The Pearl Thief

When I found her at Inchfort that morning I gave her my pearl. I didn’t need to tell her where it came from and she didn’t have to ask. She closed her fingers around it and smiled.

‘Pinkie will miss you,’ she said.

‘Oh, Nell.’ I wanted to cry.

‘I suppose I might miss you too,’ she admitted softly.

I was damned if I’d cry.

‘There’s pearls in the Dee up at Craig Castle,’ I said, rather desperately. ‘And the oats and tattie harvest when the summer’s done. You’d be welcome.’

‘Your dad invited mine already.’

‘But I’ll be in school,’ I mourned.

‘Not always,’ she pointed out. ‘And I might find another lad like your brother and forget about you.’

She said that. As if I might, in her imagination, be an alternative to finding a lad.

‘You think so?’ I challenged.

‘Would you mind?’

‘I want you to be happy.’

‘Och, away wi’ you, Queenie.’

‘I do,’ I said stubbornly.

She cocked her head, and gave that little appraising hnnph.

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘you’re better at giving than you were.’

Then softly she sang a part of the song she’d sung to me at the ceilidh at Inchfort, Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’: ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

and the rocks melt wi’ the sun:

I will love thee still, my dear,

while the sands o’ life shall run.’

She stopped. She was waiting for an answer.

I started to sing the rest, and she joined in.

I so loved singing with her.

‘And fare thee well, my only love!

And fare thee well awhile!

And I will come again, my love,

tho’ it were ten thousand mile.’

She opened her hand. The pearl gleamed for a moment on her open palm. And then she put it in her mouth and swallowed it.

She met my eyes, waiting for my reaction.

For a moment I was stung and blinded by tears.

Then we both burst out laughing.

The kisses don’t matter.