Page 26 of The Secret Christmas Library

The only light was the fire and the candles, but it took a moment for Mirren’s eyes to adjust; she could see the flare of the electrics behind her eyeballs and squeezed her eyes shut.

When she opened them, it was like a freeze-frame: nobody had moved, everyone straining, halfway through mid-air, trying to rescue the swan, or reach out, then finding themselves in the dark.

The corners of the room, anything not near the fire, vanished immediately. From deep in the castle there was the echo of a crash, almost certainly Bonnie and some plates, which shook Mirren from her reverie, the taut thrill of the four bodies, frozen there in the firelight.

‘Crap!’ shouted Jamie, with some feeling, as they all straightened up, Mirren breathless. ‘Oh, God. Did you get it? Did you get it?’

For a second, Mirren was so shocked and confused, she didn’t know what he meant. Then she checked her hand. To her total surprise, there was the other half of the swan; her hand must have closed on it automatically.

‘Yeah,’ she said quietly. ‘I got it.’

Esme blew air out. ‘Bloody electrics. Is it the weather or did you not pay the bill?’

‘It’ll be a fuse,’ said Jamie. ‘The solar pays the bills.’

‘Babe, it’s been cloudy since . . . ’ Esme shrugged. ‘2020?’

‘I’m glad we got to finish dinner,’ said Theo, lifting up the candelabra. ‘Should we go check Bonnie’s alright and not broken her neck anywhere?’ He opened the door, which led to the kitchen stairs. ‘Bonnie?’

The voice came from far away. ‘I’m here! I’m fine! But I think you might have to say goodbye to the last of the Royal Doulton.’

‘It’s horrible anyway,’ shouted back Esme.

Slowly, a glow appeared in the stairwell, followed by Bonnie’s cheerful face, candlelight flushing her a lovely pink. Mirren glanced at Jamie; she still couldn’t quite understand the relationship between them. She didn’t want to look at Theo, in case he had his wolfish expression on again.

‘It’s not the fuses,’ she said, coming in with an armful of extra candles under her elbow.

She stuck them in various holders and in any saucer or plant pot she could get her hands on.

By the time she’d finished, the room looked like a particularly incendiary place for a wedding proposal. ‘I checked them already.’

‘You’re so practical,’ said Mirren.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Bonnie, dismissively, as if the very idea of the laird of the manor checking his own fuses was a ridiculous thing to think, as indeed, to Bonnie, it was.

Jamie frowned. ‘Not the lines, surely? They told us last time . . . ’

‘What did they tell you?’ said Esme.

‘They said they’d reinforce the lines, so that the snow didn’t bring them down,’ said Jamie.

‘Yes, but they have places people actually live to do first,’ said Esme. ‘We’re at the very end of the line.’

Jamie nodded. ‘You’re right. It must be the lines. Okay. How are we for candles?’

Bonnie looked at him. ‘We’re fine,’ she said.

He looked at Theo and Mirren.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know when we might get out of here.’

Theo shrugged. ‘If you’re saying I won’t have to spend Christmas Day at my uncle’s watching the King’s speech and everyone getting drunk and racist by three p.m., that’s fine by me.’

Jamie looked at Mirren, who had of course already known her Christmas wasn’t going to be brilliant.

‘I’d need to phone home,’ she said.

‘Bollocks,’ growled Theo suddenly. ‘My battery is going to go. No phones. When will we get power back?’

‘That’s what we’re saying,’ said Jamie. ‘Could be days. The snow has to stop, and the engineers have to come out. At Christmas.’

Theo grabbed it out of his pocket. ‘I should not,’ he said, texting frantically, ‘have used it as a torch, in retrospect.’

‘You’re not even going to call?’ said Mirren.

‘You don’t even have a phone.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Mirren. ‘Can I borrow yours?’

‘Do you know your mum’s number?’

‘No!’ said Mirren. ‘Oh, goodness. I’d better email her a message.’ She frowned. ‘Something that doesn’t sound like I’ve been kidnapped.’

‘You kind of have,’ said Theo. ‘Maybe they did this on purpose.’

‘Yes,’ said Esme drily. ‘We’ve lured you both here for the fabulous ransoms you so clearly would generate.’

Mirren didn’t think that was very funny.

‘I was rather hoping for sex slave cult,’ said Theo, and Esme snorted, the candlelight glinting off her nose ring.

Jamie took his old phone out of his sporran and handed it to Mirren. It felt like an oddly intimate thing to do.

‘I don’t know about a signal,’ he said, and sure enough, there was only half a bar showing. ‘But do what you can.’

‘My text went,’ said Theo helpfully.

Mirren looked at him. ‘Would you mind . . . could you possibly ask your people to get in touch with my mum?’

She gave him the name of the care home her mum worked at. Her mum would probably still assume the worst, but then her mum assumed the worst when she called her literally going down the road to the shops, so she didn’t think this would make that much difference. It was the best she could do.

‘We’ve got plenty of goose,’ said Bonnie. ‘Never quite got the hang of downgrading Christmas in this place.’

