Ibbotson, Eva - The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

‘Oh dear,’ said Aunt Emily when he was out of sight. ‘I did so hope he would say good evening to you. He’s a very polite person really, but so dreadfully shy.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Madlyn.

‘It’s Cousin Howard. He finds it so hard to meet new people but I hoped as you were “family” . . . Never mind, I’m sure when he knows you better ... Now here are your rooms.’

Their rooms were in the newest part of the castle, which was only three hundred years old. They were next to each other with a connecting door between them, and Katya’s room was across the corridor, so they slept well and were up early next morning to explore.

They found Aunt Emily in the kitchen with Mrs Grove, who always came in early from the village.

Madlyn liked Mrs Grove straight away; she was sensible and friendly, and when Rollo said he didn’t like porridge, that was the end of that. She didn’t try to persuade him or fuss and when Madlyn explained that he had toast fingers and Marmite for breakfast every day of his life, she said that was perfectly normal.

‘Ned used to eat peanut butter day in and day out when he was small, and he’s strong enough now.’

‘Who’s Ned?’ asked Madlyn.

‘My son. He’s around somewhere; he comes to give me a hand when he isn’t at school.’

‘How old is he?’ Madlyn wanted to know.

‘He’s eleven.’

After breakfast they said goodbye to Katya, who left for the station in a taxi, and then they set off to explore the castle, which they found very interesting, though rather cold and damp.

Madlyn particularly liked the museum. It wasn’t much like the museums in London but it was very ... personal. In the London museums you never saw rocking horses with missing legs or stuffed ducks that had choked on a stickleback or dog collars which had belonged to Jack Russell terriers who were able to climb trees. There was a set of brushes for cleaning out Northumbrian Small Pipes and a round, brownish thing covered in some kind of skin, which was labelled ‘The Clawstone Hoggart’. It was on a table all by itself and was obviously important, but they had no idea what it was.

Rollo of course liked the dungeon. He could see at once that all the old machines that had been used for doing the washing could easily have been instruments of torture – and in a corner behind the mangle he found two fat cockroaches whose chestnut wing cases shone most beautifully in the dusk.

But when they had explored all the rooms that they could get into they came back to Mrs Grove in the kitchen.

‘I can’t find the television set,’ said Madlyn.

‘There isn’t one, dear. Sir George doesn’t want one in the place. Nor no computer either.’

Madlyn tried to take this in. She had never been in a house without a television.

‘It’s my favourite programme tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. ‘And Rollo always has his animal programmes.’

‘You can come and watch in my house,’ said Mrs Grove. ‘The village is only five minutes down the road. Ned’ll show you.’

Madlyn thanked her and made her way to Aunt Emily’s room. She could hear someone hoovering on an upstairs landing but when she got closer the hoovering stopped and when she went to investigate there was nobody there.

The idea had been that Aunt Emily would look after Madlyn and her brother with Mrs Grove helping out when necessary, but it soon became clear that it was going to be the other way round.

As far as Madlyn could see, it was Aunt Emily who needed help, and she needed it badly.

She needed help with her hair, which looked like a grey worm that had landed by mistake on her head and passed on to a better world; she needed help with her clothes, which she had lost track of in various drawers – and she certainly needed help with the things she was knitting for the gift shop.

Aunt Emily was very fond of knitting, but unfortunately you can be fond of something and not be very good at it, and Madlyn was not surprised that the gloves and scarves she had made were not selling well.

After all, most people have five fingers; there is really nothing to be done about that.

‘What about crochet, Aunt Emily?’ suggested Madlyn. ‘We could make table-mats and doilies; they’re easy – they just go round and round.’

Aunt Emily thought this was a good idea, and she showed Madlyn the patchwork tea cosy she was working on.

‘Do you think people would notice if I used snippets from George’s pyjamas? I mean, pyjamas aren’t really ... underwear ... are they?’ said Emily. ‘It’s not as though they were striped. Or flannel. Striped flannel would never do, I see that.’

In the next few days Madlyn was busier than she could remember, and she was glad of it because she missed her parents more than she could have imagined. She mended the leaking lavender bags, she turned the pot-pourri to stop it mouldering, she helped Mrs Grove to make fudge to sell the visitors in fancy bags. When Sir George found out how neat her handwriting was he asked her to help with the labels in the museum. She was even allowed to make a new label for the Clawstone Hoggart.

‘What exactly is a Hoggart, Uncle George,’ the children had asked at lunch when they first came.

‘A Hoggart?’ Uncle George had looked vague.

‘Yes. The Clawstone Hoggart in the museum. We’ve never seen one before.’

‘No... well ...’ Sir George took a sip of water. ‘We think it might be...’ He turned to his sister. ‘You tell them.’

‘We found it in an old chest,’ said Emily. ‘It just said “Hoggart” – and of course it was foun“d here so it is a “Clawstone Hoggart”. But we’re not sure exactly . . . Cousin Howard is looking into it.’

If Cousin Howard was trying to find out what a Hoggart was, that was all that he was doing. He still hurried away from the children; he didn’t come down to meals; he never spoke. His room and his library seemed to be the whole of his world.

Rollo was also helping, but in his own way. He had found places in the gardens and grounds where if you sat quietly things came and looked at you. Red squirrels and voles and sometimes a vixen with her cubs. There was a badger’s sett by the stream and under the stones in the shrubbery a whole fascinating world of beetles and centipedes as fierce as they were tiny.

What he liked particularly about Clawstone was that there wasn’t much difference between the outside and the inside of the castle. In London you had to go out of doors to see animals, but here there were mice in the sofa cushions and owl pellets in the attics and hedgehogs in the scullery clanking about and looking for their saucers of milk. And though he knew that animals were best left where they were, Rollo made an exhibit for the museum which he thought would interest the visitors. It was a shoebox stuffed with poplar twigs in which hawk-moth caterpillars crawled about, chomping the leaves.

The children had arrived on a Monday and, though the next Open Day was not until the following Saturday, Madlyn could see how hard everyone was preparing for it. It wasn’t just the lavender bags and the scones; the rooms had to be cleaned and the notices put up and the car park checked for potholes and the cobwebs swept out of the toilets. Uncle George and Aunt Emily did a lot of this, but they would have been lost without Mrs Grove.

And Mrs Grove had an unpaid helper. She had Ned.

Madlyn had heard the sound of someone hoovering often in the first days, but when she went to investigate the noise stopped and there was no one to be seen.

She put up with this as long as she could. Then on the third day she decided she had had enough.

‘I know you’re there,’ she yelled from the bottom of the stairs, ‘and I think you’re rude and horrible and unfriendly to keep hiding.’