“Yes, they’re both here today,” said Eric. He hesitated, then added, “Good luck.”
Merlin grimaced and handed him the blackthorn stick.
“Give that to Audrey, will you, when she gets back?”
Eric nodded, and popped it into a tree stump umbrella stand by the door, complete with sawn-off roots, which held several similar sticks, two ivory-handled black umbrellas of some antiquity, and a two-handed sword with a bronze entwined dragon hilt that was longer than he was tall.
“Would you like me to take your glass rose, too?” asked Eric.
“Uh, no, I’ll keep it,” said Susan. She wasn’t sure why, except that she wanted to look at it more closely when she got the chance. She’d seen it swaying and bending, the petals fluttering, and even though it was now stiff and solid glass, it had a naturalistic feel and looked like a work of very fine art, not something from some factory mold.
Susan followed Merlin between the tables towards a door at the back of the showroom, trying not to turn her head too quickly to look at interesting books and shower them with droplets of water. Because the books were old and most didn’t have dust jackets, it was hard to see what they were while rapidly passing by, particularly without turning her head, but she did manage to read the gilt or silver embossed type on some as she went past, noting titles and names she knew like The Tempest and Ivanhoe and Persuasion and Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Austen and Brontë. Several shelves contained only Bibles, some of them obviously very old indeed, and there was a special display case between two bookcases where she paused for a moment, awed by its contents: William Blake’s Poetical Sketches, a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, and the crowning presence of a Shakespeare First Folio.
Next to the rear door, there was a very large glass-fronted bookcase, where the books were not in rows, but face out on stands. Susan stopped as she recognized childhood favorites, made much easier because many of these were of a later era than those on the other shelves and did have dust jackets. There was John Masefield’s The Box of Delights; and the C. S. Lewis Narnia books; and Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey; The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker; Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken; several of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels, including Susan’s favorite, The Silver Branch; Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones; The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner; Five Children and It by E. Nesbit; and many others. Most were editions she knew from the library, but in much better shape, the dust jackets kept pristine under protective clear wrappers.
“Children’s writers,” said Merlin. “Dangerous bunch. They cause us a lot of trouble.”
“How?” asked Susan.
“They don’t do it on purpose,” said Merlin. He opened the door. “But quite often they discover the key to raise some ancient myth, or release something that should have stayed imprisoned, and they share that knowledge via their writing. Stories aren’t always merely stories, you know. Come on.”
Susan tore herself away from the children’s books and followed Merlin through a cramped rear office that contained two rolltop desks, an old wooden six-drawer filing cabinet, and a rifle rack containing six Lee-Enfield .303s, their 1907 Pattern Sword bayonets in a smaller rack below, and a slightly battered green ammunition case beneath that, with stenciled yellow type: “300 Cart. .303 Ball.”
Merlin led Susan out through a door at the rear of the office, into a narrow wainscoted corridor with two doors on the left and a broad staircase on the right. The left-hand door had a stylized bonnet drawn on it in gold, and the right-hand a top hat.
“Which bathroom do you want to use?” asked Merlin. “Towels inside, and there’ll be clothes, too; you can get changed if you want. Only boiler suits, I’m afraid, and mostly too big. I think we bought all Winston Churchill’s old ones. At least they’ll be dry.”
“Are you getting changed?” asked Susan suspiciously. She couldn’t picture Merlin in an oversized Churchillian boiler suit.
“Later,” said Merlin. “I’m only suggesting it because you really are very muddy. . . .”
Susan looked down at herself, noted this was accurate, and went in through the door marked with the bonnet. She figured the women’s toilet would be more salubrious than the men’s. Cleaning toilets in pubs had made her well aware of the difference.
When she emerged ten minutes later, Merlin was waiting. He had somehow cleaned and dried his blue dress, and the towel wrapped around his head in a turban didn’t look stupid, but like some sort of new fashion he’d started.
Susan didn’t feel too jealous. Despite Merlin’s comment, she’d found a blue boiler suit exactly her size, and it still had a belt, which the ones she’d seen in charity shops had always long since lost. With the belt pulled in, the suit had some shape, and numerous useful pockets made up for the rough feel of the heavy cotton. She’d tied her own clothes into a bundle and felt rather like an unlikely hobo from a 1930s film, a bit too shiny and clean.
“How did you get one that fits?” asked Merlin. “I’ve looked in both bathrooms tons of times! They’re always way too big! Were there any more that size?”
“No,” said Susan.
“Typical,” muttered Merlin.
“What’s with all the boots in there?” asked Susan. As well as shelves of carefully folded blue boiler suits, there were racks and racks of highly polished heavy black boots in the expansive bathroom, which was more like a locker room at a big school than anything you’d expect out the back of a bookshop. Very large, cumbersome, and doubtless uncomfortable boots.
“Old ceremonial stuff,” said Merlin, with a shudder. “Which we are forced to wear occasionally. Come on. Great-Uncle Thurston and Great-Aunt Merrihew are upstairs.”
Susan took two steps up, and paused. The central staircase was older than the rest of the house. It was
