Stone Country Read online

  His brother had him instantly and pulled him inside. They landed with a thud on the floor.

  The room was in semi-darkness. When Ross grew accustomed to the light he saw two people sitting quietly by their beds. He waited for one of the men to call out or to complain but their eyes remained fixed on a picture of a sailing ship.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Alastair. ‘They don’t know we’re here. I’ve already checked.’

  ‘Are they sleeping?’ asked Ross quietly, getting to his feet. Alastair waved a hand in front of the men’s faces. ‘With their eyes open.’

  They’d seen their first mad people and they weren’t scary at all. Except that when Ross got a little closer he discovered that the men were strapped to their chairs, wrists and ankles bound tight. One of them was drooling. A thin line of wetness had attached itself to the man’s shirt, forming a damp patch on his chest.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ admitted Ross.

  ‘I bet they’ve been given special drugs like heroin or opium, or maybe he’s been sitting in a freezing cold bath for days. It makes a person into a turnip. Look at them.’

  Ross waved a hand in front of the unseeing patient and stuck out his tongue. ‘But why do they want to turn them into a turnip?’

  ‘They don’t. They’re trying to make them normal again. But when they’re as mad as a hatter you can’t make anyone normal again. You can only lock them up and feed them. They don’t feel anything, you know. They don’t know if it’s summer or winter. If it’s hot or cold. Nothing.’

  Alastair went to the door and turned the handle. It opened easily. ‘Guess they don’t have to lock them in when they’re tied up.’ Outside in the corridor he began checking the wards. He slid bolts across to reveal empty rooms. Only one was padlocked. ‘That’s probably where they keep the really mad lunatics.’

  ‘Won’t someone come looking for us?’ asked Ross, thinking of the broken window pane.

  ‘Doesn’t seem like it. I bet they’re searching the garden. Let’s try this one.’ Inside the ward sat four children on narrow cots. They looked younger than Ross. A battered teddy bear lay abandoned on the floor, and a little girl started to cry. Alastair held a finger to his lips to shush her, and they quietly left the room.

  ‘Are they mad too?’ asked Ross once they were back in the hallway.

  ‘Maybe they’re orphans,’ answered his brother. Downstairs they could hear people moving about. ‘We’d better hide. Just until things quieten down.’

  A key sat in the padlock of the last door and without hesitating they unlocked it and entered. A man in a white jacket with long sleeves wrapped tight around his body shuffled in a circle across the empty room. ‘If they let me go I won’t do it again. If they let me go I won’t do it again,’ he repeated.

  Alastair reached a protective arm across Ross and, very slowly, they edged to the door.

  ‘I said I wouldn’t do it again. I said I wouldn’t do it again.’ The man rushed towards them.

  Ross screamed as they ran into the hall and straight into the path of a young boy clutching a teddy bear. ‘Hello,’ he said, with a timid smile.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ said Alastair to the child. ‘Is there a way?’

  The boy nodded and they followed him to the landing. Sitting on the top step, the bear in one hand, the boy began to push himself down the flight of stairs on his bottom.

  ‘We’ll be here all day,’ complained Alastair as they watched the little boy’s progress. ‘I’m going to carry you,’ he whispered to the child. He swept the boy up into his arms and ran down the rest of the stairs. At the bottom the child pointed to an alcove under the stairs, and the three of them squeezed into the small space. Concealed by a table crammed with books, they hid in the gloom as doors slammed and people called out for any intruders to show themselves. Ross’s fingers closed around the sweets in his pocket and he gave one to the boy. A swatch of dark skirt swished past them. The little boy pressed closer to Ross, the teddy bear wedged between them. The stairs creaked.

  When they eventually crawled out from under the steps the boy led them to the back entrance of the building, pointing to a set of keys hanging from a hook on the wall. ‘A way out,’ said Alastair, as he began trying each key in the lock.

  ‘Hurry up,’ urged Ross. The keys tinkled in Alastair’s fingers. On the floor above doors were being banged as rooms were searched. Next to him the little boy jigged up and down on one leg, clutching the bear by its neck. He tugged on Alastair’s sleeve.

