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 MacGregor’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 fran?ais 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.’