by Eva Ibbotson
Sir George was remembering the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease some years ago. The government had ordered all the infected cattle to be killed and their bodies burned or buried. The animals were stunned with bolt guns and driven in lorries to the killing fields, or else shot where they stood. When the stench of burning flesh became too much for people to bear, the carcasses were buried in pits and covered in lime. The farms of England became a ghastly battlefield filled with smoke and the cries of people whose animals were doomed.
‘It was like being in hell,’ said Sir George.
Meanwhile, the vets said, there had to be the strictest quarantine. They took notices out of the van saying ‘No Admittance’ in red letters, and ‘Quarantine’ in yellow letters, and they gave instructions for ditches to be dug in front of every gate and troughs of disinfectant to be put there for people to dip their feet.
‘Once the herd is culled and the fields have been fumigated you can allow people back again, but not till then. The whole area must be out of bounds.’
‘You mean we can’t have our Open Days?’ asked Aunt Emily.
‘Definitely not. That would be a sure way of spreading infection.’
But at the end, as they got back into the van, they were reassuring. ‘Your beasts won’t feel a moment of pain. From the moment they’re stunned and fall to their knees it’ll all be over for them. There’s many a human being who would wish for such a painless death,’ they said.
And then they drove away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sir George did not like picnics, and he particularly did not like picnics by the sea. He did not like sitting bolt upright in the sand, or paddling in icy water or trudging across sand dunes carrying hampers and rugs.
But three days after the men in white coats had been, Sir George sat staring out to sea with his legs sticking out in front of him and his tweed hat jammed down on his head – and beside him sat his sister Emily. She too was not fond of picnics: her back hurt when she sat without a support and both the Percivals thought that folding chairs and beach umbrellas and those sorts of things were vulgar. Sir George wore his tweed suit and Emily wore her fifteen-year-old knitted skirt, and both of them wanted only one thing: that the picnic, and the day, should be over.
The bay where they sat was very beautiful: a golden curve of sand with a view of two islands in the distance, and just enough of a breeze to crown the waves with little crests of white. The tide was out; the hard-packed sand rippled near the waterline, the rocks sparkled in the sun. Madlyn and Ned had taken their nets and were fishing the pools, calling out to Rollo when they found a starfish or a scuttling crab or a cluster of anemones.
But Rollo, who could have named all the creatures that they found, sat beside his Great-Uncle George, silent and still, as though he too was old, and had a back that hurt, and wished that the day was over.
The ghosts had stayed behind in the castle. They were going to keep Cousin Howard company.
‘It’s the salt spray from the sea, you know,’ Ranulf had explained. ‘A ghost’s ectoplasm can stand most things, but salt makes it curdle.’
Actually this wasn’t true. There is nothing that ghosts like better than a visit to the seaside, but the ghosts were being tactful. They thought that on this historic and horrible day, the family might like to be alone.
Madlyn had caught a tiny green fish with a frog-like face and called out to Rollo.
‘Look! I think it’s a blenny.’
Rollo glanced up for a moment, but he did not move from his great-uncle’s side.
Madlyn bit her lip. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said miserably to Ned. ‘He can’t go on like this.’ She threw the fish back into the pool and pushed her hair out of her eyes.
‘I don’t want to spoil things for my parents, but perhaps I ought to ask them to come home.’
‘He’ll be better when today is past,’ said Ned. ‘He keeps seeing it all in his head.’
For this was the day when the men were coming to take away the cattle. It was to get Rollo out of the way that Sir George had insisted on this picnic by the sea.
‘Come on, I’ll take you for an ice cream,’ Ned said to Madlyn. ‘The van’s just coming down.’
They came back with with three vanilla cones and handed one to Rollo who thanked them politely, but when they came back five minutes later he was still holding it out in front of him while the melting ice cream dripped down his hand.
And so the day dragged on.
They unpacked the lunch which Aunt Emily had prepared, and did their best with it. The eggs were not quite hard-boiled and squirted a little as they bit into them, the slices of cucumber inside the sandwiches seemed to be jet-propelled and shot on to their laps, and the scones were some that Emily had made for an earlier Open Day. But it didn’t matter because quite soon everything they were eating became covered in sand.
In the afternoon, Madlyn and Ned found some children at the other end of the beach and joined them in a game of cricket – and then at last Uncle George took out his watch and said it was four o’clock and they could go home.
As they drove through the village there was no need to ask if it was all over. People stood outside their houses looking silent and grave, and when they waved to Sir George they might have been greeting a passing hearse.
And even through the windows of the car the children could smell what had happened. The summer scents which usually came on the breeze were gone: the smell of flowers, and fresh-cut grass, and heather from the hills. Instead there was only one odour: the heavy, dark stench of disinfectant, stinging the nostrils, catching the throat.
They got out and climbed stiffly up the steps. In the upstairs salon, the ghosts were waiting for them.
‘We wanted to speak to you,’ said Ranulf. He looked tired and tense and under his shirt they could hear the rat greedily gnawing. ‘We have come to a decision. We feel that we will be in the way if we stay. You will want to be private among yourselves.’