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ Alastair replied.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the key turned in the lock and they pushed through the door. Alastair shouted his thanks to the boy and then he took off, skirting the hedges, calling to Ross to keep up.

  Ross concentrated on Alastair’s heels as they hurdled flowerbeds and weaved past blossom-drooping trees, out a gate and towards the expanse of the Botanical Gardens. He glimpsed the child once. A small shape quickly consumed by deepening shades of green.

  Chapter 2

  As his father paced the drawing room, a tobacco pipe wedged firmly between his teeth, Ross wished that his grandfather had never left Scotland. For, at this very moment, he was in dire need of the clan’s help. As he waited with Alastair for judgement to be passed, Ross stared at the Grant family crest hanging above the fireplace. The image represented a burning beacon atop Craig Elachie, a hill that was the assembly point for the Grants. He’d been told by his grandmother that there was a fine view down the length of the Upper Strathspey from this hill, and that if you lit a fire on its summit members of the clan would come from miles around to help you. It didn’t matter if you were about to attack your enemy or needed help to defend yourself and your home, the clan would come to your aid. Although Ross Grant had never seen Scotland – his family had left their homeland for Australia two generations earlier – he knew his people were fighters. They’d battled red-coated Englishmen and upstart clans from across the mountains for many years, striking down their opponents with a broadsword in one hand and a shield in the other. Ross stole a glance at his father and pictured himself running up the steep hill, his boots slipping in damp heather, the torch he held aloft flecking the night sky with trails of burning ash.

  Barely half an hour had passed after their return from the asylum before the police had arrived, and Ross’s torn shirt and grazed chin provided immediate cause for interrogation. The mistake they’d made was to stop in the kitchen for a glass of water instead of going straight upstairs to wash and change. Miserably, Ross understood how they must have looked to the constable: guilty. They had no excuse. Now the police were gone but, considering his father’s expression, Ross rather suspected that it may have been safer if the uniformed men had remained.

  Morgan Grant turned at the end of the room. Lamp glow threw smudges of pooling light on the mantelpiece and tables. Their mother was present, a rare occurrence. Only exceptional occasions drew her down to a family gathering. Like when one of the old great-aunts fell ill, which they seemed to be in the habit of doing. If Ross moved his neck very carefully he could see her. Her ostrich-plume fan fluttered like a bird, her dull coin eyes staring at nothing. ‘Your father’s gout is back. The warmer weather does not agree with him.’

  And then in swept their grandmother, who settled in a chair, smoothing her blush-pink gown. ‘What have I missed?’

  ‘Where to start?’ countered their father.

  Next to Ross, Alastair made a noise like a whoosh of air. With their grandfather’s deteriorating health keeping him bedridden, their grandmother’s presence was always prized. Punishments were never quite as severe when she was around, although Ross guessed that tonight he and Alastair would both feel the sting of the thick leather strap stored in the second drawer of their father’s desk. It was all right for Alastair, he didn’t have an already sore backside, but this would be Ross’s third lashing in a week. One of the maids had found Alastair’s sketches for the c
amphor laurel wings under Ross’s bed, his brother having decided they were safer there than in his own room. Then Alastair had blamed Ross for leaving the stable gate open, explaining he’d receive a lighter punishment as he was younger. It never turned out that way. Ross spent more afternoons grasping the edges of his father’s wooden desk than he cared to recall. Quite often, as Ross tugged up his britches, he caught sight of Alastair through the window, running around the garden tossing a ball to the dogs.

  The only good thing about getting a whipping was that his nose spent time hovering inches above his father’s desk, where letters and maps were always strewn about. Last week there’d been a telegram from Pine Creek. One of the stockmen on Waybell Station, up in the Northern Territory, had been bitten by a crocodile. He’d survived the attack but eventually died.

  Ross searched in his pocket for a boiled lolly and quickly put it in his mouth before anyone noticed. He pushed at the sweet with his tongue and realised too late it was one that required a great deal of sucking. It stuck between his teeth.

  Their father started at the end not the beginning, telling his grandmother about the policeman who’d come to the house and the newspaper reporter who waited outside for an interview, refusing to leave. They were in serious trouble, he said for the second time.

