Chapter Fifteen
Castle Lore
Sale of Contents
Viewings: Saturday 8am–1pm
Public bidding on selected lots: 1pm–9pm
Pre-arranged guests only
‘We’re definitely late,’ said Annie, reading the sign at the entrance.
‘Check your bag, Miss.’
‘You have security at auctions?’ she said, stopping under an archway where a burly man in black blocked their way.
The man didn’t reply, only casting a detection wand over Annie’s shoulder bag and then down her body.
‘They do when it’s a place like this, I guess,’ said Harri, taking in the gatehouse with its portcullis drawn up over their heads. ‘Can’t have just any scruffy so-and-so walking in.’
‘How come we’re here then?’
Harri presented the man with their passes; the ones Jowan had given him when he picked them up in Minty’s Land Rover for the short journey down B roads and along the back fields, heading inland.
Harri had insisted they’d get a cab back down to the village after the auction ended tonight; it seemed unnecessary, making Jowan leave home on a dark winter’s night when there were perfectly good taxi apps.
‘And you’ve got the credit card?’ Annie asked, while the man made Harri turn, patting down his pockets.
‘Woah! Easy there!’ He would have glared at him if he wasn’t so massive. Instead Harri indignantly tugged at his coat to straighten it out and led Annie away as soon as the man was satisfied he wasn’t a threat to Devonshire’s security. ‘And we can spend up to two grand on book stock, right?’ he said.
‘Particularly books relating to Devon.’ Annie knew their mission too. Jowan had been very clear.
‘Yep,’ Harri confirmed. ‘History books, maps, local legends, that sort of thing, and absolutely anything that references Clove Lore and literally any fiction. The more antiquarian the better. And no old dictionaries, bibles or encyclopaedias, because they don’t sell.’
The security guard grunted in their wake, and they followed the signs through the gatehouse and across a small bailey courtyard of bare dirt. This was no stately home with modern adaptations in the living quarters, manicured lawns and a gravel driveway for a Bentley; Castle Lore was a grey stone Jenga tower reaching into the even greyer afternoon sky with crumbling arrow slits, gargoyles worn away to faceless, obscene stumps, and rooks’ nests and weed clumps peppering the masonry where the mortar holding it all together should be. One whole side of the old heap was propped up with wooden scaffolding that looked like it had been there for decades.
Even in the wintry daylight, the lamps glowed orange and inviting through the castle’s few glazed, narrow windows, and there was a loud hubbub of voices coming from inside.
‘Sounds like a party,’ said Annie as they climbed the worn steps and through the arched open doors.
‘Ah, good! You’re our last arrivals,’ said a woman tapping on a tablet behind a table positioned between two suits of armour, their helmets lolling forward like soldiers propped up while dozing. Her ID said she was Katie Barnes of Blazey, Barnes and Blazey, Business Liquidators and Private Auctioneers, Totnes.
‘Has the bidding begun?’ Annie asked.
‘Not yet,’ Katie replied cheerily. ‘These are your complimentary drink tickets. One each. And you’ll be at table eighteen. You are blue guests.’
‘Okay.’ Harri looked at the seating plan on its stand. Table eighteen was at the back of the room, furthest from the auction block, and it was coloured in blue like their drink ticket. The tables closest to the front were yellow. Harri guessed they were for the big buyers.
‘It’s too exciting!’ Annie didn’t seem to mind that they were very much the bottom of the bidding power pile. Katie handed Annie a card with a large number printed on both sides.
‘What’s this?’
‘That’s your registration card,’ said Katie.
‘Nope, still no clue.’ Annie flashed her white teeth.
‘You hold it up when you want to bid.’
‘Right, of course, sorry.’
‘Shall we?’ said Harri, crooking his arm. Annie accepted it with a gracious nod and they walked past the foot of a carved wooden staircase towards what a sign told them was the grand reception room, and where all the noise was coming from.
He’d resolved to try to match Annie’s energy the last couple of days when they’d been busy and peaceful in the bookshop and the volunteers had thankfully left them alone.
They had been re-treading the easy, well-worn grooves of their bookselling days in Aber. Thursday and Friday had been counted in cups of experimental latte recipes and iced hangover buns, modest daily totals (who knew the ninety quid takings of day one would be a record for their holiday?), and a continuous round of tidying and reshelving, shopping for cafe ingredients and cooking dinners eaten together. Harri had read in the evenings alone in his bed while Annie had held her book closed on her lap and watched the flames in the shop fireplace until she gave up kidding herself she wanted to read and took herself to bed to watch British soaps and quiz shows until she fell asleep.
