And there was my favourite item, a small round cup made of blackened wood set in silver filigree. I could picture it sitting in a back corner of a dusty glass case in the tower of the Big House, full to the brim with loose pearls like the ones on the bracelet downstairs. I had never been allowed to touch the cup, but Grandad had let me play with the pearls when I was very small.
‘My mother’s mother’s mother’s …’ he’d said they were. I can’t remember how many mothers back they went. All those pearls were found in Scottish rivers. I’d loved the way out of all the ancient artefacts in his collection, only the pearls didn’t look old. Like the royal pearls downstairs, they were as beautiful and ageless as the rivers where they’d been grown.
Now the cup was empty. The pearls were gone. Another wave of sadness washed over me. I’d felt instinctively that they belonged in that cup. Grandad must have sold them, as he’d sold so many of his heirlooms and so much of his land, to keep the estate going during his illness.
I was surprised that Mary would have gone out leaving a door open with all this valuable stuff lying about. She takes her job as the Inverfearnie Library custodian very seriously.
I poked my nose into the other rooms, her bedroom and the bathroom, but Mary was nowhere to be found.
I decided to leave her a note. I went back up to where she’d been working. There was paper everywhere, but all covered with lists and descriptions of artefacts. Finally I settled on an empty brown envelope addressed to my grandfather and postmarked Oxford from two years ago. The back was engraved with the name of a scholar I’d never heard of at the Ashmolean Museum. The envelope had been slit open with a knife or letter opener long ago, and whatever message it had once contained was not lying about in an obvious place. It didn’t seem important in any way, so I wrote to Mary on the back quickly to say that I was home in Scotland and staying at Strathfearn House for the next few weeks, and that I would stop in again to visit.
Here was another odd thing. When I went to prop my message against a chipped clay pot of unknown origin, in front of the pushed-back chair where Mary would be sure to see it when she came back, a pearl fell out of the envelope.
I thought it dropped off me at first – as if I’d been wearing it in my hair, or as an earring! It was the palest rose-petal pink, the size of a barley grain and perfectly round. It hit the green baize table cover with a sound like pip and lay still. It was intact and beautiful.
I picked it up – it was so round I had to wedge it beneath my fingernail to get hold of it. It must have been part of the collection. I thought of dropping it into the black wooden cup. But afraid of disturbing the cataloguing system, I put it back inside the envelope it had fallen out of. I folded the envelope over so the pearl couldn’t fall out again and propped it against one of the jam jars.
I went back outside, leaving the kitchen door a little open behind me, the way I’d found it.
The hammering and drilling and tractoring going on at the Big House and further downstream was no more than a faint hum. I didn’t feel like going back to the Big House. I thought I’d go to look at the Drookit Stane and the Salmon Stane, the standing stones in the river and Inchfort Field, just to make sure the builders hadn’t knocked them down to make an access road or boat ramp or something. Maybe I’d just peek at the one in Inchfort Field without leaving the birch wood. I didn’t want to get mixed up with the Water Bailiff.
I went down the gravel driveway, and crossed the humped bridge of moss-covered stone, as old as the seventeenth-century library itself, that leads to the opposite bank of the Fearn. Then I continued along the path on the other side of the river.
Where the burn bends it has scooped out a little shingle beach on one bank, where we used to swim. There was a heron standing midstream near the tall Drookit Stane, absolutely still, focused on fishing. Its shadow was dark against the stone and its reflection rippled in the water. I stopped still too – but not still enough. It heard me and lifted off awkwardly, heading downstream with long, slow wing beats.
I sat down on the flat sun-dappled rock slab where the wounded poacher had rested, and where Grandad had taught me and my brothers to guddle for trout. I wondered if I could still catch a fish using only my hands. No one was about, not even the heron, and I was overcome with a wave of sadness over my grandfather and his house and his things that weren’t ours any more, and all the summers that would never come back.
So I lay down and slid my bare arm into the clear brown water.
There. I was minding my own business, waiting for a fish to tickle. I suppose I didn’t really have any right to fish there because it wasn’t our land any longer. Julie the poacher!
I thought about the pearls that I’d never see again, and all my grandmother had lost. I thought about picking an armful of her own roses for her. The plan improved: I would dig some up so she could take them with her when she had to leave the house for good.
I’d not slept well on the trains across Europe. I’d been travelling for three days. I was lying in the sun and lulled by the sound of running water, and I fell asleep thinking about roses.
I remember what it looked like when my head exploded with light and darkness, but I didn’t remember anything else until the moment I found myself in St John’s Infirmary in Perth three days later.
2
NO MODESTY AT ALL
I don’t think I am capable of describing the headache with which I woke up.
For a long time I lay very still, not daring to move, and wishing I would lose consciousness again. When it became clear that this was not going to happen, I opened my eyes.
My friend Mary Kinnaird was sitting beside me, reading a book.
She was wearing her usual tweed skirt and a powder-blue blouse and a dreadful prickly cardigan like the sheepskin in the story of Jacob and Esau. I had no idea where I was or how I’d got there. But if Mary Kinnaird was sitting next to me calmly reading, I knew I was perfectly safe.
I said, ‘Hullo, Mary.’
She didn’t hear me. I waved.
She was so startled she dropped the book. Her smooth, broad brow crinkled with distress. Then she leaped out of her chair and landed on her knees next to me by the bed in which I’d been laid out, and grabbed my hands and exclaimed, ‘Oh, Julia! Julia, do you know me?’
‘Of course I know you, Mary,’ I said peevishly.
‘I’m sorry, darling, you’re speaking into my bad ear.’ Flustered, she dropped my hands to hold up the beautiful brass horn. ‘Can you see? Can you hear me properly? What happened? Oh dear, now that you’re awake I really should go and ring your mother. Julia, can you speak? How do you feel?’
I wanted to tell her to shut up or her blethering was going to kill me. I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter whether I could see or speak and that I didn’t care if she wanted to go and ring the King. I couldn’t possibly tell her what had happened because not only did I not know, but due to my fearsome headache I never even wanted to find out.