Page 25 of The Secret Christmas Library

Everything always looked better after a good meal, and as Bonnie tidied away the amazing lemon tart she had served with crème Chantilly and which everyone else had eaten with a fork and Mirren had started, too late, with her teaspoon, they moved, replete, back to the drawing room, and took comfortable chairs around the fire.

Jamie had brought his laptop and plugged a router into the wall, which apparently would harness some tiny scrapings of internet every so often from a passing satellite, if nobody sneezed and a mouse didn’t run across the road. Although the snow was not going to help.

Bonnie had announced that the kitchen door was jammed up already and if it didn’t stop soon they’d all be climbing out of the first-storey windows.

Mirren must have looked nervous, because Bonnie had smiled and said, not to worry, there wasn’t anything to complain about until it hit the third-storey windows, and Mirren had said are we going to be alright for supplies and Bonnie had said absolutely not, the castle had never been cut off by flooding, snow, ice, storms, harsh weather or war before and they had absolutely no idea what they were doing, what a great idea to think about stockpiling supplies, if only they’d thought of it .

. . but she said it with such a sweet smile that Mirren couldn’t take offence.

Jamie had opened up his creaking laptop and said, ‘Now, right,’ and Mirren was trying to pay attention, but it had been such a long day, with an exceptional amount of new things to deal with.

Now, staring into the fire, the tartan blanket warm around her shoulders, her stomach full of good food and good wine, and with a wee dram of whisky sitting next to her on the flimsy lacquered table, she was in severe danger of falling asleep straight away.

‘So,’ Theo was saying. ‘It’s numbers? Might it be celestial navigation again?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Jamie. ‘He didn’t like to repeat himself.’

‘Remember Morse Code year?’ said Esme. ‘I thought he was going to cry.’

‘Fibonacci year was the worst,’ said Jamie. ‘I think he gave up after that. None of the adults could do it either. Mum started yelling at him. He ended up spending the whole of Christmas Day in his office on his own.’

‘Oh, yeah!’ said Esme. ‘And old Mrs Airdrie – that’s Bonnie’s gran – let us watch Top of the Pops on the kitchen TV. That was a brILLIANT Christmas.’

There wasn’t, Mirren now noticed, a television in the house, or at least not one she’d seen so far.

In fact, there were almost no signs of modernity at all.

There was the old gramophone, and an old wireless – not a router, an actual radio – in her bedroom, which she couldn’t imagine how to use.

There were no charger cables, apart from the old laptop charger cable Jamie had, no flat screens, no Xbox .

. . It was a house stuck in the very distant past.

‘Anyway, binary doesn’t just mean numbers,’ said Jamie. ‘It stands for letters too. Just like Morse, actually. Zeros and ones instead of dots and dashes.’

‘Uh-oh,’ said Esme.

Theo fingered the tiny sheet of paper, frowned, and felt in his pocket for a thick pair of dark-rimmed glasses, which rather suited him.

Mirren watched him sleepily. He was so attractive.

But not a good prospect, she thought. Then she also thought, who cares about that?

But that was what she’d thought when they met last year: that he was absolutely gorgeous and that everything else could sort itself out.

So she’d thrown caution to the wind, gone after him for no other reason than that she found him attractive, and told herself that it didn’t matter that she didn’t want anything serious – and what had happened?

She’d felt annoyed and miserable at being ghosted afterwards, for months.

Completely not worth it. If a hangover lasted for an entire season, you’d never drink again.

She stared instead at Jamie, focusing so intently on his laptop, waiting for a connection.

He was young, but his height and thinness made him look older than he was.

His shoulders were broad – but not quite broad enough yet for the burden life had landed upon him.

His open face and sweet turned-down eyes should have been very attractive, as well as his full lips – the gift of a fashion model or two somewhere in his family tree – but the worried look permanently lodged on his face detracted from the effect.

Theo’s devil-may-care stance would always be more appealing than Jamie’s weight-of-the-world demeanour.

Even when something undeniably nice was happening, like being served the world’s best venison stew in front of a roaring fire in a Scottish castle in the snow, he still had the air of a man who was wondering if he’d left the oven on.

Though Mirren would hazard a guess he’d never turned an oven on in his life.

He felt her eyes on him and looked up, and his first instinct, she noticed, was to smile. She liked that about him.

‘It was,’ he observed, ‘a very stupid idea to try to start interpreting a tiny, decades-old binary code written on a swan after two old-fashioneds and half a bottle of Burgundy.’

‘Are the figures swimming?’

‘The swan is.’

Mirren stared into the fire as Theo intoned the numbers while Jamie typed them out.

‘01010100 . . . 01001000 . . . 01010010 . . . 01000101 . . . 01000101 . . . oh, God,’ he said, swiping off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. ‘I’m literally going to send myself to sleep.’

‘T . . . H . . . R . . . E . . . E . . . ’ Jamie spelled out laboriously. ‘It says “three”! Three wishes?’

‘Three kings?’

‘Three lions on a shirt,’ said Theo promptly. They all looked at him, crossly, and the siblings looked very alike suddenly.

‘Aye, that’ll be right,’ said Bonnie, who was clearing away the coffee cups.

Theo bent back down to it.

‘01001110 . . . 01001001 . . . 01001110 . . . 01000101 . . . ’

‘N . . . I . . . N . . . E . . . ’

‘Nine?’ said Mirren, suddenly a little concerned.

‘He wouldn’t,’ said Jamie.

‘He bloody would, that old bastard,’ said Esme, storming over. ‘He’s using a number code to translate numbers . . . back into numbers. Oh, my God.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Jamie, helplessly. ‘Maybe it’s an address. Thirty-nine Regent Street or something.’

‘Then you’d write thirty-nine.’

They all stared at Theo who cleared his throat and peered through his spectacles.

‘01010011 . . . 01000101 . . . 01010110 . . . 01000101 . . . 01001110 . . . ’

‘S . . . E . . . V . . . Oh, bollocks,’ said Jamie.

‘It’s numbers? Is it all numbers? Give me that.’ Esme snatched the fragile swan from Theo’s fingers.

‘NO, DON’T!’ hollered Jamie. ‘It’s fragile!’

Just as he said this, the ancient, crumbling paper came apart in her long, pointed fingernails, the two halves of the swan dropping perilously close to the fire, the warm updrafts from the hot air refusing to let them come to land but instead drawing them dangerously close to the chimney . . .

It was Mirren who reached them first, hurling herself towards them and surprising even herself by grabbing at both pieces, desperately holding on to one, the other just beyond her grasp, if she could just . . .

BANG!

And, with an enormous crash of snow falling off the roof, there was a thud, a flash, a crackle, and every light went out.