Page 11 of The Secret Christmas Library

The front door creaked as if someone were streaming a sound effects playlist, a proper horror film screech. Mirren laughed rather nervously; Jamie didn’t seem to notice.

They entered a vast hallway, with grey flagstones on the ground and a huge crevasse in the wall to their right.

Above them, a minstrels’ gallery, a long mezzanine space that ran the entire width of the hallway.

The room itself was huge, triple-height.

Mirren smelled the slightly fusty but not unpleasant air and glanced upwards.

The ceiling held a vast chandelier, shrouded in cobwebs.

It was hard to see all the way up, but it looked as though, once upon a time, the ceiling had been painted a deep blue, and there were still the faintest traces of painted-on stars that must once have been bright gold.

‘Wow,’ Mirren said again, then told herself to stop doing that. She closed her mouth; she was not a codfish.

A small side door opened, and a young woman came through, beaming. She was short and round and naturally pretty, with a large bust, pink cheeks and masses of soft russet-coloured hair. Her huge brown eyes looked amused.

‘Master!’ she said happily, then, at Mirren’s shocked look, laughed.

‘Don’t, Bonnie!’ said Jamie. ‘It’s not funny.’

‘I know,’ said the girl, but the smile still played around her lips. ‘I’m just trying it out for size.’

‘Please don’t,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s already weird enough.’

At this her face turned sad, and she went and stood beside him. ‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘I was just trying to lighten the mood.’

She was wearing a plain black dress and had a tea towel slung over her shoulder, Mirren noticed. Did she work here? She seemed extremely confident if she did. Was she staff? Were there lots of staff? Maybe they hadn’t noticed the windows.

Bonnie turned round with a slightly forced smile. ‘Welcome! Are you the crack discovery team?’

Theo, charming as ever, stuck out his hand. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said, smiling.

‘I’m not sure if we’re exactly a team,’ said Mirren, which came out as rather peevish and awkward, particularly as at the same moment Jamie said, ‘Yes!’ Bonnie just looked confused.

‘Well, welcome to McKinnon House,’ she said. Her voice was a lovely musical burr. ‘Did you eat on the train?’

They both nodded.

‘Then I won’t make a second breakfast unless you’re really hungry. But come, bring your bags in. I’ll show you to your rooms and then I’ll put the kettle on.’

They followed her through the side door, and down a long passageway, with doors off the left-hand side, and several large, square white shapes on the walls. Mirren looked at them curiously.

‘Sold off?’ said Theo, sympathetically. Jamie nodded, looking sad.

‘They were just all your face, going back four hundred years,’ added Bonnie cheerfully. ‘We’ll simply take a new picture of you with a wig on. There’s a wig box in the East Attic. If the mice haven’t got to it,’ she added, thoughtfully.

‘Let us assume,’ said Jamie heavily, ‘that the mice have got to it.’

Mirren wondered what their relationship was. The girl was obviously informal, almost sisterly. But she appeared to be working here? A girlfriend? Surely not, with the tea towel. But it was very difficult to tell.

Jamie carried on down a set of steps, then turned into a turret spiral staircase that seemed to go up three storeys; Mirren had completely lost her bearings.

They emerged on to an extraordinarily long corridor, the walls covered in an odd red grosgrain material, which seemed to vanish into the distance.

It felt cold and unloved and smelled musty, like a huge but spooky hotel.

‘Wow,’ said Mirren again, but less emphatically.

The other thing she noticed was that, here, each side of the corridor was lined with just one thing – bookshelves.

Miles of them. There were bookshelves as far as the eye could see, overflowing with books.

Mirren and Theo, bibliophiles both, immediately glanced at the piles.

Everything was ramshackle, piled up without much order to it.

The books were of all types: old law registers, hunting manuals, novels, memoirs, shopping lists, all of it thrown in hugger-mugger.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Theo, looking up. ‘There’s no organisation here at all.’

‘Nope,’ said Bonnie, reasonably cheerfully.

‘We’ll get to that,’ said Jamie, hastily.

Bonnie came to the middle of the corridor, where there was a grand pair of double doors on the left, opening towards the front of the house.

She flung them open, and Mirren and Theo moved forward, only to stop in amazement.

They were standing once again on a gallery level above a vast room: a library.

Light streamed in through double-height windows, even from the ice-grey day beyond.

A gilt spiral staircase led down from the gallery level to the endless units of shelving down below, with several fine desks dotted here and there.

The books here were older, mostly hardbound, but, Mirren could tell from glancing to one side, as hugger-mugger as before, with no rhyme nor reason applied that might explain why, for instance, an early set of Dickens was sitting next to a handwritten recipe book from the nineteenth century, which was in turn against a collection of 1970s Rupert the Bear and Jack Frost annuals, which frankly Mirren would happily have sat down and read right then and there, were it not so chilly in the library that she could see her breath in front of her face.

‘The library,’ said Theo, impressed.

‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘The East Library.’

They both looked at her, and she smiled her warm smile. ‘Oh, aye, you’ve got your work cut out. He was quite the man for books, the old laird.’

This sounded like the understatement of the year.

They left the East Library, and continued down to the end of the corridor, where they went up and down various sets of steps, each with bookshelves, or simply piles, until they found themselves in another endless corridor, and it was here that Bonnie opened up two doors, opposite each other.

