‘Harri,’ she began. ‘There’s some stuff I didn’t tell you.’
Chapter Sixteen
A Lot More Than They Bid For
They’d been summoned to the bidding by the sound of a gong before she could say anything more, and Harri had taken her arm and walked her down the creaky stairs.
He’d been concerned, of course, but she couldn’t have known where his mind had gone when she told him she had secrets to share. The little key in his heart had turned and sprung the lock, letting out a rush of hope despite all the promises he’d made himself at the beach after talking with Paisley.
There’d been no time for talking, however, as they were ushered to their table of bidders. The blue seats.
Katie closed the doors upon the room once everyone was inside. Her colleague took his place at the rostrum, introducing himself as ‘Colin Blazey of Blazey, Barnes and Blazey’, and proceeding to talk for a very long time about the ancestry of the Courtenay family, which could be traced back to Agincourt, and then there was a lot of talk about provenance and estate inventories and the declining fortunes of the little known Lord Courtenay who’d passed away five months before, leaving no will, no heirs, and no money.
Castle Lore, the Borrowers learned, was as yet unsold, but listening to the whispers of the antique dealers at the table around him, Harri gleaned there’d been some interest in the land from developers keen to have the site for rental chalets and caravans, letting the castle moulder on, uninhabited, as a picturesque ruin at the centre of their holiday park.
Annie didn’t seem to be listening much to any of it, sitting now with her head lowered and her hands in her lap.
Even when the auction began she was subdued, though Harri was fascinated by the auction-goers in the yellow seats hastily claiming lot after lot. The cold businesslike way it was all conducted astonished him.
The furniture went first, then the weaponry and armour. By the time they got to the contents of the library, Harri’s thighs were numb and Annie was slumped in her seat, her coat wrapped tightly around her. Harri had considered offering her a spot in the nook under his arm, but something stopped him, even though they’d done just that the other night, snuggled up together like the oldest, most innocent friends as they watched TV on Annie’s bed.
‘Lot sixty-six, first editions of the Marquis de Sade in their original French.’
This made him sit up.
‘Shall we start at eighteen hundred?’
‘Oh!’ Harri’s shoulders dropped and he watched as the Eagle and Owl fought it out until the Owl was beaten and the Eagle had promised twelve grand for the titles.
‘Don’t think that’s the kind of thing Jowan was after anyways,’ Annie whispered, amused, as though they could have afforded it if it was.
The auctioneer worked his way through the library contents. Bound manuscripts, illuminated scrolls, titles in Latin and Greek selling for prices that had Harri plumping his bottom lip in incomprehension. A huge old bible with the family’s coat of arms embossed into leather went for only a couple of hundred quid, which he couldn’t believe, and as soon as volume one of something calledThe Yellow Bookand a water-damaged, incomplete Shakespeare’sFoliosold for eye-watering amounts, to the Owl, as it happens, both of the bookish birds of prey got up and left the room, their business concluded.
‘Maybe now we’ll stand a chance?’ Harri whispered to Annie.
The lots got smaller and induced fewer gasps from the crowd, until finally there were books the Borrowers could afford. With Annie’s encouragement, Harri claimed two lots of assorted three-volume melodramas and Mudie’s Circulating Library editions of forgotten novels once popular in the nineteenth century. Annie did the maths in her head while Harri raised the card to claim collections of obscure European poetry, histories of the British Isles, naturalists’ yearbooks, almanacs and what the auctioneer called ‘railway novels’ in gaudy jackets. Finally, they snagged some Devonshire history books that nobody else bid on.
‘We’ve only a few pounds left,’ Annie warned him, just as the auctioneer presented a cardboard box, soft and bulging with damp.
‘Assorted library papers, uncatalogued, largely foxed, dating from this century. Do I hear twenty-five pounds?’
Harri glanced at Annie. She shook her head.
‘Ten?’ the auctioneer tolled. ‘Do I hear five, then?’
‘Five!’ said Harri, his card lifted.
‘Sold.’
As the hammer fell, the Borrowers rose to settle the bookshop’s debt at Katie’s station by the doors.
Harri claimed their free drinks and the pair took their seats again for what the catalogue described as ‘the prestige’ lots of the day. There were mayoral chains of office and a rope of Jacobean freshwater pearls allegedly seized after Bannockburn; six fine portraits in miniature of eighteenth-century Courtenay women in feathered hats, and an impressive oil-painting of a pointy-bearded Royalist Courtenay in a high lacy collar. This bidding had been accompanied by bursts of applause and a lot of boozy hilarity from the yellow tables.
Annie and Harri watched on, spent out and sleepy. Their table had emptied ages ago. The auctioneers were preparing to open the bidding on the contents of the stable block, which included an engineless, tyreless Rolls-Royce.
‘I’m surprised Minty didn’t want to come to the auction,’ Annie said to Harri, dabbing at her mouth with her cocktail napkin because that’s what they did in period dramas and it seemed like the proper thing to do now. ‘I guess they wanted us to enjoy the experience. It’s certainly been eye-opening. Kinda sad, though.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Harri, though he wasn’t sure if she was referring to the sorry state of the Courtenay estate or to the other, secret thing she’d wanted to tell him.
