Merlin went up to the door and knocked three times.
“Don’t worry,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “You’ll be okay.”
“What?” asked Susan, who hadn’t been worried about not being okay. Not until Merlin mentioned the possibility. “What do you mean?”
“I’m on your side,” replied Merlin, stepping back as the door opened. There was no one there, only a narrow stair between roughly plastered stone walls. The steps were thickly carpeted in red with bronze stair rods, and lit by gas lamps, which Susan could actually hear hissing as they climbed up.
“Why do I need someone on my side?” asked Susan. “And why the gas lamps?”
“The Greats are old; they like familiar things,” said Merlin. “Affectation, I suppose. We are all a little prone to it.”
Susan stared after him, wondering how long it was since any house in London, or anywhere in the United Kingdom, had been lit by gas. But as Merlin showed no sign of giving further explanation or slowing down, she followed.
The stair went up a long way, and as they climbed, the plastering disappeared, and the stonework became more obvious.
Finally, after what seemed to Susan to be an ascent equivalent to three or four floors, they came to another door, of rough-hewn wood. Merlin knocked again, with his gloved left hand, and it was opened immediately by a tall, elegant, very dark-skinned woman who looked to be around thirty or so, with long black hair in a gilded hairnet, wearing an ankle-length silk dress of vibrant red, and canvas jungle boots. She was backlit in the doorway by sunlight and made a very striking impression.
She was holding a blue enameled fountain pen in her right hand and a notebook in her left. For a moment Susan thought she wore a single glove of brilliant silver cloth, before she saw it was her actual left hand that was shining silver and she wasn’t wearing a glove at all.
“Cousin Sam!” exclaimed Merlin. “I didn’t know you were back. Writing a poem?”
“Indeed,” said Sam. “Compulsorily returned for restorative reading and therapeutic poetical composition, post my contretemps with the Rollright stones and the Silver-Eyed One. Only to be dragged from my study to do a spot of light bodyguarding for the Greats, since there seems to be something of a flap going on.”
“Sonnet? Villanelle? Chanso?” asked Merlin.
“Limericks,” said Sam gravely. “Thematically linked limericks.”
“I look forward to the next poetry night,” said Merlin. “Do you—”
A slightly querulous, Scottish-accented woman’s voice from somewhere behind Sam interrupted him.
“Sam! Is that Merlin and the girl? Hurry them along, I haven’t got all day!”
Sam stood aside, and gestured. Susan followed Merlin, up into a very large open-plan penthouse that had huge floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. She could see Hyde Park to the west, the houses on the southern side of Stanhope Gate and the Dorchester to the north, but they were all curiously below them, though she could have sworn the hotel at least should be much taller than the bookshop. It had stopped raining, and the sky was sort of blue, though it didn’t come close to the perfection of the May Fair sky the goblins had taken them to.
Sam sat down on a chair by the door, lifting her book. There was a scabbarded sword leaning on the wall by her side, next to that an AK-47 and a canvas ammunition bag holding three curved magazines, and next to that a blackthorn stick very similar to the one Audrey had in the taxi. Susan tried not to look at Sam’s faintly glowing silver hand, and after two or three gawping seconds, succeeded.
Looking across the room, Susan noted a life-sized bronze sculpture of a man that was either The Age of Bronze by Rodin or more likely a copy, since it looked rather battered and was being treated in a very cavalier fashion, with an old Burberry trench coat and some sort of waterproof cape hanging off its head. Apart from the sculpture and a broad and very faded Persian or Turkish carpet, the large room was very sparsely furnished. There was a 1920s art deco–ish lounge and three club style leather armchairs of older vintage facing it in the middle of the room, and between them, serving as a coffee table, a large cut-down whisky barrel with a glass top, the barrel staves marked in fading six-inch-tall red letters: “Milltown 1878.”
Two seventyish or maybe older people put their books down and rose from their chairs to greet them. A silver-haired, craggy-faced man, massively shouldered, who had to be close to seven feet tall, clad in a well-worn tweed suit, a brown leather glove on his right hand; and a much shorter, slighter woman, still beautiful though very lined, her pure white hair pulled back and tied with a black ribbon. She wore a very eccentric outfit: a fisherman’s green vest replete with colorful flies hooked onto loops above the pockets, over a black, sleeveless cotton dress that showed off her surprisingly muscled, if wrinkled, arms, complete with a very faded tattoo of a long dagger with three drops of blood on her left forearm. She wore a rubberized gardening glove on her left hand.
“Great-Uncle Thurston and Great-Aunt Merrihew,” said Merlin. “This is Susan Arkshaw.”
“And about time,” said Merrihew, her Scottish accent very clear. “As you know, this is very inconvenient, Merlin. Come closer, young woman. We won’t bite.”
“I won’t anyway, lass,” rumbled Thurston. “There’s nowt to fear.”
He had a broad Yorkshire accent. Susan walked over to the chairs, glancing from one to the other, noting that Thurston was reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, in which he’d carefully placed a bookmark before closing it; and Merrihew had simply put her Penguin paperback of The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham open facedown on the whisky barrel table.
But it was their voices she noticed most. Susan hadn’t really thought about it till now, but
