The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

But they knew really. When a great wrong has been done to someone, it has to be put right. There isn’t really any doubt about that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The last thing the children had wanted was to spend another night in the chapel.

‘We must get back quickly,’ said Madlyn. ‘They’ll be so worried about us.

’ But how?

They had come up to Blackscar in the warden’s car in a panic and in the night. Now they couldn’t believe they’d had the nerve to do it.

‘I’m worried about the clutch,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I don’t want to do any more damage.

’ But the matter was settled for them, because when they tried to start the engine nothing happened.

‘The battery’s flat,’ said Ned gloomily. ‘We’ll have to walk to the next village and get a bus, and then a train.’

Madlyn had taken some money from the Open Day tin before they left; there would probably be enough to take them some of the way at least, and when they were clear of the island they could phone Sir George.

There was a timetable tacked to the noticeboard in the church porch, and a map. There was one bus a day from a village called Seaforth three miles away, but they had missed it.

The ghosts were not sorry to have another night to rest. They had felt unwell and uncomfortable in the hotel. Perhaps it was the central heating, or Dr Manners’s toilet water, but Brenda said she had a headache and Ranulf’s rat was off his food. Not that Ranulf wanted to have his heart chewed exactly, but when you are used to something you are used to it.

But the real nuisance was The Feet. They had had to pick up The Feet by force and carry them to the island, and as soon as they got back they had run off to the tombstone labelled ISH again and dug their toes into the moss and refused to move.

They would have been angry at such bad behaviour except that The Feet were so worried and distressed. Every time they were told to come away from the tombstone, drops of sweat broke out all over their skin.

‘If it is sweat,’ said Rollo. ‘Perhaps it’s tears.’

The thought that The Feet were crying was of course very upsetting. ‘But we can’t just leave them here,’ said Sunita.

So all in all the ghosts were very glad to rest for another night.

And while they slept a boat chugged quietly into Blackscar bay and tied up at the jetty.

It was a forty-foot trawler, scruffy and battered, with knotted pine planking. It could have been any fishing boat, but fixed to the forward deck was a large harpoon gun.

The boat was a whaler and it was flying the Norwegian flag.

No one was up yet; it would be dark for at least another two hours. The sailors – rough-looking men – turned in to their bunks. Presently they would unload the cargo they had brought, but now they slept.

The Feet felt the slight vibration of the trawler’s engine as they lay under the tombstone, but they did not move. But Rollo heard the noise of the engine and woke... and crept out of the church and climbed up the grassy hill that gave a view over the whole island. The boat had come in, just as Dr Manners had said, to take the cattle to the promised land. He watched for a while; then, as the light grew stronger, he took out Uncle George’s binoculars.

It was a very small boat to transport a whole herd of cattle. It was really very small.

And something nagged at the back of his mind. Something about one of the men he had seen out of the window in Dr Manners’s room – a man he thought he had seen before...

The Mundanians were in their wooden hut, eating their breakfast of beans and fermented goat curd.

There were eight of them: a very old woman with a single gold tooth, a younger, buxom one, and six men, all living in a space the size of a caravan. The huts on either side of them housed chickens.

They looked tired, and the day that faced them would be as hard as all the others. Cleaning out the animal houses, incinerating the waste matter, humping heavy loads to and from the workshops... and other things that they tried not to think about.

Today there was an extra job – unloading the cargo which the whaler had brought.

The hut was bare and cold; the Mundanians could not afford proper heating and their food was what they could scrape from the soil. They were so poor that they could buy nothing, and in any case they were forbidden to go to the mainland.

Dr Manners had not been lying when he said that the Mundanians came from a very beautiful country high in the mountains of central Europe, and that they were of proud and ancient stock. But the Mundanians had not come to Blackscar because they had heard of Manners’s missionary work; they had never even heard of Blackscar. What had happened was that two years earlier a cruel dictator from a neighbouring country had conquered Mundania and started a reign of terror. He had forbidden the Mundanians to speak their language or have their own schools or practise their own religion, and when anyone protested they were imprisoned or killed.