Page 25 of The Secret Christmas Library
‘You thought right,’ said Jamie. Even Theo, whose interest in food was lackadaisical at best, perked up from the stop of a stepladder where he had been reading a Victorian book of childcare, eyes bulging slightly in horror at its contents.
They sat in front of the roaring fire and drank tea as the last of the light drained from the sky, and Jamie closed the shutters and the room became cosy and pretty much warm enough to take your jacket off, if not your jumper, obviously.
Mirren ate a scone hungrily, piled high with the jam from the estate, then another. The boys too were tucking in with goodwill when she pulled out the poem again. She moved across the room to a tiny escritoire. ‘Can I sit here?’
‘Yes,’ said Jamie. ‘Rest assured, if anything was worth anything, it was sold off years ago.’
‘To buy more books,’ said Theo.
‘So it’ll be either reproduction or valueless.’
‘Okay,’ said Mirren, sitting down at the little table. It was still delicate and flimsy; she felt rather huge and inelegant sitting there. Opening up the tiny drawers that rose up from the polished table surface, she found, to her delight and surprise, proper vellum notepaper, an ink bottle and an old fountain pen.
‘Ooh!’ she said. ‘Can I use this?’
‘Again, just assume anything you find in the house you can use,’ Jamie said.
Mirren took the fountain pen and rinsed it in a bathroom down the hall, then had the satisfaction of drawing fresh black ink up through the balloon cartridge.
‘Oh,’ she said in delight. ‘I haven’t used one of these for years.’
She started to write an elaborate ‘D’ on the vellum paper. The nib was fine, and the paper slightly rough, but in a way that caught the ink beautifully. She smiled, pleased at her handiwork, and copied out the rest of the line in calligraphic script from the paper Jamie deposited in front of her.
‘Where did you learn to do that?’ asked Jamie, looking over her shoulder.
She went slightly pink. ‘I had a . . . well, I went through a phase in my adolescence.’
Theo glanced at it. ‘My God, Sutherland,’ he said. ‘How nerdy were you? Did you learn how to do this by staying home on prom night?’
Mirren gave him a look, and set about quietly picking out the nouns in careful script.
Lines . . . book, pen, line . . . setting of the sun – maybe that was to the west. Stars, land, sea; everything was in here. Ancient routes, though? Surely all the routes were ancient. Lines and setting suns. And crowns of gold . . .
‘What does itmean? Have you got anycrowns of gold?’
‘I believe any crowns of gold would have been sold pretty much first,’ said Jamie drily. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It is possible he was just . . . I don’t know. Wibbling. He loved games and puzzles, all those kinds of things. He was such an odd man. It’s not outside the realms of possibility that he’s just winding us up. From beyond the grave. Or thought he did have something – thought that he’d bought so many books, one of them must be worth something.’
Theo blew out some air. ‘As an investment strategy, you’re probably better off betting on horses. This is a wild goose chase. Playing silly buggers.’
‘But . . . no. I can’t think like that. He was absolutely adamant that he had something precious,’ said Jamie. ‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t have any reason not to believe him.’
‘Well, quite,’ said Mirren.
Jamie looked over her shoulder. ‘I thoughtgo seemight mean the halt. Because it’s where you might travel from.’
‘There are no books there, though,’ said Theo.
‘No, I know.’
‘Go see,’ said Mirren. ‘I mean, you don’t really need those words in the poem.First take thy pen, go inworks totally fine.Take thy pen, go in, go see. . . ’ She frowned. ‘What did you say before?’ she asked Theo. ‘Just now.’
‘About playing silly buggers?’
‘Before that.’
‘About being on a wild goose chase?’
Mirren glanced down. She wrote the wordsgo seethen she wrote the wordgoose. ‘Have you got any geese here?’ she asked.