‘With no Open Days you will not need us,’ began Mr Smith, ‘so we will go away and—’
What happened next surprised everyone and it surprised Madlyn most of all.
If there was one thing Madlyn was known for, it was her even temper, her good manners and her wish to behave well and make people happy. Now she suddenly went mad. She stamped her feet. She screamed. She hurled abuse.
‘How dare you?’ she yelled at the ghosts. ‘I’ve had enough! Rollo’s making himself ill – he’ll probably die and my parents are miles away and I don’t know what to do and now you dare to go away and leave us. I can’t stand it, I can’t and I won’t—’
And she threw herself on to the ground and burst into violent and uncontrollable sobs.
The ghosts stood round in dismay. Aunt Emily tried to go to her and stepped back as Madlyn kicked out.
‘Leave me alone. I hate you all. Just go away and leave me alone.’
And then, as they all stared helplessly, not knowing what to do, there was … a kind of stirring … and then, quite on their own, The Feet walked slowly, steadily, to where Madlyn lay on the ground, still shaken by sobs.
The Feet did not say anything, for reasons which are obvious, but they settled down to keep watch beside her. One foot guarded her left side, one foot guarded her right side – and what they were telling her was absolutely clear.
‘We love you,’ said The Feet, without uttering a single word. ‘We will never leave you. We belong.’
That night Rollo ate his supper and went to bed quietly, and slept. Sometimes you have to grow up quickly – and the day on which the cattle left Clawstone was such a day.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Trembellows were very pleased with themselves. They had done good to the countryside; they had helped the Ministry of Animal Health to make the farms of Britain safe – and they had made a tidy sum of money.
‘Of course we could have got more, much more,’ said Lord Trembellow now, spearing a piece of bacon. ‘Bu
t I felt it was my duty to help those men.’
The family were having breakfast. Olive did not go to school – she was too clever to do lessons with ordinary children so she had a tutor who came in the afternoons – and Neville had come up from London.
‘It’s our best pit, Number Five,’ said Neville. ‘We could have got a fortune for the use of it.’
‘Yes, we could, Daddy,’ put in Olive.
‘That’s perfectly true, my little sugar plum,’ said Lord Trembellow, wiping a dollop of marmalade from his chin. ‘But sometimes one just wants to help. To do what is right and good.’
Lady Trembellow choked slightly on a corner of toast. She could not actually remember a single time when her husband had wanted to do what was right and good.
‘We can easily manage with the other four pits,’ said Lord Trembellow. ‘It’s only for three months and then Number Five will be in use again.’
‘Not all of it, surely,’ said Lady Trembellow. ‘Not the part where the cattle are buried.’
‘No, not that part, of course,’ said Lord Trembellow impatiently. ‘We would not want pieces of bone spoiling our gravel – the Trembellow gravel is famous for its purity. But Number Five is a very large pit. The waste ground at the back can be left undisturbed for a long time. And Dr Dale assured me that the carcasses would be buried with large amounts of lime and other chemicals. There’ll hardly be a trace of the beasts left – not just the soft parts will be dissolved but the skeletons too, and then it’ll be business as usual.’
Lord Trembellow took a sip of coffee and smiled at his family.
‘It couldn’t have worked out better,’ he said.
The vets had put ‘No Admittance’ signs at the entrance to the gravel pit and shut off access from the road. Number Five would be a kind of Sleeping Beauty, sealed off from the world while the infected animals decomposed in the soil. Then in three months’ time, Dr Dale had said, the Trembellow lorries could go in and out freely and the neighbourhood would be clean again.
But of course the real reason why Lord Trembellow was pleased was quite a different one.
Sir George’s cattle were gone forever. Everyone said that the old man had given up – that he would not attempt to restock Clawstone. In any case, the beasts were the only ones of their kind in Britain. He was a broken man, according to the rumours – and with Clawstone in strict quarantine and no visitors allowed, he would not be able to earn money by having Open Days. All the Bloodstained Brides and Sawn-up Girls wouldn’t help him, thought Lord Trembellow gleefully, which meant that soon now, very soon, Sir George would sell him the park for building land. And at a much lower price than he would have asked before.
Those blasted cows had been in his way for too long, he thought. That they were rotting in his gravel pit made him feel good.
‘Two hundred houses,’ he murmured, seeing the park becoming useful at last.
Olive picked up her napkin and wiped her small pinched mouth.
‘Two hundred and fifty, Daddy, don’t you think?’ she said.
Lady Trembellow said nothing. Her husband had arranged for her to have her ears operated on in London but she had a surprise for him. She wasn’t going to have any more operations to make her look better. She didn’t mind whether she looked better or not. What she wanted was to feel better, and to live a better life – and Trembellow Towers was not the place for that.
No one knew it yet – but Lady Trembellow was going away.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A great deal of nonsense has been written about banshees. In some books they’re described as fairies, in others as witches or ghosts. They’re supposed to be death portents, which means they appear when someone is about to die, but it could also mean that they look so awful that a person who sees them dies of shock, which is not the same at all. There are legends about banshees who wash out the bloodstained linen of the dead, and others about banshees who belong only to the royal families of Ireland.
