He’d found, not a neglected family wine-cellar, but
a hidden, secret library…
Poking around in the basement he’d found with Roy beneath the
ruins, scrambling over shifting, crunching heaps of nameless bits - sheets,
shards and lumps of ancient stuff - unreliably led by the hectic, twitching
light of a candle, that threw ghost-train spasms of light and manic
hunchbacked shadows along the blackened brickwork of the archways, he found
himself suddenly at the end of a long, narrow section, where he scraped to a
halt and stood to attention, non-plussed, all quizzical before a tall wooden
door in the wall.
Moving the candle closer, he soon located the mottled silver doorknob.
He gripped it firmly, and tried to twist it. Stiff and stubborn with age, it
resisted. But turning the knob, pushing against the door with his whole
body-weight, and with a final, determined thrust of his substantial shoulder, there
was a mighty, splintering crack, and the door gave way.
Inside, by the light of the flickering candle, he saw what appeared to
be the wine-cellar of a well-to-do household. Certainly, there were the usual rows
and rows of neat, wooden shelves, but on the shelves, in place of the anticipated
ranks of ancient bottles, the disciplined parade of cobwebby colonels in
vintage regalia, there were untidy rows of faded green and brown leather-bound
books; rows and rows and rows of dusty books! He’d found, not a neglected
family wine-cellar, but a hidden, secret library.
