The Pearl Thief

‘Everyone on this floor says!’ I glanced at the lump in the next bed – every fibre of her being and all her bedclothes appeared to be listening.

And then, with a deep breath and in spite of the villainous headache, I changed how I was talking. Because I can.

I grew up sharing my summers with Travellers. The Perthshire Stewarts, when they are up in Aberdeenshire, are old friends of my father’s, who is a Stuart … likely we are all related regardless of the Gallic spelling of our name. They come every year to Craig Castle, my real home, and camp there. They come in July to thin the turnips and they come back in October for the tatties. I can give you an earful in the peculiar patois code they call cant. The Stewarts laugh at me for trying, but it makes them think twice about me.

I said to my visitors now, ‘If you brought me here, I’m likely one of your kind, aye? If I’m bingin’ wi’ Nawkens, I am no barry scaldy dilly.’

For the first time, the girl at the foot of my bed looked away from me. She and her brother exchanged sharp, unspoken glances of warning and caution. I’d shaken her. I felt better.

The boy said abruptly, ‘Now you do sound like a Stewart.’

My turn to be shaken. That was canny.

‘I am a Stuart,’ I said rebelliously.

The girl made a dismissive little sigh, as if she were growing bored. ‘You’re not one of those Highland Gaelic-speaking folk. Who are you really?’

I was still mad. I was a bit mad at everything, now. I rubbed my temples. I countered fiercely, ‘I told you my name! I told you two names. Who are you?’

‘My real name?’ The boy grinned.

‘Any old name!’

The girl spoke for him. ‘He’s called Euan McEwen.’

‘She’s Ellen,’ Euan said.

Ellen suddenly gasped and laughed. ‘I ken who you are! You’re Strathfearn’s granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me – why don’t you deserve a glass of water?’

It was like playing tennis, and we’d both won a point. We stared hard at each other. She wasn’t angry with me. She really wanted to know.

‘The nurses don’t know who I am,’ I said. ‘They think I’m one of you because you brought me here. One of them thought I was poking fun at her because of the way I talk.’

Euan stood up. He padded silently to the foot of my bed, where he peered up and down the ward as if he expected the police to come along and arrest him. Finally he crept deliberately to the other end of the floor. Ellen and I watched, she standing with her arms folded and me leaning up on my elbows against my pillow. Euan picked up a glass from a tray next to someone’s bed – I saw him nodding in a friendly way as he spoke a quiet word or two to the bed’s occupant, and nobody seemed to object. Then he went to the back wall where there were worktops and a basin with running water, and he came back with the glass full.

It was such a simple kindness.

I drank like a person rescued from dying in a desert. I was absolutely parched. When I’d finished he took the glass and went to fill it up again.

He filled it three times for me but I couldn’t drink the third. Ellen watched indifferently.

Euan sat back on his heels by my bed, holding the glass. ‘Better?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘Nae bother.’

Ellen beckoned her brother with another nod of her head. ‘We’d best be off. You’ll have everyone’s attention the now, Euan, after parading up and down the ward like a soldier. And that librarian might come back.’

I found I didn’t want them to leave. ‘Oh, at least do stay until she comes! Mary won’t mind if you’re here –’

‘You think?’ Ellen gave a quiet little snort of scorn. ‘I’m not staying for the librarian.’

‘But –’

I’d somehow managed to tap into a wellspring of intolerance I hadn’t at all expected from the McEwens.

‘I hate that librarian!’ Ellen vowed vehemently. ‘Shaness! She doesn’t speak to you if you greet her. She stares and then she turns her back. You always feel she’s laying a curse on you.’

Euan picked up where Ellen left off. ‘She carries a gun. She shoots into the night if she hears so much as a twig snap!’

‘She can’t hear a twig snap,’ I said. ‘She’s mostly deaf. It would have to be a thundering great tree limb falling before she’d hear it! I bet that’s why she doesn’t return your greeting, either. If you were a young lady living all by yourself on an island in a burn in the middle of a wood, I bet you’d carry a gun too!’

‘She’s skittery as a haunt,’ said Ellen. ‘She looks like a goblin. God pity her.’

Now this was making me cross.

‘She has a medical thing. She was born with it. It’s called …’ My brain stretched. Yes, it still worked. ‘. . . Treacher Collins syndrome,’ I pronounced triumphantly. My elder brother Sandy had explained it to me. ‘The bones in her head didn’t get made properly before she was born. That’s why her face is so peculiar. And why she can’t hear. She is the kindest person I know.’

‘Not to “filthy tinker folk” she isn’t,’ said Ellen. ‘Every year when she sees Dad fishing in the burn for pearls she calls out the river watcher after him. She doesn’t even speak to Dad, just rings for the law straight away. She knows full well he’s not after salmon and that he has a right to be there. Sergeant Henderson puts up with him because they were both in the Black Watch together during the war, but every year when we come back she makes out like she’s never seen our dad before. Last year he thought he’d knock at the library door, polite, to warn her, and she told him it was Council land and he’d no right of way to cross the Inverfearnie Island bridges. She threatened him with her shotgun! And –’

Euan took over the story. ‘And this year, Ellen went and borrowed a book from the library. She wore a tweed skirt and the librarian thought she was country hantle from Brig O’Fearn village. But when the librarian realised after a bit that Ellen was a Traveller lass, didn’t she ring the hornies straight away again! She sent a policeman out to us to collect a library book.’

‘What was the book?’ I asked.

Ellen was silent for a moment.

‘Last year’s Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.’

Somehow even Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland sounded like a challenge when those words got spat out by Ellen McEwen.

My brother Sandy, who is a curator at the British Museum in London, has got an article published in that volume. I wondered what Ellen wanted it for.

At this dreadful moment the officious nurse came back.

‘What is going on here?’ she thundered.