The Beasts of Clawstone Castle Read Online Free Page B

mouth.
    ‘Are those stinging nettles she’s eating?’ asked Rollo.
    Sir George nodded. ‘Cows know what plants are good for them, especially when they’re going to have their calves. She’s due any day now.’
    They watched in silence. Then quite suddenly the herd took off, the king bull leading, stampeding across the shallow ford, racing away towards the high ground.
    ‘Was it us?’ asked Rollo, worried.
    Sir George shook his head and pointed. A red deer, an antlered stag, had appeared between the trees.
    ‘They’ll take off suddenly like that if anything startles them.’
    Rollo said nothing as they drove back through the gates, and nothing when they returned to the castle. In silence he made his way up the main staircase, and the second flight of stairs, and the third. When he reached the top floor he walked from room to room till he found a window that overlooked the park and the hill where the cattle were grazing. Then he pulled a table over to the window and found a chair, which he put on top of the table, and climbed on to it and pressed his nose against the glass.
    Sir George found him there an hour later. Rollo’s eyes were dreamy, his nose was pale where the blood had left it.
    ‘Are they always white?’ he asked his great-uncle. ‘Always and for ever?’
    ‘Yes. Always. They have bred true for a thousand years.’
    Rollo nodded. ‘Are they your cows? Do they belong to you?’
    ‘They belong to themselves. But I guard them.’
    Then: ‘I will help you,’ said Rollo.

C HAPTER F IVE
     
    O n the Saturday when Madlyn first helped to sell tickets for Open Day, exactly twelve people came to look over Clawstone Castle.
    And on the same Saturday, the number of people who went to visit Trembellow Towers, just twelve kilo-metres away, was three hundred and four.
    Not that Lord Trembellow had to count heads the way they did at Clawstone. He had set up an electric turnstile at the entrance to the house, which relayed the number of visitors directly to his office. Trembellow might be his home but he ran it as a business.
    He ran everything as a business; his home, his wife and children and, of course, the firms he owned: the cone manufacturing factory, the road haulage business, the quarries and the gravel pits. There was hardly an hour in the day or night when one of his lorries was not roaring up and down the roads of Britain, or one of his shovellers was not digging into a hillside or one of his cement mixers was not helping to spew out concrete.
    Lord Trembellow had been born Arthur Ackerly in Newcastle upon Tyne. His father worked on the coal barges which plied up and down the Tyne; there had been seven children to feed, and Arthur had done wonderfully well, so if he was pleased with himself – and he certainly was – no one could blame him.
    When he bought Trembellow Towers, he was determined that it should be the most outstanding, the largest and the most visited castle in Britain. It was not an old building like Clawstone; it looked in fact as though the hill it stood on had come out in enormous, red brick boils. Even so, it was not large enough or showy enough for Lord Trembellow. He added two towers to the ones that were already there and dug a moat and built a drawbridge. He had battlements put on the roof and built a minstrels’ gallery and enlarged the banqueting hall.
    The museum at Trembellow did not exhibit stuffed ducks that had choked on sticklebacks or gas-mask cases left over from the war. It showed priceless swords and body armour and jewelled saddles. The visitors who came to Trembellow thought, of course, that these things had belonged to the family for generations, but actually Lord Trembellow’s grown-up son Neville, who lived in London and was a banker, had bought them at antiques auctions. Neville had bought pictures of the ancestors that hung in the dining room too. They were nothing whatever to do with the Trembellows, but one ancestor is much like another and nobody