The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

If Cousin Howard was trying to find out what a Hoggart was, that was all that he was doing. He still hurried away from the children; he didn’t come down to meals; he never spoke. His room and his library seemed to be the whole of his world.

Rollo was also helping, but in his own way. He had found places in the gardens and grounds where if you sat quietly things came and looked at you. Red squirrels and voles and sometimes a vixen with her cubs. There was a badger’s sett by the stream and under the stones in the shrubbery a whole fascinating world of beetles and centipedes as fierce as they were tiny.

What he liked particularly about Clawstone was that there wasn’t much difference between the outside and the inside of the castle. In London you had to go out of doors to see animals, but here there were mice in the sofa cushions and owl pellets in the attics and hedgehogs in the scullery clanking about and looking for their saucers of milk. And though he knew that animals were best left where they were, Rollo made an exhibit for the museum which he thought would interest the visitors. It was a shoebox stuffed with poplar twigs in which hawk-moth caterpillars crawled about, chomping the leaves.

The children had arrived on a Monday and, though the next Open Day was not until the following Saturday, Madlyn could see how hard everyone was preparing for it. It wasn’t just the lavender bags and the scones; the rooms had to be cleaned and the notices put up and the car park checked for potholes and the cobwebs swept out of the toilets. Uncle George and Aunt Emily did a lot of this, but they would have been lost without Mrs Grove.

And Mrs Grove had an unpaid helper. She had Ned.

Madlyn had heard the sound of someone hoovering often in the first days, but when she went to investigate the noise stopped and there was no one to be seen.

She put up with this as long as she could. Then on the third day she decided she had had enough.

‘I know you’re there,’ she yelled from the bottom of the stairs, ‘and I think you’re rude and horrible and unfriendly to keep hiding.’

For a while the noise of the machine went on. Then it stopped and a boy came down the stairs towards her. He had very blue eyes and bright ginger hair, and Madlyn knew at once that it was going to be all right, that she had found a friend. All the same, she decided to be offended for a little longer.

‘Hiding from people is hurtful,’ she said sternly.

Ned came down the last of the steps till he was level with her.

‘I didn’t know what you were going to be like. You could have been like the Honourable Olive.’

‘Who’s the Honourable Olive?’

‘She’s an awful girl. Horrible. She lives at Trembellow and she looks like a pickle, all sour and vinegary – but snobby with it.’

‘Well, I’m not snobby and I’m not a pickle.’

‘No,’ said Ned. He had never seen a less pickled-looking girl.

‘Why is she the Honourable Olive?’

‘Her father’s a lord. He didn’t used to be – he used to be just an ordinary bloke, but he made all those traffic cones they have on motorways to tell people they can’t go there. He made millions of them and he got very rich and they made him a lord and he bought Trembellow Towers.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Even in the few days she had been at Clawstone, Madlyn had heard about Trembellow Towers.

‘You could come to my house this afternoon if you like,’ said Ned. ‘There’s a programme about whales for your brother. And you could email your parents if you wanted to.’

Madlyn’s face lit up. If there was one thing she wanted more than any other it was to make contact with her parents, and she knew that she’d been right about Ned. He was going to be a true and proper friend.

The children felt at home straight away in Mrs Grove’s bungalow. It was a small modern house, with just three rooms and a tiny garden, and it was marvellously warm and clean and comfortable. The TV chuntered away to itself quietly in the corner, there were geraniums on the window sill and from the kitchen came the smell of unburned scones and flapjacks baking in the oven.

Mrs Grove’s husband had been killed two years earlier, when a drunken lout in a Jaguar had run into his delivery van, but if she was sad she kept the sadness inside – and she still had Ned.

While Rollo settled himself down in front of the whales, Ned took Madlyn off to his room and sent a message to New York, and they were lucky: by the time they had finished tea there was a reply saying all was well.

When they got back to the castle they found Aunt Emily riddling the kitchen range. There was a smudge of soot on her nose and her hair was coming down.

‘Isn’t it the dearest little house?’ she said wistfully when they told her about their afternoon. ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a house like that. No stairs and you just turn a knob and the fire comes on.’

‘Well, couldn’t you, Aunt Emily?’ asked Madlyn. ‘Do you have to go on living here?’

Aunt Emily sighed. ‘I’m afraid we do,’ she said. She rubbed her nose, spreading the soot a little further. ‘One has to do one’s duty.’