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 medieval, not Georgian, with black oak banisters and rough-planked treads. She looked up the stairwell and saw it extended at least six floors, which was one more than she’d counted from outside. Looking down, the stair disappeared into darkness after three or four flights; there were no electric lights down there, not even the dull, antique lamps on the staircase above.
“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?”