The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  It was a thin metallic wand, slender as a stem of wheat and about as long as Jamie’s hand. It curled at the end like a giant fish hook. It was a shape that made no sense, a thing that had no business being in the river, and yet there was also something perfectly ordinary and familiar about it.

  ‘It’s a temple,’ Jamie said.

  ‘It’s a what?’ said Euan.

  ‘It’s one side of a pair of spectacles. It’s a temple. You know, the arm thing that holds your glasses on your head – it hooks over your ear.’

  ‘There’s all sorts rubbish in the burn,’ said Mr McEwen. ‘Folk are careless.’

  I didn’t consciously remember that Dr Housman had been wearing broken glasses. But when I’d doodled that pair of spectacles, they’d been missing one side.

  Jamie’s small gold twist of wire was the piece that had come off – the piece I hadn’t seen.

  It had to be a trace of Dr Housman. But it didn’t tell me a damned thing more than I already knew.

  ‘This sun is burning me already – I can feel it,’ Jamie said, hauling himself wet and gleaming as a selkie on to the flat rock. ‘Give me back my shirt before I am entirely grilled.’ He looked up at me. ‘Are you all right?’

  I nodded. I didn’t quite trust myself to speak.

  ‘I expect we’ll have to hand that in to the police to go with the chap’s cap,’ Jamie said.

  ‘We’ll let you do that,’ said Alan McEwen. ‘They’ve been round here twice already poking their nebs in about, and they dinnae like us. No point in looking for trouble.’

  ‘Well, the Water Bailiff is a terrifying man and no mistake,’ said Jamie. ‘He’s thrashed me and every one of my brothers at some time or other – our Sandy used to dive to look at the log boat sticking out of the peat near the mouth of the Fearn, and the Water Bailiff hauled him out of the river once and thrashed him with a birch switch without even letting him get dressed first. I’ll take this in to the police and leave you out of it.’

  Mr McEwen strode through the water and waded out on to the little beach, where I was standing with Pinkie. ‘Come along up to the camp and meet Mrs McEwen,’ he invited. ‘You can thank her yourself for the care she gave you; she’ll be happy to see you well again, lass. And now that we know you’re one of Strathfearn’s – well, I knew your grandad, and he’d have done the same for any of my bairns. A fine man, Strathfearn. The finest.’

  ‘And maybe we’ll find a pearl or two inside the crooks we’ve got for Mammy,’ Euan said. ‘Come and watch her open them.’

  5

  WHAT’S YOUR PROPER WORK?

  You know what I was expecting to find at the McEwens’ camping place? A community of twenty families, a nomadic village of tents, each with its own cooking fire, filling Inchfort Field like a ghost of the Roman military outpost it is named for. But the McEwens had got a most modest set-up, in a high, sunny corner of the field sheltered by the beech hedge of the estate boundary. They’d parked themselves as far away as possible from the queer old standing stone at the bottom of the field, covered with lichened carvings of starey-eyed fish, and I didn’t blame ’em. Grandad always told us that stone walks down the path to join the tall Drookit Stane in the river on Lammas Night and swim with the salmon in the dark. Antiquarians are all secretly pagan heretics.

  There weren’t twenty people, let alone twenty families camped at Inchfort Field, and a third of those were little.

  ‘Gosh, I thought there were more of you here!’ I said as we crossed the field. ‘Everybody makes it sound like –’

  ‘– the place is crawling with tinks?’ Euan made tinks sound like bedbugs. Suddenly he reminded me very much of his twin sister. My heart leaped again, thinking Ellen might be there.

  ‘Well, I didn’t say it.’

  ‘There’s three families here. Daddy’s and his brother’s. And Mammy’s best friend and her daughter and her man. Lots of weans – you’ll see! And Daddy’s old Auntie Bessie, who’s got no family but ours.’

  Ellen was there. She and Mrs McEwen and the very old Auntie Bessie were the only grown-ups about, though there were a handful of wee lassies skipping rope lower down the field; everyone else was out thinning turnips at Bridge Farm. Ellen was busy though, stripping bark from whippy willow branches. The old woman fed bits of bark to a fire over glowing coals, and Mrs McEwen was deftly weaving a willow basket with the supple wands that Ellen gave her. They were looking after the wee-est of the bairns while they worked – Ellen had a baby tied cuddled against her chest in a shawl, its downy hair just brushing against her chin. Her own hair was a glory of copper fire that morning, shining like a whisky still, long and loose in gentle flames down her back.

