The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, Page 3

  They bumped their way across the fields, and crossed a shallow ford.

  Then: ‘Oh!’ said Rollo.

  Sir George nodded.

  ‘Yes, there they are.’

  And he stopped the engine and they sat in silence, and looked at a sight one could see nowhere else in England: the Wild White Cattle of Clawstone Park.

  Madlyn had never been interested in cows. If she thought of them at all she imagined stolid, square-rumped animals who stood humbly in stalls with machines clamped to their udders and said ‘Moo’.

  But these creatures were not like that. They were not like that at all.

  They stood in the shade of a clump of oaks and every line of their bodies – the graceful lift of their heads, the long legs of the calves standing beside their mothers, the proud strength of the wide-horned bulls – spoke of grace and nimbleness and speed.

  ‘I was stupid,’ said Madlyn to herself. ‘I didn’t understand.’

  Where they had come from, these fabled beasts, no one knew. Some said a ship from Spain had been wrecked on the coast and the cattle had swum ashore and made their way across the hills to Clawstone. Others said they were descended from the wide-horned aurochs who had lived in the primeval forests of the north. Whatever their beginnings, the cattle had roamed free inside the seven hundred acres of Clawstone Park as long as anyone could remember – and the owners of Clawstone had protected them.

  But they protected them from a distance, for the creatures were as wild as wolves. No one milked them; they were never brought inside in bad weather or to have their calves; no one fed them cattle cake or took them to the vet – indeed, it could be dangerous to handle them; they could not endure the touch of human beings.

  And each and every one was as white as snow.

  ‘Can we get out?’ asked Rollo.

  ‘No. But we can go closer.’

  It was like an African safari as they drove slowly towards the herd, hoping they would not take flight.

  ‘They were the cattle of the ancient Druids,’ said Sir George, and it was easy to imagine how those wise wanderers would have prized such a herd, both as givers of food and as a source of sacrifice. It was always white bulls that the gods wanted when they thirsted for blood.

  They had come very near to the herd. Sir George turned off the engine and they let down the windows as far as they would go. The king bull stared at them, unafraid, knowing that nothing could threaten him. Beside him grazed the oldest of the cows, with her scars and her crumpled horn. Two calves butted each other, playing; another drank from its mother, who flicked the flies from him with her tail. One cow was lying down a little way from the rest; a salad of dark green plants hung from her mouth.

  ‘Are those stinging nettles she’s eating?’ asked Rollo.

  Sir George nodded. ‘Cows know what plants are good for them, especially when they’re going to have their calves. She’s due any day now.’

  They watched in silence. Then quite suddenly the herd took off, the king bull leading, stampeding across the shallow ford, racing away towards the high ground.

  ‘Was it us?’ asked Rollo, worried.

  Sir George shook his head and pointed. A red deer, an antlered stag, had appeared between the trees.

  ‘They’ll take off suddenly like that if anything startles them.’

  Rollo said nothing as they drove back through the gates, and nothing when they returned to the castle. In silence he made his way up the main staircase, and the second flight of stairs, and the third. When he reached the top floor he walked from room to room till he found a window that overlooked the park and the hill where the cattle were grazing. Then he pulled a table over to the window and found a chair, which he put on top of the table, and climbed on to it and pressed his nose against the glass.

  Sir George found him there an hour later. Rollo’s eyes were dreamy, his nose was pale where the blood had left it.

  ‘Are they always white?’ he asked his great-uncle. ‘Always and for ever?’

  ‘Yes. Always. They have bred true for a thousand years.’

  Rollo nodded. ‘Are they your cows? Do they belong to you?’

  ‘They belong to themselves. But I guard them.’

  Then: ‘I will help you,’ said Rollo.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On the Saturday when Madlyn first helped to sell tickets for Open Day, exactly twelve people came to look over Clawstone Castle.

  And on the same Saturday, the number of people who went to visit Trembellow Towers, just twelve kilo-metres away, was three hundred and four.

  Not that Lord Trembellow had to count heads the way they did at Clawstone. He had set up an electric turnstile at the entrance to the house, which relayed the number of visitors directly to his office. Trembellow might be his home but he ran it as a business.

  He ran everything as a business; his home, his wife and children and, of course, the firms he owned: the cone manufacturing factory, the road haulage business, the quarries and the gravel pits. There was hardly an hour in the day or night when one of his lorries was not roaring up and down the roads of Britain, or one of his shovellers was not digging into a hillside or one of his cement mixers was not helping to spew out concrete.

  Lord Trembellow had been born Arthur Ackerly in Newcastle upon Tyne. His father worked on the coal barges which plied up and down the Tyne; there had been seven children to feed, and Arthur had done wonderfully well, so if he was pleased with himself – and he certainly was – no one could blame him.

  When he bought Trembellow Towers, he was determined that it should be the most outstanding, the largest and the most visited castle in Britain. It was not an old building like Clawstone; it looked in fact as though the hill it stood on had come out in enormous, red brick boils. Even so, it was not large enough or showy enough for Lord Trembellow. He added two towers to the ones that were already there and dug a moat and built a drawbridge. He had battlements put on the roof and built a minstrels’ gallery and enlarged the banqueting hall.

