The Beasts of Clawstone Castle by Eva Ibbotson

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.

C HAPTER S EVENTEEN
     
    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