The Pearl Thief

It wasn’t, of course. We’d got Ellen to plant the pearls in their jar quietly back in the Murray Collection, where Sandy would discover them eventually and report them to the National Museum of Antiquities or the Murray Estate. He hadn’t noticed them yet and I couldn’t help thinking of them as our secret wedding present to him. I knew that just the discovering of them would make him joyful, even if he had to give them away in the end. It was true what Ellen had said about giving; and nothing of Strathfearn’s was ours any more except in spirit.

Because now the Glenfearn School was ready to finish and furnish the Big House, and the other dormitories and the new classrooms, before the school term began. The grounds were not ready but the house was nearly complete – as was the catalogue – and the plan was for the Murray/Beaufort-Stuart party to clear out north to Craig Castle in the week following the Laird of Moredun’s Opening Day shoot. I had only a fortnight of my holiday left anyway.

The day before the shooting party (and my birthday), Father arrived in the landaulet from Craig Castle, so as to be able to transport those of us who didn’t fit in the Magnette. Sandy would stay on to finish the log boat excavation, but for the rest of us it was going to be goodbye to Strathfearn House for good.

The day of the shoot was warm and bright.

That was a blessing and a curse. I started out feeling brisk and happy but by mid-morning my blouse was sticking to my back and when I took off my tweed jacket Jamie grumbled at me, even if he was my favourite brother, because the white stood out against the heather; notwithstanding I was well hidden behind the sheltering wall of the butt and the birds couldn’t possibly care what I was wearing. And I couldn’t get my hair out of my eyes because of that vindictive nurse chopping it all different lengths so that it wouldn’t stay pinned. And I hadn’t held a gun since December, so I had to be womanly and be satisfied picking up other people’s dead birds with the dogs and beaters after each drive. And it was my birthday but even Euan and Jamie were too focused on loading guns and killing birds to remember to say anything about it. And when they were kind and offered me a gun during one of the drives, I couldn’t hit a single bird.

I would have started to feel sorry for myself had not Mummy and Mrs Menzies arrived with the lunch at midday. They were accompanied by Jean McEwen leading ponies loaded with baskets stuffed to bursting. A couple of housemaids from the castle ran back and forth spreading white tablecloths over picnic rugs and laying out cold meats and Dundee cake, and, oh, lord, one of the maids was Florrie.

My legs were decently clad in stockings and wellington boots, and I was in a proper tweed skirt of my own and not Sandy’s hitched-up kilt, but in a sweaty blouse with sleeves rolled up and hair standing in spikes in the Pitbroomie wind, the only things keeping Florrie from recognising me were my collection of useless hairpins and the fact that this time I was supposed to be a girl.

I didn’t think I could count on the hairpins to disguise me, so I threw all my soul into Being A Girl.

I snatched up a couple of cold beef sandwiches and two bottles of ginger beer and made a beeline for Francis Dunbar, standing awkwardly a little apart from everybody else, looking a little lost, with one hand deep in his pocket and a cigarette in the other. Father and Jamie were chatting to Moredun about moorland maintenance; Euan had vanished discreetly into the gorse with the rest of the beaters; Sandy was being solicitous of Mary; Jean McEwen was organising the emptying of the ponies’ baskets; and Mother was helping Mrs Menzies be hostess to a party of about twenty-five local people who all knew each other. Frank was a clear outsider.

‘Here you are, Mr Dunbar,’ I said, holding up a sandwich and a bottle. He came out of his dream, smiled with pleasure and crushed his cigarette underfoot.

‘Thank you, Miss Beaufort-Stuart,’ he said. ‘Have you had a good morning? Oh, and many happy returns!’

I looked up at him archly (so stupid – perfectly embarrassing behaviour on my part, but of course I was trying to avoid being recognised by Florrie). He took the bottle and sandwich and watched me wrestle ineffectively – on purpose – to get my own bottle open.

‘Let me,’ he said, predictably.

This allowed our hands to brush against each other’s, and me to laugh as the fizzy drink popped and bubbled over the neck of the bottle, and when he gave it back to me we had to wipe our hands on the edge of a tablecloth. And we ended up sitting together.

‘I missed everything I shot at,’ I admitted. ‘How about you?’

‘Not too bad. I’m out of practice, but I’ve been satisfied this morning. I was a soldier for ten years; I did a lot of game hunting in India.’

‘That’s right – you’re a veteran of the Black Watch, like Sergeant Henderson and Alan McEwen! You’ll wear your kilt tonight?’

‘Of course!’

Embarrassing.

But I was enjoying it too; and when he noticed my birthday present from Mummy, it was an excuse to give him my hand and let him hold it and admire it – my hand, I mean, though the ring was the excuse.

It is a square-cut ruby in rose gold, set between wee triangles of tiny pearls.

I told him, ‘It was my great-grandmother’s. My grandmother gave it to Mother for her eighteenth birthday.’ (See how I slipped that in? Quite true, but perpetuating the illusion that today was my eighteenth.)

‘Are they Fearn river pearls?’

‘All but one of them is. There’s a story about it. The setting is French, and my grandmother lost one of the pearls right after she was married, and the jeweller in Perth couldn’t match it. So my grandfather replaced them all with Fearn pearls that he’d found himself. After my mother was married, she lost another! So my father replaced it with a Dee pearl he’d found in the river on our estate at Craig Castle in Aberdeenshire. They don’t quite match now, if you look closely.’

‘Would you believe that after all the time I’ve been at Strathfearn, I still can’t tell a Fearn river pearl when I see one?’ Frank said.

He raised my fingers and bent his head to look at the ring, then prudently let go, flushing a little.

‘Can’t you see the difference?’ I asked.

‘One’s almost gold-hued!’

‘That’s the one from the Dee. The pinker ones are from the Fearn.’

‘Pearls from two of your rivers. I like that.’

I said honestly, ‘I do too. I love it fiercely for just that. Because it is a little bit of Strathfearn and a little bit of Craigie and a little bit of France, and of my mother and father and grandmother and grandfather, and I will have it with me always. It is all of ours and they are part of me.’

We caught each other’s eyes. I turned away demurely.

‘Have you met my father?’ I asked, recognising the moment when our tête-à-tête was beginning to look too intimate. ‘Come along and be introduced.’