The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Read Online Free Page B

I met Miss van Deering, and by then I’d read most of them twice over. That morning it was sheeting with rain, and while we were finishing up breakfast Kitty came in for her usual cup of tea and said since there wasn’t any point in my going out to help Mr. Frostle I might as well come and give her a hand in the library. Kitty was an old woman who’d worked in the house more than fifty years. She’d been an under-housemaid to start with, living in, but then she’d married the groom, Benjie Prior, and gone to live with him in one of the cottages. Now she just came in to clean the bits Miss van Deering used, her bedroom and so on, and a little room right above the kitchen, called the office, which was her day room. Doing the library was something else.
    Getting on three years I’d been living at Theston, but I’d never been up on the main floor, where the library was, and all the other big rooms. In the old days, when there’d been all those servants, the gentry liked to pretend they weren’t there except when they needed them, so the servants had their own steep wooden stairs running up at the back of the house, with doors through to all the floors, so they could get in and out to do their work when the gentry weren’t around. To get up to our bedrooms in the attics we used the back stairs as far as the second floor. Someone had decided it wasn’t worth doing the blackout any further, so they’d shut the stairs off from then on, and we had to slip through and on up some other stairs to the third floor, which the gentry had used for guests who didn’t matter that much, and for their own kids. Then one more lot of stairs took us on to the attics. (This is all going to come in later.)
    Well, Kitty took me up from the kitchen into this long dark passage on the first floor, switching the dim lights on and off as she went by. Then she took a key from a shelf and unlocked a great big door and switched the light on until she’d drawn the curtains and opened the heavy wooden shutters behind them. The furniture was covered with dust sheets and all the shelves had newspapers on them, folded to cover the tops of the books and hang down the spines. It was still really summer outside, but it looked like winter in the room with the wet gray light falling on the snowy dust sheets. There were three tall windows with old blotchy mirrors between them. Otherwise it was bookshelves all the way round, from the floor almost to the ceiling, except for the door and a huge fireplace opposite the windows. Each stack of shelves had a letter at the top. We were doing stack C.
    There was a special stepladder, made of shiny wood with brass fittings, so you could reach the top shelves. Kitty didn’t like the ladder, which was why she needed me to help. I climbed up to the shelf she showed me and passed the newspapers down to her, carefully, so they could be used again. Then the books, one at a time. They were all bound in leather and felt heavier, more solid, than the books I was used to, and they had their names on the back in gold lettering.
    When we’d got the whole shelf down Kitty gave me a cloth and some special oil and showed me how to oil the covers so the leather didn’t crack, while she looked through them one by one for woodworm and damp and checked that the little leather labels with the gold letters on weren’t coming unglued. Then we put them all back in the same order they were in to start with. It took us the whole morning to do just two shelves. It sounds boring, but it wasn’t. I really enjoyed it, handling those lovely old books and looking after them the way they needed. And I did it right, too, not the way I worked for Mr. Frostle. Kitty didn’t have to tell me off once.
    The first shelf, there were two volumes of something and three volumes of something else and six of something else, all different shapes and sizes. The second shelf started like that, but