But this time the children took no notice. ‘Please, Cousin Howard, we need your help,’ said Madlyn. ‘We really need it.’
Cousin Howard reappeared through the door. He was wearing his usual dressing gown and leather slippers, and his face, which was always pale, had turned quite white with panic and alarm.
‘I’m not . . . I don’t talk to people I don’t know . . .’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t talk to people that I do know. I don’t talk.’
He took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. He had the long scholarly features of the Percivals, and his straggly grey hair was badly in need of cutting.
Howard had lived most of his life at Clawstone, but like all the Percival men he had been sent away to boarding school when he was a boy, where he had been most unhappy . . .
‘What’s the point of Percival, can anyone tell me?’ one of the prefects had sneered when he first saw Howard. ‘I mean, what’s he for?’
No one knew the answer to that, and all through his time at school Howard had been called Pointless Percival. That kind of thing can leave its mark and it was not surprising that Howard was so withdrawn and shy and spent his life sorting and cataloguing books. But though the children were sorry for him, they had no time to waste.
‘Cousin Howard, we’ve got to do something to make more people come to the castle. We’ve simply got to,’ said Madlyn. ‘Otherwise the cattle will have to be sold and maybe the castle too and—’
‘Oh, don’t say that!’ The thought of leaving his home made poor Howard tremble. ‘So we have to find a way of attracting more visitors, and we thought if we could show them some proper ghosts – real spectres – they’d come and tell their friends and—’
A heart-rending wail – a wail of true despair – came from Cousin Howard.
‘Oh, no . . . No! It’s impossible. It is quite out of the question. George has asked me, and Emily too – but I’ve had to refuse. Showing myself to all those people . . . Appearing and disappearing. I couldn’t. I absolutely couldn’t.’
And he began to shiver so badly that his outline became quite blurred.
The children looked at each other. They were very distressed by the misunderstanding, and the pain they had caused poor Howard.
‘We don’t mean you, Cousin Howard,’ said Madlyn.
‘We wouldn’t think of asking you,’ said Rollo reassuringly.
‘We need proper ghosts. Really scary ones with . . . oh, you know, heads that come off, and daggers in their chests, and that kind of thing,’ said Ned – and then blushed because it seemed rude to suggest that Howard was not a proper ghost.
But Cousin Howard was terribly relieved. ‘Oh, I see. Well, that’s all right then. I really don’t think I would do, you know. I tripped on my dressing-gown cord on the stairs and broke my neck, but it was a clean break – there’s no blood or anything.’ He bent his head and leaned forward to show them, and really there was hardly anything to see – just a slight dent in the ectoplasm. ‘And I have never felt inclined to gibber or howl or anything like that,’ Howard went on. ‘It isn’t what I do. But if it isn’t me you want, why have you come?’
‘We thought you might know where we could find some other ghosts. The kind that would be terrifying,’ said Madlyn. ‘We thought you might have friends.’
Howard was shocked. ‘Friends! Oh, dear me no! I don’t have friends. I don’t go out much, you see. I hardly ever go out.’
But the children just looked at him steadily.
‘Please could you try and help us?’ said Madlyn. ‘Please?’
‘It’s for the cows,’ said Rollo.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Olive Trembellow was perfectly correct, as she always was. On the following Open Day there were three hundred and fifty visitors to Trembellow – and the number of visitors going to Clawstone was down to seven.
So now she was doing what she liked best in all the world.
She was doing sums.
She was multiplying the number of visitors who had come to Trembellow on the last Open Day by the amount each of them had paid, and the answer was coming to a figure with a lot of noughts at the end. Olive liked figures with noughts on the end. She liked them very much.
When she had checked her calculations she went to see her father in his study.
Lord Trembellow was doing business with his son Neville, who had come up from London, and a builder he had brought with him, but he didn’t mind being interrupted. Olive was almost a business partner herself.
‘Look, Daddy – we’ve taken nearly four thousand pounds today. We had three hundred and fifty visitors and Clawstone only had seven – and one of those was a spy.’
