The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was a terrible moment.

‘Oh, the poor man; how dreadful,’ said Aunt Emily, running out of her room. ‘What if he gets concussion?’

‘What if he sues us?’ said Sir George. ‘We’d be ruined.’

While they waited for the ambulance, and Mrs Grove let out the other visitors, every kind of dreadful thought ran through the heads of the people in the castle. If the Major was seriously hurt they would never dare to let in visitors again. It looked as though, after all their hard work, the first Open-Day-with-Ghosts had ended in disaster.

The ghosts, of course, started to blame themselves.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have strangled him so hard,’ said Brenda, and Mr Smith was worried that he had stuck the wrong hand out of the oak chest.

‘It sometimes bothers people, seeing those slivers of muscle on the bone. Slivers can be very unsettling.’

By the time the ambulance men came with a stretcher, Major Hardbottock had come round, but they insisted on taking him to hospital for scans and a check-up.

‘You never know with head injuries,’ said the first man, looking solemn.

‘I don’t like the look of his eyes,’ said the second.

So the Major was driven away, and in the castle they settled down anxiously to wait for news.

Sir George rang the hospital in the early afternoon, and again an hour later, and then once more, but no one could tell him anything. The Major was still having tests.

‘If they’ve found something serious I shall never forgive myself,’ said Aunt Emily.

Supper was a silent and a gloomy meal. But just as they were clearing it away, Ned came running in from the village to tell them what he had seen on the seven o’clock news.

‘He was sitting up in bed — the Major — surrounded by journalists and telling them about this amazing castle he had seen absolutely chock-full of ghosts.’

And sure enough, the following morning what the Major had said was in all the newspapers, with a big picture of him and a smaller, smudgy one of Clawstone.

The day after that, the Major gave a lecture. But it was not the one he usually gave called ‘My Journey to the North Pole,’ and it was not the one called ‘My Travels in the Sahara’. It was called ‘My Adventures in the Most Haunted House in Britain.’

So, within a very few days, the number of visitors to Clawstone doubled and then trebled and then quadrupled. People came with troublesome children, hoping they would be frightened into good behaviour; groups of youths abandoned their computer games to come to Clawstone; and parties arrived from bowling clubs and cricket associations and unions of transport workers and cheesemakers and dentists.

What’s more, the first visitors, who had left screaming, came back, bringing their friends. The hikers who had been nearly throttled by Brenda brought their companions from the Ramblers’ Club; the professor came with a batch of students; the little girls persuaded their teacher to bring the whole class — and old Mrs Field brought her physiotherapist.

‘I can’t understand it,’ said poor Aunt Emily. ‘Do you think people like being frightened?’

They increased the number of Open Days to two a week, and then three; they could have filled the castle every day, but they didn’t because they didn’t want to exhaust the ghosts.

‘They work so hard,’ said Madlyn, ‘it wouldn’t be fair.’

The Feet had danced so energetically that they had developed ectoplasmic blisters on their big toes, and in between haunting they just crept into the Wendy house and slept and slept and slept.

‘I wish there was something we could do for them,’ said Rollo.

‘Maybe we could wash them — they’re always washing people’s feet in the Bible,’ said Madlyn.

But no one knew quite how to do this and anyway it seemed rather rude, so they left it. They had become very fond of The Feet. Having them was rather like having a dog who understood much more than people realized.

Knowing how useful they had been made the phantoms really happy. After years of wandering they felt they had come home.

Being happy is good for people’s health and this is as true of ghosts as of anyone. The rat became quieter; often it did not gnaw for hours at a time. Brenda shrieked less, and once, as they sat on the wall looking down on the park, she admitted that perhaps she had been a little unkind to Roderick, the man who had shot her.

‘He was away in the war, you see, in Burma, and my mother said I must marry someone rich, so I accepted this man who made boots for the army.’

After the first week, Cousin Howard bicycled off to Greenwood to thank Mrs Lee-Perry and the ghosts at the Thursday Gatherings for their help, and they said it had been a pleasure.

‘It’s wonderful to know that dear George’s cows will now be safe,’ said Fifi Fenwick.

Because that, of course, was the point of it all. As the money came in — more and more of it — work began at once on the park. The walls were mended, the stream was dredged, the dead wood was cleared from the copses. Sir George walked with a spring in his step, and when cattle experts came from other countries he showed them round with pride.

‘You’ll see, my boy,’ he said to Rollo, ‘we’ll have the finest herd in the world.’

‘We have the finest herd now,’ said Rollo.

Both George and Emily thanked the children most sincerely for what they had done and asked them if there was anything they wanted for themselves, but there wasn’t; at least, not anything you could buy. Madlyn wanted her parents to come back and Rollo wanted to adopt a Siberian tiger in the zoo, but there was a waiting list.

‘But I think you ought to buy yourself a new skirt,’ said Madlyn to Aunt Emily.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, dear. I simply couldn’t,’ said Aunt Emily, looking shocked and worried. ‘I’ve settled into this skirt; I wouldn’t want to break in a new one, not at my age.’

But in the park the cattle lifted their heads proudly as if they knew that their future was secure. When Rollo went out now with the warden, Ned’s uncle, in the trailer, he could identify all the animals. The two calves, who were friends and slept with their heads resting on each other’s backs; the cow with the extra-long eyelashes, who stood for hours in the stream cooling her feet; the bullock who refused to fight but dozed the day away under his favourite willow tree …

Then one day Sir George came down from the roof with his telescope.

‘There are more cars coming here than are going to Trembellow Towers,’ he said.

He tried hard not to look pleased but he did not succeed. He looked very pleased indeed.