He grabbed me by my arm and pulled me forward, pointing. ‘The bloody idiots!’ he gasped through clenched teeth. ‘They dug up the log boat!’
‘Grandad’s boat? The Bronze Age boat Sandy wrote about?’
‘Yes, that one, the one he got birched for poking about when he was a lad –’
‘– and Grandad left it buried in the peat so he wouldn’t damage it!’
‘Because it’s THREE THOUSAND YEARS OLD! Yes, THAT LOG BOAT,’ Jamie cried.
It had been destroyed.
They’d chopped it out of the riverbank in pieces. They must have had no idea what it was – just an old wooden boat in the way of their work. Maybe they didn’t even realise it was a boat; Sandy wrote that it had been carved out of a single log, from an oak tree the size of which hasn’t existed on British soil since before the Romans.
When Jamie and I found the boat, the biggest chunks of it had been tossed up all anyhow on a pile in the brambles on the other side of the river path to get them out of the way of the pipeline. I don’t know if I’d have recognised that dried-up heap of mud and mould as the River Fearn log boat on my own, but once Jamie identified it, I knew without a doubt that he was right.
I remembered something that Frank had said about Housman’s legs: once they dried out they decayed faster. I made my way into the briars and rubbed my fingertips over the topmost layer of millennia-old wood. It came away on my fingers like shoe polish, browny black as the peat it had been buried in.
‘The air’s disintegrating it,’ I said. ‘It’s damp now, but that’s because it rained last night. It’s been drying out.’
I tried unwisely to shift the top piece of boat, and a chunk of it broke off in my hand. It was crumbly and brittle as fudge.
‘Bother. Bother!’
‘Don’t touch it again!’
‘I’m not going to!’
Jamie gave me his hand to help me back out of the brambles.
I said angrily, ‘Now I feel violated.’
‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘It’s … it’s like someone’s vandalised Grandad’s grave.’ He looked around for Pinkie. ‘What the devil is the matter with that dog?’
Pinkie had flattened herself on the path again, cringing and making pathetic little whining sobs.
‘Whisht. All right, lass,’ Jamie said, long-suffering, and allowed Pinkie to bundle herself over his shoulder so he could carry her past the wreck of the Bronze Age boat. It made him look like he was wearing a lion’s-mane hood, like the warriors in the pictures of the Abyssinian Emperor’s coronation.
‘You are a hero,’ I told him.
‘I wouldn’t do it for any old dog. Only this one reminds me of you.’
‘I’m not afraid of boats.’
‘You are of ghosts.’
‘Ha-ha.’
Jamie put Pinkie down again after thirty yards or so. We were all a bit bedraggled after the safari through the Aberfearn Castle jungle and climbing in chimneys and adventures with greasy Things in dungeons.
‘What I’m really scared of now,’ I said ominously, ‘is Sandy.’
With good reason, as it happens. I have never seen him so volcanic with rage. I never realised he could be.
It was all over the dailies the following day; in his outrage Sandy rashly rang both the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman, but of course it was the Perth Mercury who got there first. They sent a lady photographer, Catriona Lennox, and I was distracted by her brisk skill and competence from the outrage of this ‘rape of a national treasure’ (Sandy’s exact words to the reporters – he has never reminded me so much of Grandad). I envied Miss Lennox, not for what she was doing, but because she was able to do it so well. A bit like my envy of Ellen’s pipe-smoking! Incidentally she was the only one of the photographers who didn’t try to move about the pieces of the boat so she might get a more ‘boatlike’ picture.
It was no longer very boatlike, poor thing.
And then my loyalties were torn to shreds, for Sandy and Frank Dunbar had a terrific row. Right in the reception hall of the Big House with half a dozen workmen and me and Jamie and Colette all gaping at them.
‘You have no control whatsoever over this project!’ Sandy raged at the harassed site manager. ‘You don’t know who’s working out there. You don’t know where they are or where they’re staying. When they disappear you don’t think to follow up until they’ve been gone for a solid week. When you find –’
‘I know what I haven’t done!’ Dunbar interrupted in fury. ‘Do you think I don’t know what I’ve failed to do?’
They faced each other like boxers, shoulders squared and heaving as they fought to control their breathing. Sandy was a good deal shorter than Francis Dunbar. But Sandy was sturdier, they were about the same weight, and they must have been near each other in age, though the silver showed in Frank’s brown hair and not in Sandy’s strawberry blond.
‘You’ve been here one week,’ Dunbar accused Sandy. ‘You’ve been here one single week, sitting cosy and quiet on that island making lists and being served cups of tea by the librarian –’
This made Jamie and I both suddenly aware that Colette was manfully maintaining the burden of steaming china she’d been carrying through to Mémère. Jamie quietly took the tea tray from her.
‘How can you have any idea of what I’ve had to cope with in the past month?’ Frank cried. ‘What gives you any kind of authority to accuse me of negligence?’
With fearsome loyalty, and freed of the servitude of carrying the tea tray, Colette sallied into the battle. She said frostily, ‘He is the Earl of Strathfearn.’
It was a moment of extraordinary awkwardness.
Sandy held up one hand, flapping it back and forth in a deprecatory way as if to clear the air of his inheritance.
Dunbar recovered first.
‘With all due respect to your hereditary title, Lord Strathfearn …’ He paused, raised his chin with that direct and winning confidentiality and added apologetically, ‘It is Lord Strathfearn, isn’t it? With all due respect, the house and grounds of this estate belong to neither one of us. But I have the burden of maintaining them in trust. I understand why you’d feel I’ve failed that trust, but how was I to know – how were any of us to know –?’
Sandy brandished at him his Exhibit A, last year’s Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in speechless agony.
‘It’s not exactly the Perth Mercury,’ said Francis Dunbar. ‘I don’t get a copy delivered to my door.’
I let out a choked and hysterical squeak of laughter.
All of us watching had withdrawn into sides. Jamie and Colette and I stood in a huddle behind Alexander Lawson Murray Wallace Beaufort-Stuart, Earl of Strathfearn, and the six painters and paper-hangers stood uncomfortably lined up across from us behind Francis Dunbar, the project manager for the Glenfearn School renovation. It was like the Battle of the Clans on the North Inch in Perth, and I was Hal o’ the Wynd, not sure which side I was fighting for.
Everyone glared at me when I giggled.