Page 53 of The Secret Christmas Library

Mirren screamed and Jamie looked up.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Out! Out! Get out! Run back towards the house!’

‘Not without you,’ said Mirren. ‘I’ll run across the loch and die.’

‘Okay,’ he said, tucking the parcel carefully into an inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Follow me.’

Outside the house, they ran around the back, and he handed her another fire extinguisher. ‘Know how to use one of these?’

‘I absolutely don’t!’

‘Okay, well . . . don’t open it in your face.’

He showed her how to pull off the black safety guard, and they directed the foam towards the branch on the roof, which lay there smouldering among the thatch.

Mirren’s aim was terrible, but Jamie managed to bank it carefully, smothering the flame and adding as much of the spray as he could for good measure.

‘Okay,’ he said, as it finally damped down. ‘Okay.’

He was breathing hard as he put down the fire extinguisher, just as Mirren turned round to see that a line of low hedging had caught on the side of the kitchen garden – and was racing closer to the castle. They could hear Roger outside somewhere, barking his head off.

‘Quick!’

But they couldn’t move quickly with their stupid snowshoes – or at least Mirren couldn’t. They forged their way ahead as well as they could, hot and red-faced, Mirren’s muscles all screaming at her as she deeply regretted not paying attention to the CrossFit machine.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

Jamie was looking at the smouldering hedge. ‘You go ahead! Wake up the others! We’ll get them out!’

‘Where?’ said Mirren.

‘Well, we’ll get them downstairs. Just in case. It’s not going to make it to the house, though. It won’t. It can’t.’

‘We didn’t think it would make it to the cottage!’

Jamie frowned, looking back. The maze was still ablaze; the cottages seemed safe for the time being. ‘I’ll bring the fire extinguishers up. Every one we can find. We’ll need to wake everyone. Buckets too. Cover it in snow.’

They went in the main door, the big old wooden entrance creaking furiously at being opened, as it so seldom was. Jamie left it open, then found the huge old gong and started hitting it. Roger stayed outside, as if astounded that the humans could be so stupid.

‘EVERYONE! UP! UP! EVERYONE!!’

Mirren stood behind him. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, suddenly. ‘Do you think Theo and Esme . . . ’

Jamie covered his face with his hands and almost started laughing. ‘Oh, please,’ he said. ‘What are we like?’

But Esme came running down by herself, nightgown flying behind her.

‘The maze is on fire!’ she shouted.

‘Really?’ said Jamie. ‘That’s a coincidence; we were ringing the bells for fun.’

‘It won’t reach the house,’ said Esme, bullishly.

Then they all turned as Bonnie ran up to them, and finally Theo, down the main stairs, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

Bonnie stared out of the main doors. ‘The maze . . . it’ll hit the cottages!!’

‘No, the cottage is fine,’ said Jamie. ‘I checked.’

‘You’ve been up to the cottages?’ said Bonnie.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was looking bad for a minute there but it was just a flying branch on the roof and the wind direction has changed now. It’s not going to spread in that direction.’

‘Okay,’ said Bonnie. ‘But what is it doing?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s dying down?’ said Theo optimistically. ‘I’m really, really sorry. I thought it was out. I thought I’d got it.’

Jamie waved it away, not making a big deal out of it. ‘You did your best,’ he said, and Mirren had a little start in her heart – that she thought well of this man.

Bonnie shook her head. ‘It won’t be enough,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Jamie. ‘We’re just down to round up all the fire extinguishers.’

Bonnie nodded. Then, suddenly, she stopped and cocked her head. ‘Can you hear it?’

They all stopped then and listened. There was a cracking sound, a creaking and a twisting noise.

‘What’s that?’ said Esme.

Bonnie looked at her.

‘It can’t be the thaw,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s still freezing outside.’

‘I think . . . ’ said Bonnie. ‘I think it’s worse. I think if there’s anything you need . . . you should probably grab it.’

And, in the second of stunned, disbelieving silence that followed, Jamie grabbed Mirren and held her close. He didn’t know.

But Mirren, the quantity surveyor – she knew. She looked at Bonnie and nodded in agreement.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Esme.

The cracking grew louder. There was a creaking everywhere. Something was very wrong.

‘It’s the pipes,’ said Mirren, quietly.

Bonnie nodded. ‘They’re unbelievably old. And the stress they’ve had on them – the snow, then the ice has frozen them, then more snow’s warmed them . . . I mean, we’ve had bad years before . . . ’

‘And the flames have stretched them, and the cold must have pulled them about like billy-o.’

The two girls nodded.

‘The pipes run up the north side; it’s a long branch off the mains water. Your great-great-grandfather got us off the well system about the same time as the railways came. And I don’t think anyone’s looked at those pipes since . . . well, Jamie, have you even looked at the schematics?’

Jamie looked very guilty, as the creaking grew louder. ‘They’ve burst before,’ he said defensively. ‘Loads of times.’

