Page 16 of The Secret Christmas Library
Jamie carried on down a set of steps, then turned into a turret spiral staircase that seemed to go up three storeys; Mirren had completely lost her bearings. They emerged on to an extraordinarily long corridor, the walls covered in an odd red grosgrain material, which seemed to vanish into the distance. It felt cold and unloved and smelled musty, like a huge but spooky hotel.
‘Wow,’ said Mirren again, but less emphatically. The other thing she noticed was that, here, each side of the corridor was lined with just one thing – bookshelves. Miles of them. There were bookshelves as far as the eye could see, overflowing with books. Mirren and Theo, bibliophiles both, immediately glanced at the piles. Everything was ramshackle, piled up without much order to it. The books were of all types: old law registers, hunting manuals, novels, memoirs, shopping lists, all of it thrown in hugger-mugger.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Theo, looking up. ‘There’s no organisation here at all.’
‘Nope,’ said Bonnie, reasonably cheerfully.
‘We’ll get to that,’ said Jamie, hastily.
Bonnie came to the middle of the corridor, where there was a grand pair of double doors on the left, opening towards the front of the house. She flung them open, and Mirren and Theo moved forward, only to stop in amazement. They were standing once again on a gallery level above a vast room: a library.
Light streamed in through double-height windows, even from the ice-grey day beyond. A gilt spiral staircase led downfrom the gallery level to the endless units of shelving down below, with several fine desks dotted here and there. The books here were older, mostly hardbound, but, Mirren could tell from glancing to one side, as hugger-mugger as before, with no rhyme nor reason applied that might explain why, for instance, an early set of Dickens was sitting next to a handwritten recipe book from the nineteenth century, which was in turn against a collection of 1970s Rupert the Bear and Jack Frost annuals, which frankly Mirren would happily have sat down and read right then and there, were it not so chilly in the library that she could see her breath in front of her face.
‘The library,’ said Theo, impressed.
‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘The East Library.’
They both looked at her, and she smiled her warm smile. ‘Oh, aye, you’ve got your work cut out. He was quite the man for books, the old laird.’
This sounded like the understatement of the year.
They left the East Library, and continued down to the end of the corridor, where they went up and down various sets of steps, each with bookshelves, or simply piles, until they found themselves in another endless corridor, and it was here that Bonnie opened up two doors, opposite each other.
‘How will we ever find our way back?’ said Theo.
‘You’ll figure it out,’ said Bonnie, smiling.
Mirren followed her into the first of the rooms, on the right. It was filled with bookcases, naturally, with a huge Audubon book on birds on top of the pile on the low antique table. But her eye was caught instead by – it couldn’t be – she couldn’t stop smiling – a genuine four-poster bed.
‘No way,’ she said. ‘I’m sleeping here?’ Then, quickly, ‘Oh, this is nice,’ as she didn’t want to imply that she didn’t sleep in four-posters all the time. Secretly, though, she wanted to run upto it and bounce on top of it. A real four-poster bed! It had dark red sheets and hanging curtains, like the walls outside. A little dusty, perhaps, but she could handle that.
Bonnie didn’t seem to have noticed her excitement. ‘I’d draw the curtains on it,’ she said. ‘Gets a bit fresh in here.’
Mirren looked around. The room was absolutely freezing, but the windows were jammed shut – warped, she guessed, correctly.
‘Is it okay to . . . put the heating on?’
Bonnie smiled and Mirren realised what else was strange about the room: it didn’t have a radiator.
‘Aye, whenever you like,’ she said, nodding at the fireplace, which had a pile of wood next to it. ‘I’ll start it off for you,’ she said, seeing Mirren’s horrified face. ‘Don’t worry about it. And I’ll damp it at night.’
The wardrobe, when opened, proved also to be full of books, plus a tiny electric heater, of uncertain vintage and frayed cord, which in the huge room, with its long, moth-eaten curtains and uncarpeted boards, apart from a beautiful rug in front of the fire, looked about as useful as trying to heat the room with a hairdryer. Mirren figured she’d be better off with the actual fire.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Do you want me to leave you to get settled in?’
‘No! I’ll never find my way back again!’
‘Fair enough.’
Theo’s room, on the opposite side of the corridor, was much the same, only without the four-poster, and rather smaller, and it looked over an internal courtyard, choked with weeds. Mirren felt slightly superior, until she noticed Theo had a duvet rather than ancient, dusty blankets.
There was one bathroom, and it was miles away at the end of the corridor. You would have to absolutely tear up there inthe cold. Mirren regretted not having had a bath on the train that morning. The bath here was fitted with a handheld shower attachment made of rubber that went over the taps and didn’t seem remotely up to the job of cleaning a person. There were two small threadbare towels on the rack and the cracked black and white tile floor looked uninviting, but, as Mirren’s eye followed the inevitable book pile leading up to a mullioned window high in the wall, she saw that the room looked out over the towers of the castle, pennants fluttering, and over to the steel-grey sea beyond. It was a vista of mind-boggling wild beauty. Mirren could almost imagine an old wooden sailing ship bearing men back from the rich worlds of Scandinavia along with wool and silk and pottery.
‘It’s lovely,’ she sighed.
Bonnie nodded. ‘Come on, I’ll take you back downstairs for a brew.’
