Dogs by M A Bennett

Author:M A Bennett [Bennett, M A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471408007
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Published: 2019-05-20T14:15:33.220000+00:00

Scene vii

The library was as dark and mysterious as it had been a year ago when I’d gone there at night to look for the hunting books. But it was a lot less forbidding. This time was different – Perfect wouldn’t be lurking around with a shotgun. He was the creature of the de Warlencourts and this time we had them with us. Cass and Louis, the keepers of the kingdom, present and future.

I led everyone up the winding stair to the mezzanine, the place where Shafeen and Nel and I had hidden from Perfect, and the location of my dream. I saw the hunting books at once, black morocco leather decorated with tooled gold, in a row as straight and neat as a rank of soldiers. I noticed, though, that there was no new volume. That, at least, was something. Maybe that dark part of Longcross’s history had finally been put to rest. Meanwhile, we were on the trail of another mystery. I looked along the shelves, bypassing all the Lake Poets and the ancient tomes I’d seen last year. I could see the scruffy edges of unbound manuscripts in a dim corner, but, it now being about ten at night, it was too dark to make anything out. ‘I can’t see a thing,’ I whined.

‘Hang on,’ said Cass. She bent to a low shelf and came up with a candle on a sort of holder thing. She struck a match and the flame flowered into life. ‘It’s so people can find things up here at night.’

‘Only at Longcross,’ I said, ‘would you have an open flame in a library.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s a hurricane lamp. Look.’ She put a glass cylinder over the flame, so it was protected. She handed it to me. It had a kind of metal handle, like a teacup, to put your forefinger through. I lifted the flame to the shelves and started pulling things out. Some of the manuscripts looked pretty old, and some were quill-written, but they all said things like ‘Proceedings of the Moot court of Alnwick’, or ‘Reflections of a Country Squire’. There were no plays of any sort, never mind plays by Ben Jonson. I could feel the others shuffling behind me with the anticlimax. I’d been so sure I’d find Act Five here. Why else would I have been directed to Longcross by the typewritten acrostic? Was it some sort of weird prank? Eventually I straightened up and swung round to the others. It was time to fess up. ‘There’s nothing here. Maybe –’

I jumped.

The arc of candlelight had illuminated a portrait, hung in the darkest corner of the mezzanine, in a pulse of light so brief it had seemed that the sitter had leaned out of the blackness to scare me. I stepped back, hand on my pounding heart. Then, shaking, I lifted the hurricane lamp high to study the face that had given me such a movie jump-scare.

And that’s when I saw the third portrait connected to The Isle of Dogs that we were to find at Longcross.

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