The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It would have been all right, thought Madlyn; she would have been able to hold Rollo back, but everything was against her. First of all Sir George came down to breakfast in his suit, which was only twenty years old, instead of in his thirty-year-old ginger tweeds, and said he was going to London.

He didn’t tell the children why he was going but he looked worried and preoccupied. The truth was that he had decided to go to the Ministry of Animal Health and find out more about the disease which had felled his cattle.

Then Aunt Emily, after staggering about bravely with her eyes half closed against the light, went to bed with one of her sick headaches.

‘You will be all right, won’t you?’ she said anxiously to Madlyn. ‘Mrs Grove will come up if you want her to.’

‘We’ll be perfectly all right,’ said Madlyn firmly.

The last bit of bad luck for Madlyn was that Mrs Grove, not knowing that Emily was laid up, took a local train to Berwick to visit her brother, who had left hospital and was staying with a friend.

Nothing could stop Rollo now.

‘We have to go to Blackscar. We have to see what’s happened.’ It was no good trying to get him to see sense; no good telling him that the animals that Hal had seen could have been any load of cattle going to any slaughterhouse in the country. He was like a zombie. ‘We have to go,’ he kept repeating. ‘We have to.’

‘How?’ said Madlyn angrily. ‘How do you think you can get to this Blackscar place. It’s over a hundred miles away, over the border.’

‘We can drive,’ said Rollo.

‘Oh we can, can we? And who’s going to drive us?’

‘I can drive,’ said Ned unexpectedly. ‘My uncle lets me drive his estate car in the park.’

Madlyn glared at him. Ned was usually on her side; she had learned to rely on him.

‘Oh yes? And you’ve got a licence, I suppose, at your age.’

Ned shrugged. ‘I didn’t say I had a licence. I said I could drive.’

‘And get arrested as soon as the first police car sees us. You’re mad.’

Rollo turned to Mr Smith.

‘You can drive,’ he said. ‘You must be able to. You were a taxi driver.’

‘I may have been a taxi driver once, but I’m a skeleton now,’ said Mr Smith.

‘But you could, if you had to, couldn’t you?’ Rollo went on.

The skeleton sighed, ‘You’ve no idea how much ectoplasmic force it takes to move things when you’ve passed on,’ he said. ‘Look at Brenda — she always has to rest after she’s strangled someone. It isn’t as though we’re poltergeists.’

‘No indeed, we are definitely not poltergeists,’ agreed Ranulf, sounding quite shocked. ‘Poltergeists are just vulgar bundles of force.’

‘And nasty bundles at that,’ said Brenda. ‘Bang, crash, thump! No skill. No care for other people.’

‘Well, then it’ll have to be Ned,’ said Rollo.

‘No!’ said Madlyn. ‘I won’t have Ned sent to prison or wherever they send children to. If I have to choose between being driven by a skeleton or an eleven-year-old boy, I’d rather it was a skeleton. But anyway, we haven’t got anything to drive in so there’s no point in arguing. Uncle George has taken his Bentley.’

‘There’s my uncle’s estate,’ said Ned. ‘He hasn’t used it since he came out of hospital. It’s old but it goes.’

In the end the skeleton and the boy took turns to drive the ancient, rattling car up to the Scottish border, towards the flat, low-lying eastern shore. Ned had filled the tank from the petrol pump in the farmyard and when Madlyn saw that she couldn’t stop them going, she knew she had to come too — and she packed a hamper of food and some warm clothes and their toothbrushes. If Rollo was killed by a cattle rustler at least he’d die with clean teeth.

They had waited till it was dark. Mr Smith wore his overcoat with the hood up and no one stopped him, but it was a nightmare journey. He’d been the safest of drivers when he was alive, but now his finger bones slipped on the steering wheel and his single eye gave him distorted vision. Nor was it any better when Ned drove: his legs were really too short to reach the pedals, and his gear changes made Mr Smith wince.

In the back, the ghosts sent out waves of ectoplasmic force to help but it wasn’t easy. Ranulf’s rat was gagging badly: rodents are good on ships but motor transport doesn’t agree with them. And being in a car always reminded Brenda of the drive to church for her wedding and made her weepy.

But somehow they did it. The journey, which should have taken two hours, took nearly four, but well before dawn they saw the outlines of the Lammermuir hills to the west. Their headlights caught fields of sheep, copses, an occasional farmhouse, but it was a bleak and empty landscape that they were coming to.

Then, still before sunrise, they reached the sea and saw before them a low dark shape in the water.

They had arrived.

The tide was high. They could hear the water lapping on the rocks. It would be several hours before they could hope to get across to the island. What they needed now was somewhere to sleep.

‘I’ve never seen such a lonely place,’ said Madlyn. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone living here at all.’

There was no sign of a village or even a farmhouse — but standing quite by itself on a spit of land was a church.

It was a very small church, and very simple, but solid and well built to withstand the winds from the sea. It was too dark to make out more than the outline: the squat tower, the arched windows. Surrounding it was a small graveyard. The building looked almost like the turf from which it sprang.

