The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (20 page)

But the real trouble was Ranulf. Ranulf in a way had been the leader of the ghosts, the one that spoke for them. Without the rat he became a slightly fatter ghost, and quieter.

‘You’re pleased, though, aren’t you?’ people would ask.

‘Of course I’m pleased,’ he would snap. ‘What do you think?’

But he was very grumpy all the same – and of course the horror of Ranulf opening his shirt had been very much part of the haunting. When a ghost opens his shirt and shows people a rat gnawing his heart it is one thing. When he opens his shirt and shows them an ordinary chest with a few hairs on it, it is another.

Then there were The Feet. They had forced The Feet to come back with them, but they were damp all the time and no one doubted that it was tears rather than sweat that they were producing. Nor was there any chance that they would be much use on Open Days. Ned had put on the CD of eightsome reels, and one toe had twitched slightly but that was all.

‘I could go back to making lavender bags,’ said Aunt Emily, but Madlyn said quickly that she thought this would be bad for Aunt Emily’s eyes and they would think of some other way of getting hold of money.

And then something quite unexpected happened.

An American who was on holiday in Great Britain stopped his car outside Clawstone and asked if it would be possible to look round. He was very interested in old buildings, he said, and though he knew it was not an Open Day he would be so pleased.

Because he had asked so nicely and seemed such a friendly man, Sir George agreed, and he asked the children if they would show him round.

The American liked the dungeon and the armoury and the banqueting hall – and then they showed him the museum, where he admired the sewing machine and the stuffed duck that had choked on a stickleback and the collection of Interesting Stones.

And then he stopped in front of the Hoggart.

‘My, my!’ he said. ‘But that’s amazing. That’s extraordinary.
I’m
a Hoggart!’

The children looked at him, hoping he had not gone off his head. A Hoggart was a small brown thing with a few letters stamped on it. What’s more, it had been found in Clawstone; there was no other Hoggart in the world. Cousin Howard had spent many hours in his library trying to find out about Hoggarts and he had found nothing.

But the man repeated what he had said.

‘I’m a Hoggart. I’m Frederick Washington Hoggart. Here – look.’

And he took out his wallet and showed them his credit cards – rows and rows of them – and sure enough, he was a Hoggart. He was also in a very excited state.

‘Could you please ask your great-uncle to let me see that thing? I’ll handle it so carefully you wouldn’t believe. Only I must see it. I must see those letters underneath.’

So they called Uncle George and he took the Hoggart from its stand and handed it to the American.

He looked at it for a long time. Then very slowly he turned it inside out, to reveal a few patches of matted hair.

‘Oh my, my ... I can’t believe it – it’s incredible,’ he said, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘This is the most amazing day of my life.’

He was so overcome that they had to find him a chair.

‘See those letters,’ he said when he had recovered himself. ‘They are the name of my great-greatgrandfather.’

And he told them about Josiah Frederick Hoggart, who had fought under George Washington in the American War of Independence.

‘He was with him when they crossed the Delaware and overcame the British, and later he helped him with his business affairs. And of course Washington never forgot a friend and before he died he left instructions that Josiah should be invited to his funeral. It was a big honour, you can imagine – he was given a place right in front and needless to say he ordered a new wig. A special one made by the best craftsman in the state. It was powdered, of course; he wore it under his tricorne. And then when everyone swept off their hats because the coffin was coming past, Josiah swept off his wig as well!’

Mr Hoggart broke off, overcome again by emotion.

‘Oh, the disgrace,’ he went on. ‘The embarrassment! He sent his slaves running after it but it was blown into the Potomac River and was washed away. It was a terrible blow to his family – the wig worn at the interment of George Washington lost and gone. It would have been our way of proving what an old family the Hoggarts are.’

He stopped and dabbed his eyes again.

‘It’s very small for a wig,’ said Madlyn.

‘Well, it’s only part of it, of course – but it’s enough to show that it’s authentic. Oh, wait till I tell my wife – Clara’s so proud of the Hoggart ancestry.’ He broke off again, shaking his head. ‘Only I don’t understand – how could it possibly have got to Clawstone?’

Sir George had been listening carefully. ‘Actually it was found in an old chest in our attic – and now I think of it, it was a sea-chest. My great-great-uncle was the captain of a frigate and he might well have sailed as far as the mouth of the Potomac. It’s not impossible that one of his sailors picked it up.’

The American was still holding the Hoggart in his hands. It looked more than ever like part of a Pekinese that had fallen on hard times. Now he rose to his feet.

‘Sir George, I know what this must mean to you. You must prize it above everything in your collection. But if you would sell it to me – I can’t tell you what it would mean.’

Sir George was about to open his mouth and say that Mr Hoggart was welcome to the thing, it had no value for him But before he could do so, Madlyn had stepped heavily on his foot.

‘How much would you give for it?’ she asked.

‘Would you take two?’ asked the American. ‘Two million, of course.’

‘Pounds or dollars?’ said Madlyn.

‘Dollars. But, say, if that’s not enough, how about two and a half ? The money doesn’t matter to me – I manufacture non-stick pans and you’d be amazed how many people need those. I could go up to three but I might have to call Clara—’

Sir George swallowed.

‘Two and a half is enough,’ he said, and found his hand pumped up and down by the blissful Mr Hoggart.

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you. You’ve made me a very happy man. Oh, wait till I call Clara. We’ll keep it under glass in the hall where everyone can see it.’

Sir George did not say so, but he too was a very happy man. The money, carefully invested, would see to the upkeep of the cattle for years and years and years.

Knowing that the ghosts could rest now and that Aunt Emily did not need to make lavender bags or bake scones was a great relief. Even so, it was difficult not to be sad when the time came to go home.