  The museum at Trembellow did not exhibit stuffed ducks that had choked on sticklebacks or gas-mask cases left over from the war. It showed priceless swords and body armour and jewelled saddles. The visitors who came to Trembellow thought, of course, that these things had belonged to the family for generations, but actually Lord Trembellow’s grown-up son Neville, who lived in London and was a banker, had bought them at antiques auctions. Neville had bought pictures of the ancestors that hung in the dining room too. They were nothing whatever to do with the Trembellows, but one ancestor is much like another and nobody guessed.

  Visitors to Trembellow did not have to stumble round the castle on their own as they did at Clawstone. They had proper guides who made little speeches in each of the rooms. There was piped music in the tea rooms and everything sold in the gift shop was stamped with the Trembellow crest. You can buy a coat of arms from the College of Heralds when you become a lord and Lord Trembellow had done just that.

  ‘Well, my little sugar plum,’ he said now, coming into the dining room for his lunch, ‘we’ve beaten our record. Three hundred and four visitors!’

  His ‘little sugar plum’ was his ten-year-old daughter Olive, and it was hard to imagine anyone less sugary or less like a plum. Her skin was sallow, she was thin with a pursed mouth and small black eyes, and the inside of her brain might have been a calculator.

  ‘We shall do even better next Saturday,’ she said now.

  Olive was a great comfort to her father. She was small but she did not look young; she looked like a shrunken company director, carried a briefcase even in the house and was so clever that she could almost have taken over the family business then and there.

  ‘I’ve had trouble with one of the waitresses in the tea room,’ said Lady Trembellow, sighing. ‘She spilled tea on a woman’s lap.’

  ‘Well, sack her for goodness’ sake, Phyllis. You’re far too soft,’ said her husband.

  And Olive said, ‘Yes, mother, you’re far too soft.
Neville says so too.’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ said Lady Trembellow sadly.

  She had been very happy in the small semi in Newcastle in which she and Arthur had first lived, and happy in the detached house in the suburbs to which they moved next, but as the houses they lived in grew larger she did not feel happier. She tried very hard to keep up with her husband, who wanted her to be young and thin, and every so often, just to please him, she went off to London to see a fashionable doctor who made women more beautiful. Lady Trembellow knew that plastic surgeons had done wonderful things in the war, repairing the horrific wounds that servicemen had suffered, so she trusted this doctor completely and did everything he suggested. She had a facelift and she had some fat removed from her thighs and a tuck put in her tummy – but she did not feel younger or more beautiful. She felt as though everything was very tight.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll be up to three hundred and fifty visitors by the end of the month,’ said Olive. ‘And the Clawstone visitors will be down to ten ... and then five... and then nobody!’

  ‘That’s right, my little pigeon,’ said her fond father. ‘We’ll put that ramshackle place completely out of business. And that’ll be the end of the Percivals and their stupid cattle... They can send the cows to be slaughtered and we’ll throw them out and take over.’

  He rubbed his hands. When he first moved to Trembellow he had opened his house to the public because he wanted to show off his wealth and his possessions, and beating Sir George was good sport.

  But since then he and his son Neville had come up with an excellent idea. The grounds of Clawstone Castle would make a perfect building site for a new housing estate. Nothing fancy – just two hundred or so houses close together and a supermarket and a garage.

  Clawstone was twelve kilometres away, so one wouldn’t see the new development from the windows at Trembellow; there was a hill in the way and a wood. There was no danger that he or his family would have to look at rows of houses lived in by people who wouldn’t know how to make their gardens nice – if indeed there was room for gardens, which there probably wouldn’t be.

  He had done the sums: two hundred houses would bring in a cool ten million pounds.

  But first he had to turn out Sir George – and of course the blasted cattle they made such a fuss about. And that meant ruining the Percivals and driving them away from Clawstone. That the best building land in Britain should be grazed over by cows was ridiculous. It was an outrage. Something would have to be done, Lord Trembellow told himself – and he was the man to do it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rollo was a faithful person. He did not forget to feed his caterpillars and he went on putting out saucers of milk for the hedgehog. Hardly a day passed when he did not visit the badger’s sett by the stream and he went on writing letters to his skink. But he had told his great-uncle that he would guard the cattle – and that was what he did. He knew he must not go into the park alone, that the animals could be dangerous, but he could stand by the gate in the wall that surrounded it, and watch, and this is what he did, often for hours at a time. And when he had to be indoors he went on watching. He had his special cow-watching places: the library steps in the book room and the old table in one of the attics, on to which he had put a kitchen chair. The book room faced east and the attic faced west so that he could follow the cattle as they wandered through their domain. It was only when they were deep in a cluster of trees that he lost sight of them.

  The day after Rollo had first been to the park Sir George brought him a pair of binoculars, much smaller than the usual ones.

