Page 50 of The Secret Christmas Library
‘Because I didn’t grow up in a house with more than one set of stairs,’ said Mirren. ‘Nobody explained the rules.’
‘Those are . . . yeah, they’re meant to be kept locked.’
Mirren remembered how stiff the door had been. Perhaps, now she thought about it, it had been locked, and the wood had softened, just like the rotting window frame in her bedroom. ‘Ah,’ she said.
‘Did you give it areallygood tug?’ said Jamie, his lips twitching.
‘I thought it was the way!’
‘Are you sure you weren’t snooping?’
‘Well, no. For one thing,’ said Mirren, ‘I wanted breakfast. And secondly, even if I were, I think this is a job about snooping, or am I wrong? Are we basically here to do snooping or not?’
‘Fair point,’ said Jamie.
‘But I wasn’t.’
‘Okay.’
‘I wasn’t!’
‘Did it not occur to you that you might have gone down past the kitchen?’ said Esme.
‘There’s nowhere to get off,’ said Mirren.
Bonnie snorted from the stove. ‘Come on, Esme, she was curious. You remember what we were like with that staircase.’
‘I’m glad they at least tried to keep children out of it,’ said Mirren, taking a long and very welcome sip of her coffee.
‘Where does it go?’ asked Theo.
‘It leads down to a secret cave. In the cliff.’
‘No way!’ said Theo. ‘Cool! For smuggling?’
‘At one point, no doubt, but no, mostly for escape,’ said Jamie. ‘There were some . . . divided loyalties up here. For the King, for the Young Pretender, but even before then . . . there was some fairly emphatic landing of literature from the Netherlands, Germany . . . ’
Bonnie sat Mirren down at the seat nearest the Aga and put a heaped plate in front of her. Sausages, bacon, eggs . . .
‘Tea? Coffee?’
‘You don’t need to . . . ’
Mirren tried to get up to help. Bonnie gave her a stiff look. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’ve shown everyone that you’re a good and helpful person – it’s fine. So just sit down and let me do my job.’
Stung, Mirren sat down on her chair with a thump. The breakfast was delicious, though – there were triangles of soft brown fried potato cakes, called, inexplicably, potato scones, which you spread with butter and salt and which were obviously going to decrease your life expectancy by half an hour for every one you ate but which were so uncommonly delicious she couldn’t really complain about it. Bonnie put down a huge mug of tea, which warmed her from the outside in, and gradually her shivering subsided.
Theo was writing out the binary code by hand, and Jamie was translating it. It was number after number; ridiculous to use a number code to transcribe numbers, but, Mirren was starting to realise, wholly typical.
‘Well, this is boring,’ scowled Esme, looking out of the window. The snow reached up to the window ledge. The day, though, was starting to clear; there was the slightest hint of blue sky.
Mirren finished her breakfast as the boys looked down the long list of numbers. The goose house theory seemed to be losing ground. She looked out.
There were two windows, one facing the front of the house with the buried cars, and one facing west, towards the kitchen garden. The freezing winter sun was gradually rising above what was left of what must once have been neatly trimmed topiary hedges; they were overgrown now, and scruffy, but their layout remained, and the sun marked bright lines through the gaps across the pristine snow. The light lay like diamonds, sparkling a full array of colours on this ground on which nobody had ever walked, in this silent world, without an engine, a police siren, or even a plane overhead. Nothing at all. A city girl all her life, Mirren leaned forward to breathe it in.
‘I don’t think it’s boring,’ she said, putting her fingers to the window. Frost feathered the inside. It truly was cold. Esme looked at her with a curled lip, as if about to make a sarcastic response, then changed her mind and looked round at the boys. ‘What is it?’
‘Just a string of numbers,’ said Jamie, looking frustrated.
