Jamie stared at me as if he’d never seen me before.
‘I think you’re right.’ He sounded as if he absolutely couldn’t believe I’d worked it out, but knew it made sense. ‘No wonder he was rude about Mémère managing the estate badly,’ he breathed. ‘Imagine everyone but him overlooking something so valuable!’
‘Well, I didn’t,’ I huffed. ‘I kept saying the pearls were missing.’
Jamie swore. ‘Poor Mémère.’
‘And, oh, poor Nanny.’
‘Let’s not tell her.’
It wasn’t long before the McEwens came back. The four of us sat in the steaming mist and polished and counted three hundred and twenty-seven pearls before we put them back in the jar, packed in clean cotton wadding.
Then we all went up to Inchfort Field one last time, and Euan and Ellen went off away west with everybody else, waving wildly back at us till we couldn’t see them any more, and then I drove Jamie over to the Big House in Mother’s car. We hid our recovered stolen goods under my bed until we had a chance to take them to Aberfearn Castle.
I was tempted to fill the little wooden cup with the pearls again, but it would have been too dramatic. And also – there were too many. Where did they all come from? But Mémère had never missed them, and for all the thousands of pounds they might have been worth, they would not bring Grandad back nor stop the inevitable conversion of Strathfearn House to the Glenfearn School. Nothing in the Murray Estate belonged to us any more. What would Sandy have done with them if he’d found them? Labelled the jar with a number and noted it in the catalogue? And they’d just have gone off to Sotheby’s in London to be auctioned with the rest of the Murray Hoard.
Suddenly I felt rather sympathetic towards poor old Hugh Housman. He knew what he’d found. I might have tried to run off with those pearls too, if I’d been him.
WHAT HAPPENED
24TH JULY–17TH AUGUST 1938
13
SEVERAL THINGS I CAN’T HAVE
I missed the McEwens tremendously.
All that weekend the lifeboats hunted for Hugh Housman up and down the Tay, although apparently the authorities didn’t think he’d have moved much from where the original bits of him were found. Even the fact that his lower half was so far downstream from where I saw him (and so were his clothes) suggested that he’d wandered down there, alive, before he drowned.
It was amazing, and not very nice, either, how much the disappearance of Hugh Housman taught us about the science of drowning. I felt like we were all holding our breath, hoping and dreading some more of him would turn up.
Hugh Housman was not in the pipeline trench. They checked and checked. They must have accidentally dug him out and tossed him aside when they were dredging. Frank Dunbar was finally given permission to lay the pipes and get on with it. The tennis courts were shaping up too; the whole estate was beginning to look properly academic.
It was possible Hugh Housman’s upper half was part of the new tennis courts now.
The night after the McEwens left we had another midnight visitor – Pinkie.
The silly, wonderful creature. She abandoned Ellen and even Euan in favour of me. I was convinced she was very protective, and had it in her doggy head that I was naturally fragile. Indeed, I believed Pinkie was a reliable witness to whatever really had happened to me – if only she could speak. I’d called her faithless, but I thought now that was very unjust. She was relentlessly loyal. Only she wanted to be with the person she felt had the greatest need at any given moment.
Here’s how she announced her arrival at Strathfearn House: rattling the door handles of the morning room at two thirty in the morning, just below my window, nearly frightening me out of my skin once again. I was the only person to awaken at first, and reminded myself sternly: Frank sends someone round to check the doors. But then Pinkie started howling and woke up everyone else. So of course we had to let her in.
Jamie and I took her with us on the Sunday to smuggle our stolen pearls into Aberfearn Castle.
We’d both been clever enough to wear trousers and leather shoes. The path that leads through the gate arch in the curtain wall was overgrown with nettles and bramble all in flower. Grandad’s groundsmen used to keep it mowed – I remembered coming here on a very elegant picnic with Mémère, which we ate on tartan blankets on the bare stone floor of the tiny sixteenth-century stone summer house overlooking the River Fearn. In my childhood memory we crossed a wide green swathe of lawn, so truly velvet that I pulled off my sandals and ran barefoot on it; I could feel the cool, worn stone of the summer house steps beneath my feet when I thought about it.
But now Jamie and I had to trailblaze our way through a thicket that felt like the Briar Wood surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle, except that all around us you could hear the roar of engines and the thump of diggers.
‘Dunbar says they’re going to fence this off from the school grounds,’ Jamie said. ‘If they can’t keep the boys out of the castle they’ll have to pull it down.’
‘I hate the ruin of things,’ I mourned. ‘I like that they’re fixing things, making the house useful. I can see the good in it. But why the castle has to be fenced off and Inchfort Field made private … I just hate it.’
‘You sound like Ellen. She should run for Parliament.’
‘That’s even less likely than Sandy being elected to the House of Lords.’
‘Don’t,’ Jamie said. ‘You’ll just end up cross.’
Nettles didn’t seem to bother Pinkie. She bounded ahead of us up a narrow trench through the undergrowth.
‘See, someone’s used this path this summer,’ Jamie said.
‘But it’s all springing back,’ I pointed out. ‘None of it’s newly trodden. They probably came to take a look at it when they started dredging the pipeline for the swimming bath.’
‘You can get in through the eastern wall too though, through the river gate. They’ll have to block that off as well if they want to keep the boys out.’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have just one last summer picnic with Mémère here?’ I said wistfully. ‘But she’s too frail to march through these weeds.’
‘She could if she had to,’ Jamie said, and we both laughed.
The stout medieval wooden door that I remembered was gone. It was doubly weird to think that this forlorn place was no older than our own solid and beloved Craig Castle in Aberdeenshire. The wreck of Aberfearn Castle seemed to belong to another geological age.