Page 19 of The Secret Christmas Library
‘And you do?’
There was a silence in the kitchen and Jamie and Bonnie looked at each other.
‘Sorry, are you guys . . . married?’asked Bonnie.
‘No!’ said Mirren, too quickly, and everyone looked at her. It was more awkward than ever.
Theo didn’t even look remotely perturbed. After a second, he held up another finger – ‘And kestrels, yeah?’ – while Mirren felt herself go bright pink.
Jamie meanwhile was staring out of the window, sadly.
‘There’s been a McKinnon House on this site for five hundred years. Every bit of this place was built at a different time. There’s a fourteenth-century chapel, can you even imagine? What they were praying for, back then?’
‘Was it maybe central heating?’ asked Mirren.
Jamie rubbed his head.
‘I can’t . . . I can’t bear to give it up. To lose it all. But the paperwork . . . the will.’ His face looked older suddenly. ‘Thewill . . . I thought there might be something left over. But there isn’t. Not a bit of it. Just debts and bad memories.’
Bonnie blinked. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘You know there’s nothing left,’ he said. ‘Nothing to keep it going. Nothing to pay you.’ He nodded at Bonnie, who rolled her eyes, as if that was the last of their worries. Ah, thought Mirren. Interesting.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Theo, standing up. ‘Some billionaire will want to take this off your hands. It’s breathtaking.’
He stepped forward and, with some difficulty, opened the kitchen door. Up the steps, light flooded in. At the top of the steps was a kitchen garden, still neatly kept, with the peeling white crenellated wall above it, and a perfect wrought-iron gate giving a view of the grounds ahead.
‘You’d think,’ said Jamie. ‘But it’s too big even for them. And lots of them want to knock everything down and start again and they’re not allowed to do that either. Our neighbours want to buy the halt, for the train link. But that’s all they want: one field. One field that will block our right of way and ruin the grounds. And nothing else.’
‘So, hang on – you can’t sell it, it can’t be knocked down, it can’t be used for anything...’ said Mirren. ‘The government are not being very helpful, are they?’
‘You could say that,’ said Jamie.
‘The White Elephant,’ said Theo. ‘You should have elephants on your gate posts instead of pineapples.’
Jamie smiled for the first time that morning. ‘Huh,’ he said.
‘Well, you lot can carry on grousing,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’ And she vanished into the depths of the house.
Jamie waited until she had gone out of earshot, then lowered his voice.
‘But there was one thing in my grandfather’s papers,’ he said. ‘Just one thing.’
Mirren, wanting to ease the atmosphere between them, glanced over at Theo. He didn’t look back, concentrating fiercely on Jamie.
Jamie felt in an inside pocket of the old tweed jacket he was wearing over a jumper, then pulled out a long vellum envelope.
13
'So, my grandfather . . . ’
‘What was his name?’ asked Mirren. Theo and Jamie just looked at her.
‘Well, James, duh,’ said Theo.
‘Stop doing this,’ said Mirren. ‘Duhhing me every time I don’t know some stupid posh-people code thing. I don’t even want to be in the posh Olympics, so you can just stop duhhing me about it.’ And she stuck her tongue out at him.
Jamie laughed. ‘You are completely right,’ he said.
