The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER FIVE

On the Saturday when Madlyn first helped to sell tickets for Open Day, exactly twelve people came to look over Clawstone Castle.

And on the same Saturday, the number of people who went to visit Trembellow Towers, just twelve kilo-metres away, was three hundred and four.

Not that Lord Trembellow had to count heads the way they did at Clawstone. He had set up an electric turnstile at the entrance to the house, which relayed the number of visitors directly to his office. Trembellow might be his home but he ran it as a business.

He ran everything as a business; his home, his wife and children and, of course, the firms he owned: the cone manufacturing factory, the road haulage business, the quarries and the gravel pits. There was hardly an hour in the day or night when one of his lorries was not roaring up and down the roads of Britain, or one of his shovellers was not digging into a hillside or one of his cement mixers was not helping to spew out concrete.

Lord Trembellow had been born Arthur Ackerly in Newcastle upon Tyne. His father worked on the coal barges which plied up and down the Tyne; there had been seven children to feed, and Arthur had done wonderfully well, so if he was pleased with himself — and he certainly was — no one could blame him.

When he bought Trembellow Towers, he was determined that it should be the most outstanding, the largest and the most visited castle in Britain. It was not an old building like Clawstone; it looked in fact as though the hill it stood on had come out in enormous, red brick boils. Even so, it was not large enough or showy enough for Lord Trembellow. He added two towers to the ones that were already there and dug a moat and built a drawbridge. He had battlements put on the roof and built a minstrels’ gallery and enlarged the banqueting hall.

The museum at Trembellow did not exhibit stuffed ducks that had choked on sticklebacks or gas-mask cases left over from the war. It showed priceless swords and body armour and jewelled saddles. The visitors who came to Trembellow thought, of course, that these things had belonged to the family for generations, but actually Lord Trembellow’s grown-up son Neville, who lived in London and was a banker, had bought them at antiques auctions. Neville had bought pictures of the ancestors that hung in the dining room too. They were nothing whatever to do with the Trembellows, but one ancestor is much like another and nobody guessed.

Visitors to Trembellow did not have to stumble round the castle on their own as they did at Clawstone. They had proper guides who made little speeches in each of the rooms. There was piped music in the tea rooms and everything sold in the gift shop was stamped with the Trembellow crest. You can buy a coat of arms from the College of Heralds when you become a lord and Lord Trembellow had done just that.

‘Well, my little sugar plum,’ he said now, coming into the dining room for his lunch, ‘we’ve beaten our record. Three hundred and four visitors!’

His ‘little sugar plum’ was his ten-year-old daughter Olive, and it was hard to imagine anyone less sugary or less like a plum. Her skin was sallow, she was thin with a pursed mouth and small black eyes, and the inside of her brain might have been a calculator.

‘We shall do even better next Saturday,’ she said now.

Olive was a great comfort to her father. She was small but she did not look young; she looked like a shrunken company director, carried a briefcase even in the house and was so clever that she could almost have taken over the family business then and there.

‘I’ve had trouble with one of the waitresses in the tea room,’ said Lady Trembellow, sighing. ‘She spilled tea on a woman’s lap.’

‘Well, sack her for goodness’ sake, Phyllis. You’re far too soft,’ said her husband.

And Olive said, ‘Yes, mother, you’re far too soft. Neville says so too.’

‘I suppose I am,’ said Lady Trembellow sadly.

She had been very happy in the small semi in Newcastle in which she and Arthur had first lived, and happy in the detached house in the suburbs to which they moved next, but as the houses they lived in grew larger she did not feel happier. She tried very hard to keep up with her husband, who wanted her to be young and thin, and every so often, just to please him, she went off to London to see a fashionable doctor who made women more beautiful. Lady Trembellow knew that plastic surgeons had done wonderful things in the war, repairing the horrific wounds that servicemen had suffered, so she trusted this doctor completely and did everything he suggested. She had a facelift and she had some fat removed from her thighs and a tuck put in her tummy — but she did not feel younger or more beautiful. She felt as though everything was very tight.

‘I’m sure we’ll be up to three hundred and fifty visitors by the end of the month,’ said Olive. ‘And the Clawstone visitors will be down to ten… and then five… and then nobody!’

‘That’s right, my little pigeon,’ said her fond father. ‘We’ll put that ramshackle place completely out of business. And that’ll be the end of the Percivals and their stupid cattle… They can send the cows to be slaughtered and we’ll throw them out and take over.’

He rubbed his hands. When he first moved to Trembellow he had opened his house to the public because he wanted to show off his wealth and his possessions, and beating Sir George was good sport.

But since then he and his son Neville had come up with an excellent idea. The grounds of Clawstone Castle would make a perfect building site for a new housing estate. Nothing fancy — just two hundred or so houses close together and a supermarket and a garage.

Clawstone was twelve kilometres away, so one wouldn’t see the new development from the windows at Trembellow; there was a hill in the way and a wood. There was no danger that he or his family would have to look at rows of houses lived in by people who wouldn’t know how to make their gardens nice — if indeed there was room for gardens, which there probably wouldn’t be.

He had done the sums: two hundred houses would bring in a cool ten million pounds.

But first he had to turn out Sir George — and of course the blasted cattle they made such a fuss about. And that meant ruining the Percivals and driving them away from Clawstone. That the best building land in Britain should be grazed over by cows was ridiculous. It was an outrage. Something would have to be done, Lord Trembellow told himself — and he was the man to do it.