Page 16 of The Secret Christmas Library

Jamie suggested they move to the Chinois Drawing Room, as it was one of the rooms Bonnie kept up; the place visitors were taken to, one of very few that was shown off and painted up and kept tidy.

There seemed to be endless other public rooms they glimpsed from the corridors.

The huge spaces between the great double doors – with wood peeling; missing door handles sometimes, indicated the vast size of the rooms behind them.

There was a long rug down this particular corridor; once, Mirren thought, looking at it, it must have been heavenly, with little birds in turquoise and gold leaf intertwining to form the pattern, almost entirely obscured.

The sides of the carpet were held down either side with more and more books piled up; it was like wading through a tide.

Mirren glanced at titles as they headed past: a history of Raworth School; a guide to tea shops, and a recent Jack Reacher.

Theo was right, the order made no sense.

Halfway down, Jamie stopped, and opened one particular set of double doors, with an anxious look on his face, as if he really wanted them to like it.

How strange, she thought, to be what many people would consider to be the luckiest fellow in the world, inheritor of a huge country estate, and yet to be so worried and unhappy; for it to be such a burden.

Feeling sorry for a posh boy was very far down her list of things to do, but she couldn’t deny that she did.

The Chinois Drawing Room – ‘Colonial nightmare,’ Theo whispered to her in a rare moment of solidarity, and she could only agree – was undeniably beautiful.

Turquoise, gold and red wallpaper – faded, but its colours still bright – covered the walls with bright, bustling bees and butterflies.

There were brightly painted screens in several parts of the room, which was clean and clear of dust, and, thank goodness, a newly laid fire was burning in the grate. Mirren darted towards it gratefully.

She glanced out of the vast window. Every window showed a picture of the water, shimmering silver and pewter, under a sky that was already, in early afternoon, leaching light.

The view, though, was still exceptional, a vision unchanged for hundreds of years.

There were no oil rigs to spoil the vista; no tankers cruising the horizon, although they must be out there.

It was just the tumbling cliffs beneath the beautiful drawing room, all the way down to the lapping water and the sea in front of them.

Nothing between them and Norway. Once upon a time, she thought, ships would have come here; to trade, to fight – who knew?

She walked over, and stood so close against the window that she could see her own face superimposed on the scene, feeling as though she was stepping into someone else’s history, the history of the many, many people who had walked these halls; it was thrilling.

The men of course had to go and do derring-do; but how many women and girls had stood here, looking out, dreaming of distant shores?

The daughters, the brides, the mothers, the parlourmaids; the rich, the bored, the spoiled; the slaveys; the silent unvoiced legions of women who had come and gone across this room, once upon a time.

It occurred to Mirren suddenly that with her background – her ancestors were Scots who’d moved down south when the pits closed – she would not have been a lady in a long, pretty dress staring out and dreaming of voyages and dances.

She would have been one of the staff. Just as she thought this, Bonnie pushed her way into the room.

‘You didn’t!’ said Jamie, glancing at the tray then beaming at her. Bonnie beamed back at him and set the tray down. Mirren wondered once more about the relationship between them.

There was a large teapot, wearing a cosy – it was such a very long way from the kitchen to the room they were in; everything would get cold on the way without it – and a huge plate of raisin scones, puffy and floury and utterly delicious-looking; next to that sat an ancient glass dish containing jewel-like jam that was obviously home-made – gooseberry, Bonnie announced – and cream and sugar in beautiful blue and white Chinese willow-pattern porcelain, almost every piece chipped, and butter and clotted cream likewise.

‘You haven’t had any lunch,’ said Bonnie, ‘so I thought you might want your afternoon tea early.’

‘You thought right,’ said Jamie. Even Theo, whose interest in food was lackadaisical at best, perked up from the stop of a stepladder where he had been reading a Victorian book of childcare, eyes bulging slightly in horror at its contents.

They sat in front of the roaring fire and drank tea as the last of the light drained from the sky, and Jamie closed the shutters and the room became cosy and pretty much warm enough to take your jacket off, if not your jumper, obviously.

Mirren ate a scone hungrily, piled high with the jam from the estate, then another. The boys too were tucking in with goodwill when she pulled out the poem again. She moved across the room to a tiny escritoire. ‘Can I sit here?’

‘Yes,’ said Jamie. ‘Rest assured, if anything was worth anything, it was sold off years ago.’

‘To buy more books,’ said Theo.

‘So it’ll be either reproduction or valueless.’

‘Okay,’ said Mirren, sitting down at the little table.

