Page 34 of The Secret Christmas Library
‘He ran this place into the ground.’
‘But he had a hard upbringing.’ said Mirren, indicating the box of letters.
‘That’s actually quite offensive to all the good people in the world who had hard upbringings,’ said Esme, annoyingly.
While the siblings started bickering about light bulbs and where you could and couldn’t take them from – the stairs, Esme arguing quite convincingly, being one of the places you should leave them in place – Mirren took the tracings over to Theo’s pile of Arctic animal books. One of them, it turned out, was designed for children.A Bestiary, it was called; obviously a copy of a much, much older book – although between its dusty hard covers, closed with a clasp, it seemed quite old enough already. It was an engraved copy of a mediaeval manuscript. The pages were incredibly thick; double thickness really, many of them stuck together with age and, presumably, damp. The copyright page said 1928.
Mirren blew the dust off the gold-blocked pages. It was a true thing of beauty; a reproduction, but beautifully done, with strange creatures: plenty of dogs and horses, obviously, but also unicorns, drawn as if real; curious-looking weasels and foxes with bounding tales and quizzical expressions; dragons of all shapes and sizes. The dogs were Mirren’s favourite, often smiling, for some reason, and many with eyebrows that gave them distinctive expressions. There were hunting stags and does, flitting through gilt-embroidered apple trees, against rich backgrounds of forest trees latticing into repeating patters. It was quite, quite beautiful.
‘Cor,’ said Mirren quietly, and Theo leaned over to see. He grinned.
‘No penguins.’
‘No penguins,’ said Mirren, smiling back
‘ . . . but who canbearit?’ said Theo, turning a page.
There was the most beautiful picture of a bear in the moonlight, rich in glowing reds and blues. The bear appeared to be mauling something, but it didn’t take away from the loveliness of the drawing. Theo gently brought over the tracing paper from the old school box and laid it on top of the bear picture. They looked at each other.
‘Who’s even going to pay the electricity bill?’ Esme was shouting.
‘Well, Grandfather left . . . ’
‘What?’
Jamie went quiet. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally.
Esme’s sharp face was wintry. Theo and Mirren exchanged glances. He obviously didn’t want to tell her.
‘I heard you had people up here,’ Esme went on. ‘I figured you were up to something – selling the land or looking to cut your losses . . . what are you doing? What are you selling?’ She looked around the messy library. ‘What the hell is this? For God’s sake, Jamie.’
‘I didn’t ask for this.’
‘Oh, come on; there hasn’t been another boy born for thirty years! It was always going to be you! You should have been preparing for it all your life!!’
‘Grampa didn’t want to teach me and . . . Mum wasn’t around.’
Esme fell silent. ‘Well, no,’ she said eventually.
Mirren looked back down at the tracing of the bear. Theo moved it gently and, as they knew it would, it fitted exactly over the Bestiary bear, a perfect tracing, except, of course, with white fur instead of brown.
‘This doesn’t prove anything,’ whispered Theo, ‘not really.’
They looked at it for a little longer.
‘And it doesn’t really get us anywhere.’
Gently, Mirren pushed at the tracing, on to the book beneath. As the tracing paper hit the book and she pressed on it once again, she sniffed.
‘What?’ said Theo.
‘I don’t know,’ she muttered. Jamie and Esme were now having some sort of ding-dong about Scottish Power.
Mirren pressed a little harder, and felt something give under her fingers.
‘Careful!’ hissed Theo; she pulled back the tracing paper and they both stared at it. As they laid the tracing paper more carefully back over the outline again, the page below buckled. With great care, Theo touched it gently with one finger. Whereupon the bear, only just attached to the page, came loose, and within the thick old pages was revealed a small, empty compartment, which was bear-shaped.
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