by Eva Ibbotson
Being happy is good for people’s health and this is as true of ghosts as of anyone. The rat became quieter; often it did not gnaw for hours at a time. Brenda shrieked less, and once, as they sat on the wall looking down on the park, she admitted that perhaps she had been a little unkind to Roderick, the man who had shot her.
‘He was away in the war, you see, in Burma, and my mother said I must marry someone rich, so I accepted this man who made boots for the army.’
After the first week, Cousin Howard bicycled off to Greenwood to thank Mrs Lee-Perry and the ghosts at the Thursday Gatherings for their help, and they said it had been a pleasure.
‘It’s wonderful to know that dear George’s cows will now be safe,’ said Fifi Fenwick.
Because that, of course, was the point of it all. As the money came in – more and more of it – work began at once on the park. The walls were mended, the stream was dredged, the dead wood was cleared from the copses. Sir George walked with a spring in his step, and when cattle experts came from other countries he showed them round with pride.
‘You’ll see, my boy,’ he said to Rollo, ‘we’ll have the finest herd in the world.’
‘We have the finest herd now,’ said Rollo.
Both George and Emily thanked the children most sincerely for what they had done and asked them if there was anything they wanted for themselves, but there wasn’t; at least, not anything you could buy. Madlyn wanted her parents to come back and Rollo wanted to adopt a Siberian tiger in the zoo, but there was a waiting list.
‘But I think you ought to buy yourself a new skirt,’ said Madlyn to Aunt Emily.
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, dear. I simply couldn’t,’ said Aunt Emily, looking shocked and worried. ‘I’ve settled into this skirt; I wouldn’t want to break in a new one, not at my age.’
But in the park the cattle lifted their heads proudly as if they knew that their future was secure. When Rollo went out now with the warden, Ned’s uncle, in the trailer, he could identify all the animals. The two calves, who were friends and slept with their heads resting on each other’s backs; the cow with the extra-long eyelashes, who stood for hours in the stream cooling her feet; the bullock who refused to fight but dozed the day away under his favourite willow tree …
Then one day Sir George came down from the roof with his telescope.
‘There are more cars coming here than are going to Trembellow Towers,’ he said.
He tried hard not to look pleased but he did not succeed. He looked very pleased indeed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lord Trembellow was in his new gravel pit, bullying his workmen, when Olive drew up in one of the Trembellow chauffeur-driven cars.
‘Daddy, I’ve bad news,’ she said. ‘I’ve got yesterday’s figures. Clawstone has beaten us by thirty-seven visitors. Thirty-seven! ’
Her sallow face was even more pinched than usual; one could feel the awful numbers eating into her brain.
The gravel pit was a new one; Lord Trembellow had bought it two weeks earlier and already the Trembellow lorries were driving up in a steady stream, loading gravel, and reversing out again on to the road.
There were great gashes in the hill sides; even after this short time hardly a blade of grass was to be seen. The noise of the diggers and the crushers and the earth movers was overwhelming; the air was full of dust and the smell of diesel fuel. It was Lord Trembellow’s fifth gravel pit and the largest and the best.
‘It’ll be that rubbish about ghosts, I suppose,’ he said now. ‘Lies and trickery. Well, we’ll get even with them. If they can get ghosts we can get ghosts. Bigger ghosts. Scarier ghosts. More of them.’
So that night he telephoned his son Neville in London and told him to buy some ghosts.
‘I don’t care what you pay,’ he told Neville. ‘Just get the best.’
But Neville said he didn’t know how to buy ghosts, and anyway he was going up to Scotland to play golf.
‘We’d better go ourselves, Daddy,’ said Olive. ‘Neville can be rather weak sometimes.’
So Lord Trembellow and his daughter decided to go to London. Lady Trembellow didn’t want to come. Ever since she’d had her tummy tuck she’d felt ill and uncomfortable. It was the most expensive tummy tuck anyone had ever had, but it still hurt.
Before they left they made a shopping list.