  ‘Mammy, we’ve brought our lucky lass for you to meet,’ Euan called out as we came close. ‘She’s awake and walking.’

  Their mother, Jean McEwen, laughed. ‘Looks like our Pinkie’s found a new best friend!’

  Their mother wasn’t like the other McEwens at all. She was little and merry and good-natured. Instantly I wished I’d thought to bring her a gift, and wanted to kick myself for not having anything to offer.

  I knelt abruptly in front of her. When she put aside the willow withies she’d been weaving, I snatched up her hands, held them close together in mine, and kissed them. ‘Hello, Mrs McEwen! I think I owe you my life.’

  She shook her head and laughed. ‘Och, Lady Julia, no such thing. I only kept the rain off you for a night!’

  ‘And isn’t that a woman’s proper work, sheltering bairns?’ Ellen remarked coolly.

  Mrs McEwen still grasped my hands – I’d instinctively done the right thing to greet her so warmly – but Ellen McEwen held my gaze with chilly challenge, menacing and stony-faced.

  I wanted very much for her to like me.

  ‘Well, somebody has to look after bairns,’ I said.

  I swear, it was as though I could read Ellen’s mind. She was practically daring me to ask her: ‘Is that your baby, Ellen McEwen?’

  In the same instant I was certain that it wasn’t. She was just waiting for me to jump to conclusions about her, in exactly the same way the St John’s Infirmary staff had jumped to conclusions about me.

  ‘What’s your proper work?’ I asked her.

  ‘What’s yours, wee primsie toffee-nose?’

  ‘Whisht, Nellie!’ the very old woman scolded her.

  ‘I’m still in school,’ I said. ‘So’s Jamie.’

  ‘I’m a willow basket weaver,’ Ellen said in a voice that made it sound like she’d made it up on the spot.

  ‘Oh, aye?’ Jamie flung himself down on the grass by her side, artless and winning. ‘Did you cut all this lot yourself? Do you make your own creels?’ He patted her small fisherman’s basket on the ground next to her. ‘There were always piles of baskets in the Big House – they use ’em for everything from sandwiches to guns. We used to see people cutting willows on the far bank where the Fearn meets the Tay.’

  Ellen looked down her nose at him, the tiniest of smiles curled in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Aye, Jamie Stuart, that’s us. That’s our willow bank. We own it, by ancient deed. Since before the new house was built. Since the Murrays lived in the castle.’

  The ‘new’ house, Strathfearn House, replaced a Georgian mansion destroyed by fire. The castle is five hundred years old and nobody has lived in it since the eighteenth century. ‘Since the Murrays lived in the castle’ is a very long time ago however you look at it.

  ‘And that’s us banned after your gran moves out,’ Ellen added grimly, and the rudimentary smile disappeared.

  ‘But why, if it’s yours?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘There’s no place to camp after this year. You can’t camp on the riverbank because of the mud and the tide. So that’s us done with those willows. Forever. The camping green by Bridge Farm’s been closed down by the County Council, and Inchfort Field will be closed off when the Glenfearn School opens. Shaness! We’ve always done casual work for the Strathfearn Estat
e – working the fields, gardening, helping with the grouse shooting. But those scaldy builders aren’t interested in giving us work, and I ken the Glenfearn School won’t want filthy tinkers anywhere near their boys. And the pearl fishing – we won’t be able to do that here either. Do you know what Fearn pearls are worth? Ten pound Daddy got for one last year.’

  Cripes. At that rate, twenty-five pearls would pay Jamie’s school fees at Eton for a year. And there was me ten years ago as a little girl playing with Grandad’s pearls like marbles, and me now feeling sentimental that my pretty toys were gone.

  It makes you very uncomfortable to realise that your emotional attachment to something is an indulgence.

  ‘Neither did our gran want to have to sell the estate,’ I said hotly.

  Ellen gave a snort. ‘Your poor gran. Hungry, is she?’

  Ellen’s mother apologised firmly. ‘Never mind our Ellen. She’s angered about the big changes and she’s still mourning your grandad. His passing’s a great sorrow to all of us. Your mother Esmé and I were playmates when we were half your age.’

