‘You damned seductive Bluebeard,’ I gasped – to myself; he couldn’t hear me. ‘You rat. You greedy rat. Those. Aren’t. Your. Pearls.’
I threw the car into reverse and screeched backward across the drive, spraying gravel against the nearest library windows. If anyone was calling to me still, I couldn’t hear. I tried to shift into low and ground the gears terribly, so that the poor car shrieked in protest. I tried again, jammed the stick into the right place, and roared forward ten feet across the gravel. My glove slipped on the stick and I stalled trying to get into reverse again.
I struggled to pull off the damned gloves. It took ages. I got my left hand free.
Clutch in, engine on – the Magnette roared backward. I drove it like a roadroller, ten feet backward and forward, up and down and up and down across the drive. Beneath the motor car’s screeching wheels, pearls and broken shards of jam jar ground against gravel, ground into powder, into stony dust.
Suddenly Francis Dunbar was practically on top of me again; he’d run out after me and somehow leaped on to the car. He now had one leg over the door frame, as he tried to climb into the passenger seat and grab at the handbrake.
‘Get out!’ I snarled.
I lashed at him blindly. To my horror and satisfaction, my fingernails connected with skin. He howled. The Magnette stalled again.
I cowered with my face against the driving wheel and my arms over my head as Mary, close behind him, fired rather a lot of birdshot into the back of Francis Dunbar’s Black Watch kilt.
Mary was merciless.
Together, one of us on each side of him, we helped the moaning Francis Dunbar into her bedroom where she made him stand upright, leaning against her chest of drawers, while she laid out a multitude of protective towels before allowing him to collapse on his stomach on the bed.
‘Now, Julia, you’re not needed here. Go and telephone the police, and an ambulance, and I’ll get him some brandy. You know where the ’phone is.’
So I did, rather dreading that they’d send Sergeant Angus Henderson. (They didn’t.) After I’d hung up the receiver I thought I’d better put a call through to Glenmoredun Castle and Strathfearn House.
At last Mary left her victim groaning in her bedroom, waiting for proper medical assistance. I heard her close the door and step out into the corridor. I was still sitting, like a stunned bird, in the telephone cupboard.
‘Come along, Julia. Come and sit in my study. I’ll get us both a cup of tea. Or you’d like brandy too, perhaps?’
‘Tea’s fine.’
She settled me in the red leather chair and bustled about in her dressing gown with her ear trumpet hanging triumphantly on its gold chain around her neck.
‘You’re my knight in shining armour, Mary,’ I said, when she was facing me.
‘What did he do to you?’
‘He’s the one who gave me that dunt on the head.’
‘Then I’m glad I shot him,’ she said fiercely.
The cup and saucer she’d been holding clattered as she set it back on her desk. She came and sat on the footstool by my side and suddenly buried her face against my knee, weeping into the leaf-green chiffon.
I had to fiddle with the chain around her neck to free the trumpet. I held it to her ear and bent over her, with one hand resting gently on her shoulder.
I said, ‘Great Scott, Mary. Don’t cry!’
‘It’s a crime to shoot a man,’ she sobbed. ‘Your grandfather had to appear in Perth Sheriff Court that time he shot the poacher. They put Mademoiselle Lavergne in prison just because they thought she’d killed Dr Housman, even though she hadn’t. What will happen to me? I’ll lose my position! What in the world will I do?’
I was pretty sure what I’d just done to the Murray Estate pearls wasn’t legal either. I wasn’t in the least afraid of what would happen to me and it seemed unbearably unjust that Mary should fear for her life’s work because she’d defended me when I was being attacked.
‘Sandy will make sure you’re all right,’ I assured her, certain of this. ‘And I will too. I’ll defend you in court if I have to! So will my mother!’
‘I never do the right thing,’ she wept.
‘What tosh! You do better than that. You are able to see when you’ve done wrong. Most people just try to make excuses.’
She scrubbed at her eyes, still weeping.
‘I want to be like you, Mary –’
‘Oh, Julia, how could you!’
‘I do! Oh, I do. You are so – so clever and independent and brave. So brave! I feel I could never be as brave as you – to have so much of the world pitched against you all the time, and to face it and face it and face it.’
I leaned down to kiss her smooth, tear-stained cheek. ‘I have always wanted to be like you.’
She didn’t show any signs of stopping and for a while I just let her cry, leaning over her with my arms around her shoulders. Probably, if I’d just spent an evening at home in a lonely old house by myself, too self-conscious to go dancing with my intended at his little sister’s birthday party, and then had to shoot a man in said little sister’s defence, I’d have collapsed in tears at the end of it too.
When her sobs began to subside a little, I squeezed her in my arms again.
‘Do buck up, Mary. I want my tea.’
She gave a choking little laugh.
‘I’d better find a handkerchief first,’ she said.
She extricated herself from my clinging arms. I realised I’d been holding on to her rather desperately.
She looked up at me with fond, red-rimmed eyes.
‘You are quite like me in some ways,’ she said, and stood up with determination, and went to get the kettle.
The Murray Estate initiated charges of theft against both Housman and Dunbar – of the necklace Ellen made me! Which was all that was left of the Murray pearls after that night at the library. MacGregor’s hadn’t valued it by the time we were ready to depart Strathfearn but the whispers I heard began at the staggeringly preposterous sum of seventy thousand pounds. Father said it would likely raise more than that at auction; the British Museum and the Ashmolean had already both expressed interest, not to mention the National Museum in Edinburgh. Father thought it was even possible some of the amount would come back to Sandy if it completely cleared Grandad’s debt.