The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, Page 2

  At ten o’clock Mrs Grove’s sister Sheila came to take the tickets, bringing with her a duffel bag filled with things that people in the village had sent for the museum and the shop. The postmistress had had a clear-out in her attic and found the old cardboard gas-mask case which had held her grandfather’s gas mask in the war. And Mr Jones had made a new puzzle for the shop.

  Mr Jones was the retired sexton and had taken up fretwork. He made jigsaw puzzles by sticking pictures on to plywood and sawing them into wiggly shapes, and he was very kind about letting Miss Emily have them to sell in the gift shop. The one he had sent this morning was a picture of two vegetable marrows and a pumpkin which he had managed to saw into no less than twenty-seven pieces.

  Then Mrs Grove and her sister set up the folding table and brought out the roll of tickets and the saucer for the change and laid out the pamphlets Sir George had written giving the history of the castle, and Open Day began.

  It did not go well. By lunchtime only ten people had come and there had been some unpleasantness because Emily had left her bedroom door open and a family with two small boys had gone in and peered at her nightdress, which they thought had been worn by Queen Victoria and was part of the tour. Nobody bought a lavender bag and a man with a red face brought back the jigsaw puzzle he had bought the week before and asked for his money to be returned because the pieces did not fit properly. It was not until the visitors had made their way out of the castle and were wandering about in the gardens that Sir George and his sister could relax.

  But today their quiet time did not last for long because the postman brought a most distressing letter. It was from Sir George’s niece, Patricia Hamilton, asking if they could have Madlyn and Rollo to stay for two months in the summer.

  The parents apologized; they hated to ask favours, but if it was possible it would be a wonderful thing for the children.

  ‘Children!’ said Sir George, leaning back in his chair. His voice was grim. He might as well have been saying ‘Smallpox!’ or ‘Shipwreck!’

  ‘Oh dear, children,’ repeated Emily. ‘I do find children a little alarming. Especially if they are small.’

  ‘Children are generally small,’ said Sir George crabbily. ‘Otherwise they would not be children.’

  Emily was about to say that actually some children were quite large these days because they ate the wrong things – she had read about it in the paper – but she didn’t.

  ‘Do you think they will shout and scream and... play practical jokes?’ she asked nervously. ‘You know . . . string across the stairs and apple-pie beds?’

  Sir George was frowning, staring out of the window at the park.

  ‘If they let off fireworks and frighten the animals I shall have to beat them,’ he said.

  But the thought of beating children was seriously alarming. You had to catch them first, and then upend them ... and his joints were a trouble to him even when he had to get up from his chair. What if they were the kind of children who squirmed ?

  ‘They have been brought up in town,’ he went on disapprovingly. ‘The boy will probably pretend to be a motor car and make those vroom-vroom noises all the time.’

  ‘And the girl will wear thin shoes and carry a handbag.’

  A gloomy silence fell. Then:

  ‘Cousin Howard won’t like it,’ said Emily.

  ‘No,’ said her brother, ‘Cousin Howard won’t like it at all. But the children are “family”. Patricia is my niece. They have Percival blood.’

  Emily nodded. Blood is blood and cannot be argued with – and the next day they wrote to say that of course Madlyn and Rollo would be welcome to spend the summer at Clawstone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Madlyn stood still in the centre of the courtyard and looked round at the towers and the battlements which surrounded her.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she said.

  ‘Poor thing’ is not usually what people say to castles, but Madlyn was right. Clawstone did not look well. There were blobs of lichen – green blobs and yellow blobs and purple blobs – all over the steps which led to the front entrance. The statue of a knight-at-arms had lost his nose, the two cannons which flanked the doorway were covered in rust.

  And the two old people who came carefully down the steps to greet them looked rather like poor things also. Sir George had bent down, ready to shake hands, but it did not seem certain that he would be able to straighten himself up again. Emily’s skirt was coming unravelled at the hem, and her watery eyes were worried.

  The children had travelled in charge of Rollo’s former childminder, a plump and caring lady called Katya. She loved the children and she loved England, but she did not care for the English language, which she spoke oddly or not at all.

