The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

The Feet did not say anything, for reasons which are obvious, but they settled down to keep watch beside her. One foot guarded her left side, one foot guarded her right side – and what they were telling her was absolutely clear.

‘We love you,’ said The Feet, without uttering a single word. ‘We will never leave you. We belong.’

That night Rollo ate his supper and went to bed quietly, and slept. Sometimes you have to grow up quickly – and the day on which the cattle left Clawstone was such a day.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Trembellows were very pleased with themselves. They had done good to the countryside; they had helped the Ministry of Animal Health to make the farms of Britain safe – and they had made a tidy sum of money.

‘Of course we could have got more, much more,’ said Lord Trembellow now, spearing a piece of bacon. ‘But I felt it was my duty to help those men.’

The family were having breakfast. Olive did not go to school – she was too clever to do lessons with ordinary children so she had a tutor who came in the afternoons – and Neville had come up from London.

‘It’s our best pit, Number Five,’ said Neville. ‘We could have got a fortune for the use of it.’

‘Yes, we could, Daddy,’ put in Olive.

‘That’s perfectly true, my little sugar plum,’ said Lord Trembellow, wiping a dollop of marmalade from his chin. ‘But sometimes one just wants to help. To do what is right and good.’

Lady Trembellow choked slightly on a corner of toast. She could not actually remember a single time when her husband had wanted to do what was right and good.

‘We can easily manage with the other four pits,’ said Lord Trembellow. ‘It’s only for three months and then Number Five will be in use again.’

‘Not all of it, surely,’ said Lady Trembellow. ‘Not the part where the cattle are buried.’

‘No, not that part, of course,’ said Lord Trembellow impatiently. ‘We would not want pieces of bone spoiling our gravel – the Trembellow gravel is famous for its purity. But Number Five is a very large pit. The waste ground at the back can be left undisturbed for a long time. And Dr Dale assured me that the carcasses would be buried with large amounts of lime and other chemicals. There’ll hardly be a trace of the beasts left – not just the soft parts will be dissolved but the skeletons too, and then it’ll be business as usual.’

Lord Trembellow took a sip of coffee and smiled at his family.

‘It couldn’t have worked out better,’ he said.

The vets had put ‘No Admittance’ signs at the entrance to the gravel pit and shut off access from the road. Number Five would be a kind of Sleeping Beauty, sealed off from the world while the infected animals decomposed in the soil. Then in three months’ time, Dr Dale had said, the Trembellow lorries could go in and out freely and the neighbourhood would be clean again.

But of course the real reason why Lord Trembellow was pleased was quite a different one.

Sir George’s cattle were gone forever. Everyone said that the old man had given up – that he would not attempt to restock Clawstone. In any case, the beasts were the only ones of their kind in Britain. He was a broken man, according to the rumours – and with Clawstone in strict quarantine and no visitors allowed, he would not be able to earn money by having Open Days. All the Bloodstained Brides and Sawn-up Girls wouldn’t help him, thought Lord Trembellow gleefully, which meant that soon now, very soon, Sir George would sell him the park for building land. And at a much lower price than he would have asked before.

Those blasted cows had been in his way for too long, he thought. That they were rotting in his gravel pit made him feel good.

‘Two hundred houses,’ he murmured, seeing the park becoming useful at last.

Olive picked up her napkin and wiped her small pinched mouth.

‘Two hundred and fifty, Daddy, don’t you think?’ she said.

Lady Trembellow said nothing. Her husband had arranged for her to have her ears operated on in London but she had a surprise for him. She wasn’t going to have any more operations to make her look better. She didn’t mind whether she looked better or not. What she wanted was to feel better, and to live a better life – and Trembellow Towers was not the place for that.

No one knew it yet – but Lady Trembellow was going away.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A great deal of nonsense has been written about banshees. In some books they’re described as fairies, in others as witches or ghosts. They’re supposed to be death portents, which means they appear when someone is about to die, but it could also mean that they look so awful that a person who sees them dies of shock, which is not the same at all. There are legends about banshees who wash out the bloodstained linen of the dead, and others about banshees who belong only to the royal families of Ireland.