But most books are agreed on one thing: banshees are very sorrowful and sad and what they do, if they possibly can, is wail – the proper kind of wailing which involves howling and weeping and the wringing of hands.
Banshees need to wail like footballers need to kick balls and opera singers need to sing and acrobats need to turn somersaults. If they don’t get a chance to wail they seize up. But though they are strange and gloomy, and like dark places, banshees do not cheat. If they wail it is because there is something to wail about – and usually this means that somebody has died.
But what sort of somebody? A banshee who is serious about her work isn’t going to wail for some thugs who have hit each other on the head with broken bottles and landed in the local cemetery, or for a car thief who has smashed himself up going joyriding in a stolen car.
And as people became more and more unpleasant and slaughtered each other in stupid wars, banshees these days quite often found themselves wailing for animals.
The Johnston sisters were elderly and lived together in a small house in a quiet street in a London suburb and at first you might have thought they were exactly like so many old ladies who live together, bothering no one.
But if you looked carefully, you could see … signs. The sisters’ eyes were slightly swollen and their noses were reddened at the tips from years of weeping, and there were bald patches on their scalps where they had pulled out tufts of grey hair in their grief.
There were other signs too: the collars of their black dresses often seemed to be damp and they drank enormous quantities of tea. To make tears, the body needs a lot of liquid – and there is nothing better for making tears than tea.
They were drinking tea now, sitting round the blue teapot with its knitted cosy, and dunking ginger biscuits, when they heard the newspapers dropping in through the letter box. There was the Evening Herald, the Radio Times – and the Banshee Bulletin.
And it was in the Banshee Bulletin that they saw an extraordinary piece of news.
‘My goodness, how amazing!’ said the eldest of the sisters. ‘Who would have thought it?’
‘Yes indeed,’ said the middle sister. ‘Quite extraordinary. And so sudden.’
‘It’s the last thing I would have expected,’ said the youngest sister. She was delicate and took things hard.
There was a pause while they poured themselves another cup of tea. Then:
‘You don’t think … we ought to ...?’ said the eldest sister.
‘It makes one wonder, certainly,’ said the middle sister.
The youngest sister swallowed the last of her biscuit. ‘I haven’t had a good wail for a long time. I feel quite bunged up. But it’s a long way.’
‘Yes, it’s certainly a long way.’
‘And we’re not young any more.’
‘No, we’re definitely not young any more,’ agreed the others.
There was another pause, during which more tea was drunk and ginger biscuits were dunked. Then:
‘I do feel perhaps it’s our duty to go,’ said the eldest sister. ‘Goodness knows what kind of banshees they have up in the north. They probably live in caves and wear skins.’
So the next morning the three ladies set off in their small black motor car. They had been careful not to clean the car because they wanted to merge into the background (banshees are very fond of merging) and they had packed it with food for the journey and rugs and a change of underclothes.
But the most important thing they took was an enormous cardboard box crammed full of clean and freshly ironed handkerchiefs, and this was sensible. A working banshee cannot have too many handkerchiefs – and the job they were going to do in the distant north was one of the biggest they had ever taken on.
Rollo went on behaving well. Seeing Madlyn in such despair and anger had shaken him badly.
But he was not the same as he had been before. He was very quiet; no one heard him laugh; and he spent a lot of time with Sir George in his study, listening to stories of what it had been like to be a soldier
in the war.
‘You obeyed orders,’ said Sir George. ‘Sometimes it was very difficult and you thought the orders were wrong, but you obeyed them because you knew that the men who gave them were doing their duty. And it’s the same now. The men who took the cattle were obeying orders from the government. They were doing their duty. When they killed the animals in the big foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, people screamed and threatened to shoot themselves, but making a fuss doesn’t help. We have to obey orders and we have to do it quietly,’ said the old man.
But when he was alone he would stand by the window, not moving, wondering if there was any point in going on.
It was a sad time everywhere. Cousin Howard went back to his library to see if he could find out something about the Hoggart – but, to tell the truth, he found researching Hoggarts a lot less interesting than helping to set up Open Days. Madlyn went down to Ned’s bungalow and played computer games and tried to cheer up Ned’s uncle, who had come out of hospital and blamed himself for not having noticed that there was something wrong with the cattle.
‘I can’t think why I didn’t see it,’ he said. ‘They seemed just fine to me.’
The village too was quiet – a listless, sad quietness. And in the park the uncropped grass grew long, and longer; the roses in the hedges smelled of disinfectant; and it rained and rained and rained.
When the cattle had been gone for more than a week, Ranulf called the children up to the nursery.
‘It’s Sunita. She thinks there is something we should do,’ said Ranulf. ‘Go on, Sunita, you tell them.’
Sunita had been looking out of the window at the empty park. Now she turned and, though she spoke gently as she always did, they could see that what she was saying mattered to her very much.
‘I think we should go and say goodbye to the cattle. I think we need to go and see the place where they are buried and wish their spirits a safe journey.’