  ‘Is here Madlyn, is here Rollo,’ she said. Then thumping herself on the chest: ‘Is here Katya.’

  Uncle George shook hands with everybody. Now that they were here he had to admit that the children did not look dangerous. Madlyn was very pretty and Rollo was very small and the lady who had brought them was returning to London on the following day.

  As the children followed Aunt Emily up the stone staircase and down the corridor which led to their rooms a figure in a long dressing gown appeared suddenly and came towards them. They stopped, ready to greet him, but when he saw them the man turned round abruptly and scuttled away.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Aunt Emily when he was out of sight. ‘I did so hope he would say good evening to you. He’s a very polite person really, but so dreadfully shy.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Madlyn.

  ‘It’s Cousin Howard. He finds it so hard to meet new people but I hoped as you were “family” . . . Never mind, I’m sure when he knows you better ... Now here are your rooms.’

  Their rooms were in the newest part of the castle, which was only three hundred years old. They were next to each other with a connecting door between them, and Katya’s room was across the corridor, so they slept well and were up early next morning to explore.

  They found Aunt Emily in the kitchen with Mrs Grove, who always came in early from the village.

  Madlyn liked Mrs Grove straight away; she was sensible and friendly, and when Rollo said he didn’t like porridge, that was the end of that. She didn’t try to persuade him or fuss and when Madlyn explained that he had toast fingers and Marmite for breakfast every day of his life, she said that was perfectly normal.

  ‘Ned used to eat peanut butter day in and day out when he was small, and he’s strong enough now.’

  ‘Who’s Ned?’ asked Madlyn.

  ‘My son. He’s around somewhere; he comes to give me a hand when he isn’t at school.’

  ‘How old is he?’ Madlyn wanted to know.

  ‘He’s eleven.’

  After breakfast they said goodbye to Katya, who left for the station in a taxi, and then they set off to explore the castle, which they found very interesting, though rather cold and damp.

  Madlyn particularly liked the museum. It wasn’t much like the museums in London but it was very ... personal. In the London museums you never saw rocking horses with missing legs or stuffed ducks that had choked on a stickleback or dog collars which had belonged to Jack Russell terriers who were able to climb trees. There was a set of brushes for cleaning out Northumbrian Small Pipes and a round, brownish thing covered in some kind of skin, which was labelled ‘The Clawstone Hoggart’. It was on a table all by itself and was obviously important, but they had no idea what it was.

  Rollo of course liked the dungeon. He could see at once that all the old machines that had been used for doing the washing could easily have been instruments of torture – and in a corner behind the mangle he found two fat cockroaches whose chestnut wing cases shone most beautifully in the dusk.

  But when they had explored all the rooms that they could get into they came back to Mrs Grove in the kitchen.

  ‘I can’t find the television set,’ said Madlyn.

  ‘There isn’t one, dear. Sir George doesn’t wa
nt one in the place. Nor no computer either.’

  Madlyn tried to take this in. She had never been in a house without a television.

  ‘It’s my favourite programme tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. ‘And Rollo always has his animal programmes.’

  ‘You can come and watch in my house,’ said Mrs Grove. ‘The village is only five minutes down the road. Ned’ll show you.’

  Madlyn thanked her and made her way to Aunt Emily’s room. She could hear someone hoovering on an upstairs landing but when she got closer the hoovering stopped and when she went to investigate there was nobody there.

  The idea had been that Aunt Emily would look after Madlyn and her brother with Mrs Grove helping out when necessary, but it soon became clear that it was going to be the other way round.

  As far as Madlyn could see, it was Aunt Emily who needed help, and she needed it badly.

  She needed help with her hair, which looked like a grey worm that had landed by mistake on her head and passed on to a better world; she needed help with her clothes, which she had lost track of in various drawers – and she certainly needed help with the things she was knitting for the gift shop.

  Aunt Emily was very fond of knitting, but unfortunately you can be fond of something and not be very good at it, and Madlyn was not surprised that the gloves and scarves she had made were not selling well.

  After all, most people have five fingers; there is really nothing to be done about that.

  ‘What about crochet, Aunt Emily?’ suggested Madlyn. ‘We could make table-mats and doilies; they’re easy – they just go round and round.’

