Page 12 of The Secret Christmas Library

‘So,’ said Jamie, after he’d demolished a second piece of shortbread, ‘this house has been in my family – on and off – for, well, hundreds of years. A proper long time. They had some wars and whatnot and this and that . . . ’

‘Is this shorthand for “killed lots of peasants”?’ asked Mirren, and was silenced with a look.

‘I’m not saying here is our perfectly acquired fortune,’ said Jamie.

‘One, because there is no such thing as a perfectly acquired fortune, and two, because we don’t have any money any more.

But regardless, a couple of generations ago, the war did huge things to the staff and upkeep of the house. It just became impossible to maintain.’

Bonnie nodded at this. ‘There used to be fifty people living here, running this place,’ she said. ‘But . . . ’ She raised her hands. She must, Mirren thought, be the last member of staff.

‘We get a bit from letting people come and visit,’ said Jamie.

‘But most people come and see it and go, Oh my God it’s freezing, oh what a shame it’s falling apart, seriously, ￡10, I don’t think so, what are all these books doing here?

Our Tripadvisor ratings are awful. Then we failed a health and safety check. ’

‘I am not surprised,’ said Mirren.

‘Those reviewers were evil,’ said Bonnie, darkly.

‘They can’t all have been evil,’ said Jamie. ‘I don’t . . . I mean, eight hundred people can’t all be born evil just because they gave us mediocre reviews on Tripadvisor.’

‘Yes, they can,’ said Bonnie stoutly.

‘Anyway, after the war, everyone was so miserable – we lost four men off the estate, three under-gardeners and a butler.’

‘Those were Goodwin boys,’ said Bonnie.

‘That was nothing compared to the first war. They lost over a dozen then. There’s a memorial up by the maze.’

‘You have a maze?’ said Mirren.

Jamie shrugged, in a ‘yeah we have a maze but it’s nothing really I’m embarrassed about it to be honest’ kind of a way.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘My great-grandfather was really knocked by the war. And the house had been requisitioned anyway; they trained a lot of soldiers here. He was in the air force but he did his leg in and they shipped him home and he was stuck here. He kept track of all of them, or tried to. It was very bad for him. He had . . . I suppose what you’d call a nervous breakdown afterwards.

The army gave back the house but they’d left it in a hell of a state, and there were no staff to come back.

The men who’d come back from the war – they wanted better jobs, or to go to college or do something else. And some didn’t come back at all.’

He took a long swig of his tea and Bonnie topped up the kettle.

‘He died . . . he died.’ He clearly didn’t want to say any more about that.

‘And then my grandfather inherited. He was only young; he didn’t know what to do, I don’t think.

I only knew him when he was old. I just know things got worse and worse.

He got into book-collecting. We’d always been readers and I think he started selling off bits and pieces of the estate.

He couldn’t afford to look after it, and taxes kept going up and up.

He’d sell something, like a painting, or some china, but then he’d buy books.

Loads of them. It started off with kind of famous books or good books, but it seemed to get more and more compulsive . . . ’

‘Like being a hoarder,’ said Mirren suddenly. ‘Except he never ran out of space.’

‘Yes, I think that’s exactly it. It was never quite this bad, was it?’ he said, glancing at Bonnie, whose face looked gentle. ‘Not when we were bairns.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie. ‘My ma would complain about it then. Maybe we just didn’t notice it.’

‘Maybe we liked it,’ said Jamie, and they shared a look.

‘Aye, we did,’ said Bonnie.

‘Forts, endless bloody forts,’ said Jamie. ‘And Esme kept making Wendy houses and boys weren’t allowed in.’

‘I wasn’t allowed in either,’ said Bonnie with a snort, and Mirren let them reminisce. Upstairs downstairs, she thought, and wondered if there was more than that.

‘Well, anyway,’ said Jamie. ‘He got married to my grandmother.’ Another look shared with Bonnie. ‘Who was, uh . . . anyway. And they had my mother, just before their marriage broke up.’

‘Goodness knows how,’ said Bonnie, and Jamie grimaced, but Bonnie didn’t look as if she’d remotely stepped over the mark, even though dissing people’s grandmothers tended to be on the avoidance list as far as Mirren had always been concerned. Maybe that made her common.

‘And then she grew up and married and then divorced my dad, who lives in Dubai with his second wife, and my mum lives in Perth with her third husband, Plumber Boy Jim – Perth, Australia, that is, not actual Perth down the road. I have a clutch of half-siblings here and there whom I don’t know, and then there’s me and Esme and, well, my grandfather died last month. And left . . . ’

‘A right bloody mess,’ said Bonnie.

Mirren frowned. ‘Your mum didn’t inherit?’

‘Primogeniture,’ said Jamie. ‘Sorry. It’s about penises and stuff.

