Page 20 of The Secret Christmas Library

‘So this is where it’s all going on,’ said the figure standing in the door with her hands on her hips.

Mirren and Theo whipped their heads round as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t.

Jamie was behind the figure, and squeezed past her, none too gently.

‘Mirren, Theo – my sister, Esme.’

‘Yes, sorry, everyone, I’ve discovered your little game.’

The voice was disarmingly posh – Jamie’s voice was kind of posh, but Esme spoke like the late Queen in old black and white broadcasts, before she got told to sound more like her subjects.

She was tall and slender, with a razor-sharp haircut that accentuated her high cheekbones.

Her hair was tipped in purple in a way that 99.

99 per cent of mortals who weren’t five foot ten wouldn’t have a hope of getting away with, and she had tattoos almost everywhere.

She was wearing heavy boots and combat trousers and was ever so slightly fabulous.

‘There’s no game, Esme,’ said Jamie. ‘I mean, apart from . . . well, there’s some kind of riddle thing . . . ’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’

‘Because,’ said Jamie, obviously trying to keep his temper, ‘every time I mention anything to do with Forres you say oh God don’t bore me with that shit.’

‘Yes, and then I say, sell the entire damn thing and send me my money.’

‘There isn’t any money, Esme.’

‘That’s ridiculous. This place has thirty-six bedrooms; how can there be NO MONEY?’ She glared at Mirren and Theo. ‘And you’re obviously paying these guys. Someone told me they’d seen the train running, so I knew something was up.’

Jamie scowled. ‘I’m paying them with money from the job which I had. How’s your latest internship going? Or are you on another career break?’

‘You have NO IDEA what it’s like to try to make a living as a creative,’ said Esme.

‘Neither do you!’ sniped Jamie, and the atmosphere suddenly turned as cold as the snow outside.

The lights buzzed again.

‘Oh, yeah, the road’s shut,’ said Esme. ‘They’ve closed the snow gates as well.’

‘You shouldn’t have driven through it,’ said Jamie, his voice a little softer. ‘It’s dangerous.’

Esme snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Me and the Landie know this place back to front.’

Jamie looked outside. ‘Well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I think “the Landie” is going to be buried in about six minutes.’

Esme cursed. Then she turned round and faced them all again.

‘So, what are you looking for, then? This place has been picked clean by vultures for years, you should know. That’s why there are all the gaps on the wall where pictures used to be. If there’s anything of value in this house, our mother would have sniffed it out years ago.’

‘Esme . . . ’

‘Did he tell you he was a lovely man?’ said Esme, addressing them.

‘I said he was complicated,’ said Jamie.

‘He ran this place into the ground.’

‘But he had a hard upbringing.’ said Mirren, indicating the box of letters.

‘That’s actually quite offensive to all the good people in the world who had hard upbringings,’ said Esme, annoyingly.

While the siblings started bickering about light bulbs and where you could and couldn’t take them from – the stairs, Esme arguing quite convincingly, being one of the places you should leave them in place – Mirren took the tracings over to Theo’s pile of Arctic animal books.

One of them, it turned out, was designed for children.

A Bestiary, it was called; obviously a copy of a much, much older book – although between its dusty hard covers, closed with a clasp, it seemed quite old enough already.

It was an engraved copy of a mediaeval manuscript.

The pages were incredibly thick; double thickness really, many of them stuck together with age and, presumably, damp. The copyright page said 1928.

Mirren blew the dust off the gold-blocked pages.

It was a true thing of beauty; a reproduction, but beautifully done, with strange creatures: plenty of dogs and horses, obviously, but also unicorns, drawn as if real; curious-looking weasels and foxes with bounding tales and quizzical expressions; dragons of all shapes and sizes.

The dogs were Mirren’s favourite, often smiling, for some reason, and many with eyebrows that gave them distinctive expressions.

There were hunting stags and does, flitting through gilt-embroidered apple trees, against rich backgrounds of forest trees latticing into repeating patters. It was quite, quite beautiful.

‘Cor,’ said Mirren quietly, and Theo leaned over to see. He grinned.

‘No penguins.’

‘No penguins,’ said Mirren, smiling back

‘ . . . but who can bear it?’ said Theo, turning a page.

There was the most beautiful picture of a bear in the moonlight, rich in glowing reds and blues.

The bear appeared to be mauling something, but it didn’t take away from the loveliness of the drawing.

Theo gently brought over the tracing paper from the old school box and laid it on top of the bear picture. They looked at each other.

‘Who’s even going to pay the electricity bill?’ Esme was shouting.

‘Well, Grandfather left . . . ’

‘What?’

Jamie went quiet. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally.

Esme’s sharp face was wintry. Theo and Mirren exchanged glances. He obviously didn’t want to tell her.

‘I heard you had people up here,’ Esme went on. ‘I figured you were up to something – selling the land or looking to cut your losses . . . what are you doing? What are you selling?’ She looked around the messy library. ‘What the hell is this? For God’s sake, Jamie.’

‘I didn’t ask for this.’

‘Oh, come on; there hasn’t been another boy born for thirty years! It was always going to be you! You should have been preparing for it all your life!!’

‘Grampa didn’t want to teach me and . . . Mum wasn’t around.’

Esme fell silent. ‘Well, no,’ she said eventually.

Mirren looked back down at the tracing of the bear. Theo moved it gently and, as they knew it would, it fitted exactly over the Bestiary bear, a perfect tracing, except, of course, with white fur instead of brown.

‘This doesn’t prove anything,’ whispered Theo, ‘not really.’

They looked at it for a little longer.

‘And it doesn’t really get us anywhere.’

Gently, Mirren pushed at the tracing, on to the book beneath. As the tracing paper hit the book and she pressed on it once again, she sniffed.

‘What?’ said Theo.

‘I don’t know,’ she muttered. Jamie and Esme were now having some sort of ding-dong about Scottish Power.

Mirren pressed a little harder, and felt something give under her fingers.

‘Careful!’ hissed Theo; she pulled back the tracing paper and they both stared at it.

As they laid the tracing paper more carefully back over the outline again, the page below buckled.

With great care, Theo touched it gently with one finger.

Whereupon the bear, only just attached to the page, came loose, and within the thick old pages was revealed a small, empty compartment, which was bear-shaped.