The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

People who pay to look round castles and stately homes usually like to have something to buy, and Emily had done her best. She had made three lavender bags, which she had sewn out of muslin – the kind that is used for bandages – and filled with flower heads from the bushes in the garden. One of them leaked a little but the other two were intact, and since so far no one had actually bought any bags there would probably be enough for today. She had prepared two bowls of dried rose petals, which were meant to scent people’s rooms: pot-pourri, it was called. The trouble was that it was difficult to dry anything properly in the castle, which was always damp, both inside and out, so the petals had gone mouldy underneath. Now she packed the scones she had baked into plastic bags and stuck little labels on them saying ‘Baked in the Clawstone Bakery’, which was perfectly true. She had baked them herself the day before on the ancient stove in the kitchen and they were not really burnt. A little dark round the edges perhaps but not actually burnt.

It was important not to lose heart; Emily knew that, but just for a moment she felt very sad and discouraged. She worked so hard, but she knew that never in a hundred years would her gift shop catch up with the gift shop at Trembellow Towers. The gift shop at Trembellow was larger. It had table mats stamped with the Trembellow coat of arms. It had furry animals bought in from Harrods and books of poems about Nature and embroidered tea towels. And leading out of the gift shop at Trembellow was a tea room with proper waitresses and soft music playing.

No wonder people turned left at the Brampeth Crossroads and made their way to Trembellow instead of Clawstone. And it seemed so unfair, because the people who owned Trembellow did not need money; they only wanted it, which is not the same at all.

But she would catch up, Emily told herself; she would not give in to despair. She was always having good ideas. Only yesterday she had found some old balls of wool left in a disused linen bag which would knit up into mittens and gloves. The moths had been at some of them but there were plenty left.

Sir George, meanwhile, was opening up the rooms he had prepared to make things interesting for the visitors. He was a private sort of person and found it difficult to have people tramping through his house and making loud remarks, which were often rather rude, but once he had decided it had to be done, he worked hard to see that the people who came got value for their money.

So he had filled the billiard room with all sorts of things – his grandmother’s old sewing machine and a rocking horse with a broken leg and a box of stones he had found on the beach when he was a boy, and he had put a big notice on the door saying ‘Museum’.

Down in the cellar he had collected ancient contraptions which might well have been used as torture instruments – rusty mangles which pulled at the laundry maids’ arms as they turned the handle, and huge washtubs which they might have drowned in, and dangerous boilers which had to be heated with fires underneath that could easily have burned them to death. He had labelled the door ‘Dungeon’, and he had made an armoury too, into which he had put his rifle from the war and the bow and arrow he had had as a little boy and various pikes and halberds and axes he had found lying about.

But he too, as he tidied the exhibits and straightened the signs saying ‘Danger’ on those floorboards which had gone rotten, had to be careful not to feel discouraged and sad. For he knew that for every car which made its way to Clawstone, there would be ten cars at least going to Trembellow. And really he couldn’t wonder at it. Trembellow had a proper dungeon with throat manacles and racks on which people had been stretched and died in agony. Trembellow’s museum housed priceless rings; the weapons in the armoury had belonged to Charles the First. And the man who owned Trembellow was as rich as Sir George was poor.

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.