The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER ONE

There are children whose best friends have two legs, and there are children whose best friends have four — or a thousand, or none at all.

Madlyn was very fond of people. Ordinary, two-legged people. She liked the girls at her school and in her dancing class, and she liked the people she met at the swimming pool and in the supermarket and the library. When you like people they usually like you back, and Madlyn had so many invitations to parties and sleep-overs that if she had accepted them all she would never have had a night at home. She was very pretty, with silky fair hair and clear blue eyes and a deep laugh — the kind that infects other people and makes them think that being alive is a thoroughly good idea.

Rollo, her brother, who was two years younger, was quite different. He did not mind people, but his truest friends lived under stones or in the rafters of the local church or in heaps of earth in the park, and if he was writing a birthday card it was more likely to be addressed to his stump-tailed skink than to a boy in his class.

The skink didn’t exactly belong to him — it lived in London Zoo — but he had adopted it. The zoo runs a very good scheme whereby children can choose an animal to adopt and when he was six years old his parents had taken him to the zoo to choose something he liked.

The cuddly animals like the wombats and bush-babies and fluffy possums all had waiting lists of children wanting to adopt them, but Rollo had always liked lizards and as soon as he met Stumpy’s eyes and saw his berry-blue tongue flicker out he knew the creature was for him.

The children lived in a ground-floor flat in a pleasant part of south London. Their parents were funny and clever and nice, but they were apt to be a little bit frantic because of their jobs. Mrs Hamilton ran an experimental theatre which put on interesting plays but kept on running out of money, and Mr Hamilton was a designer and had to have good ideas about what people should do with their houses.

Both of them worked long hours and never knew when they were going to be home and, when Rollo was a baby and Madlyn had just started school, life had been rather a muddle. But as Madlyn grew older everything became easier. Though she loved parties and clothes and going out with her friends, she was a sensible and practical girl and soon she began to take a hand in the running of her home. She left notes for her mother, reminding her to pick up Rollo’s coat from the cleaners and make an appointment with the dentist; she rang her father at the office and told his secretary that a man from Hong Kong had come to see him and was eating doughnuts in the kitchen. And almost every morning she found the car keys, which her parents had lost.

Most of all, she saw to it that Rollo had what he needed, which was not always the same as what other boys needed. She soothed him when stupid people asked after his skunk instead of his skink; she stopped the cleaning lady from throwing away the snails he kept in a jar under his bed, and when he had a nightmare she was beside him almost as soon as he woke. It wasn’t that she loved him — she did, of course — but it was more than that. It was as though she was able to get right inside his skin. As for Rollo, when he came in through the front door he looked first of all for Madlyn and if she was there he gave a little sigh of content and went off to his room to get on with his life.

When everything is going along normally it is hard to imagine why there should be a change. But at the beginning of the summer term when Madlyn was eleven an offer came from an American college inviting Mr Hamilton to spend two months in New York setting up a course for people who wanted to start their own design business. There was a room in the college for him and his wife, but nothing at all was said about the children.

‘We can’t possibly leave them,’ said Mr Hamilton.

‘And we can’t possibly take them along,’ said Mrs Hamilton.

‘So we’ll have to refuse.’

‘Yes.’

But the Americans had offered a lot of money and the car was making terrible noises and bills were dropping through the letter box in droves.

‘Unless we send them to the country. They ought to be in the country,’ said Mrs Hamilton. ‘It’s where children ought to be.’

‘But where?’ asked her husband. ‘Where in the country? Where would we send them for two whole months?’

‘Up to the Scottish border. To Clawstone. To Uncle George at Clawstone Castle. I’ve always meant to take them there but…’

By ‘but’ she meant that Uncle George lived in the bleakest and coldest part of England and was a thoroughly grumpy old man.

‘We’ll see what Madlyn thinks,’ said her father.

Madlyn, when they put it to her, knew exactly what she thought. She thought, no. She had four parties to go to, the school was planning a visit to the ballet and she had been chosen to play Alice in the end-of-term production of Alice in Wonderland. What’s more, from what she had overheard, she was sure that Uncle George’s castle was not the kind that appeared in cartoon films, with gleaming towers and princes, but the other kind — the kind one learned about in History lessons, with things like mottes and baileys and probably rats.

‘It would mean wearing wellington boots all day,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t got any.’

Rollo was lying on the floor, drawing a picture of a Malayan tapir which lived near his skink in the zoo. Now he looked up and said, ‘I have. I’ve got welling-ton boots.’

Mr and Mrs Hamilton said nothing. The Americans were offering enough money to enable them to fix the car and pay every single bill in the house when they got back. All the same, they stayed silent.

The silence was a long one.

But Madlyn was a good person, the kind that wanted other people to be happy. Being good like that is bad luck, but there is nothing to be done.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Madlyn at last. ‘But I want proper boots, green ones, and a real oilskin and sou’wester, and an Aran knit sweater, and an electric torch with three different colours…’

She was a person who could always be cheered up by a serious bout of shopping.