  Aunt Emily thought this was a good idea, and she showed Madlyn the patchwork tea cosy she was working on.

  ‘Do you think people would notice if I used snippets from George’s pyjamas? I mean, pyjamas aren’t really ... underwear ... are they?’ said Emily. ‘It’s not as though they were striped. Or flannel. Striped flannel would never do, I see that.’

  In the next few days Madlyn was busier than she could remember, and she was glad of it because she missed her parents more than she could have imagined. She mended the leaking lavender bags, she turned the pot-pourri to stop it mouldering, she helped Mrs Grove to make fudge to sell the visitors in fancy bags. When Sir George found out how neat her handwriting was he asked her to help with the labels in the museum. She was even allowed to make a new label for the Clawstone Hoggart.

  ‘What exactly is a Hoggart, Uncle George,’ the children had asked at lunch when they first came.

  ‘A Hoggart?’ Uncle George had looked vague.

  ‘Yes. The Clawstone Hoggart in the museum. We’ve never seen one before.’

  ‘No... well ...’ Sir George took a sip of water. ‘We think it might be...’ He turned to his sister. ‘You tell them.’

  ‘We found it in an old chest,’ said Emily. ‘It just said “Hoggart” – and of course it was foun“d here so it is a “Clawstone Hoggart”. But we’re not sure exactly . . . Cousin Howard is looking into it.’

  If Cousin Howard was trying to find out what a Hoggart was, that was all that he was doing. He still hurried away from the children; he didn’t come down to meals; he never spoke. His room and his library seemed to be the whole of his world.

  Rollo was also helping, but in his own way. He had found places in the gardens and grounds where if you sat quietly things came and looked at you. Red squirrels and voles and sometimes a vixen with her cubs. There was a badger’s sett by the stream and under the stones in the shrubbery a whole fascinating world of beetles and centipedes as fierce as they were tiny.

  What he liked particularly about Clawstone was that there wasn’t much difference between the outside and the inside of the castle. In London you had to go out of doors to see animals, but here there were mice in the sofa cushions and owl pellets in the attics and hedgehogs in the scullery clanking about and looking for their saucers of milk. And though he knew that animals were best left where they were, Rollo made an exhibit for the museum which he thought would interest the visitors. It was a shoebox stuffed with poplar twigs in which hawk-moth caterpillars crawled about, chomping the leaves.

  The children had arrived on a Monday and, though the next Open Day was not until the following Saturday, Madlyn could see how hard everyone was preparing for it. It wasn’t just the lavender bags and the scones; the rooms had to be cleaned and the notices put up and the car park checked for potholes and the cobwebs swept out of the toilets. Uncle George and Aunt Emily did a lot of this, but they would have been lost without Mrs Grove.

  And Mrs Grove had an unpaid helper. She had Ned.

  Madlyn had heard the sound of someone hoovering often in the first days, but when she went to investigate the noise stopped and there was no one to be seen.

  She put up with this as long as she could. Then on the third day she decided she had had enough.

  ‘I know you’re there,’ she yelled from the bottom of the stairs, ‘and I think you’re rude and horrible and unfriendly to keep hiding.’

  For a while the noise of the machine went on. Then it stopped and a boy came down the stairs towards her. He had very blue eyes and bright ginger hair, and Madlyn knew at once that it was going to be all right, that she had found a friend. All the same, she decided to be offended for a little longer.

  ‘Hiding from people is hurtful,’ she said sternly.

  Ned came down the last of the steps till he was level with her.

  ‘I didn’t know what you were going to be like. You could have been like the Honourable Olive.’

  ‘Who’s the Honourable Olive?’

  ‘She’s an awful girl. Horrible. She lives at Trembellow and she looks like a pickle, all sour and vinegary – but snobby with it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not snobby and I’m not a pickle.’

  ‘No,’ said Ned. He had never seen a less pickled-looking girl.

  ‘Why is she the Honourable Olive?’

