“Yes, there’s a kind of penthouse that can’t be seen from the street,” said Merlin breezily. “And the stairs go down a long way. The place was built around the remnants of an older one, and above an older structure still. Come on.”
“I’ve had a lot to take in,” said Susan mulishly, sitting on the bottom step. “By rights I should be sobbing in a corner and demanding to wake up from this terrible dream.”
“Really?” asked Merlin. He started back down the steps. “Uh, are you in fact okay?”
Susan paused to think, then nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I wonder if it’s delayed shock. Later I’ll be talking gibberish.”
She hesitated, then added, “In a way, it even felt . . . not unexpected.”
“Being danced by goblins into a mythic May Fair?”
“Yes . . .” replied Susan. She frowned. “Maybe I don’t know enough to be properly frightened.”
“Maybe,” said Merlin. He seemed to be about to say something else, but didn’t, instead clattering on up the stairs. “Top floor! Come on!”
Susan stood up, and followed, but she stopped dead on the first landing. The arched doors leading off to left and right here were eight feet tall and painted with scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The left-hand door depicted the witches and Macbeth gathered around a huge iron cauldron, which looked oddly out of scale, being as tall as the women. The right-hand door featured Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest, with Caliban lurking in the darkness behind them, in a cave by the sea.
Susan recognized the paintings immediately, or rather recognized they were much larger versions of paintings by an obscure eighteenth-century artist called Mary Hoare, who Susan only knew about because Hoare was one of the favorites of her art teacher, Mrs. Lawrence.
“These are by Mary Hoare!” exclaimed Susan, leaning in close to look. “But much bigger . . . and in oils. Does anyone know you have these?”
“I hope not,” said Merlin. “Mary Hoare was one of us, right-handed, you know. Lots of visual artists among the right-handed; we left-handed tend more towards poetry and music. I believe Miranda there is a self-portrait, of sorts. And the cauldron is . . . um . . . also based on . . . never mind.”
Susan paid no attention to Merlin’s sudden reversal on whatever he was going to say about the cauldron. She leaned closer to look at the painted door.
“If these are original,” she said, “they were painted in the . . . sometime around 1800?”
“Seventeen ninety-six,” said Merlin. “We do need to get a bit of a move on—”
“I love them!” exclaimed Susan. She started up the stairs. “Are there more?”
“Uh, no,” replied Merlin. “I mean, no more by Mary Hoare. Slow down. . . .”
Susan was taking the steps three at a time, but she slowed as she reached the next landing, and Merlin heard her disappointed sigh. The doors there were gray-painted steel, riveted along the edges, and would not have looked out of place on a ship. Which was actually where they had come from; they were armor-plated doors from the magazine of the World War One dreadnought HMS Benbow.
“Those are from a battleship,” said Merlin, following Susan as she continued on up the stairs. “There have been a number of people in charge of interior decoration over the years, and since we practically never let visitors past the actual bookshop, there’s never been a push towards uniformity—”
“You practically never let visitors in?” asked Susan. “What about me, then?”
“You’re an exception,” said Merlin. “Evidently. Now, I wonder if you can tell me the artist responsible for the next set of doors?”
Susan stopped again as they reached the landing of the third floor.
“No . . . they’re beautiful. German, I think?”
The doors here were very old, and each leaf was set with nine deeply carved limewood panels, depicting scenes of medieval life in a late Gothic style. There were peasants reaping a field, merchants weighing coins, knights at a tourney, monks in a scriptorium, a wagon at a tollgate . . . and several showing booksellers amongst their wares, but with swords hidden behind the books, and odd creatures, even a dragon. All beautifully represented, the carving incredibly detailed.
“You’re good,” said Merlin. “They’re by Tilman Riemenschneider. A fifteenth-century sculptor. In Würzburg for the most part, though he carved these here.”
“One of the right-handed?” asked Susan.
“Oh no, not one of us at all,” said Merlin. “But he owed a debt to a family member, and made us these panels. I’m afraid the doors on the next two floors are perfectly ordinary, but we do have quite a quantity of artwork throughout the house, and elsewhere. I could show you around sometime, perhaps. Before we go out to dinner or whatever. People do tend to give us things when we help them out, and the right-handed are inveterate collectors of art.”
“Points for inveterate,” said Susan as they continued upstairs. She chose to ignore the implication that they would definitely be going out somewhere together. “I’ve never ever heard anyone actually say that.”
“We live among books,” said Merlin, with a shrug.
“Do the left-handed collect anything?” asked Susan as they passed the doors on the next landing, which were very disappointing, and would not have been out of place at Susan’s 1950s-built school.
“Weapons,” replied Merlin.
There were three doors on the fifth-floor landing, where the main staircase ended. Those to the left and right were the same as the previous floor, dull factory-made things and only notable because they looked much newer than the rest of the building, things of ugly postwar painted plywood.
But there was also one door straight ahead, which, while not adorned with artwork, had the impressive, dusky sheen of very old, highly polished mahogany. There was no doorknob or handle, but a knocker in the middle, a ring held