For Rollo the thought of returning to London was made easier because of something his parents had told him on the telephone.

His skink had become a father. There were five baby skinks; not eggs but proper skinks the size of little fingernails. There’d been a letter from the zoo.

‘So I suppose I’m a sort of skink grandfather,’ said Rollo.

‘We’ll be back at Christmas,’ said Madlyn, standing close to Ned as they waited for the taxi to take them to the station.

‘And at Easter,’ said Rollo.

But they were back even sooner than that because they were invited to a funeral.

F
unerals are often sad, but this one was not sad at all. It’s true everybody cried, but the tears were happy ones and the loud sniffs that echoed through the little church at Blackscar sounded musical and right.

After all, it was not a funeral so much as a reunion.

Three months had passed since the Clawstone Cattle had walked to safety over the water and Dr Manners and Dr Fangster had been taken away by the police. But the banshees had been right when they said they had remembered something important about The Feet. Many years ago they had gone up to wail at the funeral of a wealthy grocer from Edinburgh who wanted to be buried near his mother’s old home by the sea, and after the ceremony the verger had shown them the tomb of Hamish MacAllister, the Chieftain of the Blackscar MacAllisters.

Even then there was nothing left of the brave chief’s name carved in the stone except the ISH part of Hamish, but the verger was interested in history and he had told them that when MacAllister had been taken for burial, no one could find his feet.

‘It was after one of those messy border battles where they fought with cutlasses and broadswords and axes. One can’t blame anyone,’ said the verger. ‘It must have been so difficult sorting everything out.’

And when the banshees had met The Feet in the gravel pit something had tugged at their memories.

Even so, it took a long time to organize a proper funeral. The little church was seldom used now; they had to get special permission and the ceremony they planned was an unusual one – but nothing, in the end, could have been more moving and more beautiful.

The ghosts and the children sat in the front pew with The Feet resting between Madlyn and Sunita. No one had been silly and tried to decorate them with ribbons or polish their toenails. The Feet were what they had always been: strong and manly – and themselves.

Behind them sat Aunt Emily and Uncle George with Mr and Mrs Hamilton, the children’s parents, who had come up from London, and next to them sat Mrs Grove with her brother, the warden, who was quite well again. It had taken the hospital a while to find that his stomach cramps were not due to appendicitis but to something he had eaten, and when Manners’s crooks were exposed it was found that the lunch box he took to work had been tampered with. Major Hardbottock, the man who had made the ghosts famous, was there too – and one person they scarcely knew and had not at all expected to see: Lady Trembellow.

The rest of the church was given up to visitors and most of these were ghosts. The ghosts from the Thursday Gatherings had made their way to Blackscar: Fifi Fenwick, and the Admiral, and kind Mrs Lee-Perry, who had passed on now and become a phantom too, so that travelling was much easier ... and Hal, Mr Smith’s friend from the motorway who had first noticed the cattle going north.

And then the first sonorous peal on the organ resounded through the church – and Cousin Howard began to play. Because he was a scholar and a librarian he knew exactly what was right, and when the congregation rose to sing the first verse of the hymn he had chosen, they found themselves quite choked with tears, for he had found a hymn about The Feet. It was called ‘Jerusalem’ and it began:

The service went without a hitch. The banshees wailed, Cousin Howard played a last resounding chord on the organ – and everybody gathered in the church porch to watch as The Feet, like a bride going to the altar, walked slowly towards the tomb of Chief MacAllister.

When they reached the gravestone, The Feet turned shyly, so that their toes faced back towards the church, and the heels lifted once and came down again in a last gesture of farewell.

But only the ghosts were with The Feet in that final moment of reunion. The human beings had gone back, knowing that what goes on when the veil of reality is torn aside is not something that ordinary mortals should try to understand.

So they waited quietly, sitting in the pews. And then, breaking the silence, they heard a deep, ecstatic and very Scottish roar of welcome from beneath the ground, and knew that the MacAllister was complete at last ... and that The Feet whom they had loved so much were truly home.

After a funeral there is always something to eat. The banshees had arranged a splendid buffet lunch in a hotel further up the coast, and it was now that the children found out why Lady Trembellow was at Blackscar.

She had taken on Manners’s Research Centre on the island and turned it into the Blackscar Animal Sanctuary.

‘You see, I read about Dr Manners and I wanted to do something. He was the doctor who did all those operations on me and caused me so much misery, and I wanted to undo some of the harm he has done. I’ve always loved animals and I needed to do something useful with my life.’

She told them that they had managed to save the gorilla and were sending him back to Africa, and already people were sending a stream of tired donkeys and unwanted horses who would live out their days in peace along with the poor beasts that Manners had tried to tamper with.

‘Of course, money is always short but people have been kind,’ she said, and she looked meaningfully at the collecting box on the reception desk.

But for Lord Trembellow things had not gone well at all.

For when the police started investigating the theft of the cattle, Trembellow had come under suspicion at once. It was his gravel pit that had been used for the scam, his wife had known Manners, he was known to have wanted to get rid of the cattle. Worst of all, money had been paid into his bank account by the thieves who had pretended to be vets from the ministry.

So they took Trembellow away for questioning and charged him. As a matter of fact, though he was a greedy and ruthless man he knew nothing of Manners’s plans. He had really believed that the vets came from the ministry and that the cattle were buried in his pit. Nor did he realize that Klappert’s Disease did not exist and that the stolen cattle were perfectly healthy. But by the time he had hired lawyers to clear his name, and then more lawyers and better lawyers still, all his money was gone and he had to sell Trembellow Towers and all his businesses. Now he and Olive were living in a little grey house on a council estate.