly she’d torn a hole in the thin fabric of one sleeve. I thought Ellen was going to explode with rage.

  But she didn’t. She stepped past the nurse without a word, and wiped Euan’s face with the back of one hand. He stood up. Together they walked with dignity back the way they’d come in, with every patient watching the show. Euan held the door for his sister.

  She hesitated. Then she turned around and called to me defiantly, ‘We’re away to Blairgowrie for the berry picking. We’ll be back at the Strathfearn Estate for the flax at Bridge Farm. Get well and come to see us at Inchfort Field!’

  ‘I will!’ I vowed to her from across the ward.

  My mother arrived eventually, but I was asleep again by then and she did not want to waken me. She arranged for my discharge the following morning, and I was assigned a different nurse for the duration of my stay. The ward sister in charge was extremely grovelly and apologetic for her subordinate’s behaviour, concerned when I couldn’t bear to finish my breakfast porridge, and called me ‘Lady Julia’. I used my new-found power to demand coffee, but couldn’t finish that, either.

  I left St John’s on a spring tide of obsequious kowtowing. The noted surgeon who had last year coaxed an extra five months of life out of my dying and bedridden grandfather came out to the car to see me off.

  (It was my mother’s little two-seater Magnette which she drives herself – Grandad’s landaulet had already been sold and the driver dismissed. Mother’s car is a cracking red sporty thing with glittering chrome knobs all over and it is utterly impractical, apart from her occasionally giving me a driving lesson in it when she is in one of her more Bolshevik moods. Driving like a man is one of her few foibles.)

  The surgeon held the door while Mother tucked me in with pillows and a blanket, as the car has no top. ‘Lady Craigie, I do apologise your daughter wasn’t given a private room.’

  ‘Of course you couldn’t have known who she was!’ Mother said. ‘How lucky we are that the Travellers were so kind to her. That was Jean McEwen and her folk, wasn’t it? To think Jean and I used to play together along the Fearn! It’s my own fault she’s never met my daughter and couldn’t recognise her!’

  She didn’t say, You can’t be blamed for the occasional small-minded pig-headed idiot turning up on your nursing staff – it is hard to cure people of ingrained cultural platitudes. But I knew that, like me, she was thinking it hard.

  And like her, I didn’t say anything. I was sheerly grateful that the headache had subsided, and that I was out of the newspaper nightgown. Mother had brought me sensible clothes of her own (my trunk still had not arrived). I dared to ask, ‘Can I drive?’

  ‘Do not be ridiculous, Julia.’ But she laughed.

  As we headed out of Perth on the Edinburgh Road I shook off the blanket and managed to kneel backward on the seat, sticking half my body out of the car like a dog, enjoying the fingers of wind rumpling the tufts of leftover hair.

  ‘Darling, I cannot bear to watch,’ Mother shouted.

  ‘Slow down, then, Mummy! You’re supposed to be watching the road, not me.’

  The concentration it took to hold myself up made me seasick again, however, so I was forced to behave myself and sit properly.

  3

  LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES

  My grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Strathfearn, whom my brothers and I call by the French pet name Mémère, had been reduced to three rooms in her late husband’s ancestral mansion – four if you counted the bathroom. (Not the nursery bathroom – it gave everyone vapours to think I was lounging blissfully unclothed in that enormous bathtub, which was also used by the workmen in the east wing.) Four little iron beds had been brought down to Mémère’s big bedroom from the abandoned staff rooms in the attic; two of these beds had been installed side by side in Mémère’s dressing room for Mother and Solange, with just enough room to walk between them, and another was lined up at the foot of Mémère’s four-poster for her lady’s companion Colette. Mine was shoved against Mémère’s tall French windows. This was really the nicest place to be because I got to decide for myself whether the windows were open or shut. Also we still had the little morning room downstairs to ourselves, with big notices saying NO ENTRY posted on the terrace and in the corridor to keep the workmen out. We had use of the kitchen, but so did everybody else.

  For my first two days out of hospital, I couldn’t go downstairs to the morning room anyway. Standing at the top of the stairs was like being on the edge of a sea cliff, only worse – the vertigo actually made me want to be sick. I had to sit down on the top stair with my head between my knees before I managed to creep back to bed. The days that followed were interminable. I couldn’t do anything – I couldn’t focus my mind sharply enough to do a crossword or read or even be read to, though Mother and Solange and Mary Kinnaird all did try.

  Solange also fussed with my hair and filled my surroundings with roses, and brought me tall drinks full of mint leaves and lemon peel. Eventually I wanted to strangle her. I’d never known her to be so nervous.

  ‘Please go away, Nanny. I don’t want to be read to,’ I told her petulantly, a small child all over again with my grown-up self-sufficiency completely destroyed, and felt instantly, hideously guilty as she tiptoed out of the room to continue her never-ending quest for something to distract me with.