‘How will we ever find our way back?’ said Theo.

‘You’ll figure it out,’ said Bonnie, smiling.

Mirren followed her into the first of the rooms, on the right. It was filled with bookcases, naturally, with a huge Audubon book on birds on top of the pile on the low antique table. But her eye was caught instead by – it couldn’t be – she couldn’t stop smiling – a genuine four-poster bed.

‘No way,’ she said. ‘I’m sleeping here?’ Then, quickly, ‘Oh, this is nice,’ as she didn’t want to imply that she didn’t sleep in four-posters all the time.

Secretly, though, she wanted to run up to it and bounce on top of it.

A real four-poster bed! It had dark red sheets and hanging curtains, like the walls outside.

A little dusty, perhaps, but she could handle that.

Bonnie didn’t seem to have noticed her excitement. ‘I’d draw the curtains on it,’ she said. ‘Gets a bit fresh in here.’

Mirren looked around. The room was absolutely freezing, but the windows were jammed shut – warped, she guessed, correctly.

‘Is it okay to . . . put the heating on?’

Bonnie smiled and Mirren realised what else was strange about the room: it didn’t have a radiator.

‘Aye, whenever you like,’ she said, nodding at the fireplace, which had a pile of wood next to it. ‘I’ll start it off for you,’ she said, seeing Mirren’s horrified face. ‘Don’t worry about it. And I’ll damp it at night.’

The wardrobe, when opened, proved also to be full of books, plus a tiny electric heater, of uncertain vintage and frayed cord, which in the huge room, with its long, moth-eaten curtains and uncarpeted boards, apart from a beautiful rug in front of the fire, looked about as useful as trying to heat the room with a hairdryer.

Mirren figured she’d be better off with the actual fire.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Do you want me to leave you to get settled in?’

‘No! I’ll never find my way back again!’

‘Fair enough.’

Theo’s room, on the opposite side of the corridor, was much the same, only without the four-poster, and rather smaller, and it looked over an internal courtyard, choked with weeds. Mirren felt slightly superior, until she noticed Theo had a duvet rather than ancient, dusty blankets.

There was one bathroom, and it was miles away at the end of the corridor.

You would have to absolutely tear up there in the cold.

Mirren regretted not having had a bath on the train that morning.

The bath here was fitted with a handheld shower attachment made of rubber that went over the taps and didn’t seem remotely up to the job of cleaning a person.

There were two small threadbare towels on the rack and the cracked black and white tile floor looked uninviting, but, as Mirren’s eye followed the inevitable book pile leading up to a mullioned window high in the wall, she saw that the room looked out over the towers of the castle, pennants fluttering, and over to the steel-grey sea beyond.

It was a vista of mind-boggling wild beauty.

Mirren could almost imagine an old wooden sailing ship bearing men back from the rich worlds of Scandinavia along with wool and silk and pottery.

‘It’s lovely,’ she sighed.

Bonnie nodded. ‘Come on, I’ll take you back downstairs for a brew.’

Mirren still couldn’t get her bearings. They went down a different set of stairs, set behind a door that was inlaid into wood panelling and hard to spot, and then moved into what was clearly a different part of the building.

The ceilings were lower, the windows smaller, now looking out on to the forest they had come through on the way.

A city girl her entire life, Mirren didn’t know if she had ever looked through a window like this before.

There was not a single sign of modern life in the frame: fields and paths and forests and nothing else as far as the eye could see; not a car, nor a roof; not an aerial or a power cable.

Somewhere out there must be the railway line, but it was invisible from here.

She had never been further away from . .

. well, everything. She instinctively reached for her phone to take a photograph before remembering that she didn’t have it, which added to the unreality of the entire thing.

A large open door and a further three steps downwards – there seemed to be odd steps up and down all over the place – opened out into a very large kitchen, with a scullery leading off it.

It was absolutely huge, with a vast scrubbed wooden table, and a sink the size of a trough.

There was a large old range, and as Mirren drew closer to its cosy heat, with her hands outstretched, she realised quite how chilled she had become in the house.

‘You’ll get chilblains,’ said Bonnie and Jamie at the same time, then shared a look.

‘What are those?’ said Mirren.

‘I don’t really know,’ said Jamie. ‘Bonnie’s grandmother used to say it all the time.’

There were dressers full of more crockery than Mirren had ever seen in her life: dozens and dozens of patterned plates, side plates, egg cups, toast racks. There were nine teapots displayed on a shelf and six silver coffee pots. Bonnie pulled one down.

‘Sit,’ she said. ‘From the look on your face—’ she was talking to Mirren ‘—Jamie hasn’t explained a thing, has he?’

Jamie raised his hands. ‘They just got here!’

Mirren shook her head. ‘Not really . . . something about . . . ’ She wasn’t sure how much Bonnie would know, and closed her mouth. It might not be something she should be talking about.

An ancient kettle started whistling on the stove and Bonnie took it off and filled the teapot.

She also opened one of the myriad doors on the range and withdrew a plate of warm shortbread, cut into fingers, lightly sprinkled with sugar.

Even though Mirren had had a huge breakfast hardly any time before, the smell was irresistible, and Bonnie pushed the plate towards her as they all sat around one corner of the vast table, Mirren gradually warming up.

‘Come on, then, Master Jamie,’ she said, in her slightly teasing tone. ‘You tell it.’