‘And been patched up, here and there. But they haven’t been heated over a flame before.’

The creaking and crackling was growing louder. And then Mirren turned to look behind her.

From the laundry behind them, where the scullery and store rooms were, came a faint trickling noise. And suddenly she could see it: a line of water, moving terrifyingly quickly, seeping under the door.

‘Okay, no time to grab anything,’ said Bonnie, authoritatively. ‘Let’s head out.’

‘Where?’ said Esme. ‘The cottages are closer to the fire.’

‘I know,’ said Jamie, ‘but if we take the extinguishers . . . ’

Already one side of the kitchen floor was covered in water, moving at lightning speed, like a living thing, spreading over the floor, and they ran through to the main section of the house to leave by the front door.

What they saw there dismayed them utterly.

There was water cascading down, pooling at the bottom of the staircase; desperately flowing downstairs, looking for an exit.

But that was not the worst of it. Years of neglect, of lack of money, lack of care – centuries of the house being there, put up in bits and pieces – meant that it was bodged, crumbling, held together with sticky tape and hope, birds’ nests and layers of peeling paint and wallpaper.

They watched, horrified, as cold water cascaded around their heels, at first very slowly then faster and faster; and then, horrifyingly, a crack appeared above the ancient door, running swiftly upwards, straight to the ceiling.

Jamie rushed forward and pulled at the great door, but the water pounding against the wood that had warped was holding it fast; he twisted the great handles, without success.

They charged back to the kitchen, just in time to see a huge eruption of black, filthy water from the butler sink, pounding against the ceiling with full force. The ground was trembling now beneath their feet.

Jamie looked at Mirren. ‘Might this . . . come down?’

‘I said we all needed hard hats,’ said Mirren.

They turned backwards, pursued by the filthy, sticky water that had started to move things – chairs, plates, and most of all books, coming at them menacingly out of the dark. Mirren gave a silent prayer of thanks that the electricity was not on, to spark, but as it was things were bad enough.

‘Break the windows?’ said Theo, but the water was now over their knees, kept pouring out from every sink, every loo, every hole in the place, like a river breaking its banks.

They waded back to the main hall, where things were worse than ever: the grandfather clock had lifted off the floor, was slowly subsiding in the water.

‘Oh, God,’ said Esme. ‘Quick. Up the stairs.’

Nobody had a better idea, and they ran up, against the water crashing down.

The smell was terrible as water cascaded through every wall or ceiling with a crack in it, which was all of them.

Masonry was tumbling now, falling from the cornices, the elaborate plasterwork on the ceiling.

A large chunk caught Theo on the head, and he cried out.

‘We have to get out of here,’ said Jamie.

‘The turret,’ said Mirren and Esme both at once. With a tremendous bang, a picture fell off a wall that was cracking in half. Jamie’s torch was wobbling, its batteries running low.

‘Quickly then,’ said Bonnie, and they tore along the corridors, wading through the water and a sea of books.

Mirren’s heart was sad to see them floating by: a life’s work; a memoir of a great hero, now forgotten; a history of wars in which nobody now was left alive; incomprehensible jokes from long ago; compendiums of butterflies; stories of kings and queens of foreign lands, unimaginably long ago.

An Alice in Wonderland crossed her vision, looking surprised to be off on an adventure of its own; great long lists of cricketers eddied around her; a Shakespeare floated past peaceably, as if content to know that nothing could sink him forever.

She passed the door of the East Library just in time to watch the great chandelier come crashing down.

The small door in the corner was also jammed, but all five of them together hurled their weight on it, and they spilled through it, almost falling down the stairs in their eagerness.

This was the far corner, the very far edge of the castle, and it was built of ancient, thoroughly solid stuff, stones laid hand over hand.

There were no curlicues, no plaster cherubs or fancy borders, no light fittings to crash, no pipes to unleash chaos.

Even with the torches it was black as pitch down the hole, and the noises from the rest of the house were harrowing.

‘Nobody lose their footing,’ said Esme, as they started down the spiral stairs. ‘You’ll fall all the way down.’

Her voice echoed, and Mirren shivered, terrified, holding tight to the external wall, even as, on the other side of it, all hell was breaking loose.

She couldn’t feel her feet – the water was cascading all down their ankles – and she couldn’t see them either in the dim light; but she felt, all the way down, the comforting hand of Jamie’s in hers, pulling her onwards.

He never let her go, even if he would have balanced far more easily on his own.

They carried on so long, their footprints sloshing, that Mirren started to get very scared, particularly when Bonnie slipped and Jamie only just managed to shoot his other hand out in time to catch her.

‘I got you,’ he said, and, as she turned, Mirren caught her face in the wavering torchlight.

‘Thank you,’ Bonnie said, and for a second she and Jamie looked very alike. And then they continued on.