“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 in the mouth of a lion, whose bronze mane spread impressively for at least a foot in every direction.
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.”