‘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.
‘Nowthisis a library,’ she whispered to Harri, now standing by her shoulder.
‘This is likechurch,’ 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’sThe 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?’