  The ball of sugar finally came free. Ross let it rest on the middle of his tongue.

  Their mother sighed dramatically. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs. This is all far too tiring.’

  ‘Aye, you do that, Mary,’ responded their grandmother. ‘I’m sure you’ve had an extraordinarily busy day.’ Grandmother Bridget flicked the fan in her lap impatiently as their mother left the room. ‘Now that Mary’s gone perhaps you could refrain from wearing the last of the pile from the rug, Morgan, and for heaven’s sake stop masticating that infernal pipe.’

  ‘The doctor says it’s good for my health,’ he replied. ‘It expands the lungs.’

  ‘Aye, right, well, I dinnae require my lungs expanded too,’ she snapped.

  Ross moved a little closer to his brother. Alastair risked a glance at him. If things were bad enough to draw their mother down from her room, they were made even worse when she didn’t stay. The inexplicable boundary that kept Mary Grant apart from her family could at times be crossed, like this evening, but their mother was never quite one of them.

  A knock sounded on the front door. The boys’ grandmother and father exchanged a cautious glance as the housekeeper, Mrs Blum, went to see who it was.

  As his father and grandmother waited for the visitor to be announced, Ross looked at the portraits on the wall. At the tartan and swords. There was an Englishman across the waters who’d saved a Grant once and to whom the family owed a life. It was a very old story. Ross thought it make-believe, and yet every New Year’s Day a glass was raised to Captain Thomas of the West Indies.

  This was it then, Ross thought. If it all went bad, their father would choose either Alastair or him. One of them would have to go.

  They heard what sounded like the caller complaining at being kept waiting and then lumbering footsteps and a tapping noise carried along the marble hallway towards them. They all knew who it was and their faces fell. If Ross could have hidden he would have.

  ‘Who is it?’ his father called out of habit.

  ‘Who do you think? Your aunt,’ came the reply from just outside the drawing room. Supported by two walking canes, the oldest member of the Grant family shuffled into the room. She acknowledged her sister-in-law and nephew with a curt nod, the familiar scent of lavender and old age trailing the black taffeta gown she wore.

  ‘Stand fast, stand sure,’ Alastair whispered the Grant family motto.

  Nothing was worse than a visit from Great-Aunt Fiona. Everyone knew she didn’t like children. Children were meant to stay out of sight until they were fully grown. They were to be fed and watered in closed confines and only let out in the sun twice a day for limb-growing exercise. And they were never meant to speak. Ever. Ross heard her once say that children’s brains were not fully developed enough to comprehend common sense and, accordingly, it was a waste of time listening to them. Her two surviving children were proof of these beliefs, for even in late adulthood they rarely talked unless spoken to first and when outside they followed daylight like sunflowers.

  ‘It’s unlike you to come out at night, Aunt,’ commented their father.

  ‘And it’s unlike you to query my coming, Morgan,’ she replied. Halting before Ross she gave a brief grunt. ‘Did I not tell you this would happen?’ She brushed aside her nephew’s offer of help as she lowered herself into the chair next to Ross’s grandmother, the blackness of her skirt creasing into glossy folds. Ross almost expected cobwebs and dust to puff out all around her. Trying not to stare, he fixed his gaze instead on the mantelpiece, where a picture of the dead Queen Victoria was displayed. Great-Aunt Fiona looked like her, very grumpy, and they wore the same clothes, down to the white handkerchief on her head.

  ‘You have been far too lenient, Morgan. And before you offer up one of your paltry excuses I should tell you that there is a newspaper man loitering in the garden. I jabbed him with my stick but he refused to leave. Were the Lord to grant me another ten years I hope never again to witness such an assault on this family’s reputation.’

  Ross rolled the sweet around his tongue as their great-aunt leant forward. Holding up her spectacles, she wedged the circles of glass under gappy eye bones and squinted. Little by little she examined them until, inspection completed, she gave a shudder. Ross felt like one of his grandfather’s butterflies mounted under glass.

  ‘And look at their clothes. They are a disgrace,’ she finished.

