Page 32 of The Secret Christmas Library

‘But we need this now,’ said Jamie. ‘Come on, sis.’

‘Why the great rush?’ she said.

Jamie looked uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to tell her about the council rates being due, thought Mirren suddenly. Goodness. The crossing of wires and secrets in this family could fill every book in it.

‘Because these guys have homes to go to,’ he said.

‘Not right now, they don’t,’ pointed out Esme, not unreasonably.

Mirren was warmer after their tramp across the snowy fields, her gaze still turned up to the sky.

A few moments ago, Jamie had quietly come up to her and touched her shoulder and pointed – she had followed his arm upwards and seen, to her amazement, what he told her were a pair of golden eagles, rising from the forest and making a circle in the blue sky.

‘Oh, wow,’ she said now, as the sun glinted off their feathers. Their wingspan was vast and magnificent; they looked like creatures from another age, their profiles strong and cruel. All of a sudden, one of them vanished from view, diving somewhere out of their field of vision.

‘That’s one little mouse who won’t be making it home tonight,’ said Jamie, soberly.

‘I thought you country folks loved killing things,’ said Mirren, surprised.

‘He’s a sentimental one,’ said Esme. ‘That’s why we live in the largest spider colony in the western world.’

‘Yeah, alright,’ said Jamie, and then tramped on, but Mirren still felt touched by her small glimpse of these other creatures and their very different world. It applied to the McKinnons too, she found herself thinking. A very different world.

Right at the very edge of the field, to the left of the woods, Esme stood up in the corner, one foot on each of two wires supported between two posts, and held her head up high.

‘Are we ready?’ she said. ‘Theo, you have the numbers?’

Theo waved his notebook in his hand. He was wearing enormous mittens that looked like oven gloves, which slightly distracted from the dashing, saturnine air of the cape.

‘Don’t check your Instagram,’ said Jamie in a warning voice.

‘I’m just going to upload a few TikTok videos,’ said Esme. ‘It’s a relatable guide to being snowed in at your family castle.’

‘That does sound relatable,’ said Theo.

‘You’d be amazed,’ said Esme, snootily. ‘Lots of people like being considered to be in an algorithm of family castle owners.’

‘Not me,’ said Jamie, quietly.

Esme showed her face to her phone, then held her long, elegant arm up in the air. ‘Okay, stand by . . . ’

She pulled it down.

‘It’s 2G! OMG, I didn’t realise they even still made 2G.’

‘Bugger,’ said Theo. ‘It’ll probably give us the search results right back in binary.’

‘Just give me the number! I’m on six . . . no, now it’s five per cent.’

‘Okay, okay, quick, if it’s an old book, ISBNs hadn’t filled up so fast . . . try starting with a zero. 0862411793.’

Esme finished and brought the phone down and they watched in silence, as the phone took an age to search, a tiny circle going round and round.

‘Gah,’ said Jamie. ‘I thought we could maybe check the news.’

‘Or the weather forecast,’ added Mirren. They turned to look at her, as if confused. ‘What?’ she said.

‘Smell the air,’ said Jamie. ‘Can’t you smell it?’

She did, and all she could smell was a slight icy briny smell; the air had a foggy feel. She shrugged.

‘Okay,’ said Jamie. ‘Well, it’s going to snow again. In a bit. Look.’

He pointed north, up past the house; low down on the horizon, thick clouds like duvets were gathering. They looked cosy. Mirren figured they would be anything but.

‘Okay, it’s coming, it’s coming . . . YES! It is a book!’

Theo tried to look modest but failed.

‘It is a house full of books, I suppose,’ he said, in case anyone had forgotten that it had been his idea.

‘Well, bloody hell,’ said Esme. She showed them. ‘It’s Sunset Song,’ she said, naming the famous Scottish novel.

‘What?’ said Mirren, who, growing up in London, had never heard of it.

‘Did you not do it for your Higher English?’ said Jamie.

‘What’s Higher English . . . wait: sunset. Sunsets! The setting of the sun, Theo! In the poem!’

‘But that’s so weird,’ said Esme, displaying the cover on her phone. ‘It’s a modern edition, that one, with the painting on the cover. You can still buy it. It’s not that old.’

Esme’s phone suddenly collapsed into black. She stared at it for a second, as if she could will it back into existence, then sighed heavily and put the useless chunk of glass back in her pocket.

‘There’s hardly any modern stuff in the house,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s the book Google found for you – might it be a different edition?’ said Jamie.

‘All the editions have different ISBNs,’ said Theo. ‘But . . . oh.’

‘What?’

‘Well, only books after – I don’t know, but they’re quite recent, ISBNs, I think. Old books don’t have them.’

