Chapter Seventeen
A Library Sleepover
William Sabine set down his torch and moved slowly around the room, lighting the candles from a pocket matchbox.
‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in hospital?’ said Annie, following him.
‘What are you doing here, Annwyl, hmm ? In my library?’
‘Your library?’ repeated Harri, trying hard to recover his composure. He could still hear his own pulse hammering in his ears.
Mr Sabine shuffled towards the desk. A stricken expression passing over his face as he surveyed the open book and the spectacles arranged on the display cushion. He closed The Picture of Dorian Gray and held it in his hands, his eyes settling on the spectacles.
‘Nicholas’s library,’ he said, sadly.
Harri flicked his eyes to Annie. Her cheeks were flushed pink but there were no other outward signs of what they’d just been doing. A shudder of wanting shocked down his spine. He tried to hide it.
‘Sir Nicholas Courtenay? You knew him?’ Annie’s brain was evidently working far better than Harri’s; amazing considering how close she’d just been to coming apart completely against his lips.
Harri tried to concentrate. ‘How did you get here, Mr Sabine?’
‘I walked, mostly,’ he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
‘But that must have taken all day!’ Harri was already reaching for his phone. ‘Mr Sabine… do you live here ?’
The man nodded.
‘I’ll find Katie,’ said Annie, jolting into action. ‘She’s the auctioneer, Mr Sabine, she’ll need to know we’re here…’
‘Save yourself the trouble,’ said William, softly, staying her with a lift of his hand where he held a big key, very much like the one Harri had put in his pocket. ‘They’ve all gone. I let myself in.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Harri. ‘You live here? But they’re selling the place, aren’t they? Are you a Courtenay too?’
The old man chuckled at this. The chuckle turned into a cough and he reached for a box of freshly dispensed pills, still with their white sticker over the seal.
‘Get me two of these please? And there’s a Marsala in the cabinet.’ Harri took the packet from him and William produced a smaller key, giving it to Annie. ‘Over there, beneath the globe.’
Annie took the key, her face all curiosity and concern, but she still did as she was instructed. The hatch beneath the globe sprung open and, sure enough, there was a decanter and goblets inside.
‘Should you have alcohol?’ Annie asked.
Mr Sabine only raised a wild eyebrow and Annie gave in, pouring him a little of the tawny wine.
‘Mr Sabine,’ said Harri after a glance at his phone screen. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock. We need to decide what we’re doing tonight. Where are you staying? Can’t we take you back to the hospital? Or at least, to the bookshop?’ Where was Minty when you needed a responsible adult to delegate? Harri didn’t have a clue what to do.
‘ Tsh! ’ tutted Mr Sabine, before washing down in one gulp the pills Harri had popped for him.
‘I’m not the only one enjoying a nightcap, I see?’ William said mischievously, nodding to the open bottle of red wine by the hearth next to Annie’s bag, its contents spilled everywhere. Seeing their blushes, he let out a laugh. ‘I may be old and unnecessary, but I know a hawk from a handsaw.’ He dropped himself into the fireside armchair with the sigh of a man arriving home after a long time away.
Harri smiled at this. He was quoting Hamlet . He couldn’t be so ill and confused if he was able to do that.
‘You seem better,’ said Harri.
‘I’ll never be better.’ He held out his empty glass for Annie to refill. ‘But yes, they helped me with my prescriptions and the doctors reached their diagnosis. A water infection,’ he said in a low voice, not for Annie’s hearing, ‘and a lack of sodium, apparently.’ He chuckled and scratched his bare head. ‘The marvellous complexity of the human body, and it can be poleaxed for the lack of a few grains of salt.’
When Annie came back her demeanour had shifted. She stood by Harri’s side and handed over William’s glass, filled halfway this time. ‘We would have been locked overnight in the castle if you hadn’t shown up.’
Harri felt a sudden flush of warmth emanate from her. She had to be thinking of what would have happened if they hadn’t been interrupted. Her arms were by her sides now and his whole soul wanted to reach for her hand, to let her know it wasn’t over. They had left everything To Be Continued, only she took a quick step away, leaving a cold space between them.
He didn’t know what would happen if they didn’t get the chance to talk it all over, and the sooner the better, but a feeling of unease was making its way inside him now.
Annie couldn’t look at him even though he was blatantly looking right at her. Was she embarrassed? Regretful? He needed to know.
‘I watched from the gatehouse until the last car was gone and I let myself in,’ William explained. ‘It’s my right, after all. I’ve lived here these last fifty years.’
Annie crouched by his side.
Harri felt like he was watching from behind glass. He had to talk with her. But how, when they had poor Mr Sabine to sort out?
‘Nicholas and I were companions,’ the man was telling Annie fondly.
‘You were…’ Annie began, before stopping herself.
‘We were the closest of friends, which is better than whatever is running through your head, young Annwyl.’ He smiled sadly and his whole face transformed into a picture of softness. ‘You young people might want to imagine us being more, but friendship was all we ever needed.’
Harri wished he wouldn’t call her Annwyl, even though it was only the old man’s way of teasing him. It made him feel even more ridiculous than he already did.