Things had been easy once again, and today was set to be even easier. It’s not every day you get free rein to rummage through the contents of an ancient country pile.
‘Top three books about creepy-ass castles?’ Annie joked as they turned into the reception room, all dark wood panelling, ceilings as high as the room was wide, with antler chandeliers hanging above them.
‘Easy peasy,’ he began. Harri reeled off his favourites. Dracula , obviously. The Castle of Otranto would come a close second place, and he couldn’t not have Howl’s Moving Castle in there. He’d read that in high school, and it had stayed with him ever since.
Annie had been about to add her own favourites when a voice called out to them over the hubbub.
‘It’s the young’uns!’
The animated face of the elder Mrs Crocombe with her headscarf knotted under her chin loomed out of the crowd and following behind came Mr Bovis dressed as though for a day’s gamekeeping in tweed knickerbockers and long woollen socks. His Harris coat carried the smell of mothballs with it.
‘So, my dinner date didn’t go quite as planned?’ said Mrs Crocombe, blocking their entry further into the room.
You mean our dinner date, Harri wanted to say, but he only pulled his lips into a straight smile.
‘Turned out all right in the end, though, didn’t it?’ Bovis put in. ‘We saw young Kit and Anjali in here earlier. They were leaving when we arrived, looking every bit like love’s young dream.’
Mrs Crocombe was smiling thinly. ‘Not one of us had money on the pair of ’em, but we shan’t hold it against them. Love’s a funny thing, does what it wants.’
Annie wasn’t smiling quite so delightedly as Harri would have expected and she’d dropped Harri’s arm upon sight of the troublemakers. Maybe the novelty of the Clove Lore busybodies was wearing thin, or worse, maybe she still remembered the hurt he’d caused the night of their date with his jealous behaviour? He’d noticed Annie had been prone to quiet moments these last few days and he’d accounted for it by guessing she was still hurting for Cassidy, though he harboured a sneaking feeling there was still something he was doing wrong that was making Annie occasionally quiet and sad, even if she’d tried to hide it.
He watched her now.
‘Aren’t you going to stay for the bidding?’ Annie was asking.
‘Oh no, we’re only here for a nosy,’ said Mrs Crocombe.
‘Can’t be spending money willy-nilly,’ Bovis threw in, rocking on his feet. ‘Not when we’ve been saving up…’
Mrs Crocombe shot him a glare that was hard to miss.
‘Oh! Uh…’ Bovis collected himself. ‘Not when my old Land Rover’s needin’ new…’ he hesitated, ‘…brakes?’
‘Ah!’ Harri made the sort of interested sound he thought was expected of him, but really his attention was drawn to the extraordinary sights around the room.
A suddenly very flustered Mrs Crocombe was hastening Bovis away saying, ‘You young’uns be sure to enjoy yourselves.’
If he’d been paying attention, Harri would have heard the chastened Bovis receiving a ticking off as she bustled him away. Annie turned her head to watch them go, bemused, but Harri had already forgotten about them.
‘Woah!’ he said under his breath as the room revealed itself to them fully. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Treasure hunting?’ Annie hazarded.
What followed that afternoon was an astonishing insight into what happens when a very lonely old man, the last of his line, dies all by himself leaving a crumbling castle full of treasures to be sold off in recovery of his ancestors’ ancient debts.
Everything he once owned was catalogued and laid out for the world to pore over. Harri and Annie shuffled around the numbered items, reading aloud their descriptions in the catalogue.
There were fat West Country salmon mounted on plaques with the dates from a century ago when they were yanked out of something called The Bridge Pool, Bideford. These leaned up against grimy family portraits of stern men and feeble, sallow women all bearing the once-impressive name of Courtenay. There were unwound clocks with stilled hands, chairs too weak with age to sit on, silver dinner canteens tarnished black, delicate Chinese tea sets so transparent they might disintegrate upon use, bright oriental rugs that looked like they’d spent their lives rolled up and never been walked on, fine smoking jackets, parliamentary robes, ribbons and medals, hunting pinks and riding crops from the turn of the last century, unsmoked Cuban cigars in exotic boxes, crates of stoppered cognac, lots and lots of antiquated guns and swords, and then boxes and boxes of foxed letters and estate records shoved in a corner beside a pile of neatly folded flannel bed sheets.