  The old woman added, ‘See, Nell, she’s got her grandad’s eyes – hazel as autumn leaves turning, clear as Cairngorm mountain amber.’

  I couldn’t help smiling at her. ‘Thank you! I loved Grandad’s eyes.’

  Ellen gave an undisguised snort of disgust. I could hear her thinking at me: FATHEAD. I was not making a good impression.

  ‘I’ve five fine mussels for you to open, Jean,’ Mr McEwen said briskly to his wife. ‘We’ll let the lucky lass try one as well, aye? Give her a sup of tea and I’ll crack these crooks the while.’

  ‘Bessie, put the tea can on,’ said Ellen’s mother.

  ‘Julie take it off again,’ I misquoted on purpose, and they all laughed, except crabbit Ellen, and I felt warm. This was more like it, this was what was missing in the stifling, strained atmosphere back at Strathfearn House – ordinary cups of tea with people laughing and chatting over them. I hadn’t realised how tense and worried my people were until I was away from them, or how much it was weighing on me.

  While the big black tea can boiled, I had time to make good sense of the small campsite. There was a cooking fire in an old sheep-dip tin, standing on flat stones on the bare earth where they’d cut away the turf so it could be filled in when they left. A handful of chickens scavenged together under the hedges, and there were a couple of placid ponies and a couple of fine-looking horses cropping grass in the sun, and a wagon and a smaller cart by the gate. There was a long bow tent snugly made of hazel wands and sacking; there was also an old military tent. Clean washing hung discreetly on poles behind the tents. All the shelters looked sturdy but could be easily dismantled when they decided to move on; nothing wasted.

  ‘Where do you draw water?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘From the burn for washing,’ said Mrs McEwen. ‘From Boatman’s Well for drinking.’

  ‘But it’s so browny yellowish!’ I protested.

  ‘Och, that’s just peat,’ Mrs McEwen answered. ‘Peat never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Gives flavour to the tea,’ said Ellen slyly as Bessie set out tin cups, one of which would be mine in a moment or two.

  I answered boldly, ‘I cannot wait to try some.’ I had not ever drunk from the Boatman’s Well before but I am not afraid of PEAT, Miss Ellen McEwen.

  ‘Here you are, Davie.’ Euan knelt beside me and handed me the first mussel.

  Scottish river mussels are not like the little ones you get in the sea, or find scoured as blue and white shells along the tide line. The five mussels that Alan McEwen had brought back for his wife were as long as my hand, and nearly as wide, narrowed in the middle like fiddles.

  ‘That’s maybe a good hundred year old,’ said Mr McEwen, indicating the one I held. ‘Older than the Big House. Go on, open her up.’

  It was smooth and brown as a leather wallet and it opened like a hymnal. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a pearl, though the inside of the shell was beautiful. I held the two halves spread wide on my palms while Mrs McEwen slid her thumbs underneath the shell’s luckless inhabitant – but there was nothing in it but a grey blob of dying mussel.

  I felt sad, all of a sudden – not about there being no pearl, but about us having killed a wild thing that had been minding its own business in the River Fearn for a hundred years or more. A little violation.

  ‘Ah well, there’s four more here!’ McEwen Snr said cheerfully.

  ‘What do you do with them after?’ I asked. ‘Can you eat them?’

  ‘Eh, no, lass,’ Mrs McEwen said. ‘Too big and tough. You’re thinking of sea mussels. Pinkie can have the insides.’

  She took the next and used the edge of the first shell to prise the new one open.

  ‘Ah!’

  We all crowded closer to see what she’d found.

  She laid the shell on her lap. There was a small deformity in the blob of mussel there, a little membrane bag, and she pinched it between her fingers and squeezed out the pearl.

  ‘Well, this is a bonny wee thing, but will MacGregor’s buy it without a match?’

  She dropped it into the palm of her other hand so we could see it. It was shaped like a teardrop, and the palest salmon colour, like a cool sunset. It was beautiful and strange.

  She held the shell up to me. ‘Run your thumbs beneath the meat. There may be more.’

  I copied what she’d done earlier. An inch of smooth slime, then sudden rolling grains like barley beneath my thumbs. It surprised me. ‘Oh!’

  They all laughed at me.

  ‘It’s full of them!’ I gasped.

