Free The Beasts of Clawstone Castle by Eva Ibbotson Page B

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.

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
     
    L ord 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