  Bored nearly to weeping, I sat at my grandmother’s dressing table – used by all four of the older women in turn each morning, very quietly so as not to awaken me unnecessarily – and I methodically removed and replaced the lids of every single jar of cold cream and face powder again and again. There was something mesmerising and comforting about this, possibly because it proved to me that I was still able to coordinate my brain with my body. The clink of the glass stoppers in Solange’s scent bottles was as soothing as birdsong. Nosy, idle, with the prying right of an indulged and pampered baby, I was delighted to find a jewel case from MacGr
egor’s of Perth pushed against the mirror stand at the back corner of the table.

  ‘Mémère, has all your jewellery been sold?’ I asked my grandmother wistfully, in French, because although she’d been living in Scotland for over fifty years, she and Colette and Solange are French-born and ordinarily we all chatter to each other in their native language.

  ‘The Murray jewellery has been gone for years,’ Mémère said dismissively, as if she’d never liked it anyway. She and Colette were sitting at opposite sides of an octagonal card table covered with green baize, folding about a million lace-edged napkins and packing them into an enormous woven willow hamper. ‘What’s left of my own jewels is locked up in my great-grandfather’s sea chest over there, beneath still more of my mother’s linen. There’s too much of that.’ My grandmother tossed another pile of napkins unceremoniously into the basket.

  I pried open the jewel box I’d found as if it were a mussel shell. Inside it lay a pair of pearl earrings. They were tear-shaped Scottish river pearls like grey raindrops, like a sky heavy with cloud, perfectly matched.

  ‘Whose are these, then?’

  I unfastened one earring from its blue silk bed and tried to dangle it from my ear.

  ‘Julia!’

  That was Mother. All in an instant, she and Solange were both hovering over me like crows mobbing a thieving magpie. When I lowered my hands, Solange tweaked the little jewel away from me as though she thought I were about to pop it in my mouth and choke myself to death.

  ‘Are these pearls from the Murray Hoard?’ I asked.

  ‘They belong to Solange,’ my grandmother said, shrugging. ‘They were a gift.’

  Solange packed them smartly back into their case.

  Which amount of circumnavigating my question did nothing to slake my curiosity.

  ‘Who –’

  My mother and my nanny exchanged sharp looks over my head.

  ‘She’s old enough to know,’ Mother said. ‘She should know.’

  ‘You may tell her, Madame,’ Solange said miserably.

  ‘You must do the telling,’ Mother said coolly. ‘I won’t speak for you.’

  Solange, the jewel case still held between her hands, one on top of the other, walked to the tall French windows and sat down on my narrow bed, as far away as she could get from the rest of us, and gazed out over the tractors and wheelbarrows bumping back and forth over the lawn. She sat quietly for a moment, steeling herself. She took so long to continue that I found myself holding my own breath in apprehension, and let it out sharply when all of a sudden she began to speak.

  ‘I have made the acquaintance of a special friend,’ Solange said carefully. ‘An intimate friend.’

  She was still speaking French, and the euphemism ‘special friend’ didn’t sound as coy as it does in English. En français it is quite ordinary to call your sweetheart your ‘bon ami’, your good friend.

  ‘He is called Dr Hugh Housman,’ my grandmother expanded drily on Solange’s behalf. ‘He is the scholar who has been cataloguing the Murray Collection of Antiquities.’

  ‘I thought Mary Kinnaird was doing that at the Inverfearnie Library,’ I said.

  Mother corrected gently, ‘It’s being done at the library because everything is so chaotic here. There’s room to spread things out there in peace and quiet. But it’s Dr Housman’s work, not Mary Kinnaird’s.’

  Solange, distracted, now didn’t go on.

  Colette bent in embarrassment over the old linen.

  After another agonising long moment of silence, Mother and Mémère in unison gave little cat sighs, a sharp sniff that always indicates either one of them is losing patience with you, and Solange started talking again all in a rush.

  ‘Something has happened to him. I think. It was the day you hit your head, Julia. I argued with him – bitterly, bitterly – the same morning. I refused his … I refused his affections … and then I watched him from this very window as he crossed the lawn and entered the wood where the river path is, but I had locked myself in this room and did not come out again until your lady mother and your grandmother returned from the solicitor’s that afternoon –’

  Here Mother did interrupt. ‘Jean McEwen’s man found Dr Housman’s cap in the river not far from the standing stone that very afternoon. None of us has seen him since.’

  Dear Solange – what cracking melodrama! No wonder she seemed so skittish. I rubbed at my temples.

  ‘He gave you those earrings?’ I queried.

  ‘We’d been very intimate,’ Solange sniffed. ‘He found the pearls himself –’

  ‘From the cup in the Murray Hoard?’ I interrupted. ‘Grandad used to have a pile of pearls in that wood-and-silver cup in his artefact collection.’

  All the older women looked at me strangely.

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ said Mother.