  Mrs McEwen took the shell from me. She slipped half a dozen peachy pearls into the palm of her hand to show me. ‘Luck’s with us now!’ she said, and gave me the next mussel.

  There was nothing in that one, either, nor the fourth. They handed me the fifth.

  ‘Ellen, you’ve not had a shot,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘You’re the lucky one.’

  ‘Well, no, I haven’t actually found anything. That was your mum’s shell that had all the pink pearls in it. You have this one. Then it’s on me if it’s a dud, and it’s on you if it isn’t.’

  Ellen stared at me over the silky hair of the sleeping baby tied against her chest. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. ‘I like those odds. Give it me.’ She paused, then said with exaggerated politeness, ‘Pass the crook here, Lady Julia.’

  What’s my proper work, Ellen McEwen? I am going to make you call me Julie.

  I gave her the crook. She opened it.

  Inside, in its membrane sac, there was a perfect creamy pale-pink pearl nearly the size of a marble. It must have been worth a packet.

  ‘Lady Julia, ye’re a fairy,’ said old Bessie.

  Jamie laughed. ‘Don’t give her ideas.’

  But my mind was working, it’s true. I was thinking about the villainous man Grandad had caught, who’d torn through all the young mussels on the riverbed in nearly exactly the same place where the McEwens had been fishing, and how he’d found nothing; how if he’d known where to look, all along, these hundred-year-old shells full of pearls were just sitting there for the taking. They’d been there the entire time.

  And I wondered how many Dr Housman had found. He’d had those beautiful earrings made for Solange. Maybe he’d found an ancient river pearl that was absolutely extraordinary, or more than one, and he’d gone off to get them valued, or to sell them and bank the proceeds; maybe he was trying to do it quietly because Grandad was dead and the house was sold, and he wasn’t really sure whether those pearls belonged to him or to the Glenfearn School or to the King himself.

  Ellen gave her pearl to her mother.

  I offered to help with the tidying-up, still trying to win her over – with willing friendliness if nothing else, much like Pinkie.

  ‘Off you go back to your granny’s,’ said Mrs McEwen. ‘She needs your help with the packing more than we do.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve been unpack
ing,’ I laughed. ‘Since Dr Housman’s not around, I’ve been helping Mary Kinnaird sort out the Murray Collection at the Inverfearnie Library. Our brother Sandy’s going to do the cataloguing when he gets here. I keep hoping I’ll find treasure that everyone else has forgotten about.’

  ‘And to think folk call us sleekit, you spoilt wee galoot of a schoolgirl!’ exclaimed Ellen. ‘But say, can you take me to see the Murray Collection?’

  ‘Well, of course!’ I’d have thrown myself under a bus to get her to thaw a little. But I should have guessed the Murray Hoard might interest her. Euan had said she’d gone to the library to borrow the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries annual in which Sandy had published that article about the log boat.

  ‘Our Nell worked on the drawings for Strathfearn’s collection two years ago, when it got so hard for him to see,’ Jean McEwen explained.

  ‘I measured and drew all his spear tips,’ said Ellen, not without pride. ‘Could we go and look at it now? I want to see the Reliquary again.’

  ‘Now? Why not?’ I said. ‘The library’s open …’

  All unexpectedly, with quick and efficient hands, Ellen untied the shawl that held the sleeping baby cuddled against her chest. The small person opened her eyes and yawned and blinked and crinkled up her face, and I could see the little fists opening and closing. Jean McEwen reached out welcoming arms and Ellen gave her the baby.

  Jamie bounded to his feet to offer Ellen a gallant hand to help her get up. He really was layering it on. I suppose I was too.

  ‘What’s the Reliquary?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘A reliquary’s a wee pot you keep a saint’s finger bone in, or something,’ said Ellen. ‘Your grandad’s one looks like a cup.’

  ‘Black wood?’ I asked. ‘Set in silver, spiralling around it like the fish on the Salmon Stane? That is my favourite thing in the collection.’

  ‘Aye, and it’s special to Strathfearn,’ Ellen told us. ‘We gave it to the Murrays to pay for the willow bank.’ She made it sound as though the transaction had happened yesterday, not four hundred years ago or whatever it had been. ‘Your grandad was worried it would be sold when he died, and one of the things I did for him was to write to the National Museum of Antiquities about it. He wanted them to be able to bid on it first.’