  ‘My father had them made for me when I was a boy. Try them,’ he said.

  Rollo took the ancient leather case and lifted them out. Small as they were, he still found them hard to hold. Then suddenly he screwed the focusing knob the right way – and in an instant the face of a calf leaning against his mother’s side swam towards him, so close that he could have touched it.

  ‘Oh!’ said Rollo. ‘I can see his wet nose... and his ear.’

  Sir George said no more but he had to turn away from Rollo because he was so moved. He had felt himself to be very much alone, but now it seemed that there was someone else – someone of his own blood – who felt as he did about the cattle. Perhaps if he could only hold out for a few years, Rollo would take over. Perhaps there would be another member of the family who would see the cattle as a sacred trust, to be protected and kept from harm.

  George and Emily had been brought up to think that it was not polite to talk about money. They would not have thought it right to let the children know how desperately hard up they were and how important it was to get what they could from the visitors, so it was Ned who answered Madlyn’s questions.

  ‘It’s the cattle, you see. They cost the earth to keep up and Sir George’ll – he’ll never sell them or let them go. He won’t even charge people to go into the park and look at them. You could make quite a bit that way; there’s plenty of people ask to see them, but he’ll never take a penny when he shows them round.’

  ‘But why? Why are they so expensive?’ asked Madlyn. ‘They just eat grass, don’t they, and the grass is there?’

  ‘Well, it is and it isn’t. Grass is a crop like anything else. They can’t use any artificial spray or fertilizer on it because it might harm the beasts, Everything has to be done by hand, and that’s terribly expensive. And the walls of the park have to be repaired, and the warden paid.’

  The warden, Bernie, was Ned’s uncle – and Ned knew as much as anybody about the upkeep of the cattle.

  ‘You don’t think Rollo’s too fond of the cows?’ asked Madlyn. ‘He’s sort of besotted. As though ... they’re creatures from another world.’

  ‘Rollo’s all right,’ said Ned. ‘No need to worry about him. Come to that, there’s a lot of people who feel as though the cows are special. They’ve been here so long, it’s like having a bit of history right here. My Ma reckons if the cattle went, the village would become a sort of ghost town.’

  Meanwhile the summer took its course; bees hung from the flowers, the lime trees gave off a marvellous scent, high white clouds rode across the sky. But if the countryside was beautiful, what was happening inside the castle was very worrying indeed. Because the Honourable Olive had been right: more and more visitors came to Trembellow and fewer and fewer came to Clawstone.

  But it wasn’t till she went upstairs to help Aunt Emily sort out the things for the gift shop that Madlyn saw that something would have to be done.

  Emily was sitting on the bed. Beside her on the quilt were the three lavender bags, the tea cosy made of Uncle George’s pyjamas, a glove with four fingers, and a bookmark stuck with pressed periwinkle flowers.

  And Emily was crying.

  When she saw Madlyn she hurriedly dabbed her eyes but it wasn’t easy to fool Madlyn, who came and put her arm round Emily’s shoulders and said, ‘What is it, Aunt Emily? What’s the matter?’

  Emily waved an arm at the treasures on the counterpane.

  ‘Nothing has sold, Madlyn. Nothing. Not one thing. And I’m so tired, and I can’t think of anything else to make. It’s all hopeless, and it will break George’s heart if we have to sell the park. He seems to think the cows came to him from God.’ She groped for a handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘Before they opened up Trembellow we could just keep going, but now. . .’

  Madlyn moved the lavender bags and sat down beside her aunt. Part of her was feeling rather cross. She had so many friends at school that she worried about and cared about, and there were her parents and Rollo. Loving people is hard work and she had not intended to start caring about her ancient aunt.

  But she did care about her – and now it seemed that something would have to be done.

  Only what? What would bring visitors flocking to Clawstone? Not more lavender bags, that was for sure, not more burnt scones or tea cosies . . . What would turn people away from Trembellow and bring them to Clawstone?

  When she went to bed that
night Madlyn tossed and turned for hours, racking her brains . . . Then suddenly she sat up in bed. Of course. She should have thought of it before. It was obvious.

  When she had an idea now, Madlyn discussed it with Ned.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’re right. But I don’t know where we’d get them from. There aren’t any in the village as far as I know.’

  ‘Why not? You’d think there’d be plenty. People must have drowned in the horse pond or been murdered in dark lanes or buried in the wrong graves.’

  Ned was pondering. ‘I dare say, but I suppose this is a quiet sort of place and they just stayed in the ground or wherever.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask Cousin Howard,’ said Madlyn. ‘He must know.’

  Ned looked at her sidways. ‘I’d better come with you. He can be a bit moody like.’

  ‘All right. I’d be glad if you would, actually. I’ve never talked to him properly and Aunt Emily doesn’t realize that I know what he is.’

  Cousin Howard was in his library and not pleased to be disturbed. They had brought Rollo also, and when he saw the three children he hurried away quickly and vanished through the door that led into his bedroom.