‘Nothing like lists to keep things tidy,’ said Lord Trembellow. He picked up the local paper in which there was a description of the ghosts which haunted Clawstone. ‘There’s a Bloodstained Bride, it says here. So we’d better have one of them.’
‘Why just one, Daddy? Why not two?’ asked Olive, and she sat down and wrote:
‘Bloodstained Brides: Two.’
‘And a skeleton,’ read out her father. ‘Well, skeletons are common enough. We could have half a dozen.’
‘Six skeletons,’ wrote Olive.
‘And there’s this man with a rat,’ read out Lord Trembellow. ‘Ranulf de Torqueville, he’s called.’
‘We don’t have to have just a rat,’ said Olive. ‘We could get something bigger. Or we could get two rats, one for the front and one for the back. And that girl who’s sawn in half. Why only in half? Why not in quarters? Or in eighths? Eight pieces of girl …’
When they got to London they checked into the largest, glitziest hotel in the city and the next day they took a taxi to the largest, glitziest department store, where they bought two long satin wedding dresses and some jars of tomato ketchup. Then they went to a shop which supplied schools and hospitals with specimens for anatomy lessons, and bought half a dozen skeletons.
‘The biggest you’ve got,’ said Lord Trembellow.
After that they looked at rats in a pet shop but they were white and not suitable, so they got the address of a man who trained animals for films and television and he agreed to bring two stunt rats up to Trembellow. Hiring actors to pretend to be the ghosts was easy enough – actors are so often out of work that they will do anything for money – and a man who supplied circuses with their acts said he would try to send them a sawn-up girl.
‘What about the Severed Feet?’ asked Olive. ‘We could ask in a hospital if they could spare any.’
But her father said they wouldn’t bother. ‘We’ve got enough here to scare the living daylights out of everyone.’
When they got back to Trembellow they got to work, but their preparations did not go smoothly. The actor who was supposed to be Ranulf de Torqueville took one look at the rats and fainted and they had to use inflatable rats instead. The two bloodstained brides hated each other on sight, and the sawn-in-half girl got tonsillitis and never turned up at all. To make up for this they ordered another dozen skeletons and got the most expensive computer firm they could find to set the skeletons dancing and leering and leaping out of cupboards.
‘It’ll be all right on the night,’ said Lord Trembellow. ‘It better be, after the money we’ve spent.’
But it wasn’t. The actor who was pretending to be Ranulf was fond of jewellery and as he tore open his shirt, his uncut garnet ring caught on the front rat’s rubber back, causing the animal to deflate with a sad squeak. As the visitors filed past the bloodstained brides, the first bride dug her elbows into her rival, who stumbled forward, causing the bottle of tomato ketchup she had hidden in her bra to fall out and spatter the white shoes of a Mrs Price from Barnsley, who was not amused.
Which left the skeletons. They began well, jumping and clacking and leering and gibbering – but the most expensive computer experts are not always the best. The skeletons danced faster and faster still – there was a high-pitched whining noise, then a whirring … and a jumble of tangled bones came crashing to the floor.
It was unfortunate that the bones were carefully labelled in blue ink for the schools who had ordered them for their studies. A skeleton labelled ‘Property of St Oswald’s College of Further Education’ is not really a very frightening sight.
‘I don’t understand it,’ said
Lord Trembellow angrily when the visitors had gone off, jeering and scoffing. ‘Why do the ghosts work at Clawstone and not here?’
Lady Trembellow was lying on the sofa with a hot water bottle on her stomach.
‘Perhaps the Clawstone ghosts are real?’ she suggested timidly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Phyllis,’ snapped her husband.
It was time he sent her off for some more repair work, he thought. Maybe an implant on her lips to give her a bit of a pout. She still didn’t look the way his wife should look.
As for Olive, she looked at her mother with contempt, because she always found it difficult to understand that she herself, who was so clever, had been born to a woman who was completely foolish. A woman who thought that ghosts could possibly exist.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It began like all the summer days at Clawstone since the coming of the ghosts. The children went up to the nursery to say good morning and then all of them went to sit on the wall and look across the park and plan their day.