  ‘I am aware of the reporter.’ Their father checked the squat gold carriage clock above the fireplace against the fob watch on its chain. ‘We have a gentleman in hospital with a crack to his skull, a broken penny-farthing and damage at the lunatic asylum.’ Pipe smoke streamed from his mouth. ‘And did I mention that there is a man in a straitjacket out wandering in the Botanical Gardens somewhere?’

  Ross turned to Alastair.

  ‘Do you think this is funny, sir?’ Their father looked at Ross. ‘You have been named as the cause of the bicycle accident on North Terrace. You were seen by Mrs Johnston.’

  Grandmother Bridget gave a polite cough. ‘I dinnae think the confectioner’s wife can be trusted. Not after the recent troubles.’

  ‘What troubles?’ asked Great-Aunt Fiona, inwardly pulling what remained of her lips.

  ‘What about the paperboy?’ Their father drew on the pipe. ‘The police have his statement.’

  Ross pushed the candy to the side of his mouth. ‘It was an accident, Father.’

  ‘An accident? And was it also an accident that led to you breaking into the lunatic asylum, destroying their property and unlocking wards so that inmates could wander around unsupervised? Did you not hear what I said? There is currently a lunatic in the Botanical Gardens.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Great-Aunt Fiona waved a black fan and took on the aspect of someone about to faint.

  Please, God, Ross said silently, let her faint.

  ‘He was wearing a straitjacket, Father,’ said Alastair earnestly. ‘He can’t do any harm.’

  Their father’s cheeks grew mottled. He gave a short cough that developed into a convulsion that shook the length of his thick frame. Sitting his pipe on a table he went straight to the decanters on the trolley, where he poured a good measure of whisky and skolled it.

  ‘Well, well, well.’ Their grandmother patted the arm of the chair. ‘You’ve both had a busy day.’

  ‘But it wasn’t my fault, Grams,’ said Alastair. ‘It was Ross’s.’

  Ross opened his mouth to protest, shocked that Alastair would blame him when it had been his idea and things had gone so terribly wrong.

  ‘Alastair, dinnae tell your grandmother to suck eggs.’

  Ross sighed, relieved that Grams knew it wasn’t all his fault.

&nb
sp; ‘That is not the least of it, Mother,’ said their father. ‘There is a child missing. An orphan.’

  ‘What?’ Great-Aunt Fiona’s handkerchief dropped to the floor.

  ‘The little boy?’ Ross exclaimed, and the hard piece of sugar shot from his mouth, hitting his great-aunt’s skirt. It quivered for the slightest of moments and held fast. Everyone looked at the white blob of saliva-coated candy stuck on the mourning black taffeta. No one said anything. The clock ticked. His great-aunt drew back as if she’d been struck and then with the utmost reluctance she poked at it with a finger.

  ‘Confectionery,’ Great-Aunt Fiona said, as if it were poison, before flicking the sweet to the floor. Her bent figure pointed at him. ‘I always said this one would be trouble. From the very beginning. Now we have these, these murky doings to contend with. A multitude of sins to be inked on paper for posterity come the morning. Perhaps if you’d told him of his less-than-fortunate entry into this world, Morgan, he would have been more aware of his shortcomings. Then something could have been done before this.’

  ‘Fiona,’ their grandmother said loudly, ‘dinnae say another word.’

  ‘You were one of two, Ross Grant,’ she spat. ‘But you ate your brother in the womb. There should have been another boy here, a finer boy. One that deserved to be a Grant.’

  ‘Aunt Fiona, stop it please,’ pleaded their father.

  Another brother? One that he’d eaten? Ross didn’t understand.

  ‘Aye, that’s quite enough,’ Grandmother Bridget agreed.

  ‘Instead your twin, our William, died before he lived while you scrambled from dark to light in a heartbeat, thriving from the very first day.’ Leveraging her body up on the canes, she moved towards him. ‘Our William was born without arms or legs. Half the size of you. A battered body. Mauled before the poor lad had a chance. I’ve asked myself every day since, even as your poor mother sank slowly into oblivion, why you’re here and he isn’t. You’ve done this family no favours today, my lad.’ She tapped Ross in the chest with one of the canes. ‘And to think I used to wonder if the one God chose to take was not the finer.’