“What about Mrs. Spencer?” she whispered as they pattered toward the stairs. “You know she hates it when we ‘ride roughshod’ around the house after she’s retired for the evening.”
“We’re not roughshodding anything. And why do you care what a ninety-year-old woman thinks?”
“Well, she pays me for one. On top of that, she’s already chapped at me for botching a puppy-weaning two days ago. No one told me I was supposed to be weaning him so I can’t really be faulted. But naturally Mrs. Spencer doesn’t care about such technicalities.”
“Not to worry,” Win said as he helped Pru over a broken step. “The old bird’s out in a purple laudanum haze.”
She was out but for how long? The problem with purple laudanum hazes was that when Mrs. Spencer woke from them she was usually seeing red.
“So where are we going?” Pru asked.
When they hit the ground floor, Win guided her around the corner and toward the Grand Dining Hall.
“Oh good grief,” she said. “Back to the portrait? It’s lovely but can’t you moon over it unassisted?”
“Shush! This has nothing to do with the Boldini.”
When they stepped into the room, Pru’s eyes went straight to Gladys Deacon’s silver plume. That’s when she noticed the wall beside it. The fissure from a few days before had transformed into a yawning divide.
“Oh my God!” she yelped. “What happened? Is the room collapsing? Do you have earthquakes in England? We should move the portrait so it doesn’t get damaged. How do you even move a priceless work of art? A transport company?”
“No earthquakes. I opened the wall with my own two hands.”
“Mrs. Spencer is going to kill you! I mean truly kill you! Probably with a gun!”
“Miss Valentine. Look. Stop yammering and look.”
He dragged her closer. Pru’s hands trembled like the earthquake she’d imagined.
“That crack in the wall,” he said. “The wall itself. It looked queer when we were in here the other day. So I decided to perform an inspection.”
They approached the opening, which was less a hole and more of an entrance, a door, a hatch into an entirely different room.
Pru gasped as they stepped together through the passageway.
“Is that…” she started.
“Yes. A secret library. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Oh … my … God…”
She took a few more steps. They were suddenly surrounded, on all four sides, by books. Hundreds of books. Thousands, probably.
Pru’s breath quickened as she scanned the room.
Shelves ran floor to ceiling, from one corner to the next, all of them tightly packed with books of all sizes and colors. Any other room in the Grange was partially finished at best: a few appliances and minimal dishware in the kitchen, the sparse dining hall, Win’s bed on the floor upstairs. But this room, it was curated. And it was full.
“Win!” Pru said and flew to a row of J. M. Barrie. “This is magnificent!”
Peter Pan. The Little White Bird.
“I knew you’d love it.” He grinned. “Worth getting off your duff for, isn’t it?”
“Yes. A million times over.”
Pru spun around to face a collection of Arnold Bennett. She closed her eyes and inhaled, the smell of paper strong in the air.
“I feel a little drunk,” she said.
Win chuckled.
“You seem a little drunk besides.”
Pru opened her eyes again and spotted an old friend.
“Look!” she said, sliding a book from its spot. “Virginia Woolf! A Room of One’s Own. Every girl at Berkeley would be swooning at the sight.”
She opened the front cover.
“First edition. And it’s signed!”
“Ms. Woolf and Gladys Deacon were acquainted,” Win told her. “Virginia said of her, ‘one does fall in love with the Duchess of Marlborough. I did at once.’”
Win then moved down a row of books, looking for something specific.
“Ah!” he said. “Here it is. A collection from R. C. Trevelyan, the poet. Polyphemus and Other Poems, The Foolishness of Solomon, The Death of Man. He wrote almost nothing in the late teens and early twenties. A horrid case of writer’s block. Virginia Woolf said it was Lady Marlborough who released Bob from his misery. She called it ‘the legacy of Gladys Deacon.’”
“The legacy being she could get writers out of their slumps?” Pru asked. Then added with a wink, “Looks like she’d better get working on you.”
“Hilarious! A real comedy routine from our cherished Miss Valentine. And yes, she was referring to his writer’s block but also that Trevelyan lived in Gladys’s home for a spell. After leaving the duchess’s tutelage, the formerly homosexual poet had a renewed interest in the female sex. Or sex with females.”
“Was it necessary to specify that last bit?” Pru asked. She looked back at the shelf. “Hello, Mrs. Dalloway.”
She smiled but although Pru loved Mrs. Dalloway, she bypassed her for the book beside it. Grand Babylon Hotel.