‘So,’ said Jamie, his voice going dangerously quiet. Mirren felt chilled suddenly, and stamped her booted feet on the crusting snow, putting her arms around herself. ‘So we just have to go round and look at every book in the house anyway.’

‘Um, maybe,’ said Theo, not sounding quite so triumphant. ‘But, you know – faster!’

‘Exactly!’ said Mirren. ‘We know the title of the book we’re looking for.’

Jamie turned sharply.

‘In a houseful of books completely out of order . . . that bloody old man.’

They snowshoed back to the house in silence, their breath visible in front of them.

Jamie’s gaze was distracted from the ground ahead only once, when a great hare bounded across the grass, beautiful, larger than Mirren would have thought possible.

She had never seen a hare in the wild before. His face softened. Hers did too.

‘What’s the book about?’ she asked Esme, crunching along next to her.

Unexpectedly, rather than being sarcastic, Esme, her cheeks pink from the cold, was thoughtful. ‘Oh, it’s so sad. It’s a big weepy love story and she loves him so much but they’re so poor and the village is so gossipy and, her love can’t keep him sensible, and . . . it’s really beautiful.’

Mirren thought about it. ‘And it’s set . . . ’

‘After the First World War. Up near here,’ said Esme. ‘It must have been a very familiar story to him.’

‘A love story?’

‘I suppose,’ said Esme. ‘I never think of my grandfather as having a romantic life beyond my grandmother, who he wasn’t very nice to at all.

After she left, he was a confirmed bachelor, back when that didn’t immediately mean “gay” – one of those men who’s more interested in collecting and puzzles and old railway timetables than socialising.

Neurospicy, I suspect we’d call him these days.

Back then, we just called him an irascible old bugger. ’

She smiled.

‘Not for want of trying by the good middle-class divorcees of the parish,’ she laughed in memory. ‘Rushing about in their best BHS, with the most God-awful home-made shepherd’s pies.’

‘That sounds very snobby.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Esme drily. ‘You’re going to have to report me to the Guardian.’

She stalked onwards, her long legs making her look elegant even in the ridiculous snowshoes. Mirren didn’t bother trying to keep up.

‘I wish we could have called up all the covers,’ said Theo, as they sat around steaming mugs of tea and toasted sandwiches.

The Aga was powering through, and its warmth was the most wonderful thing Mirren had ever felt.

It was almost worth it, she thought, being constantly freezing and getting soaked through, for the joy of coming into the cosy kitchen.

Maybe that was why people climbed mountains: for the sheer joy of stopping climbing mountains. That made a lot more sense.

‘I saw that the cover was kind of green,’ said Theo. ‘But I’m not sure that helps too much. Did you see the spine?’

Mirren shook her head. ‘Nope.’

‘Great,’ said Theo. ‘It was a very tiny picture as well.’

‘How many editions do you think there’ve been?’ Mirren asked.

‘Over the years? Loads,’ said Theo.

‘It’s never off the school syllabus,’ said Esme. ‘Generations of girls have grown up sobbing.’

‘Did you sob?’ asked Mirren of Jamie, who shrugged.

‘That means yes,’ said Esme. ‘You should have seen him as a boy. Whenever they had to put a Roger down, he sobbed for weeks.’

‘I did not!’ said Jamie. ‘Shut up.’ He glanced around nonetheless to check that Roger the sheepdog was still at his heels, which he was.

‘You shut up!’

Mirren and Theo shared a look, that Jamie caught and immediately stopped himself. Mirren knew from her own family, particularly her relationship with her mum, how hard it was to break your old family dynamics sometimes.

‘So it could look like anything?’

‘I don’t think anything, exactly,’ said Theo. ‘It’s sad, and old, so it won’t have dogs on the front. We could each pick a corridor?’

‘We’ll have to speed down them,’ said Esme. ‘One, they’re too cold to linger, and two, there’s about two hours of light left. And I think, even before that, more snow will be here.’

‘It’s practically the shortest night of the year,’ mused Mirren. ‘The wolves are running.’

‘Well, quite,’ said Esme, gulping down the last of her tea and pushing back her wobbly chair, which scraped across the flagstoned floor. ‘I’ll take west,’ she said. ‘Any last dribbles of sun, I’ll get them. Plus, you know. Sunset is literally in the poem, so . . . ’

Jamie rolled his eyes.

‘I’ll take east, then,’ said Mirren. ‘I like looking at the sea.’

‘Okay,’ said Esme. ‘Try not to get lost again and end up in a quarry somewhere.’

‘Right,’ said Jamie. ‘Quick as you can, every room, tear through and meet back here before it gets too dark. Take candles and matches. Good luck, everyone.’