  ‘Her father’s a lord. He didn’t used to be – he used to be just an ordinary bloke, but he made all those traffic cones they have on motorways to tell people they can’t go there. He made millions of them and he got very rich and they made him a lord and he bought Trembellow Towers.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  Even in the few days she had been at Clawstone, Madlyn had heard about Trembellow Towers.

  ‘You could come to my house this afternoon if you like,’ said Ned. ‘There’s a programme about whales for your brother. And you could email your parents if you wanted to.’

  Madlyn’s face lit up. If there was one thing she wanted more than any other it was to make contact with her parents, and she knew that she’d been right about Ned. He was going to be a true and proper friend.

  The children felt at home straight away in Mrs Grove’s bungalow. It was a small modern house, with just three rooms and a tiny garden, and it was marvellously warm and clean and comfortable. The TV chuntered away to itself quietly in the corner, there were geraniums on the window sill and from the kitchen came the smell of unburned scones and flapjacks baking in the oven.

  Mrs Grove’s husband had been killed two years earlier, when a drunken lout in a Jaguar had run into his delivery van, but if she was sad she kept the sadness inside – and she still had Ned.

  While Rollo settled himself down in front of the whales, Ned took Madlyn off to his room and sent a message to New York, and they were lucky: by the time they had finished tea there was a reply saying all was well.

  When they got back to the castle they found Aunt Emily riddling the kitchen range. There was a smudge of soot on her nose and her hair was coming down.

  ‘Isn’t it the dearest little house?’ she said wistfully when they told her about their afternoon. ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a house like that. No stairs and you just turn a knob and the fire comes on.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you, Aunt Emily?’ asked Madlyn. ‘Do you have to go on living here?’

  Aunt Emily sighed. ‘I’m afraid we do,’ she said.
She rubbed her nose, spreading the soot a little further. ‘One has to do one’s duty.’

  There were now only two more days to Open Day. Mr Jones in the village had sent another jigsaw puzzle; it was a picture of a town councillor on a platform making a speech. Aunt Emily stayed up till midnight finishing the tea cosy, and Madlyn sprayed fresh disinfectant into the toilets and arranged a posy of wild flowers to put on the table in the entrance hall.

  But on the morning of the actual day, Sir George came down from the battlements holding his telescope and looking grim.

  ‘Cars streaming off to Trembellow,’ he said. ‘Dozens of them. Hardly a one coming this way.’

  Sir George was right. By eleven o’clock only four people had bought tickets and made their way up the front steps of the castle.

  Madlyn was sitting beside Mrs Grove at the table where the tickets were sold, ready to help with giving change and handing out booklets. She had taken over from Mrs Grove’s sister who now had a morning job in the village shop.

  Now, as the big clock in the courtyard ticked up the minutes, she turned to her and said, ‘Mrs Grove, why does it matter so much that people come to the castle? Couldn’t Uncle George sell it and he and Aunt Emily go and live in a bungalow? Then they wouldn’t need nearly so much money for themselves.’

  Mrs Grove turned to her. ‘Why, bless you, it isn’t the castle they want the money for and it isn’t for themselves. I’ve never met two people who spent less.’

  ‘Well, what then? What do they have to have the money for? Why is the money so important?’

  Mrs Grove patted her hand. ‘I thought you knew. It’s for the cows. It’s the cows they need it for. Everything at Clawstone is for the cows.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was not till the following day that Madlyn really understood what Mrs Grove had told her, because that was the day when she and Rollo were driven through the gates of Clawstone Park. They went in Sir George’s ancient Land-Rover and, as he stopped to take out a large iron key and unlock the padlock, it seemed to Madlyn that a change came over her great-uncle. He seemed to become taller and more upright, less stooped and weary-looking, as if he knew that what he was to show them could be equalled nowhere in the world. They moved forward, and as the gates in the high stone wall closed again behind them they seemed to be entering a kind of Paradise. It was silent except for the calling of the curlews on the hill; the trees standing in full-leaved clumps looked as though they had stood there since the beginning of time; the stream beside which they drove was as clear and clean as rivers must have been in the Garden of Eden. No artificial sprays or chemicals were allowed inside the park, so that the grassy banks were studded with wild flowers, and the blossom on the gorse bushes dazzled with their gold.