The Pearl Thief

‘Not if you put on airs, you sleekit Lady Muck,’ she told me in tones of Cairngorm mountain granite. ‘I’ll not be mocked by your kind.’ She took hold of the trolley that held the water jug and wheeled it away.

I was left gaping. What had I done? How could she think I was mocking her? Was it because I’d said ‘please’? Surely I was expected to say ‘please’?

She passed me twice more in the next hour and both times I asked her again, taking care to keep it simple and polite:

‘Please may I have a glass of water?’

How could I be putting on airs? I’d never felt so pathetic in my life. It is true you can hear Landed Gentry in my ordinary accent, but I’d never had anybody take offence at it before.

‘That’s their kind,’ the horrid woman had sneered at my lack of discretion on the floor. ‘I’ll not be mocked by your kind.’

Whose kind? Truant finishing-school girls home for the summer? Did she somehow scent my grandmother’s French blood in me? Had I raved in my sleep about the unchaperoned skiing holiday last winter? Who did she think I was? One of the ‘tinker folk’ whom Mary said had brought me in?

Of course. The headline Mary had quoted from the front page of the Mercury explained it all: ‘Tinker Lass Left for Dead’. The adjectives the nurse had used on me already – dirty, bold, sleekit – were all implied in that one damning word, tinker. Their kind. Angus Henderson, and the steamroller driver and the man on the telephone in the hall at Strathfearn House had all used the same words.

The nurse thought I was a Traveller, like the people who brought me here. That’s why she thought I was dirty. That’s why she thought I was indiscreet. That’s why she thought I was making fun of her by putting on airs.

I suppose my bare feet and bare arms and cast-off clothes hadn’t helped my case much when I first arrived.

Whoever they were, the folk who brought me here had gone out of their way to help me. They were charitable. They were good and decent people. No one should be sneering at them.

It made me mad.

At which point I was sitting there seething quite helplessly, when two more visitors came in to see me.

They were a girl and a boy, about my own age. They appeared to be twins. The boy was fully one foot taller than me, and they both had glorious ginger hair like Mary Queen of Scots (or how I imagine Mary Queen of Scots, anyway), and the pale clear skin to match. The girl walked like the goddess Athena, head high, looking neither left nor right. The boy came in furtively behind her, moving in absolute silence, as though with every step he was expecting to be shouted at to leave. There were curtained screens at the foot of some of the beds in the ward, and he stepped cautiously between them, not daring to catch the eye of any of the other patients. Both the girl and the boy wore much-mended clothes, patched at the elbows and let down at the hems. The girl had a small closed basket like Grandad’s fisherman’s creel slung on a strap over her shoulder.

She stopped next to my bed. She fixed me with stony eyes the dark blue of descending storm clouds, and continued to hold my gaze while she beckoned her brother with a shake of her head. He came to stand next to her, saw consciousness in my face and smiled.

‘Well now, Davie Balfour!’ he said warmly.

Even if I did once spend three months demanding that everyone in the household call me Davie (they might have been more indulgent if it had not also been my eldest brother’s name), I don’t expect to be recognised when I’m in drag as one of my favourite literary obsessions. Astonishment and joy made me want to laugh, only I couldn’t because my head still felt like it was being gently but methodically drubbed with a mallet. I tried weakly to manage a responsive grin.

‘You’re awake,’ the girl observed.

‘Only just,’ I said.

The boy padded silently to my side and knelt there. ‘Better than you were. We came again later after we brought you, the first day, to see if you’d wakened yet. We came yesterday too, and you were still away wi’ the fairies.’

‘What happened to me? Do you know what happened to me?’

He shook his head.

‘Do you not know yourself?’ the girl asked coolly from the foot of my bed.

‘Who are you?’ I asked. She was so self-assured, so queenly, that I thought I ought to recognise her, and I was worried she would be offended that I didn’t.

‘We found you,’ she answered.

They were the dirty bold sleekit tinkers.

They were not dirty, did not appear to be all that bold, and it remained to be seen how sneaky they were. In fact, I was floored by the girl’s beauty. She was quite Mary Kinnaird’s opposite: no kindness in her face at all, but oh, what loveliness of form in everything about her – tall and lithe with the long legs of a ballet dancer, a tiny v of ivory showing between her collarbones just above the top button of her blue and green gingham blouse, and her long hair like a flaming cloud spilling down her shoulders. Could Mary possibly feel like this looking at me, this mixture of worship and envy?

‘I found you lying on the path that leads from the burn up to Inchfort Field, wearing a lad’s kilt, your hair and tam all matted with blood,’ said the boy. ‘You started up and told me your name was Davie Balfour, then tumbled over out cold, on your face, at my feet. So I carried you over to our camping place. When you slept on, my mam tucked you in with my sister for the night. And then the next day when you still didn’t wake we brought you here in our cousin’s van.’

I couldn’t believe I’d spent a night sleeping beside that goddess-like creature and didn’t remember her.

She was still gazing down at me with the cold stare of an intrigued scientist. ‘What’s your real name?’ she asked.

I was faintly, irrationally disappointed.

‘You don’t believe I’m David Balfour?’

The boy gave a comical grimace and shook his head. ‘Nor did I believe you the first time, either,’ he said. ‘But then you fell over before you could change your story.’

I decided to change my story a little. I was wary of being accused again of putting on airs and really didn’t want to make the wrong impression.

‘I’m Julie Stuart.’

Julie Stuart is my name. Just not all of it.

‘How are you the day?’ the boy asked, with genuine concern.

‘Shipshape, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I would sell my soul for a glass of water.’

‘Whisht!’ he said, frowning. ‘What a way to speak! You would never.’

His imperial sister eyed me coolly. ‘You talk like gentry,’ she accused.

Her tone rang alarm bells in my head. She sounded like the miserable nurse. I’d never had anyone hold my accent against me before that day.

‘I’m a filthy sleekit tinker lass who doesnae deserve a glass of water,’ I told her.

Neither of them answered right away. The girl and I stared at each other in sudden hostility, like cats about to fight.

Then: ‘Who says?’ she challenged.

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