After a few moments, I said, ‘Well, we can’t stay here.’
‘I might get out,’ Ellen whispered, ‘before you go anywhere else.’
‘You get out then. I’ll reverse back down to the pavement and turn around in the field gate just before the cattle bars.’
‘You can’t reverse!’
‘I’m good at reversing.’
I couldn’t get the damned thing started though, because of the slope which made me keep stalling. Eventually I had the brilliant and simple idea of freewheeling backward – very, very slowly – down to where the road widened. Ellen knelt up on the passenger seat while I did this, gripping the back of it with both hands, and bawling directions at me like a banshee:
‘Stop, stop! There’s a bend and a CLIFF – almost a cliff – STOP! Oh, sweet heaven. Thank you. Turn, yes, just go slowly here … Aye, you’re around. Straight back a ways … Go … go … STOP!’
I slammed on the brakes for the thousandth time.
Ellen was doubled over laughing – out of mirth or hysterics I was not sure.
‘What?’ I demanded. ‘Another cliff?’
‘There was a …’ She was gasping with hilarity. ‘In the way! It was a …’
On edge with the nerve-racking task of trying to reverse my mother’s car down a road about as wide as a bed and as steep as a staircase, where I wasn’t supposed to be, I found Ellen’s hilarity contagious.
‘A rockslide? A horse and cart? Another car?’ I craned my neck, trying to see as far as she could, tall Ellen riding up on the seat back like a figurehead turned around. ‘Oh help, not the bus coming?’
‘You just missed it!’ She was doubled over with laughter.
‘The bus? I missed the bus!’
‘A grouse, not the bloomin’ bus! There was a grouse ran under the car. Straight between the wheels and out the other side!’
‘That’s lucky, then.’
It took us a while to manage the journey back down to the place where the road widened at a field gate, but we did manage it eventually without hitting anything, not even one of the suicidal moor birds. I was able to turn around and park with the Magnette squeezed on to the grass verge so that it was pointing in the right direction (back down hill).
I had definitely overstretched myself, though I dared not admit it to either Ellen or Mummy. Feeling a bit limp with relief, I pulled on the handbrake and climbed up on the seat back next to Ellen.
‘Golly, what a beautiful day,’ I said appreciatively. ‘You can see all the way to Dundee from here!’
The Tay spread between us and the Sidlaw Hills, away from Perth out to the North Sea like a widening train of blue silk. Turnips and tatties, berries and flax grew green below us.
‘What a lot of ships going into Perth Harbour!’ I said. ‘And look, you can’t see the Big House because of the wood, but there’s Aberfearn Castle at the river’s edge.’
‘Euan and myself used to romp all over inside it when we were wee,’ Ellen said.
‘So did we! Playing at kings and queens! Did you climb up inside the chimneys?’
‘Aye!’
We laughed in amazement at this improbable shared memory.
‘What a shame we weren’t ever there at the same time,’ I said. ‘We could have had proper battles.’
We turned around. Behind us, the hillside climbed away, clad in heather almost ready to burst into purple bloom, hiding young grouse.
‘This moor used to be my grandad’s,’ I said.
‘Aye, we used to work it for him,’ Ellen said.
‘He sold the family jewellery so he could go to America for treatment, and he sold the moor to keep the house going. The land joins on to the Laird of Moredun’s, so now Moredun’s got one big grouse moor. He and Grandad always used to manage their shoots together anyway.’
‘Nice the land won’t change,’ Ellen said quietly.
I turned to look at her. She was gazing across the fields and woodland of the Tay Valley, her face expressionless, her eyes hot.
‘Sometimes it makes me feel like I own it all, when I see it like this,’ I said. ‘Mine by right of me being here.’
‘I ken.’ She glanced at me sideways. ‘By right of keeping the willows and knowing where the Bronze Age boat is hidden in the burn. By right of climbing up inside the chimneys of Aberfearn Castle!’ She turned her head fully. ‘You don’t own any more of it than I do, do you?’
‘Not one twig of willow. Not one pearl.’
Even as I said it, I remembered the pearl I’d stolen from my grandfather’s empty envelope. ‘Not a single thing in Strathfearn belongs to me.’ Not one forgotten pearl. ‘Not even the kilt I’m wearing!’ I finished, and we both laughed again.
‘I used to think Grandad was as rich as the King,’ I said. ‘But that was just me being little and ignorant. There were never bank vaults full of gold sovereigns and silver ingots. There wasn’t a family fortune; there was never much money. There was only Strathfearn, only the estate and its land, cows and flax and berries, grouse and salmon and a few river pearls. And now it is gone, and so is he.’
Ellen was silent – because what was there to answer to that?
‘Sandy inherited the title by a complicated thing called Special Remainder,’ I added. ‘He’s not the eldest, but he’s my grandad’s namesake and his most special grandchild, and our big brother Davie will get our father’s title anyway. But even Sandy doesn’t get a bean to go with it. Not that he cares about land. He’s like an ostrich, head underground, digging up artefacts.’
‘He gets that from your grandad.’
‘We all do, a bit,’ I said. ‘Even you. Though I wouldn’t want Sandy’s job, stuck in a museum all day. I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.’
‘Will your folk let you do that?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody ever mentions that I’m almost old enough to be married; but I’ll bet other people mention it to them. And maybe my people discuss it behind my back.’
I realised I would be forced to run away from home if someone tried to arrange a marriage for me. I didn’t want to think about it.
I pointed at the Sidlaw Hills across the valley. ‘See King’s Seat? Just in front of it is Dunsinane, where Macbeth lived. He’s supposed to be one of Grandad’s forebears.’
Ellen opened her mouth to speak.
I beat her to the post. ‘Don’t you dare call me Lady Macbeth.’
She laughed again. ‘I wasnae going to. I was going to say: we’re half the way up Pitbroomie Hill anyway, we may as well walk to the top. The motor car’s all right here for a wee while, aye?’
So we got out and walked.
It was a steep hike – for the same reason that the Magnette hadn’t made it up the hill, we found ourselves so out of breath we were unable to talk (I was, at any rate). But it was lovely once the hillside began to level out. Able to breathe again, I sang:
‘Now the summer’s in its prime
Wi’ the flowers sweetly bloomin’