Annie was smiling back at William. ‘You didn’t seem to know any of this when you appeared at the bookshop.’
Mr Sabine huffed out a breath and shook his head. ‘I remember the day they took Nicholas away. I’d been looking after him here. He hated hospitals, begged me not to let them take him. He wanted to die at home, with me.’ Tears filled his eyes, and he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.
‘You looked after him?’ Annie was saying.
‘We looked after each other. And when the ambulance men took him out of here, he was already unconscious. I knew he wasn’t returning. And after that, I… let myself slip.’ He wiped at his eyes. ‘I didn’t see the point in keeping up with my pills. Nicholas always saw to that sort of thing. He saw to everything. This last year or two… we had both let things slip.’
‘Oh, William.’ Annie reached for his hand, holding it fearlessly.
Harri still couldn’t quite function, an awful desperation was setting in, and guilt too. His main concern should be William, like it was for Annie. She seemed to have forgotten everything that had happened.
William talked softly on. ‘I did my best by him. He was agoraphobic, you see? Always was. Even in seventy-six when I responded to his advertisement for an antiquarian and steward. The outside world drove the fear of the devil into him, so we kept our own company here.’
‘Minty said he was a recluse, a hermit?’ said Annie.
William laughed sadly. ‘He can’t be blamed for that. Have you seen the world? Oh, we had doctors stop by, over the years, and they questioned and prodded, psychoanalysed and so on, but the truth of the matter was, Nicholas didn’t need the whole world; he only needed his own little kingdom.’
‘And you were part of it,’ said Annie.
‘I was half of it,’ he corrected, sorrow splitting his face as his eyes filled. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, what would Nicholas say if he could see me now?’
Annie looked to Harri and the pain in her eyes startled him into action. Harri came to crouch by the man’s side too.
‘He’d say how glad he was to see his old friend still here, I imagine,’ said Harri.
‘But they’re selling it all out from underneath me, aren’t they?’ said William, with the look of a child.
‘They auctioned off the house contents today,’ Harri said, and a fresh wave of remorse came as he remembered the bidding and how easily he’d helped break apart the estate with the wave of a card. ‘To recover some… debts.’
‘But they can’t sell the castle,’ Annie put in. ‘Not yet. There’s some legal stuff stopping it. I don’t really understand.’
‘Because Nicholas died intestate,’ Harri put in. ‘No will.’
William kept his eyes on the handkerchief in his hand. ‘The castle will be sold by the Crown. It is beyond repair. Perhaps it is for the best.’
‘But where will you live?’ said Annie, her voice swelling with emotion. ‘Have you no family?’
William shook his head and looked around his library like he was watching ghostly scenes playing out everywhere. The place was haunted with his memories. He smiled at them as they danced across his vision. He and Nicholas by the globe, lost in conversation; his friend pacing with his hands behind his back, William smoking by the fire, debating some idea from a dusty old tome open upon the desk; the pair of them pinpointing a spot on a map and sharing their knowledge of the place, all gleaned from books, never from travel or experience. Their experiences were those recounted by authors and adventurers told in manuscript and print. They were collectors, connoisseurs, bookish companions. They had everything they needed right here in Castle Lore.
William would receive from Nicholas a list of treasures to hunt down on the first Monday of every month and he’d add them to his friend’s other requests, writing off letters to collectors and repositories across the world looking for them.
Nicholas would have the sole pleasure of unpacking them when they arrived, and so the men would have new material to read, new matters to discuss, and life went on, full of interest and intellectual endeavour. Their friendship had been their lives’ work, the rarest treasure they had.
‘I’ll stay another night,’ said William. ‘To say goodbye.’
‘We’ll stay with you, then,’ Annie replied, without asking what Harri thought.
‘And then tomorrow, we’ll all go back to Clove Lore and decide what’s to be done,’ Harri put in softly. ‘ You’ll decide. If you don’t want to go back to the hospital or wherever Social Services put you, I don’t see how they can make you. And you don’t seem ill.’
‘I’m not,’ he snapped. ‘I’m old and alone, that’s all.’
‘You’re not alone,’ Annie insisted, still holding his hand. ‘You have new friends now.’
The three of them prepared for a night at Castle Lore, William showing them where the woodstore was and how to toast bread on the library fire. There was loose tea in a silver caddy and, Nicholas’s favourite, the last of the Marc de Champagne truffles they’d have sent over from France, and as everyone busied themselves with settling down to sleep – William insisted on sleeping by the library fire, so Annie and Harri took the other armchairs – Harri felt his opportunity slipping away to talk about where he and Annie stood now that they had absolutely overstepped the boundaries of the friend zone (and Annie looked nothing but relieved not to have to talk about it).
They all slept, Annie and William more soundly than Harri, until the winter morning came. Clove Lore Castle had housed its last ever overnight guests.
When day came, it was no longer a home, but a relic out of time, its library collection hours away from being packed up and scattered across the four corners of the earth, a testament to the friendship of two men who found a whole world in each other and which had been adventure enough for both of them.