He hesitated for half a second. ‘Dr Housman told me, of course.’
‘Why would he have told you anything about them?’
This time his hesitation was damningly long.
At last Dunbar answered with even care, ‘He talked about the collection all the time. I’d helped him move it from the Big House to the library; he knew I was interested –’
‘Yes, but he wouldn’t have said anything to you about the pearls because he was going to steal them.’
Dunbar’s invading hands tightened, involuntarily gripping me in a new way.
He whispered, ‘You know.’
‘Of course I know – I found them! We all know, me and Jamie and Ellen and Euan! We found the Murray pearls where Housman left them, all three hundred and twenty-seven of them – we counted them on the riverbank!’
‘You don’t … you don’t remember?’
‘Remember what?’
He shook his head just once, his face serious. ‘Julie, it doesn’t matter.’
Just like it didn’t matter how old I was, except this time he was bluffing. His voice was hollow; his grip still tense and harsh. He wasn’t worshipping me any more. He was still bent on seduction, but for a different reason now, and in a different way. I had woken him up.
‘You knew! You were in on it!’ I accused. ‘You were going to share those pearls with him! You found them when you were moving the things to the library, and you must have hidden them together …’
I’d overheard Dunbar talking to Housman on my first day in the house; I remembered how Dunbar’s voice had brightened. The words came tumbling out almost faster than I could throw them at him.
‘That telephone call – Housman rang to call you out to help him! He’d found the perfect hiding place – he’d been talking to Alan McEwen, and he knew the McEwens would never go near the foot of the Drookit Stane. You must have gone to the library just after I did – you knew the Water Bailiff would be busy with the McEwens, and Mary was away, and you thought no one would notice you hiding the pearls. And afterwards you knew Housman wasn’t dead –’
The pieces were clicking into place in my head as if by clockwork.
‘That ancient body was a godsend for you both! It made it look as if Hugh Housman really had drowned! And when he stole my kilt and left his trousers by the river to make people think it was him they’d found, you knew – you knew he’d done it! You were angry about it! You were helping him –’
‘Julie, don’t. Please stop.’
‘You helped him hide! I’ll bet you slipped that dreadful suicide note under our carpet for him. You let him creep into your study at night – you left food for him! I saw him trying to get in. What a flipping bungler he is – he came to the wrong door! And now you’ve let him hang about the house for the past week because you both think you’re going to go back there at the end of the summer, when the rest of us are gone, and get the pearls back –’
Francis Dunbar pulled me tight against his body, crushing our ribs together, and I could do nothing to separate my mouth from his, and the suffocating kiss was meant to silence me.
But my arm was free and I could see the jar with the rest of the pearls in it out of the corner of my eye. I reached for it and grabbed.
And in a flashing instant I knew where I’d seen that jar in the first place. I’d seen it out of the corner of my eye on that first morning at Strathfearn. Sitting on the flat stone where I’d been guddling for trout, laughing at Hugh Housman splashing about in the river with no clothes on, I’d heard the bramble and elder rustling behind me; and I’d turned my head a fraction just in time to catch, in the corner of my eye, a glimpse of that stoneware Keiller jar descending at speed towards the back of my skull.
The blasted thing was too heavy and smooth to pick up with one hand gloved in slippery silk. I shoved the jar off the table and it landed on the floor with a clunk. Dunbar raised his head and glanced over his shoulder.
‘My God, is that –?’
‘You hit me!’ I gasped. ‘It wasn’t the river watcher with his cromach. You hit me with that jar full of pearls!’
‘They’re here?’ he gasped in return.
‘You snake!’
He was holding on to me so tightly it was making my ribs ache.
‘Yes, they’re here! Not just that necklace but all the rest of them too, all three hundred and twenty-seven of them – so what? What about my head?’
He relaxed his grip on me a little, and I managed to wrench myself sideways and dive under the table. I bowled the jar across the floor like a football and emerged on the other side of the table. I picked up the jar in both hands and scrambled to my feet.
‘You recognise it, don’t you? This jar full of pearls. They’re all still here in this jam pot, except the ones I was wearing –’
‘Julie, I didn’t mean to … I thought you were one of the tinkers, and you’d seen Housman –’
‘You ran away! At least Housman stuck around for a minute wondering if I was dead or alive. Anyway, couldn’t you just have gone off without hitting me and come back later to hide your stupid jar? I didn’t know what was in it or what you were up to! You didn’t need to smash my head in – even if I had been a tinker, you didn’t need to smash my head in!’
‘I panicked.’
‘So am I panicking!’
I flung the jar at the window. The casement was propped halfway, and the jar went straight through the leaded panes with a satisfying crash.
Dunbar cried out, ‘You – you didn’t!’
He came tearing around the table.
I bolted. I ducked under the table again, hurled myself across the room and vaulted pell-mell down the stairs, screeching Mary’s name – but she’d heard the glass breaking right above her room, and the jar smashing on the gravel outside her window. She came running with her shotgun just the way she’d done when I first broke one of her library windows three years earlier. For a moment we were wedged breast to breast on the narrow spiral stair: Mary on the way up in her nightgown and bare feet; I on the way down in an evening frock of chartreuse-coloured silk and long gloves, like Cinderella at midnight.
