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 wouldlovethat.’
‘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.
