We left Pinkie sniffing about in the kitchen cellars and tiptoed up the grand stone spiral stair to the Great Hall. The place required silence. It was so … so grey and still within and so green without.
The floor of the Great Hall was covered with bat and pigeon droppings and moss, but still mostly solid. We negotiated the gaps and made it across to the Earl’s Chamber, without needing to speak to each other about where we’d go next, and I followed Jamie up the chimney. I could still do it. It was even easier than it was when I was little: all the handholds and footholds were there, but now I was taller and could use my body to brace myself between the chimney walls in places where I used to have to hold my own weight with just my fingers and toes. Jamie had more trouble than me, bumping about like a bear in a heffalump trap, but I tried not to be smug about it because he was carrying the pearls in their big stoneware jar in a leather cartridge bag over his shoulder.
We emerged through the collapsed chimney wall into the wonderful little attic dovecote under the roof where the wood pigeons still roosted. They had not noticed that the place was in ruins. Only me and my brothers and Ellen and hers, and possibly our mothers when they were children, had been up here in the past two hundred years. The pigeons all went rushing out in a panic of disturbed wings as we crawled out on to the solid (and rather mucky) floor.
‘You could hide something here forever and no one would know,’ Jamie said.
‘Till the floor falls down, and then you’d never get it back.’
‘Let it fall,’ he said fiercely, and I knew he felt exactly the same way about it as I did.
Jamie climbed up on the window sill so he could reach the lowest of the nesting holes of the dovecote, and we stowed the jar of pearls deep inside. Then he jumped down and we stayed a moment looking out over our lost demesne, field and river and wood and sky, through the mullioned window of what used to be a chamber below the dovecote. The floor between these rooms was gone so it was high and narrow, a bit like a chimney itself, lit by the windows at our level and the round holes in the wall above for the pigeons to use as doors. The endless hum of building works seemed distant, like the hum of grasshoppers. They were working even on Sunday to make up their lost time.
We could hear Pinkie barking her head off somewhere far below us, so we climbed back down.
She was gambolling in the kitchen and cellars, scrambling from room to room and carrying on like a demented thing.
‘What’s got into you, you ridiculous dog?’
She leaped to greet me, but turned immediately and galloped into the kitchen. That was the biggest of the below-ground rooms, with barrel-vaulted windows and a fireplace the size of the ladies’ waiting room at Brig O’Fearn railway station, with a baking oven built into it. Pinkie bolted straight to one of the corners of the fireplace and, after a bit of excited snuffling, came back to us producing a jute sack whose contents she had clearly been worrying for some time.
As far as we could tell from the remains, she’d eaten a Thing entirely wrapped in brown paper, possibly a loaf of bread, and another Thing that had been very greasy. Neither I nor Jamie wanted to get near enough to try to discover whether the latter had been of a Meat or Dairy nature. The bag clunked when Pinkie dragged it about the stone floor, and when we managed, gingerly, to get it away from her and dump it out, we found that the last Thing inside it was another Keiller marmalade jar – a small one. It rolled across the floor as it fell out of the jute sack, and Jamie and I jumped back as if it were a firework about to go off in our faces.
Jamie prodded it with his toe.
‘Bloody coward,’ I said.
‘Language!’
I grabbed the jar and uncapped it in one defiant movement. It was half full of marmalade. We both burst out laughing.
‘Someone’s been camping,’ Jamie said.
In the darkest, innermost corner of the bread oven, which is a nice big flat ledge raised a good four feet above the damp stone floor, we found a bucket from the building site partly filled with water, a carefully folded mackintosh and a car rug. It would be a hard place to sleep, but safe and dry. Not so safe as the secret room in the attic, of course.
‘Maybe they’re still here,’ I said. ‘There’s no mould in the marmalade.’
‘Maybe it’s one of the workers from the school renovation. Anyone down from Highland Perthshire wouldn’t be able to go home easily. It’s never one of the McEwens’ folk – they’d make themselves more comfortable than this.’
‘But the Glenfearn School provides lodging,’ I pointed out. ‘There are lots of people staying on the estate.’
‘They take it out of your pay though.’
We put the mac and rug back. The plundered jute sack was harder to replace.
‘Gluttonous dog,’ Jamie remarked. ‘D’you think we should restock the cold provisions?’
‘No,’ I said forcefully, feeling mean. ‘I think this chap’s been nicking sandwiches and cigarettes from the other workmen all summer, and they’ve been blaming it on Euan.’
In the end good breeding overcame suspicion, and Jamie left a half-full packet of Craven “A” cigarettes and a matchbox on top of the depleted sack as an apology.
We didn’t once, either of us, mention aloud the pearls we’d just hidden. It was hard not to imagine that the owner of this little stash might be listening somewhere nearby, and it was irritating to discover that Aberfearn Castle wasn’t quite as abandoned as it ought to have been. But we both felt certain no one was going to climb up the chimney among the doves looking for pearls.
‘Come on, let’s leave by the river gate,’ said Jamie. ‘I want to see if that path’s been used recently.’
It had. It had been used a lot more than the main path.
‘Well, there are a lot of people working on the pipeline,’ said Jamie.
This was the first time I’d been down to the end of the path all summer, and the mouth of the River Fearn where it meets the Tay was a busy hive of frantic activity.
Out in the Tay a Royal National Lifeboat was doggedly dragging for the rest of Hugh Housman. Along the pipeline trench they’d got hoardings and pumps working to keep the water out while they laid the pipes. The generators billowed clouds of coal smoke and made the most deafening racket I’ve ever heard; the men in the trenches nearest the noise were communicating with hand gestures, like mill girls. Pinkie sat down on the river path suddenly and refused to budge.
‘Oh, lord. This daft dog,’ I yelled. ‘Jamie, help me move her on.’
He was staring in the same direction as Pinkie, but with intelligence and comprehension that Pinkie has not got.
‘What is it?’
Jamie narrowed his eyes like a rat’s – Mother’s intolerance-for-stupidity glare that we have all inherited. He stalked forward a few paces, then stopped and spun on his heels to face me. He yelled, ‘It’s the log boat.’
‘What?’