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“You own a mountain?” Cassie asked, squinting at him.
He grinned, and Cassie liked that expression on his face. “Several, actually. It’s not so unusual.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows, disagreeing. “Where are we, though?”
“Northwest Scotland,” Drummond said. “The Highlands.”
Cassie nodded, and inhaled deeply, feeling the clean, cool air fill her lungs. Somewhere overhead a bird shrieked and shattered the silence.
“We’re what, five hours ahead of New York?” Cassie asked. “How come it’s light here? It should still be night, shouldn’t it?”
“Time works differently in the shadows,” Drummond said. “It’s a little later than that. It took us a while to emerge from the shadows.” He looked around, sniffing the air. “Early morning. Come, let’s get in out of the cold. I want to have a look around and then I’ll take you to the library.”
She followed Drummond around the house for a few minutes, watching as he opened doors and wandered through rooms, touching furniture affectionately, nodding to himself in satisfaction as if pleased that everything was where it should be. There was a dining room and a lounge, a billiards room with a table lying under a heavy gray cover, and at one side of the house was an old kitchen with a large range cooker and a collection of pots and pans dangling from a rack overhead. Other than the kitchen, bookcases and bookshelves were everywhere. The rooms were all large, with high ceilings and dark wood paneling on the walls. Diagonal shafts of light cut into the gloom through tall windows, revealing dust motes that danced and spun as Drummond and Cassie’s movements stirred the air. The rooms were full of silence and memory, the sweet smell of old books and the sharp tang of well-used fireplaces waiting to roar again. It was a place of wood and paper, of stone and glass; there was nothing digital, no flat-screen televisions or LEDs. It was almost as if the house had been born in another time and had existed undisturbed by modernity ever since.
In some ways, Drummond’s house reminded Cassie of Kellner Books. Just like the bookstore, the house was full of books—no shelf was bare, no book alone and seeking company—but it was more than that. The house was full of warm corners and quiet places, pleasantly creaking floorboards and drafts of air coming from unseen gaps. The lighting was soft, and the colors muted and warm, interrupted only by the vibrant shimmering green of the trees outside when glimpsed through passing windows. It was a building that welcomed people who wanted comfort and silence, who wanted space to contemplate and to think. It had an air of formality but not stiffness, like a smartly dressed grandfather telling a rude joke.
As she toured the ground floor with Drummond, the two of them walking in silence, Cassie quickly concluded that she loved the library. It was a place she wanted to be, a place she could happily live if given the chance. As they returned to the hallway, lingering at the bottom of a grand staircase, Drummond said, “I’ve missed this place.”
“I can understand why,” Cassie said.
Facing them, on the middle landing of the staircase, a tall stained-glass window spilled light into the hallway. It made the space feel airy and open, despite all the dark wood and the heavy bookcases crowding in on them.
“Come on,” Drummond said. “I’ll show you the library.”
He started up the stairs, and she followed him. “What was that with the shadows?” Cassie asked, as they climbed the stairs. “When we arrived, when it was like we were underwater and everything was gray.”
“The library was in the shadows,” Drummond said. “I hid it.”
“Why? How?”
“We’ll come to the why, I promise, because you need to know. As for the how... I used the Book of Shadows.” He removed a book from one of his pockets and passed it to her as they reached the first landing and doubled back to climb to the upper floor. The book was dark gray in color and when Cassie opened it, she saw the text on the first page.
“‘The pages are of shadows,’” she read. “‘Hold a page and be of shadow too.’”
Cassie flicked through the pages and saw smudges of gray, like ink, and words and pictures that seemed to shift and change, partially disappearing and then reappearing. She watched it for a while as she climbed the stairs, amazed at this book that seemed alive.
“How does it work?” she asked, passing him the book back.
“You tear a page and hold the fragment in your hand. As long as you hold the fragment, you stay in the shadows. When I hid the library, I tore out a full page and left it inside the front door. And then the house slipped into the shadows. Nobody could reach it. Not without the Book of Doors.”
Cassie considered that. “Couldn’t you reach it with the Book of Shadows?”
“No,” Drummond said. “I couldn’t get back here. Not until now.” He sighed and seemed wistful for a moment as he looked around. “It’s been ten years,” he said.
“Ten years?” Cassie asked, shocked. “You haven’t been here for ten years?”
Drummond shook his head. “It was the price I had to pay to keep the books safe.”
Cassie looked at him anew. What he had done to Izzy had made her hate him, if only for a few moments, but she saw now that he had paid a price too. To have been kept from his home, particularly a home as special as this place, she couldn’t imagine. She wondered how difficult his life had been.
At the top of the stairs they reached a long landing with a thick carpet underfoot and several heavy wooden doors leading off. The walls between the doorways were covered in what looked to Cassie to be expensive wallpaper, a pattern of fine purple flowers against a pale cream backdrop. A second, smaller set of stairs led up to a higher floor, curving out of sight.
“In here,” Drummond said. He crossed the landing and opened a door immediately opposite the top of the staircase, revealing a large bright room at the front of the house. A tall bay window framed the trees out front and the mountains beyond. This end of the house looked westward, away from the road, and even from the doorway to the hall Cassie could see a long body of water, flat and gray blue.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What?” Drummond said. “Oh. That’s Loch Ailda.”