This particular day promised to be an exceptionally beautiful one, with mist in the valley and a clear pale sky.
‘I was a bit silly, buying wellington boots,’ said Madlyn.
The cattle had become so used to the children that they grazed right under the wall or dozed in the shade of the overhanging elm. The youngest calf, the one that Rollo had seen being born, would look up and twitch his ears when Rollo called down to him.
‘I’m sure I could tame him,’ said Rollo, but he kept to his great-uncle’s rule and did not go into the park alone. ‘In any case they shouldn’t be tamed,’ he said. ‘They have to be wild and free.’
Sunita, of course, could float down into the fields whenever she wanted to, and when she came the cattle just lifted their heads for a moment and went on grazing. Only the oldest cow, the one with the scars and the crumpled horn, limped after her and waited for a special word.
The whole village seemed to share in the happiness of the castle. More visitors to the castle meant more visitors to the hotels and the pubs and the shops, but it wasn’t just that. Ned had been right when he told Madlyn that the cattle who had been saved belonged to everyone.
But the ghosts never became smug. Before every Open Day they worked out new ways of scaring people, and now, though they would have liked to linger in the open air, the ghosts and the children made their way back to the castle for another run-through.
They were crossing the courtyard when a brown van drew up at the gate. Painted on the van were the words ‘Veterinary Enterprises’, and three men in white coats got out.
One was small, with a black, pointed beard, thick, black-rimmed glasses and a foxy face, and he wore a stethoscope round his neck.
The second one was tall and shambling with a sticking-out Adam’s apple, and he carried a black bag like a doctor’s.
The third man had been driving. He had slicked-down hair, full lips and highly polished shoes, and he was holding a clipboard.
Inside the van, as the doors opened, the children could see all sorts of instruments: syringes and coils of rubber tubing and thermometers and flasks.
The ghosts vanished. The children came closer.
‘Good morning. Can we help you?’ asked Madlyn politely.
‘We want to see Sir George Percival,’ said the foxy man, and he handed her a card which said ‘Veterinary Enterprises (Northern Branch)’.
‘I’ll tell him.’
She ran off and returned with Sir George.
‘I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,’ he said. ‘We haven’t called out any vets.’
The foxy man looked offended. ‘My name is Dr Dale,’ he said. ‘And these are my assistants, Mr Blenkinsop and Mr French. We’re from the Special Branch of the Ministry of Animal Health and we’re doing a routine survey of farm animals in the area. It’s part of a government initiative. You should have received a pamphlet.’
‘Well, I haven’t,’ said Sir George shortly. He was not very fond of men from the ministry. ‘Perhaps you had better speak to my warden, Mr Grove. He lives in the village.’
‘We have already tried to contact Mr Grove. Apparently he’s been taken ill; they suspect a diseased appendix, I’m told.’
Ned made a noise of surprise. ‘I didn’t know my uncle was ill,’ he said.
The men in white coats ignored him.
‘But we can perform the tests perfectly well without help. Indeed, we prefer to work alone. So if you will unlock the gates of the pa…We shall only be here for a few hours.’
Sir George was not at all pleased. ‘It would be very unwise for you to go into the park. The cattle are not usually vicious but if they are disturbed by strangers...’
Dr Dale smiled – a smug and knowing smile. ‘We are quite familiar with animals of all sorts.’
He glanced at the pile of shiny instruments in the back of the van.
Rollo, standing next to his great-uncle, drew closer and Sir George took his hand.
‘I imagine you would like to see our authorization,’ said Dr Dale.
‘I certainly would.’
Dr Dale turned to the man with the slicked-down hair, who produced a whole sheaf of forms and papers, all stamped at the bottom with red letters and the initials ‘VE’ for ‘Veterinary Enterprises’.