‘Julia! What’s happened?’
‘Francis Dunbar. Still there,’ I gasped, pointing her upward.
She didn’t hesitate. We squeezed past each other and I skidded and bumped the rest of the way down on my silk-clad bottom.
I picked myself up, gathered the stupid dress around my waist and tore outside.
The open-topped Magnette stood waiting for me. I vaulted in over the door the way my brothers do; the blessed motor, still warm, started right away. Over the engine I heard people yelling a selection of my names as Dunbar and Mary called out to me, side by side in the smashed window of the Upper Reading Room.
‘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.
Housman and Dunbar were expected to plead guilty to try to mitigate the sentence; and Housman was also going to act as a witness to Angus Henderson trying to get the McEwens in trouble by dumping my senseless body on the path near Inchfort Field. A prank against Travellers wouldn’t be considered much of a crime, but accessory to an assault against the Earl of Strathfearn’s granddaughter was a serious accusation against the Water Bailiff. I like the idea that even unconscious I may have helped to put a stop to Angus Henderson ever again battering Euan McEwen.
In the meantime Francis Dunbar was still in hospital on his stomach, and there was a new project manager taking over for the final phase of the Glenfearn School renovation. This young man delivered a letter without an envelope to Mother as she passed him in the corridor on her way into the morning room.
‘For the Earl of Strathfearn, I believe,’ the man told her briefly. ‘I’m still sorting through Mr Dunbar’s desk drawers next door.’ He disappeared back into his own office.
Mother found herself looking down at yet another sheet of Housman’s engraved writing paper, frowning. I jumped up to read over her shoulder.
My dear Sandy, As you requested, I’m returning the samples you supplied …
Mother lowered her hand with the letter in it.
‘This isn’t for Sandy,’ she said. ‘It’s two years old. It’s from Dr Housman to my father. But why would it be among Francis Dunbar’s correspondence?’
‘It’s the letter that went in the empty envelope!’ I cried. ‘Dunbar must have got it out of Housman’s bedroom – he was up there right after Housman disappeared, before the police got to it. He said he was looking for Housman’s address! Don’t you see? Housman took it when he took the pearls. Maybe he even told Dunbar where to find it after he went into hiding! Oh, Mummy, it will explain why Grandad didn’t sell the pearls! Let me see!’
I couldn’t be good. I snatched it from her.
‘Julia!’
‘Let me read it!’
She let me.
My dear Sandy, As you requested, I’m returning the samples you supplied and am writing to confirm the values I suggested in our earlier discussion by telephone. As I said then, I do not feel you would benefit by selling these at this time …
I looked up. Suddenly my heart was breaking.
Mummy could see that in my face.
‘What’s wrong, darling?’
‘I don’t know why those snakes didn’t burn this piece of paper,’ I said furiously. ‘Or, I do – they kept it because there’s a little inventory list of pearls at the end of the letter. But –’
‘Julia, I will expire right on this spot if you don’t tell me what’s in it,’ Mother scolded. She sounded very much like me all of a sudden.
I wanted to cry.
‘Grandad tried to sell the pearls to save the Reliquary,’ I told her. ‘An
d Housman lied to him and said his museum didn’t want them.’
The pearls may be of historical significance but without proof the Ashmolean is not willing to make a financial offer.
Now I was crying. Tears dropped on to the page, smearing the treacherous ink.
‘I bet Housman never even showed them those pearls! They’re jolly well interested now, aren’t they? He was already scheming to get hold of them, even while Grandad was alive! And you know what else –?’
Mother prised the damp letter from my hand so she could read it herself.
‘You know what else? I’ll bet Grandad never opened this. Ellen said he never opened post after he’d asked someone to confirm a telephone call in writing.’ I had to stop and take a breath, choking on little sobs. ‘Except that this envelope had a few pearls in it that Housman was returning to him. I’ll bet Grandad just put the whole packet back with the rest of the Murray Collection pearls when it arrived. Housman probably opened it himself when he found it.’
Mother looked up at me, and now her face was tear-stained too.
‘I’m not crying over the pearls,’ I wept. ‘I’m not even sorry about them. Just – Grandad.’
I took another gasping breath.
‘Oh, Grandad.’
‘My dad,’ Mummy breathed. ‘Yes.’
She took me in her arms and we sobbed together.
The pearls would save the Reliquary. The necklace was so valuable that it would pay for the Reliquary to stay in the Inverfearnie Library, alongside Mary Stuart’s bracelet.
Feeling triumphant and proprietorial, Jamie and I managed to dig up a couple of the rose bushes to take with us, though most of them were too old to move.
Mémère was scornful of our efforts. ‘The same ones are already growing at Craig Castle. They all come from my sister’s garden in France.’
I wished I could be like that, and like the McEwens: able to let things go without looking back.
But I was determined to look forward too.
Jamie and I went to Inchfort Field for the last time early in the morning before we left Strathfearn.