It was still delicate and flimsy; she felt rather huge and inelegant sitting there.

Opening up the tiny drawers that rose up from the polished table surface, she found, to her delight and surprise, proper vellum notepaper, an ink bottle and an old fountain pen.

‘Ooh!’ she said. ‘Can I use this?’

‘Again, just assume anything you find in the house you can use,’ Jamie said.

Mirren took the fountain pen and rinsed it in a bathroom down the hall, then had the satisfaction of drawing fresh black ink up through the balloon cartridge.

‘Oh,’ she said in delight. ‘I haven’t used one of these for years.’

She started to write an elaborate ‘D’ on the vellum paper. The nib was fine, and the paper slightly rough, but in a way that caught the ink beautifully. She smiled, pleased at her handiwork, and copied out the rest of the line in calligraphic script from the paper Jamie deposited in front of her.

‘Where did you learn to do that?’ asked Jamie, looking over her shoulder.

She went slightly pink. ‘I had a . . . well, I went through a phase in my adolescence.’

Theo glanced at it. ‘My God, Sutherland,’ he said. ‘How nerdy were you? Did you learn how to do this by staying home on prom night?’

Mirren gave him a look, and set about quietly picking out the nouns in careful script.

Lines . . . book, pen, line . . . setting of the sun – maybe that was to the west. Stars, land, sea; everything was in here. Ancient routes, though? Surely all the routes were ancient. Lines and setting suns. And crowns of gold . . .

‘What does it mean? Have you got any crowns of gold?’

‘I believe any crowns of gold would have been sold pretty much first,’ said Jamie drily.

He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It is possible he was just . . . I don’t know.

Wibbling. He loved games and puzzles, all those kinds of things.

He was such an odd man. It’s not outside the realms of possibility that he’s just winding us up.

From beyond the grave. Or thought he did have something – thought that he’d bought so many books, one of them must be worth something. ’

Theo blew out some air. ‘As an investment strategy, you’re probably better off betting on horses. This is a wild goose chase. Playing silly buggers.’

‘But . . . no. I can’t think like that. He was absolutely adamant that he had something precious,’ said Jamie. ‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t have any reason not to believe him.’

‘Well, quite,’ said Mirren.

Jamie looked over her shoulder. ‘I thought go see might mean the halt. Because it’s where you might travel from.’

‘There are no books there, though,’ said Theo.

‘No, I know.’

‘Go see,’ said Mirren. ‘I mean, you don’t really need those words in the poem. First take thy pen, go in works totally fine. Take thy pen, go in, go see . . . ’ She frowned. ‘What did you say before?’ she asked Theo. ‘Just now.’

‘About playing silly buggers?’

‘Before that.’

‘About being on a wild goose chase?’

Mirren glanced down. She wrote the words go see then she wrote the word goose. ‘Have you got any geese here?’ she asked.

‘We used to,’ said Jamie. ‘I think we used to have a goose girl.’

‘What’s a goose girl?’

‘It’s someone who looks after the geese,’ said Jamie. ‘They’d have been down at the duck pond.’

‘Do you have books down there?’

‘I suppose there’s a summerhouse. It seems a bit . . . I mean, go see meaning goose? It’s a long shot, surely.’

He got up, and Theo did too.

‘What about take your pen?’ said Mirren.

‘Yeah, well, I suppose if you were outside, but the ducks . . . you wouldn’t need a pen . . . ’

‘Is there a duck pen?’

‘Argh,’ said Jamie. ‘I don’t know! I don’t get it! It’s unbearable. There is a sheep pen, but it’s up on the side of the ben; nobody’s used it for years!’

‘If you can bear,’ said Mirren, writing the words in her beautiful script. ‘What does that mean? Like, just “can you bear it”?’

‘A bear. And a goose,’ said Theo.

‘What do you mean?’

‘At the star of neither land nor sea.’

‘I thought that might be filler,’ said Jamie. ‘All stars are in space. It’s just stupid.’

Theo frowned. ‘But if you did have geese and bears . . . and take thy pen, go in . . . ’

‘PENGUIN!’ said Mirren.

‘What??’

Mirren flapped her hands. ‘If it was . . . oh, my God . . . the north. The North Star! Over the ice! Not land, not sea – ice! Those are Arctic animals!’

‘But we’re already in the north,’ said Theo, puzzled. ‘It’s freezing enough up here. Have you got bears?’

But Jamie wasn’t listening.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I wonder if . . . I wonder if he meant the North Library.’