I shot her a look, but if she’d intended a double entendre she didn’t show any sign of it. Yet she’d managed to turn her own breakfast invitation into a challenge. Everything she said to me was a challenge.
We stood in the chill mist at the water’s edge down by the little beach where I’d been hit on the head over a month ago. The Drookit Stane was a ghostly grey shape in the middle of the burn; it seemed to shift as the mist thinned around it, as if it were hopping from foot to foot to keep warm. You could see where the story about the stones walking to meet each other came from.
I said, ‘You can get a penny for a jam jar, aye?’ I started to take off my shoes.
Euan knew right away what I was up to. ‘You wee galoot. You’re no’ diving for rubbish.’
‘Your dad said there was all kinds of scrap in the burn here. I want to pay you back for the telephone.’
‘Let her fish about,’ Ellen said. ‘It’ll be a better show than a day at the pictures.’
But her natural prudishness took over when I started to unbutton my dress in front of our brothers. ‘Shaness! You wee midden! Stop that!’
Euan dodged behind one of the horses so he didn’t have to look. They were both honestly and genuinely shocked.
Jamie intervened. ‘You crazy little idiot,’ he scolded. ‘Keep your clothes on. I’ll fetch your jam jars.’
I think he just likes an excuse to go swimming.
He took off his shoes and stripped efficiently down to his underwear – why is it all right for boys, but not for girls, to do this? He waded out into the stream, and I thought how many times we’d all been paddling just at this place in summers gone by. The mist made it magical. You still couldn’t see much of the opposite bank, but it was clearing around the Drookit Stane now.
‘I could do with one of those glass-bottomed pearl fisher’s jugs,’ Jamie complained over his shoulder. He was over his knees in the water already. ‘I can’t see anything but rocks. Wait a minute …’
The burn got deeper around the Drookit Stane, and with one false step and a splash Jamie was suddenly up to his waist.
‘Oomph! COLD!’ he cried. ‘All right, I see now how Housman might …’
He trailed off.
‘God pity us,’ Euan whispered superstitiously, because we all guessed what Jamie had been going to say and hadn’t said.
‘Do you see any jam jars?’ I reminded him determinedly.
‘There are mussels.’ Jamie stood balancing himself with one hand against the Drookit Stane, bent a little at the waist and peering into the swirling clear brown water.
Wraiths of mist crept around him. I shivered, and Ellen hooked her elbow through mine.
Euan said, ‘Come out the burn.’
‘I didn’t know these were here!’ Jamie said. ‘Rows and rows of them around the base of the stone! They’re as big as bricks!’
‘Aye, Daddy won’t touch them. Stone-grown, he calls ’em. Leave them be.’
‘Actually there is a jar! It’s wedged in a sort of nook, right at the foot of the stone.’
Jamie suddenly plunged into the burn, like the heron spearing a fish, and came up a few seconds later spluttering and triumphant, holding aloft a large stoneware Keiller marmalade pot. The lid was sealed with an elastic band around cotton wool gone green with algae.
My mouth dropped open.
It was my jam jar. It was the one I’d drawn so idly, a month ago, alongside Housman’s broken glasses. It was the jam jar whose lid I couldn’t get right.
I felt quite detached from myself, watching as Jamie came sloshing back to the bank. He held the prize out to me.
I just stared. For a moment I couldn’t make myself touch it.
And then I was angry, furious to think I’d never know what had happened to me that day, and the anger swept over me like the heat of a bonfire. It made me able to move and act and rise to the outrageous challenge of taking that dripping mysterious thing between my hands without them shaking.
I said through clenched teeth, ‘This had better be worth a penny.’
‘It wasn’t you who had to get all wet for it,’ Jamie remarked.
He sloshed back into the water, his hands on his hips, peering about in case there were more.
Euan still hid between the drinking animals, holding their lead ropes, one hand resting on a pony’s back. Pinkie was sniffing about after foxes or badgers along the overgrown path. All of Ellen’s attention was on me and the jam jar.
She said, ‘Och, that’s a big one. That’s worth twopence.’
I was like Pandora. I was mesmerised by the sealed Keiller jar in my hands, and the terrifying but irresistible compulsion to unseal it and find out what was inside.
I crossed the tiny beach to the flat rock where I’d fallen asleep guddling for trout the day I was hurt. I sat down on the rock, gripping the jar between my knees, and picked the elastic band away from the lid. The disgustingly perished slime of cotton wool came away with the elastic. I lifted the lid. There was another damp layer of cotton lining the top of the jar. I peeled it back.
‘Oh.’
The horses were forgotten. In a moment Ellen was sitting tight against me, and Euan was crowding over my shoulder. Jamie came splashing up out of the water to see.
‘Hold Pinkie. Hold her back,’ Ellen commanded, and Jamie knelt on the bank with his arms full of fox-scented golden fluff so Pinkie couldn’t get in our way.
The jar was full of pearls.
‘Oh,’ Euan breathed close to my ear, echoing me. ‘Oh, the beauties.’
Ellen said, ‘Jamie, give us your shirt.’
He tossed it to her in a ball. She spread the pale blue cotton over the flat rock, and I tipped the jar carefully out on to the soft cloth.
The pearls made a sound like rain falling in the river, pattering against one another as they slipped into the pale light of the damp morning.
They were grey and pink and salmon and buttery cream. A very few of them were as white as white, like Christmas cake icing. The biggest ones were a sort of dusty silky grey and exactly the same; there were three dozen of those at least.
Ellen picked one up and rubbed it against her nose, then held it out on her palm. Polished that little bit, just from the natural softness of her skin, the grey pearl seemed to take on a rosy sheen. It glowed like a little planet in Ellen’s open hand.
‘No one’s sold them,’ she said quietly. ‘Here they are.’
‘I said there were pearls in the Murray Hoard,’ I cried in triumph. ‘I said there were pearls in the Reliquary!’
‘These need loving.’ Ellen was fierce. ‘Oil and cotton wool and rubbing. What a thing to do with pearls four hundred years old – chuck them back in the burn like that, all mashed together against that dirty crockery!’
Ellen and Euan were like a couple of jewellers. Unlike me and Jamie, they knew exactly what they were looking at. It made me feel ignorant to listen to them.