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For my father and Julie, with love,
and with profound thanks to Professor Richard Tilleard-Cole
CONTENTS
“My back’s killing me,” Colin grumbled, trying to get the rickety wheelbarrow back on to the path again, “and this barrow’s falling to pieces. Can’t Mr Grierson get you a new one? How can he expect you to manage with a thing like this?”
Duncan Ross shrugged, and his brown freckled face darkened slightly. It always did when anyone mentioned Hugo Grierson of Lagg Castle. He was a great landowner, one of the wealthiest men in this part of Scotland, and one of the meanest, according to Duncan’s father Angus, who worked for him.
“Och, A’ve tel’t ye already,” the boy said, “he’s awfu’ tight wi’ money. He’d like fine to have us awa’ from here. Have ye no’ seen our hoos?”
They certainly had. Ramshaws was a crumbling stone hut high in the trees above Carlin’s Crag, the great white rock face that gashed this dark green woodland like a huge hunk of bone. The Ross’s cottage had walls that ran with damp, no electricity, and rotting window frames.
Colin wanted to climb the Crag but it was highly dangerous, and all fenced off with barbed wire. The views from up there must be fabulous, with the dark green pine forests spreading down to the sea, and a glimpse across to the English Lake District on a clear day. Lagg Castle, where he was staying for the summer with his sister Prill and their cousin Oliver, was just inland from the coast, overlooking the Solway Firth. They were only fifty miles across the English border, here in the Scottish Lowlands, but it felt like another world.
Today they were too deep in the woods for any kind of view, helping Duncan to dismantle a huge pile of stones in the garden of an empty cottage called Lochashiel. The stones were needed to repair a wall that had collapsed in one of Hugo Grierson’s fields, and the three children had been sent out to give Duncan a hand. The stones were so heavy, and the children had had to make so many journeys with them, that the ancient barrow really did look as if it was ready to fall apart.
“It’s pretty here,” Prill said, looking across the tangled garden at the small white-washed cottage. “Why doesn’t he let you live in this? You’d only need to tidy up a bit, and give it a lick of paint – and it’s much nearer the road. You wouldn’t have that awful long track to climb, if you lived here.”
“Aye,” muttered Duncan, looking even gloomier. “That’s true. But he wants to make money out of the place. Ma faither was born in this hoos, and it’s ours, by rights, but Grierson says he’s keepin’ it for holiday folk.”
“But there’s nobody in it,” Oliver pointed out. “The furniture’s all covered with dust sheets. I’ve looked.”
“You would,” Colin said irritably. “Why don’t you give us a hand with this lot, instead of snooping about, peeping through windows? Some holiday this is going to be. Honestly, I’ve had just about enough!” He sat down grumpily in the middle of the mossy forest path, abandoning the wheelbarrow and its load.
“Let’s have something to eat,” Prill suggested, trying to be tactful. She knew Colin was spoiling for a fight with Oliver. “There are some buns in this bag, and a bottle of lemonade.”
“Home-made,” Oliver said proudly.
Colin would have preferred Coke to the sour, gritty concoction provided by Oliver’s mother, his Great Aunt Phyllis, but she said fizzy drinks rotted your teeth and kept you awake at night. Everything was going to be home-made for the next few weeks because she was in charge of all the cooking.
Lochashiel was on the lower fringes of a vast plantation, which belonged to Hugo Grierson. David Blakeman, Colin and Prill’s father, had come up to Scotland to paint the master of Lagg. He was an art teacher at a big comprehensive school