The children walked slowly up to the big wooden door.

‘It’ll be locked,’ said Ned. ‘They always are these days.

’ But it was not locked. The door drew back, creaking, and they were in the dim interior. A few brass plates reflected what little light there was, but the inside of the church was as simple as the outside. There was a row of pews with flat cushions; the windows were filled with plain glass.

‘Could we sleep here?’ wondered Madlyn. ‘Or would it be disrespectful to God?’

‘People have always sheltered in churches,’ said Ned. ‘It’s called seeking sanctuary.’

‘Yes, I know, people… but ghosts?’

‘It should be all right if they haven’t been wicked.’

But they weren’t sure. Sinners are always welcome in a church or any House of God as long as they have repented — but what if they haven’t? It would be so embarrassing if there were thunderclaps or bolts from heaven when their friends tried to come in.

‘We’ll stay outside,’ said Ranulf. ‘Ghosts can rest anywhere.’

But the children felt it would be rude to go inside and leave their companions out in the cold.

So Ranulf glided across the porch and into the church and there were absolutely no thunderbolts of any kind. Obviously Ranulf had not been wicked and nor had the rat. (Gnawing is not wicked if you are a rat because gnawing is what rats do.) Mr Smith too passed peacefully into the church, and so did Sunita.

They were a bit worried about Brenda, because she had broken her promise to Roderick when she married the boot manufacturer, but breaking promises, though bad, is so common that it isn’t really a sin and she got in too and flopped down on a pew.

Then Sunita turned to The Feet, which were standing outside on the porch.

‘Come along, dears,’ she said to them.

But The Feet didn’t come along, even for Sunita. The Feet absolutely wouldn’t enter the church; they wouldn’t even try. They turned away firmly and the children could just make out the heels disappearing in the direction of a tombstone before the darkness swallowed them completely.

‘Oh well,’ said Madlyn. ‘Perhaps they just want to be alone.’

They were all too tired to argue, and one by one they stretched out on the pews and went to sleep.

And while they slept, the water receded and Blackscar began to lift itself out of the morning mist.

It was called Blackscar Island but it was only an island part of the time. The causeway built across the sands could carry cars and people from the mainland, but it was only passable at low tide and for a few hours on either side of it. At high tide Blackscar was as complete an island as any in the North Sea.

Because of this there had been talk among seafarers in the olden days of people, or flocks of sheep, walking on the water… and miracles — but they were walking on the submerged causeway. And anyone who set off later than the time shown on the noticeboards on either side of the causeway risked drowning. There was a list of those who had perished in this way in the church, and to prevent further accidents a kind of wooden hut on stilts had been built halfway across, with a ladder leading up to it, where foolish travellers could take refuge till the tide turned again. It was called the Blackscar Box and was not at all a comfortable place in which to spend the night.

The coast near Blackscar is bleak: flat and muddy with reeds and sandbanks — the island stretches a drear arm out into the grey water. All the same, years earlier a property developer had decided to build a luxury hotel on it. He thought people might be excited by the difficulty of getting across to the island, and by the loneliness.

The hotel he built was very grand: it had towers and turrets, and glassed verandas attached to each of the bedrooms. It had a palm court, where visiting orchestras could play, and three lounges, and the bathrooms had shell-shaped baths with gold-plated taps.

And at first people did come and the hotel did good business.

But the weather was terrible: fogs and wind and endlessly grey skies. The birds whose sad cries kept the visitors awake were not the kind that rich people liked to shoot, and the fish were just… fish — not the sort you could be photographed with when you had caught them. Who wants to be photographed with a herring?

And then a very important visitor ignored the noticeboard telling him the times of the high tide, and was drowned in his expensive motor car, and fewer and fewer visitors came, and the hotel went bankrupt.

The hotel stayed empty for nearly ten years. Then a very important doctor from London came and bought it — and with the hotel went the whole island: the fields and the marshes and the foreshore.

The name of the doctor was Maurice Manners and he was a man with a dream.

Dr Manners moved into the main part of the hotel — in fact he made it even grander — but the part where the servants used to sleep he turned into workshops and offices. He built wooden huts on the far side of the hotel and large sheds, and he fenced off paddocks, and he brought in like-minded people to help him with his business.

But exactly what his business was, no one knew, because visitors were not welcome at Blackscar. Dr Manners needed peace and solitude for his work, and for a long time now only those who had been specially invited made the crossing to the island.

Rollo woke first, and came out of the chapel to see the silver ribbon of the sea-washed road disappearing into the morning mist.

He would have set off then and there but Madlyn made them all eat some bread and butter and wash as best they could under the tap they found in the vestry. They had parked the car behind the church; with luck no one had seen it from the island, and they could make their way across on foot without being noticed.

‘We’ve got to hurry,’ Rollo kept saying, ‘before everybody wakes up.’

