I gave an internal sigh of relief – not a visible one, because being called ‘brave’ by my grandad was the highest praise I’d ever aspired to, but relief nevertheless. Ringing the police from the Inverfearnie Library was a mission I felt much more capable of completing than shooting a trespasser. I gave Grandad back his shotgun ceremoniously. Then I sprinted for the library, stung by nettles on the river path and streaking my shins with mud. I skidded over the mossy stones on the humpbacked bridge that connects Inverfearnie Island to the east bank of the Fearn, and came to a breathless halt before the stout oak door of the seventeenth-century library building, churning up the gravel of the drive with my canvas shoes as if I were the messenger at the Battle of Marathon.
It was past six and the library was closed. I knew that Mary Kinnaird, the new librarian and custodian who lived there all alone, had only just finished university, but I’d never met her, and it certainly never occurred to me that she wouldn’t be able to hear the bell. When nobody came, not even after I gave a series of pounding kicks to the door, I decided the situation was desperate enough to warrant breaking in and climbing through a window. They were casement windows that opened outward – if I broke a pane near a latch it would be easy to get in. I snatched up a handful of stones from the gravel drive and hurled them hard at one of the leaded windowpanes nearest the ground. The glass smashed explosively, and I could hear the rocks hitting the floor inside like hailstones.
That brought the young librarian running with a shotgun of her own. She threw open the door.
She was bold as a crow. I stared at her openly, not because of the flat, skewed features of her face, but because she was aiming at my head. The library window I’d smashed was public property.
Nothing for it but to plunge in. ‘Miss Kinnaird?’ I panted, out of breath after my marathon. ‘My grandad has caught a poacher and I – I need to use your telephone – to ring the police.’
Her smooth, broad brow crinkled into the tiniest of irritated frowns. She’d sensed the importance of what I’d said, but she hadn’t heard all of it. Now she lowered her gun and I could see that around her neck hung two items essential to her work: a gold mechanical pencil on a slender rope of braided silk, and a peculiar curled brass horn, about the size of a fist, on a thick gold chain. She’d lowered the gun so she could hold the beautiful horn to her ear.
‘Your grandad needs help?’ she said tartly. ‘Speak up, please.’
‘STRATHFEARN HAS CAUGHT A THIEF AND I NEED TO USE YOUR TELEPHONE,’ I bellowed into the ear trumpet.
The poor astonished young woman gasped. ‘Oh! Strathfearn is your grandfather?’
‘Aye, Sandy Murray, Earl of Strathfearn,’ I said with pride.
‘Well, you’d better come in,’ she told me briskly. ‘I’ll ring the police for you.’
I wondered how she managed the telephone if she couldn’t hear, but I didn’t dare to ask.
‘Grandad said to send Sergeant Angus Henderson,’ I said. ‘He’s the Water Bailiff for the Strathfearn Estate. He polices the riverbank.’
‘Oh, aye, I know Angus Henderson.’
She shepherded me past the wood and glass display cases on the ground floor and into her study. But I poked my head around the door to watch her sitting at the telephone in its dark little nook of a cupboard under the winding stairs. I listened as she asked the switchboard operator to put her through to the police station in the village at Brig O’Fearn. There was a sort of Bakelite ear trumpet attached to the telephone receiver. So that answered my question.
I went and sat down in the big red leather reading chair in Mary Kinnaird’s study, feeling rather stunned and exhausted, and after a few minutes she came in with a tray of tea and shortbread.
‘I expect Grandad will pay for your window,’ I told her straight away. I assumed his wealth was limitless, three years ago. I hoped he wouldn’t be angry, and I wondered how he was getting on, waiting alone with the vicious and miserable prisoner. ‘I’m very sorry I had to break the glass.’
‘And I am very sorry I pointed my gun at you.’ Mary knelt on the floor beside me, there being no other chair but the one behind her desk.
She offered the shortbread. I found I was ravenous.
‘Oh, I knew you wouldn’t hurt me,’ I told her. ‘You are too bonny.’
‘You wee sook!’ she scolded. ‘Bonny?’
‘Not beautiful,’ I told her truthfully. ‘Your face is kind. You’re sort of fluttery and quiet, like a pigeon.’
She threw her head back and laughed.
‘Prrrrrt,’ she said in pigeon-talk, and this made me laugh too. Suddenly I liked her very much.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked me.
‘Lady Julia Lindsay MacKenzie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart,’ I reeled off glibly.
‘Oh my, that is quite a name. Must I call you Lady Julia?’
‘Grandad calls me Julie.’
‘I will compromise with Julia. Beaufort and Stuart are both the names of Scottish queens; I can’t quite lower myself to Julie.’ She smiled serenely. ‘Not Murray? Isn’t that your grandfather’s name?’
‘Some of my brothers have Murray as a family name.’
‘You know the Murrays were in favour with Mary Stuart. There’s a bracelet on display in the library that belonged to her when she was a child. She gave it to your grandfather’s people because she was their patron, four hundred years ago.’
‘Scottish river pearls – I know! Grandad showed me when I was little. They’re the only thing I remember about the display cases. All those dull old books along with this beautiful wee bracelet that belonged to Mary Queen of Scots! And I’m related to her on the Stuart side.’
Mary laughed. ‘Those books are first editions of Robert Burns’s poems! I don’t find them dull. But the pearls are everybody’s favourite.’
My hidden criminal inner self noted what an idiot the wounded trespasser was, stripping young mussels from the river when this perfect treasure lay in plain sight of the general public every day.
But perhaps the river seemed easier prey than Mary Kinnaird.
She said to me then, ‘So I’m a Mary and you’re a Stuart. And I have the keys to the case. Would you like to try on Mary Queen of Scots’ pearl bracelet while you wait for your grandad to come back for you?’
Mary Kinnaird suddenly became my favourite person in the entire world.
I noticed something. ‘How can you hear me without your trumpet?’
‘I’m watching your mouth move. It helps a great deal to see your mouth straight on. I don’t like the trumpet much.’
‘The trumpet is splendid.’
She twisted her mouth again. It wasn’t a smile. ‘But the trumpet makes me different from everyone else. And I am already a bit different.’
‘No one’s exactly alike,’ I said blithely. ‘I can find my mother in a candlelit hall full of dancers by the scent she wears. Everybody’s different.’
It was very easy for me to say, flush with the fear and triumph of my last summer afternoon with my grandfather, the Earl of Strathfearn. I was safe now, eating shortbread in the Inverfearnie Library, and looking forward to trying on pearls that had once been worn by Mary Queen of Scots. Everybody’s different: it was easy for me to say.
*
‘You’re a brave lassie!’
It was a perfect echo of Grandad, but of course now it wasn’t Grandad and there wasn’t a life at stake. It was only the taxi driver congratulating me.
‘A lass like you, taking the train alone across Europe! Times have changed.’