Lord Trembellow nodded. He had sent one of his staff, a man who was new to the district and would not be recognized, to join the visitors going round Clawstone.
‘You’ve never seen such a ramshackle place,’ he had told Lord Trembellow when he came back. ‘They’ve just got a kid taking the tickets, and no guides or anything. And the rubbish in the museum – you wouldn’t believe it. There’s a sewing machine and a jar of caterpillars and something called a Hoggart.’
‘What’s a Hoggart?’ Lord Trembellow had asked.
‘I don’t know, my lord. It’s a thing like half a skinned Pekinese rolled into a sort of ball and it’s just labelled “The Clawstone Hoggart”.’
Lord Trembellow turned to his son. ‘Get me one of those in London, will you? If they’ve got a Hoggart I’ll have one too. No, get me two Hoggarts.’
‘Why only two, Daddy?’ asked Olive. ‘Why not three . . . or five . . . ?’
‘Good idea, my little sugar plum. Make a note of it, Neville. Five Hoggarts.’
Spread out on the desk in the study was an aerial photograph of the district. It had been taken from a helicopter and showed the grounds of Clawstone very clearly: the castle, the gardens – and the park surrounded by its high wall. If one looked carefully one could just make out the specks of the cattle.
Neville and the builder were bending over it while Lord Trembellow told them his plans.
‘As soon as I’ve got old Percival out I’ll get it properly surveyed, but this shows enough. The park’s a perfect building site; the drainage is good and so’s the soil – no danger of flooding. There’s room for two hundred houses easily.’
‘Why just two hundred houses, Daddy?’ said Olive in her high, prim voice. ‘Why not three hundred? Or even four? People like that wouldn’t mind living close together. Then we’d get twice as much money.’
‘Well, maybe.’ He smiled fondly at his daughter. Some people’s children were a disappointment to them, but Olive was exactly the kind of daughter he had wished for.
‘We’d have to get round the planning people but I dare say it could be done. And then – in with the bulldozers, cut down the trees, lay concrete everywhere . . . make things tidy.’
Lord Trembellow loved concrete. Grass and flowers and trees were so messy. Grass needed cutting, flowers could give you hay fever and trees blew down in the wind. But concrete . . . concrete was smooth and trouble-free, concrete gave you a level surface.
When he thought of the countryside covered in giant cement mixers pouring out streams of the wonderful stuff, Lord Trembellow was a happy man.
Lady Trembellow was quite different. She longed for a garden and she loved animals – again and again she asked her husband if they couldn’t get a dog. But his answer was always ‘No’, and when she tried to argue he changed the subject.
‘It’s time you went to London again and had something done about your nose,’ he would say. Or he would suggest that she had the cartilage in her ears cut so as to make them lie flatter against her head.
And because she had been brought up to think that a wife must please her husband, Lady Trembellow said no more.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The children had come away from Cousin Howard feeling very discouraged.
‘I suppose we were silly to think he could do anything,’ said
Madlyn. ‘He’s led such a sheltered life.’
They didn’t try to see him again and he didn’t come out of his room. But three days after they had waylaid him in his library, something strange happened. The children didn’t see it – they were in bed and asleep – but Sir George saw it and it surprised him very much.
Just as the clock struck midnight an old rusty bicycle with upright handlebars rode slowly out of the lumber room and crossed the courtyard. There was nobody on it, and nobody pushing it, but the pedals could be seen to move and the un-oiled wheels gave off an occasional tired squeak.
Quite by itself, with only the slightest of wobbles, the riderless bicycle made its way towards the gateway, turned into the drive and was gone.
‘Well, well,’ said Sir George, moving away from the window. ‘Who would have thought it? It must be years since Howard went out at night.’
Some ten kilometres south of Clawstone stood an old rambling house completely covered in ivy. The house was called Greenwood and it belonged to an old lady called Mrs Lee-Perry, who lived there alone.
