‘It was Jamie – it was me, poking around here, showing off. Please don’t –’
Mary faced me with blazing eyes and railed as if Ellen and Euan weren’t within hearing distance, or as if they were incapable of taking instruction themselves.
‘How dare you allow those people to lay even a finger on the Murray Collection! If you brought them here, you tell them to get out, this minute, and wait for you outside! I won’t have them in here! After all you’ve been through, to think of going about with their kind!’ She paused for breath. ‘You tell them to get out.’
Of course I didn’t need to tell Euan. By the time Mary had finished, Euan had already scuttled back down the stairs. I heard the clunk and crash of the heavy front door being opened hastily.
For a long moment, Ellen held my gaze with a look of bleak frost in her smoky eyes. Then she drew herself up to her full height – not as tall as her brother, but nevertheless queenly among us slight Murrays – and said to Mary clearly, ‘It’s a public library. It’s Council property. Nobody need get your permission to come in when it’s open.’
Mary turned around and galloped downstairs. Jamie and Ellen and I stood in the Upper Reading Room feeling rather stunned at how quickly the librarian had come and gone.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie said quietly. ‘That was my fault.’
‘It’s you with the damp trousers,’ Ellen said bitterly. ‘And us the librarian chucks out.’
But she didn’t go. She walked defiantly around the long chestnut table, her hands carefully locked behind her back so she couldn’t possibly touch anything. She was just looking.
At last she stopped by the spear points. ‘See those drawings?’ she said, with a nod of her head at a sheaf of paper in the middle of the green baize table cover. ‘Those are mine.’
She amended bitterly, ‘I mean, they’re not mine. But I made them.’
She finished her tour of the room.
‘Well, I expect Euan’s waiting.’
She would have gone down just then, I think; but now Mary, having left us alone with the Murray Collection for what seemed an unnaturally long time, came back up, pink and panting with exertion. It was silly to pretend I didn’t know what she objected to in the McEwens. But I’d never imagined Mary to be capable of such – well, of such meanness.
Of course she must really be just as capable of meanness as anybody else. As capable of it as I am, for example.
‘I’ve spoken to you before,’ she said coldly to Ellen.
‘I’m away,’ said Ellen fiercely, and bolted down the stairs.
Mary turned on me. ‘How could you bring them in here, Julia!’ she exclaimed. ‘And they were picking up the artefacts. I can tell that boy had just come from the river – his sleeves were still wet! My goodness. I do understand they can be good people – they did look after you when they found you in difficulty – but to bring that lad in here and let him touch things! And the way those folk mutter under their breath, blessing themselves and whatnot when they see me, as if I were a magpie sent to foretell a death. It’s not civilised. Those people are careless as can be, and I’ve to be so particular with this room now –’
‘Excuse me,’ Jamie said, squeezing past her towards the stairs. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Kinnaird – I’ve just come from the river also.’
Mary and I were left staring at each other.
I moved my mouth silently, saying words I couldn’t quite bear to speak aloud because I didn’t quite mean them.
I’m sorry too.
Then I ran down the stairs after the others.
They were gathered at the iron footbridge. Jamie and Euan, with his cap pulled low over his eyes, were perched on dangerously sagging rails opposite each other with Pinkie lying subdued at their feet – someone must have given her a severe talking-to. The heron was fishing under the bridge beneath them.
Euan slid off his perch as I came out. I saw the bridge shudder, dipping closer to the rushing water, as he came down hard on his feet. The heron took off, heading downstream with long, slow wing beats. Euan tipped up the peak of his cap so he could see me, but didn’t take it off.
‘She likes me,’ he said briefly, and with a perfectly straight face, when I got close enough that he could say it without raising his voice.
‘Look, we like you,’ said Jamie. ‘I just didn’t realise. I wouldn’t have –’ He shut up abruptly. It was an embarrassing, excruciating apology for all of us, mostly because it didn’t do any good and never would.
I caught hold of one of the cables fastening the bridge to the ground, gripping hard with both hands. Euan and Jamie jumped to attention at my elbows, concerned, as if they thought I was about to catapult myself over the cable and into the burn.
‘I’m fine. I’m just so angry.’
Ellen watched me with something like disdain. ‘Not used to it, are you?’
She opened her fisherman’s creel and drew out a little white clay pipe, which she filled from a leather tobacco pouch worn dark and soft before clamping the pipe between her teeth like a sailor.
‘Block the wind for me and I’ll give you a draw,’ she said to Euan. She dug out a box of matches and she and Euan worked together with cupped hands around the little flame. When they’d got the pipe alight Ellen had the first shot at smoking it; then, puffing out smoke like a steam engine, she handed it over to Euan.
They passed it back and forth, sharing, but not with me and Jamie.
The silence was heavy and awkward. Jamie threw me a querying look: Should we go?
As we hesitated, they finished the pipe. Ellen leaned down to knock out the tobacco residue against the base of the bridge. She was just packing the pipe back into her creel when Sergeant Angus Henderson came barrelling along the drive at a terrific pace on his bicycle, his long cromach staff under his arm like a jousting lance.
He came to a tearing halt before us, the bicycle tyres spewing up gravel almost as if he were reining in a galloping horse. He threw the bicycle aside.
‘Well now, young McEwen,’ the river watcher growled.
Euan took a step backward and Pinkie cowered, the craven thing.
Ellen stood with her fists clenched, the tendons standing out along her wrists, her face drained of blood.
For a wild moment I imagined Sergeant Henderson was challenging Euan to a duel, perhaps with quarterstaffs like Little John and Robin Hood. He clapped his tweed hat squarely against the back of his head before thumping the cromach against the ground between him and Euan with a crack that would have broken Euan’s foot if he’d meant it to. Ellen jumped back and crashed into Jamie, who steadied her with a quick light touch of one hand on her shoulder.