They keep meaning to change it in parliament but then they find they have stuff to deal with that affects more than four families a year, so we slip down the list a bit.

’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Mum didn’t want it anyway.

She spent everything she could find and buggered off. Hoarders, she and my grandfather both.’

‘And we don’t blame her,’ said Bonnie stoutly.

‘No – no, we don’t,’ said Jamie. ‘But it’s my problem now.’

Theo looked around. ‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘I think I understand. I see this a lot.’

Mirren was peeved that he appeared to be taking charge.

On the other hand, it was true, he did have more experience than she did.

Because booksellers were often needed at estate sales when someone rich died, and the relations either desperately needed cash or just wanted the books gone.

His handsome face looked concerned as he picked up his hand and started ticking off on his long fingers.

‘Would the National Trust want it?’

‘The Heritage Foundation? Neh, we’ve tried.

There are about two thousand castles in Scotland.

It’s basically the equivalent of trying to send a cow to a zoo.

They like the back bit – it’s ancient, the old stone towers and the chapel.

But it’s covered in the front bit: the turrets and the wedding cake stuff. ’

‘Those are the bits I like,’ interjected Mirren.

‘I know, but apparently it’s vulgar and just gets in the way. They are very picky.’

‘Okay. Hotel chains?’ said Theo.

‘For various reasons, to do with kestrels and bats, you can build stuff – houses, or a hotel – but you can’t put another road here.’

Theo frowned. ‘So there’s just that muddy path? Goodness, you are in a pickle.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Jamie, the weight of the world on his shoulders. Bonnie patted him gently on the arm, Mirren noticed.

‘But the train!’ said Mirren. ‘The train is awesome . . . ’ Her voice trailed off as everyone looked at her.

‘But you couldn’t actually have a proper station here,’ explained Jamie. ‘And even if you could, you can’t have a road to connect it with everything.’

‘Because of the bats,’ said Theo, ticking off another finger.

‘Bats are one of your fingers?’ said Mirren.

‘You don’t know a lot about old Scottish houses,’ said Theo.

‘And you do?’

There was a silence in the kitchen and Jamie and Bonnie looked at each other.

‘Sorry, are you guys . . . married?’ asked Bonnie.

‘No!’ said Mirren, too quickly, and everyone looked at her. It was more awkward than ever.

Theo didn’t even look remotely perturbed. After a second, he held up another finger – ‘And kestrels, yeah?’ – while Mirren felt herself go bright pink.

Jamie meanwhile was staring out of the window, sadly.

‘There’s been a McKinnon House on this site for five hundred years. Every bit of this place was built at a different time. There’s a fourteenth-century chapel, can you even imagine? What they were praying for, back then?’

‘Was it maybe central heating?’ asked Mirren.

Jamie rubbed his head.

‘I can’t . . . I can’t bear to give it up. To lose it all. But the paperwork . . . the will.’ His face looked older suddenly. ‘The will . . . I thought there might be something left over. But there isn’t. Not a bit of it. Just debts and bad memories.’

Bonnie blinked. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘You know there’s nothing left,’ he said. ‘Nothing to keep it going. Nothing to pay you.’ He nodded at Bonnie, who rolled her eyes, as if that was the last of their worries. Ah, thought Mirren. Interesting.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Theo, standing up. ‘Some billionaire will want to take this off your hands. It’s breathtaking.’

He stepped forward and, with some difficulty, opened the kitchen door. Up the steps, light flooded in. At the top of the steps was a kitchen garden, still neatly kept, with the peeling white crenellated wall above it, and a perfect wrought-iron gate giving a view of the grounds ahead.

‘You’d think,’ said Jamie. ‘But it’s too big even for them.

And lots of them want to knock everything down and start again and they’re not allowed to do that either.

Our neighbours want to buy the halt, for the train link.

But that’s all they want: one field. One field that will block our right of way and ruin the grounds. And nothing else.’

‘So, hang on – you can’t sell it, it can’t be knocked down, it can’t be used for anything . . . ’ said Mirren. ‘The government are not being very helpful, are they?’

‘You could say that,’ said Jamie.

‘The White Elephant,’ said Theo. ‘You should have elephants on your gate posts instead of pineapples.’

Jamie smiled for the first time that morning. ‘Huh,’ he said.

‘Well, you lot can carry on grousing,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’ And she vanished into the depths of the house.

Jamie waited until she had gone out of earshot, then lowered his voice.

‘But there was one thing in my grandfather’s papers,’ he said. ‘Just one thing.’

Mirren, wanting to ease the atmosphere between them, glanced over at Theo. He didn’t look back, concentrating fiercely on Jamie.

Jamie felt in an inside pocket of the old tweed jacket he was wearing over a jumper, then pulled out a long vellum envelope.