Mrs Lee-Perry was immensely ancient; she was quite transparent with age; her voice was hoarse and faint, her wrists were as thin as matchsticks and it took her nearly five minutes to get up from her chair.
But she was not dead. She should have been – she was only a year off her hundredth birthday – but she was not.
The trouble was that all her friends were. Her husband was dead and her brother was dead and all the many friends who used come to her house. Mrs Lee-Perry loved music and poetry and she had been famous for her Thursday Evening Gatherings when people played together and sang together and read aloud from books that they enjoyed.
So when the last of the friends who had come to her Thursday Gatherings had passed away, Mrs Lee-Perry almost perished from sheer loneliness.
But one day as she hobbled into her drawing room she found something unexpected. She found an old friend of hers, Colonel Hickley, sitting at the piano playing one of the tunes they had liked to sing at her Gatherings. And this was very interesting because Colonel Hickley was dead. He had passed away two years earlier and she had been to his funeral.
Which meant that he was a ghost.
And that was the beginning. Because if Colonel Hickley could still make music though he was a ghost, so could all her other friends: Admiral Hardmann, who had died on the hunting field, and Signora Fresca, who had been a soprano in Italy before she came to live in the north of England, and Fifi Fenwick, who bred bull terriers and had played the violin quite beautifully . . .
It had taken a while to find everybody and this was because the friends she was looking for were quiet ghosts, the kind that had finished with their lives and just drifted about peacefully. (It is the unquiet ghosts one hears about: the ones who have died angrily and have unfinished business in the world.) But Colonel Hickley had been most helpful and now her Thursday Gatherings were in full swing once again. Of course, she had not said anything to her neighbours or to the cleaning lady. She just saw to it that the curtains were drawn and let it be known that she was not to be disturbed, and if the people in the village guessed something, they kept quiet, for Mrs Lee-Perry was very much respected and what she did on Thursday evening was entirely her own affair.
It goes without saying that Cousin Howard had been invited – he was known to recite poetry very beautifully and he played both the piano and the organ – but he had only come once or twice because of his dreadful shyness and the feeling that no one could really want a person who had been known for years as Pointless Percival.
But now he rode his ancient bicycle up the drive of Greenwood, rang the bell and glided up to the drawing room.
He had come during a break in the music and everyone was pleased to see him.
‘Well, well, my friend, this is a pleasure,’ said Mrs Lee-Perry. ‘I hope everybody is well at Clawstone? Dear George and dear Emily?’
‘And the dear cows?’ asked Fifi Fenwick, who was a great animal lover.
‘Yes . . . er . . . yes . . . Except that’ . . .
But he was too shy to explain at once that Clawstone was in trouble and that he had come to ask for help, so he took the sheet of music which Admiral Hardmann handed him and joined in the bass part of a song called ‘A Maying We Will Go’ and another one called ‘Let the Sackbuts Sound and Thunder’. After that Signora Fresca warbled through an aria about a betrayed bullfighter and then they begged Howard to recite ‘On Hill and Dale a Maiden Wandered’, which was very moving and sad.
Everybody clapped when he had finished – a strange rustling noise made with their ghostly hands – and said that no one could speak poetry like he did, and it was now that Howard, stammering a little, explained how difficult things were at Clawstone and that the children who had come to stay at the castle had had an idea which they thought might make more people come to Open Day.
But when he had finished the ancient figures filling the room looked at him with amazement.
‘My dear Howard,’ said Admiral Hardmann, ‘I hope you don’t think that we would come and haunt Clawstone?’
‘We would hardly be suitable for that kind of thing,’ said Miss Netherfield, who had been a headmistress. ‘It sounds like romping about and we are definitely not . . . rompers.’
‘No, no!’ said Cousin Howard, and his ectoplasm became quite pink with embarrassment. And indeed the room full of elderly and respectable ghosts, with their hearing aids and walking sticks, would not have done much to bring people in on Open Day. ‘Oh, dear me no, not at all. But they wanted me to find . . . those rather vulgar ghosts . . . the kind that, er . . . scream and . . . take off their heads and so on. And I don’t get about much. I wondered if any of you . . . the Admiral might know more people . . . or have servants who know . . . ’
Poor Howard stammered and was silent. But Mrs Lee-Perry smiled at him kindly. She had known the Percivals all her life.