They had to abandon the translating of the clue for now; Jamie very carefully pressed the tiny swan between two pages of a heavy flower directory and put it on the top shelf by the Christmas tree.

Esme poured everyone another whisky, which made Mirren sleepier than ever.

She lay back on the old floral sofa and stared into the fire.

‘If it’s numbers,’ she speculated, ‘all numbers, what could it be? Latitude and longitude?’

‘That seems a bit simplistic for Grandfather. Considering what he gave us when we were five.’

‘It would be ironic if it was a telephone number,’ piped up Theo. ‘You know. Considering the circumstances.’

‘Grandfather hated the telephone,’ said Esme, dreamily. ‘Do you remember, Jamie? As if it was the police coming to fetch him or something.’

Jamie shrugged. ‘I suppose he must have got a phone call at school, telling him about his dad. You probably wouldn’t like it after that.’

‘No, I suppose you wouldn’t.’

They fell silent.

‘It’s kind of amazing,’ piped up Mirren. ‘You know so much about your family tree. I know hardly anything about my grandparents parents, except they were in farming, or in service, like everybody else. You’ve got portraits of all of yours.’

‘Well, the ones that haven’t been sold. The really crappy ones,’ said Esme.

‘It’s like the royals,’ said Theo suddenly. ‘You know who King Charles’ great-great-great-grandmother was.’

‘Do I?’ said Mirren.

‘Queen Victoria,’ said Theo.

‘Oh, of course.’

‘But you don’t know your own history.’

‘Do you know yours?’ asked Mirren.

‘A bit,’ said Theo. ‘Good minor gentry stock, and an unfortunate entanglement with a Romanian travelling circus.’

Mirren burst out laughing.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That sums you up perfectly.’

‘I’m not sure whether to be insulted or slightly titillated.’

‘Numbers,’ said Jamie again, as if he was trying to get them back on track. ‘What’s numbered in the house?’

‘The wine cellar,’ said Esme promptly. ‘It’s got vintages chalked up everywhere.’

‘Oh, lord,’ said Jamie. ‘We’ve probably drunk the last clue.’

‘Wouldn’t they start with one nine, though?’ said Mirren.

‘We used to have one eights,’ said Esme, sadly.

Bonnie was watching over the candles to make sure the wax didn’t spill over. She looked up.

‘The birds are numbered,’ she said, quietly.

Everyone turned to look at her.

‘What do you mean, the birds are numbered?’ said Jamie.

‘The geese. Breeding pairs. And the homing pigeons. And the grouse for the ghillie.’

‘Well, that can’t be it,’ said Esme. ‘These numbers in the clue were written ages ago. Any birds numbered back then wouldn’t be alive now.’

‘Yes, I didn’t mean the identified birds,’ said Bonnie patiently. ‘I mean the coops.’

‘Numbers printed on a bird . . . ’ said Theo thoughtfully.

‘It might not even be all numbers,’ said Jamie. ‘We’ve only got three. It might still be an address.’

‘It started with three,’ said Mirren. ‘It might be the numbers of pi.’

There was a massive groan.

‘Oh, GOD, please let it not be pi,’ said Esme.

‘Well,’ said Jamie, standing up. Mirren realised he was a little tipsy, and at the same moment realised she herself was, too – her head was spinning. She drank some water and watched him cross the room to the window, carefully moving through the dark.

‘I don’t know if we’ll find a damn thing tomorrow, in this snow. In the meantime . . . ’ He turned round. ‘We have jolly company. And we have music. We should dance.’

‘Jamie, go to bed,’ said Esme. ‘You’re such a lightweight.’

‘We don’t have any music,’ offered Mirren. ‘You know? Without electricity.’

As she said that he beamed at her, then knelt down to the old record player.

To her amazement, she watched him crank a handle at the side and wind it up.

Then he unsheathed an old heavy LP; incredibly large, and put it on at, amazingly, 78rpm.

It crackled and bounced and then, slightly too fast, on came an old jazz song.

‘Aha,’ he said, then offered her his hand. ‘Madam.’

‘I can’t dance to this!’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, and took her in a formal waltzing position. ‘You must have learned at school.’

‘No,’ said Mirren. ‘We were too busy in shoplifting class.’

‘Hush. Follow me.’

And, much more forward than he might have been without a couple of whiskies, he led her round the great rug in front of the fire, swaying her to and fro.

Theo immediately jumped up and held out a hand to Esme, who snorted at him, then to Bonnie, who took him up on it, and the two couples took a spin around the rug, the flames casting their shadows against the high walls as they turned and giggled over the crackling old music.

Theo bent Bonnie backwards in a dramatic arch and she laughed, her soft hair tumbling from its heavy bun.

Esme meanwhile was still staring at her dead mobile phone, crossly.

Outside the snow fell and fell and fell, but the sitting room was, at last, cosy; a tiny spot of light, Mirren thought, in miles and miles of dark, all the way out across the sea; a tiny speck of jollity and warmth among the unforgiving landscape of the north of the world, the freezing waves still pummelling the rocks below.