The ghosts meant to come with them but they were having trouble with The Feet. The Feet had spent the night on a moss-covered tombstone at the edge of the churchyard. It didn’t seem to be so different from any of the other tombstones — slightly crooked, with crumbling stonework and a name carved into it which was difficult to read. The name on this particular tombstone was ISH, which was unusual, but this was the place where The Feet wanted to be, and when it was time to set off for the island they refused to move.

Even Sunita couldn’t make them come away. When she called them, The Feet would take a few steps towards her and then they would sort of fall in on themselves, the toes curled under, and, even in the cold of early morning, a sweat broke out on their skin.

‘We’ll catch you up,’ said Ranulf, and the children scrambled down on to the sands and set off along the causeway.

It was easy to believe that only an hour earlier the road that they walked on had been under water; there were still puddles between the uneven stones. On either side of them, on the sands, waders and oystercatchers were looking for shellfish left in the shallow pools. The receding water sucked and eddied round the wooden piles.

Halfway across, they passed the ladder leading to the Blackscar Box; but they kept steadily on. They could only hope that the mist was hiding them from the windows of the hotel. Fortunately the hotel had been built so as to face away from the mainland, with most of the windows looking out on the open sea.

When they reached the island itself they left the causeway and dropped down on to the foreshore, seeking the shelter of the dunes, crawling through the marram-grass and between hummocks of sand.

So far they had met nobody.

Every so often they made their way to the top of a dune and looked out on the interior of the island. They could make out the ornate building of the hotel, a row of wooden huts and a big windowless building almost the size of an aircraft hangar.

They had come to a small bay with a wooden jetty. The water here was deep and would provide good anchorage for seagoing boats, but there were no boats to be seen. Running across the gravelly sand, they found that the foreshore on the far side of the bay had levelled out; the dunes were less steep. An upturned rowing boat gave them a hiding place from which to watch.

Smoke was coming out of the chimney of one of the huts, but still nobody seemed to be about.

And then they heard a sound that stopped them dead in their tracks. A low mooing, followed by silence. Then the same sound, repeated.

There was no holding Rollo back now; the others did not even try. He broke cover and raced across the turf towards the noise they had heard, and they went with him.

They came to a high wooden fence, topped by an electric wire. Running round the fence, they reached a gate through which they could see into the paddock.

And in the paddock was a herd of cattle.

The three children stood absolutely still. Oddly, it was Madlyn, not Rollo, who had to blink back tears. Rollo’s disappointment was so great that he could only stare in silence, holding on to the wooden bars of the gate.

For while it was true that the field was full of cattle — cows and bulls and calves — these were not the Wild White Cattle of Clawstone that they had come so far to seek. The pelts of these beasts did not take the light; their hides were dull and lifeless. There was hay in the paddock, and troughs of water, but the animals were not feeding. They lay listlessly, like dark hummocks, on the trampled grass.

And they were brown. Every single animal was a dark and uniform brown.

The children stood there, completely winded. They had come all this way for nothing. Ned was the first to pull himself together.

‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said. ‘We’d better get out before we’re caught.’

But Rollo did not move. He was staring at the beasts and breathing hard.

No,’ he said. ‘Wait.’ And then: ‘Look — look at that calf over by the trough.’

‘What about it?’ said Madlyn.

‘Look at the way it’s butting its head. And over there — the old cow up against the fence. Look at her horn.’

The others looked, but at first they did not understand.

‘Look at her horn,’ repeated Rollo.

‘It’s crumpled,’ said Madlyn under her breath.

Then the great bull, who had been lying down, half hidden by the other beasts, got suddenly to his feet and now they all saw what Rollo saw. For, brown or not, this was the great king bull of Clawstone.

The ghosts had caught up now, and above them they heard Sunita’s voice.

‘What have they done?’ she breathed in horror.

It was now that they remembered the nozzle of the spray-gun in the gravel pit. The cows must have been to the pit, then, and sprayed… but why? So that they could be stolen and carried off to another part of the country? Stolen from the vets who were going to bury them, so that they could be sold perhaps for slaughter in some place where people did not care whether the animals were infected or not?

Why should anyone disguise the cows unless they were doing something illegal, and meant them harm?

But Madlyn had had enough.

‘We’re going to go back now and tell Uncle George and the police about this. And quickly.’

They turned and ran back, dropping down on to the sands again, trudging through piles of seaweed, skirting the rock pools. The wind was freshening, blowing from the north. They crossed the bay with the jetty safely; they were nearly there. It was only a short run across the beach to the causeway.

‘Stop!’

The voice was deep, foreign. Barring the way was a man wearing baggy trousers and an embroidered tunic. His face was sunburned, he had a large curving moustache and he carried a pitchfork. For a moment the children thought they might be able to run for it — but now a second man, with an even larger moustache and even baggier trousers, appeared from behind a bush, armed with a heavy stick. They did not look like the kind of people from whom it would be easy to escape.

‘You come with us,’ said the first man. ‘Now. Quick. The boss, he waits.’

And the children were led away.