The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

Carlos had not been a healthy child. His muscles were so weak that a servant used to go upstairs behind him and help to push his leg up to the next tread, and he had mostly been fed on slops – semolina pudding and lentil soups and things of that sort, because solid food gave him a stomach ache.

Prince Carlos’s mother had died when he was a baby, and after that his father had married five more times, choosing women from all over the world. Having five stepmothers had made little Carlos very worried and unhappy – there wasn’t one among them who had loved him or been kind – and when Carlos’s father had divorced them they had gone off in a huff, with their jewels and their money, and the little boy had never seen them again.

But there was one person in the child’s life who never went away, and that was his nurse, Nadia.

Nadia had come to Barama from a long way away – from the border of Russia and China. By the time she came to Barama the little prince was so unhealthy and spoilt and sad that he couldn’t get to sleep at night and lay in his canopied bed in his vast bedroom, staring at the ceiling and imagining devils and ghouls armed to the teeth who would fly down and cut his throat.

Nadia was sorry for the frightened little boy whom nobody loved, and she sat by his bed, night after night, and told him stories.

The stories Nadia told were the ones she had been told in her own faraway country. They were stories about mythical beasts – good kind beasts who helped travellers and comforted wayfarers. She told him about griffins and dragons and horses with wings. She told him about dogs that could speak and golden cockerels and kindly snakes that wound themselves round children and kept them from harm – and she told him about one beast in particular, a beast which her people loved more than any other in the world. And when she sat beside little Carlos and spoke in her soft, low voice, he could sleep.

Then came the day when Carlos’s father was drowned, diving off his latest yacht, and Carlos became the ruler of Barama.

He could now do anything he liked, but the trouble was he didn’t know what he did like. His five stepmothers had put him off women and his indigestion put him off food and there wasn’t really any work to do governing his country because his ministers did it perfectly well.

For a while he drifted sadly through his palaces, and sat gloomily in his Turkish baths and bought a large number of dressing gowns with gold tassels which he stumbled over.

But one day as he was staring miserably out of the window, he had a vision. He would make a great garden – a paradise garden – and he would fill it with rare trees and with beautiful flowers and animals that you could see nowhere else: with the animals that Nadia had told him about in her stories. And above all with the beast she had said was the most beautiful and gentle and powerful of all – the beast which her people had loved more than any other in the world.

If he could get this amazing, swift and gentle creature for his paradise garden he thought he would be a happy man. So he called together his advisors and his courtiers and his ministers and told them what he wanted.

‘Only I don’t just want one,’ he said. ‘The Kings of Barama never have one of anything. I want a whole herd.’

So his advisors began to look for somebody who could get the King what he wanted, and after a long search they found Dr Maurice Manners of the Blackscar Animal Centre in Great Britain.

When Dr Manners heard what the King of Barama wanted, he hesitated. It was the biggest order he had ever had and there were all sorts of technical difficulties – but when he learnt that the King was offering five million pounds, he stopped hesitating quite quickly and tried to think what could be done.

Manners had come to Blackscar after a series of unfortunate accidents to the ladies he had operated on so as to make them more beautiful. There was a tummy tuck which had gone septic and a nose job which had ended up behind the patient’s ears, and, instead of standing by him and protecting him, his fellow doctors had said he was a disgrace to the profession and he was not allowed to be a doctor any more.

Some people would have been so hurt that they would have given up, but not Dr Manners. He had met up with a brilliant vet called Dr Fangster, who was bored with simply making animals better and had worked out all sorts of interesting experiments, like joining one animal’s lungs to another animal’s heart and then to a third animal’s stomach, and together they had come up with the idea for the Blackscar Centre.