I lay awake trying to find some cast-iron way to prove Solange’s innocence, of which we were all convinced. The only piece of hard evidence I had to offer were the pearls in the jam pot. I still didn’t understand the connection, but I felt certain it existed. It would be worth giving up our priceless, pointless heritage to save Solange’s life.
And at exactly the right time, the McEwens came back. They were getting ready to work with their cousins the Camerons on the shoot at Glenmoredun Castle on Opening Day – loading guns, beating the grouse out of the heather on the moor and collecting the dead birds afterwards. In the meantime they were harvesting flax at Bridge Farm, except Ellen who was now being reimbursed for her time by the Murray Estate itself at considerably higher wages than Euan was ever paid for his time digging on the pipeline for the Glenfearn School swimming bath.
So it wasn’t just Jamie and I who went to collect the pearls from hiding, but the full reconnaissance party who had found them in the first place. We all wanted to see them again, Ellen and Euan just as much as we Beaufort-Stuarts, and we knew the only place to do it safely was right there in the dovecote under the last roofed room of Aberfearn Castle.
I dressed for mountaineering in proper shoes and trousers, but did not take into account the sore shoulder until I was halfway up the chimney.
The going got harder and harder. Euan came up last, behind me, and I grew aware of him having to wait for me.
‘I’m going to stop for a minute,’ I told him, pressing my back against one wall of the chimney shaft with my feet braced against the other wall and my legs across the empty air so I could take the weight off my arms. ‘I think you can squeeze past.’
He climbed up to where I was and wedged himself alongside me.
‘I’ll bide wi’ you.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a pipe? This is the perfect place for a smoke.’
Euan laughed, but answered ruefully, ‘No, Ellen’s got it.’ His long legs seemed awfully bunched up next to me.
‘You’d make a terrible chimney sweep,’ I said.
It wasn’t as though he could carry me down, or catch me if I fell. But being packed so tight actually did make me feel safer.
We heard the rush of wings as Jamie and Ellen emerged in the attic above us and startled the wood pigeons away.
After a minute or two Ellen called down the murky shaft after her brother, ‘Sproul kinchen!’
I laughed. ‘Wee brother?’
Euan laughed too. ‘Or wee sister.’ He cried back, ‘Sproul kinchen yourself! Our Davie’s having a rest.’
‘Our Jamie’s getting worried,’ she told us. ‘Have a rest at the top.’
I gritted my teeth and fought my way up. Jamie reached through the broken chimney wall to help pull me out on to the solid floor of the lost room.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘My shoulder hurts. Bother.’
‘It’s easier going down.’
‘I know.’
As a consolation for my being pathetic they let me be the one to free the pearls.
Ellen had brought along polishing equipment in her fisherman’s creel: soft puffs of cotton wool and a jar of baby oil and a swathe of elegant fabric to tip the treasure out on. ‘Mam says pearls look best on black velvet,’ she said.
They looked marvellous on black velvet – all their subtle hues more vivid. We played with them as if we were babies playing with alphabet blocks.
‘These aren’t just the Reliquary pearls,’ Ellen said. ‘There’s too many.’
‘I know. Grandad must have collected some of them himself,’ I said.
‘It’s a shame they’ve been mixed. We’ll never know which are the oldest.’
Ellen lined up the big grey Tay pearl beads, the ones that matched. Against the black velvet they seemed to glow silvery white as moonlight. Against the black velvet they looked like …
Ellen and I gave a unified shriek of excitement and disbelief.
‘The library pearls!’
‘They’re the same as Mary Queen of Scots’ bracelet.’
We had to explain it to our baffled brothers.
‘They’re a match with the pearls on display in the Inverfearnie Library –’
‘An exact match!’
‘They’re from –’
‘The same set!’
‘It must have been –’
‘A necklace. A necklace to match the bracelet.’
Jamie let out a soft and fervent oath.
Euan breathed quietly, ‘Mary Queen o’ Scots’ own necklace? How?’
‘The ones in the library were a gift to the Murrays,’ I reminded him.
Half the birds had come back to roost grudgingly in the top dove holes. They settled into their soft chirruping murmur, a sound as timeless as the river, yet alive and warm. They warbled in the background as I enthusiastically constructed a plausible history for Mary Stuart’s lost pearls. ‘Maybe she gave the Murrays the necklace and bracelet together, but then the necklace broke and someone put the pearls in the Reliquary with the other pearls, and they forgot about them, and a hundred and fifty years later when the donation was made to the library only the bracelet was left –’
Ellen interrupted suddenly, ‘I smell smoke.’
We had our backs to the hole in the wall we’d come in by. Ellen turned around. She said, ‘The chimney’s smoking!’
We all spun round to look.
A soft roll of cloud was spilling out of the broken chimney wall and over the old wooden floor like haar mist. It was opaque, a pale and milky grey, the same colour as the Tay pearls in the shadow of a fold of cloth.
‘That’s torn it,’ Jamie said. ‘We’re stuck here!’
We couldn’t get back down a chimney filled with smoke.
All of us started to chatter at once, like the wood pigeons, trying to keep our voices low.
‘If this place catches fire we are cooked,’ I hissed.
‘It’s a chimney,’ Jamie pointed out. ‘It’s supposed to smoke!’
Ellen said through her teeth, ‘But who set the fire? Sergeant Henderson, trying to smoke us out?’
We stared at each other with drained faces.
‘We might be able to climb down holding our breath,’ I said. ‘Or breathe through handkerchiefs. If we did it quickly –’
‘Could you?’ Ellen asked sharply.
‘I’d try,’ I said. ‘I could if I had to.’
‘We could have boiled a can of tea in the time it took you to get up. You cannae hold your breath so long.’
‘I don’t think it’s Henderson, and I don’t think he’s trying to kill us,’ Jamie said in a low voice. ‘Not by building a fire in a fireplace, even if it is five hundred years old. I think it’s the fellow who’s been camping here. I think he heard our voices and now he’s trying to trap us for a little while so he can clear off. He’s been here a long time without getting caught.’
‘So we bide until the fire burns out?’ Ellen asked.