  ‘Dr Housman found Solange’s pearls in the river,’ Mémère explained. ‘Fishing for pearls is a hobby. He was a colleague of your grandfather’s, and interested in many of the same things.’

  Mother sat down again in the overstuffed wing chair where she’d been curled for most of the morning. ‘Dr Housman was an admirer of your grandfather’s antiquarian and archaeological work,’ she explained. ‘That’s why your grandmother recommended he be the one to catalogue the artefacts you call the Murray Hoard.’

  ‘So Grandad and this Housman chap both collected pearls?’

  ‘Goodness, Julia, do stop going on about pearls,’ Mémère said crossly. ‘I told you the jewellery was sold.’

  Mother was gentler. ‘We are quite concerned for Dr Housman. And more so for you: what happened to you that morning? Did you slip and fall, or did someone hit you? Did you and Dr Housman cross paths, perhaps without seeing each other? I’m anxious to ask him if he saw what happened to you. But I’m increasingly concerned that someone else attacked both of you – a poacher, perhaps – and that Housman didn’t have the narrow escape you did.’

  I tried to shift my mind from Grandad’s pearls, which I remembered, to Dr Hugh Housman, whom I’d never heard of, and it was like trying to play the trumpet without knowing which end you were supposed to blow into. Colette looked disapproving. Mother and Mémère and Solange all leaned forward breathlessly, expectant.

  ‘Was this Housman chap staying here?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t there anyone he reports to who you could ask about him?’

  Solange gave a sniff. Obviously she felt he ought to be reporting to her.

  ‘He reports to the solicitors of the Murray Estate in Edinburgh,’ Mémère said. ‘And his people at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.’

  ‘But no one seems to have any idea where he is.’ Solange sniffed again.

  As before, the most useful information came from Mother. ‘And his job isn’t being done. I’ve put a call through to Sandy to see if he can take over the archaeological catalogue until …’ My mother, the resolute Lady Craigie, couldn’t work out how to best finish her thought without sounding ominous – she couldn’t say ‘until Dr Housman comes back’ if he wasn’t going to, or if he was going to be fired when he did. She fumbled, ‘Sandy can do an adequate job as long as he’s needed. He’d love to do it. Initially the Murray Estate felt he wasn’t experienced enough, as well as him having an interest in the estate. But he’s the new Earl of Strathfearn – it’s right he do it. Mary can help him just as she’s been helping Dr Housman.’

  Mother took a deep breath, and soldiered on. ‘We’ve notified the police about Dr Housman’s absence too, and they’ve been talking to the builders on the estate here. I’m surprised the chief contractor for the Glenfearn School hasn’t seen him. Solange, you said that Dr Housman and the contractor Mr Dunbar sometimes share their meals –’

  ‘What about Mary?’ I interrupted. ‘Wouldn’t this Housman fellow normally ring the library, or leave her a note to say when he’s coming and going?’

  ‘Julia, please do wait until I’ve finished speaking,’ Mother corrected automatically. She is used to r
unning her own household and likes to have everyone’s full attention.

  I shrugged.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I spoke to Mary this morning,’ Mother said. ‘She hasn’t noticed anything unusual at the library, except that Housman had left her back door open on the day you arrived. But he doesn’t always work at the Inverfearnie Library; some days he’s here, or in Perth, or even at the National Library in Edinburgh, so Mary didn’t think anything was amiss until I mentioned it to her.’

  ‘He might have left her a note. I did.’

  ‘She hasn’t found one. That leaves Solange as the last person who communicated with him. She’d been putting fresh roses in his room, and went up earlier today to change them; she didn’t see anything that suggested he’d slept there.’

  Poor Solange gave another miserable sniff. ‘But he hadn’t taken anything away with him, either, Madame! It was the same as always. Oh, how can I speak to the project manager – to Mr Dunbar – about Dr Housman? How can I admit I go in and out of his bedroom? It would not be correct.’

  ‘Well, I can speak to the project manager. I’ll go to ask him now. I don’t like it that Julia should be mixed up in something as nasty as this. The man might have been murdered.’ Mother got up again, with an air of determination.

  ‘Perhaps I’m a witness!’ I said, relishing the idea.

  No one else relished it.

  ‘Everything is so unpleasant,’ Mémère said unhappily. ‘I detest having policemen in my house. And they stop at nothing. They will question Julia. What a thing for the front page of the Mercury.’

  I laughed, improvising an appropriate headline. ‘“Injured Tinker Lass Saw Nobody.”’

  This time Mother scolded swiftly in a tone of iron: ‘Julia.’

  Her voice was low and sharp. ‘Just because you can’t remember what happened doesn’t mean you had any less of a narrow escape! And don’t you dare forget that the Beauforts have been raked through muck before. Your grandmother had to fend off a household full of policemen after her sister’s husband died, and it’s an invasion not to be borne when someone you love has lost a battle against cancer. Not more than once. It may be that it was in France and it was before you were born, but that should not make you too young to understand nor care.’