‘Come, come,’ she said to her ghostly friends. ‘Surely you can think of a few suitable ones.’
Fifi Fenwick sighed. ‘I do remember some story about a stabbed bride . . . Or perhaps she was shot. Cynthia’s girl. It was a while ago but she’s probably around somewhere.’
‘And there was some young man over near Carlisle, ended in a dungeon,’ said Colonel Hickley. ‘Can’t quite remember it now but it was a nasty story.’
‘Well, see what you can do,’ said Mrs Lee-Perry. And her guests thanked her for a lovely evening and glided out into the night.
CHAPTER NINE
‘She’s had her calf !’ said Rollo, rushing upstairs to find Madlyn. ‘The cow who eats stinging nettles... It tried to stand up at once and then it fell down and stood up again and started to drink but the mother kept licking it so hard that it fell over again. I saw it all from the top of the wall.’ Rollo had found a flat place on the top of the wall round the park which he could reach from the overhanging branch of an elm tree. ‘The herd’s the biggest now it’s been for ten years.’
Yes, but for how long? thought Madlyn. How long will there be a herd? And for the first time since she had come, she was wishing it was time to go back home to London. Because nothing as far as she could see could now save Clawstone. At the last Open Day there had been five visitors and one of them was an old man who lived in the village and was sorry for the Percivals.
And Cousin Howard had been useless. The few times they had seen him since they’d asked for his help he had hurried away without speaking.
But the next morning, just as the children were making their way downstairs, they met him again and this time he didn’t glide away; he actually stopped and beckoned to them.
‘There are a few . . . people . . . you might like to see,’ he said in his quiet, shy voice. ‘This afternoon, perhaps?’
So they went to tell Ned and as soon as lunch was over they made their way to Cousin Howard’s library.
As they sat down, facing the big wall of books at one end of the room, they didn’t r
eally know what they were expecting, but in fact they had been invited to hold an audition.
‘I don’t want you to choose anyone . . . er . . . unsuitable,’ said Cousin Howard. ‘If . . . somebody . . . doesn’t fit your requirements they can be sent back. But the . . . ones that will appear are willing to come and . . . do what you ask.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I shall call them one by one if that is convenient.’
The children nodded and Madlyn moved her chair a little closer to Rollo’s. She didn’t think he would be nervous; he was not a nervous boy, but she wanted to be near him just in case.
Cousin Howard clapped his hands. There was a pause. Then slowly . . . very slowly . . . there appeared a long, white floating veil . . . a wreath of wilted orange blossom . . . and then: a face.
The bride who stood before them was very beautiful, but she was quite shockingly bloodied. There was blood on her veil, blood on her dress, blood on her train and her silver shoes.
And there was a good reason for this. There was a bullet hole in her left cheek, another in her chest, a third in her arm.
Cousin Howard introduced her. ‘This is Brenda Peabody. She had some . . . er . . . trouble on her wedding day. A man she had jilted shot her on the steps of the church.’
‘Trouble?’ spat the ghost. ‘Oh yes, I had some trouble! Men . . . Vile beasts! Look at that!’ She dug her fingers into the holes, and fresh streams of blood poured over her bridal clothes. ‘And it won’t come out . . . I wash and I scrub and it makes no difference, the gore just goes on coming. Drip, drip . . . ooze, ooze.’
‘I don’t know if you have heard of banshees?’ said Cousin Howard quietly. ‘They’re famous for weeping and wailing and washing out the linen of the dead. Brenda’s not a banshee, of course, she’s a proper ghost and she’s busy with her own washing, but one thing you can be sure of with Bloodstained Brides is a constant stream of liquid. She won’t dry up, you can be certain of that.’
‘She’s good,’ said Madlyn. ‘She’s very good.’