I went straight to my grandmother’s favourite sitting room and discovered it was also in disarray; and my remaining family members were nowhere to be found. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming three days earlier than expected. So, like a hunted fox bolting to the safety of its den, I sought out the nursery bathroom high in the back of the east wing, and drew myself a bath because I had been travelling for three days and the hot water seemed to be working as usual.
I didn’t have any clean clothes of my own to change into, but it is a good big bathroom, and in addition to a six-foot-long tub and painted commode there is a tall chest full of children’s cast-offs. I put on a mothy tennis pullover which left my arms daringly bare and a kilt that must have been forgotten some time ago by one of my big brothers (probably Sandy, who was Grandad’s favourite, his namesake and his heir, and who had spent more time there than the rest of us).
I was David Balfour from Kidnapped again, the way I’d been the whole summer I was thirteen, to my brothers’ amusement and my nanny Solange’s despair. I plaited my hair and stuffed it up under a shapeless faded wool tam-o’-shanter to get it out of my face, and wove my way through the passages back to the central oak staircase.
The banisters were covered with dust sheets because the walls had just been painted a modern cool pale blue – not horrible, but so different from the heraldic Victorian wallpaper. Light in shades of lemon and sapphire and scarlet spilled through the tall stained-glass window on the landing. As I turned the corner, the telephone in the hall below me started to ring.
I swithered on the landing, wondering if I should answer it. But then I heard footsteps and a click and the ringing stopped, and a harassed man’s voice said, ‘Yes, this is he … No, they’re not gypsies, they’re tinkers. Scottish Travellers. It’s tiresome, but they’re allowed to stay in that field till the end of this summer.’ The voice took a sudden change of tone and continued brightly, ‘Oh, you’ve sent the Water Bailiff up there now? My foreman thinks they’re pretty bold thieves – wants him to check all their gear for missing tools … Jolly good!’ His footsteps thumped smartly back the way they’d come.
Goodness, everyone seemed to have it in for the Travelling folk.
This Scottish traveller didn’t bother anybody. If the ditch-diggers were all downstream and the Water Bailiff was off bothering the campers at Inchfort Field, I could count on having the river path to the library on Inverfearnie Island all to myself. I thought I would go to say hello to Mary Kinnaird, who would not care if I was wearing only a kilt and a tennis pullover.
I crossed the broad lawn, broken by men smoothing earth and digging pits and laying paths. In the distance by the edge of the River Tay, over the tops of the birch trees, I could see the ruinous towers of Aberfearn Castle. The Big House is new by comparison; it was built in 1840, before Grandad was born. Before the railway came through. It was hard to believe that none of this was ours any more.
I passed into the dapple of sunlight and shade in the birch wood by the river.
An otter slid into the burn as I started along the path, and I saw a kingfisher darting among the low branches trailing in the water on the opposite bank. For a moment I stood still, watching and breathing it in. The smell of the Tay and the Fearn! Oh, how I’d missed it, and how I would miss it after this last summer!
See me, kilted and barefoot on the native soil of my ancestors, declaiming Allan Cunningham in dramatic rhapsody:
‘O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!
When the flower is i’ the bud and the leaf is on the tree,
The larks shall sing me hame in my ain countree!’
I crossed from the west bank of the Fearn to Inverfearnie Island by the footbridge. It is a creaky old iron suspension bridge so narrow you can’t pass two abreast, erected in the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. I jumped along its span to make it sway, the way my brothers and I had always done when we were little.
The library stood proud on the unnatural mound of Inverfearnie Island, which Grandad always told us might hide a Bronze Age burial beneath it. The oak front door of the library was locked, just as it had been three years ago.
This time, knowing Mary much better than I did then, I went round to the kitchen door. It was standing ajar.
‘MARY?’
I let myself in, hollering, because she can never hear you.
The kitchen was tidy and empty. I went through to her study, yelling my friend’s name. She wasn’t there, either, and it was also tidy and empty, as if she hadn’t been in all day.
I glanced into the telephone cupboard with its red velvet stool, in the dark little nook under the winding stairs. No one.
I went through to the library.
The library is two rooms on top of each other, the walls surrounded by shelves and scarcely a single book newer than before the Great War, apart from recent volumes of antiquarian journals and almanacs. But they still lend books to anglers and Scots language scholars and farmers trying to solve boundary disputes, and there is almost always someone or other studying in the Upper Reading Room.
I spared a reverent glance for the pearl bracelet. It lay locked under glass on its bed of black velvet, on permanent loan to the Perthshire and Kinross-shire Council for display in the library here. I couldn’t quite believe Mary had let me try those pearls on. They were beautiful fat Tay river pearls, so pale a grey they shone nearly like silver, the size of small marbles. Staring into the glass until it began to get fogged by my own breath, I could remember exactly how they’d felt against my wrist, cool and heavy with the magic of having been worn by Mary Stuart herself, whose surname I shared, as young as me and already Queen of Scotland.
I wiped the glass and turned away to continue the hunt for my own living Mary. I took the narrow winding steps to the Upper Reading Room of the library two at a time.
‘AHOY, MARY!’
And the Upper Reading Room was empty too.
But here was a strange thing. The Upper Reading Room was empty, but unlike the rest of Mary Kinnaird’s domain, it was not tidy. The great big chestnut table was covered end to end in ephemera and artefacts. I identified these as what my brothers and I called ‘the Murray Hoard’: intriguing archaeological finds that our grandfather used to keep on display in the tower room at Strathfearn House. I guessed that this must be a grand sorting job, with Mary called upon to catalogue the priceless ancient pieces before they went to auction. Iron and bronze spear tips, all different sizes and shapes, lay in rows, with more waiting in cigar boxes; I recognised an iridescent Roman glass vial shaped like a leaping fish which was, Grandad told me, nearly two thousand years old; and the dark polished stone axe heads were eerily three times that.