Page 17 of The Secret Christmas Library
Mirren still couldn’t get her bearings. They went down a different set of stairs, set behind a door that was inlaid into wood panelling and hard to spot, and then moved into what was clearly a different part of the building. The ceilings were lower, the windows smaller, now looking out on to the forest they had come through on the way.
A city girl her entire life, Mirren didn’t know if she had ever looked through a window like this before. There was not a single sign of modern life in the frame: fields and paths and forests and nothing else as far as the eye could see; not a car, nor a roof; not an aerial or a power cable. Somewhere out there must be the railway line, but it was invisible from here. She had never been further away from . . . well, everything. She instinctively reached for her phone to take a photograph before remembering that she didn’t have it, which added to the unreality of the entire thing.
A large open door and a further three steps downwards – there seemed to be odd steps up and down all over the place – opened out into a very large kitchen, with a scullery leading off it. It was absolutely huge, with a vast scrubbed wooden table, and a sink the size of a trough. There was a large old range, and as Mirren drew closer to its cosy heat, with her hands outstretched, she realised quite how chilled she had become in the house.
‘You’ll get chilblains,’ said Bonnie and Jamie at the same time, then shared a look.
‘What are those?’ said Mirren.
‘I don’t really know,’ said Jamie. ‘Bonnie’s grandmother used to say it all the time.’
There were dressers full of more crockery than Mirren had ever seen in her life: dozens and dozens of patterned plates, side plates, egg cups, toast racks. There were nine teapots displayed on a shelf and six silver coffee pots. Bonnie pulled one down.
‘Sit,’ she said. ‘From the look on your face—’ she was talking to Mirren ‘—Jamie hasn’t explained a thing, has he?’
Jamie raised his hands. ‘They just got here!’
Mirren shook her head. ‘Not really . . . something about . . . ’ She wasn’t sure how much Bonnie would know, and closed her mouth. It might not be something she should be talking about.
An ancient kettle started whistling on the stove and Bonnie took it off and filled the teapot. She also opened one of the myriad doors on the range and withdrew a plate of warm shortbread, cut into fingers, lightly sprinkled with sugar. Even though Mirren had had a huge breakfast hardly any time before, the smell was irresistible, and Bonnie pushed the plate towards her as they all sat around one corner of the vast table, Mirren gradually warming up.
‘Come on, then, Master Jamie,’ she said, in her slightly teasing tone. ‘You tell it.’
12
‘So,’ said Jamie, after he’d demolished a second piece of shortbread, ‘this house has been in my family – on and off – for, well, hundreds of years. A proper long time. They had some wars and whatnot and this and that . . . ’
‘Is this shorthand for “killed lots of peasants”?’ asked Mirren, and was silenced with a look.
‘I’m not sayinghere is our perfectly acquired fortune,’ said Jamie. ‘One, because there is no such thing as a perfectly acquired fortune, and two, because we don’t have any money any more. But regardless, a couple of generations ago, the war did huge things to the staff and upkeep of the house. It just became impossible to maintain.’
Bonnie nodded at this. ‘There used to be fifty people living here, running this place,’ she said. ‘But . . . ’ She raised her hands. She must, Mirren thought, be the last member of staff.
‘We get a bit from letting people come and visit,’ said Jamie. ‘But most people come and see it and go,Oh my God it’s freezing, oh what a shame it’s falling apart, seriously, £10, I don’t think so, what are all these books doing here?Our Tripadvisor ratings are awful. Then we failed a health and safety check.’
‘I am not surprised,’ said Mirren.
‘Those reviewers were evil,’ said Bonnie, darkly.
‘They can’t all have been evil,’ said Jamie. ‘I don’t . . . I mean, eight hundred people can’t all be born evil just because they gave us mediocre reviews on Tripadvisor.’
‘Yes, they can,’ said Bonnie stoutly.
‘Anyway, after the war, everyone was so miserable – we lost four men off the estate, three under-gardeners and a butler.’
‘Those were Goodwin boys,’ said Bonnie.
‘That was nothing compared to the first war. They lost over a dozen then. There’s a memorial up by the maze.’
‘You have amaze?’ said Mirren.
Jamie shrugged, in a ‘yeah we have a maze but it’s nothing really I’m embarrassed about it to be honest’ kind of a way.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘My great-grandfather was really knocked by the war. And the house had been requisitioned anyway; they trained a lot of soldiers here. He was in the air force but he did his leg in and they shipped him home and he was stuck here. He kept track of all of them, or tried to. It was very bad for him. He had . . . I suppose what you’d call a nervous breakdown afterwards. The army gave back the house but they’d left it in a hell of a state, and there were no staff to come back. The men who’d come back from the war – they wanted better jobs, or to go to college or do something else. And some didn’t come back at all.’
He took a long swig of his tea and Bonnie topped up the kettle.
‘He died . . . he died.’ He clearly didn’t want to say any more about that. ‘And then my grandfather inherited. He was only young; he didn’t know what to do, I don’t think. I only knew him when he was old. I just know things got worse and worse. He got into book-collecting. We’d always been readers and I think he started selling off bits and pieces of the estate. He couldn’t afford to look after it, and taxes kept going up and up. He’d sell something, like a painting, or some china, butthen he’d buy books. Loads of them. It started off with kind of famous books or good books, but it seemed to get more and more compulsive...’