‘Very well,’ said Sir George reluctantly. ‘But please understand that you go in at your own risk.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about, I assure you,’ said Dr Dale. ‘It’s just a matter of taking blood tests and saliva samples and skin scrapings and getting them analysed in the laboratory. We do it every day. It’s because of our work that the fine herds of this country are kept in perfect health.’
So Sir George, looking morose and angry, went ahead to unlock the gates, and the van disappeared up the track in search of the herd, who had moved on to the high ground by the waterfall.
The men were gone for a couple of hours. When they returned they were brief but reassuring. ‘We should have the results in a couple of days. Our laboratory is in the south so we’ll have to send the samples by special courier, but I’m sure we’ll be able to give your fine animals a clean bill of health.’
And they drove off in their brown van.
‘I’m sure it will be all right, dear,’ said Aunt Emily, putting her hand on her brother’s arm. ‘Don’t you remember when they tested the sheep at Greenwood for liver fluke and then they turned out to be perfectly all right?’
But Sir George only frowned.
‘Where’s the boy?’ he said.
But Rollo had disappeared, and no one saw him for the rest of the day.
They tried to carry on as though nothing had happened. The ghosts worked harder than ever and came up with more and more ideas. Brenda had decided to swoop out of a picture in the banqueting hall. It was a painting of a lady with fair ringlets wearing a crinoline and she thought that when her face changed and she turned into a Bloodstained Bride it would give a very good effect. Mr Smith practised something he called ‘The Somersault of Death’ and The Feet had learned to dance a tango inside Sir George’s riding boots.
But no one could quite hide their anxiety. Ned and his mother went to see his uncle in the cottage hospital. The warden had had bad stomach cramps and the doctors wouldn’t let him go home till they found out what had caused them.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the cattle,’ he said, turning restlessly in his bed.
Everyone talked and worried about the men in white coats – everyone except Rollo. Rollo said nothing, and whenever anyone else mentioned them, he left the room. He hardly touched his food, and Madlyn spent her nights running to and from his bedroom because he cried out in his sleep.
And so two days passed, and then three days, and four – and on the fifth, the men returned.
‘It’s no good beating about the bush, sir,’ said Dr Dale as soon as he got out of the van. ‘The news is bad. We thought you’d like to see the results of the tests your
self. Here are the sputum figures. As you see, there’s nine milligrams of pollutant per cc in all the animals tested. That’s very indicative.’ He pulled out another file. ‘And these are the urine tests.’ He paused while Sir George stared at the columns of figures. ‘I’m afraid they don’t leave any room for doubt. And the blood samples – well, you can see. With figures in the high forties we’re in an area of serious infection.’
‘And we noticed other symptoms. Lip smacking,’ said the tall, gangling vet with the Adam’s apple, ‘and foot blistering.’
‘No.’ The cry came from Rollo. ‘It isn’t true.’
The vets turned their back on him and addressed Sir George.
‘But what … what does it mean? What is the disease they have?’
The vets looked at him with sympathy. ‘I’m afraid the figures can mean one thing and one thing only. Klappert’s Disease.’
‘Klappert’s Disease?’ Sir George was bewildered. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘That’s not surprising. The disease was first described by Klaus Klappert about ten years ago. We’ve been investigating it in secret ever since – there’s a research station not far from here and I’m afraid –’ he lowered his voice – ‘a strain of the virus may have escaped. I can’t tell you how dangerous it would be if the disease were to spread. The herds of Britain could be totally wiped out.’
‘I don’t believe it. Why my cattle?’
Dr Dale shrugged. ‘These things happen. Perhaps it’s the purity of the herd which has prevented resistance. I can see that it’s a shock, but with swift and determined action we can restrict the damage in the area.’
‘What kind of swift and determined action?’
But he knew even before Dr Dale had spoken.
‘The whole herd will have to be culled, sir. It’s the law with this particular disease.’
‘Culled’ is a word which scientists use when they mean killed. Seal pups are culled when they are clubbed to death in their breeding grounds. Badgers are culled when they are gassed inside their setts.