Finally, awfully, amongst all this musty old stuff, stood the curiously out of place field hospital bed, a small television, and a rickety wheelchair with a silk smoking jacket folded over its backrest as though its owner was coming back for it at any moment.
‘I don’t know if I like this,’ Harri whispered, seeing these last possessions of the hermit Courtenay.
‘Yikes!’ Annie exclaimed, her face in the catalogue. ‘They want twelve hundred sterling for those awful taxidermy foxes over there. Why are they all snarling like that?’
‘You can put in a bid, if you like? Take one home?’ Harri teased, wishing he could enjoy the novelty of it all as much as Annie.
‘Christmas gifts? Dad would love that.’
‘Do you think he was unhappy?’
‘Who? Dad? Most definitely, if his voting record’s anything to go by.’
‘No, this Courtenay guy. Isn’t it a sad way to live and die? All alone?’
Annie considered this, letting her eyes dance up to a brass coronet candelabra and the dusty stucco plaster between the vaulted beams. ‘I dunno. He was a recluse for a reason, right? If he needed people, he’d have looked for people.’
Harri wasn’t so sure. ‘Would you be happy rattling around a draughty, creepy castle by yourself all day?’
‘Do I have Uber Eats?’
‘ The library is open for viewing! ’ came the voice of auction assistant Katie over the heads of the milling people, marking up their catalogues, some making phone calls, probably to their private buyers overseas.
‘ Ooh! That’s us. Go, go, go.’ Annie took Harri’s hand, pulling him ahead of the slow-moving crowd. ‘Is the library upstairs?’ she asked the auctioneer.
‘This way, please,’ said Katie, turning on her heels and guiding them up the wooden staircase with its boxy turns and bowed, flaking plaster. The wool carpet, once red, was worn beneath the banisters on both sides, but Harri could make out the repeated pattern of a coat of arms depicting an open book and two heraldic hearts pierced through with swords beneath the letters ‘C. L.’.
‘Clove Lore?’ Harri said to Annie.
Overhearing him, Katie answered. ‘Courtenay-Lore. The family have lived on this site since it was first built in the late-fourteen hundreds.’
‘Jeez!’ Annie sucked air through her teeth. ‘How is the place still standing?’
It was growing colder as they climbed. Harri became aware of footsteps behind them, hurried ones. Glancing back, he saw two men, one owlish in round glasses and tweeds, the other eagle-like in a dark suit and stiff collar.
‘Mind you don’t trip, please,’ instructed Katie.
Cables ran up the stairs, taped down here and there. They brought illumination to harsh spot lamps clamped to the spindles.
‘The library and upper bed chambers have always been lit by candlelight,’ said Katie. ‘Anyone buying the tower will need to do a full electrical installation.’
‘They’ll need to knock it all down and start again,’ quipped the Owl behind them.
‘Are you book buyers too?’ Harri asked the men, but neither obliged him with an answer, the Eagle overtaking them on the stairs, determined to get the first look at the library. The Owl awkwardly cut in around them as they reached the upper landing with a, ‘Sorry, chaps.’ At least he was apologetic about shoving in.
‘They’re not here to make friends,’ Annie whispered for Harri’s ears only, and he smirked back.
‘They want to beat us to the Penguin classics and Ladybird books, I bet,’ Harri joked, just as Katie was turning her key and pushing apart double doors to reveal a sight Harri would never forget for as long as he had breath inside him.
‘Oh. My. Lord!’ gasped Annie, frozen on the threshold of the candlelit library.
The Eagle and the Owl were already pulling on white conservators’ gloves and dispersing into the stacks, immediately setting to work.
Annie had no such prey instincts. All she could do was gape and stare around, stuffing her hands into the gloves Katie was insisting upon, taking in the dark wood library shelving that lined the walls, all packed with orderly old tomes in leather bindings. Wax tapers glowed in candelabras and sconces all around the time-capsule room and, as Annie’s eyes adjusted, even more detail came into focus; tapestries and heavy furniture, rugs and long red drapes, each one with a numbered auction ticket attached.
She wasn’t aware of Harri’s eyes fixed upon her, alive with something soft and admiring. In fact, he had barely registered the room, preferring instead to study the look of wonder on Annie’s face. It was this he could not draw his eyes from.
Unaware, Annie stepped further into the room. She had seen ‘old’ back in Aberystwyth where she’d walked amongst historical architecture daily. She’d had access to wonderful antique shops any time she wanted, but this place? This was time travel. This was stepping into someone else’s life entirely, a place utterly untouched by modernity. This was immersion in a forgotten way of life.
