The Pearl Thief

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 unpacking,’ 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.’