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 really know what they were expecting, but in fact they had been invited to hold an audition.