‘Now this is a library,’ she whispered to Harri, now standing by her shoulder.
‘This is like church ,’ he said. He was still gazing at her, but she had no idea.
She thought, however, that she knew exactly what he meant. They’d always shared an awed reverence for bookish spaces and this had to be the best place they’d ever stood together.
Annie noted the misty winter’s twilight and deep navy blue sky through a window of leaded diamond panes that rose from the oak floorboards to where the ceiling beams disappeared into cobwebbed darkness. At the centre of the window was the same crest she’d seen woven into the carpet; two hearts of glass pierced through with swords over an open book, its pages curved like a moustache.
A low fire crackled invitingly under a marble mantle and next to it stood a heavy, highly polished desk with a book propped open with weighted beads on a library cushion next to a pair of half-moon spectacles, as though their owner had only just left off reading.
She approached the book, poring over its words and recognised the text in an instant. It was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray , a favourite of hers since she first discovered him as a teenager hungry for Victorian decadence. She read under her breath a passage that shone out from the page, drawing her eye like a beacon.
‘As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that.’ She allowed her fingertips to lightly graze the black type. ‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.’
Annie drew out her phone to take a shot of the page, but was halted by Katie clearing her throat. When she glanced around, the auctioneer wordlessly held up her catalogue to show the ‘no photographs’ sign on its back.
‘Got it,’ she mouthed, slipping her phone into the pocket of her blanket coat and stepping deeper into the inner sanctum.
A new kind of silence descended as the book-lined walls dampened the gliding footsteps of the Owl and the Eagle. Annie forgot everything as she approached a great antique globe suspended on a brass stand. There was no sign telling her not to touch so she risked turning it, slowly letting Europe rotate away, her gloved fingertips tracing the wide Atlantic all the way to the Americas and past them once more.
‘Got the whole world at your fingertips?’ came Harri’s voice.
‘ What’s the starting bid on the globe? ’ The Eagle bellowed, as though this place wasn’t some wonder of a lost world magically preserved against the odds, but carrion to scavenge.
She couldn’t help glaring at the man, fighting the urge to ‘shush’ him. Not something she’d ever do in her own noisy, bright, lively library back home.
Katie was talking to the Eagle now, turning pages in her catalogue. She was telling him that the cabinet under the globe couldn’t be unlocked, there seemed to be no key, and that was detrimental to its sale value, but Annie’s mind was drifting further away as Harri stood by her side and together they wordlessly turned the world on its axis.
Annie loved the hubbub of her school library. Anyone could talk there. Heck, they could vocalise and stim and sing as much as they wanted. It had been just as much of a sanctuary as this old place, more so, as far as Annie was concerned, since it served the needs of so many young people. Far better than this damp treasure trove shored up to please only one rich old man.
The contrast hit her now. Even in this antiquated dream library with its elegant ladders on tracks that ran along the tallest stacks, she longed for her lanyard and plastic keycard, her pencil behind her ear, the tapping of keyboards as the kids worked on assignments, and all the questions and chatter of school life, and especially she missed the library lurkers. Those were the kids who’d skip lunch to slouch in the stacks, huddled over a book, trying to raise their grades or avoid the bullies, escaping into their imaginations. They were the ones forever asking her to order in the latest titles, making balancing the meagre budget hard, but she’d done her best to meet their needs.
Annie knew all the things a library could be for kids who didn’t feel at home in school (and plenty of them didn’t even feel at home in their own homes). She could tell you every one of those kids’ favourite series and when the next instalments were due for release.
She’d known some of their problems too; she’d been just as much a safe space as her library was for them.
‘ Overstepping ,’ the complaint had said. ‘ Undue influence over young minds. ’
Her heart plummeted like a broken elevator to think of it now, just as it had done that day she and the rest of her colleagues had been handed the letters on the library steps and Sally the school administrator had taken possession of their keycards until ‘the necessary inquiries are concluded’.
She hadn’t replayed that moment until now, having blocked it out in her rage. It had been too painful to think of what she had lost, of what those kids had lost, when the complaint came in and her senior colleagues had dug in their heels and refused to concede to an external audit of their library purchases over the last few years. They were going to do it anyway, of course, armed with their new lists of banned books currently circulating amongst concerned parent groups online and getting longer by the day.
‘Annie?’ Harri was watching her, his eyes soft with concern.
She blinked at him through welling tears, coming back to herself.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Harri,’ she began. ‘There’s some stuff I didn’t tell you.’