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Ellinghurst from an ordinary manor house into a medieval castle and built castellations and turrets and a moat with a bridge and a huge arched gatehouse with machicolations and a portcullis and a lookout tower with a hole for boiling oil. Oskar’s mother had told Oskar that SirJeremiah had been an admirer of Richard the Lionheart and, like the great Crusader king, believed in gallantry and chivalry and the unrelenting plunder of the people for profit. She said that if your concern for the tenants on your land extended only as far as their potential capital yield, it was probably prudent to have a portcullis, just in case.
    â€˜No little lily-handed Baronet he,’ Oskar’s mother said, and Oskar knew from the way that she said it that the words came from a poem. Oskar’s mother loved poems. She said that poems could be just as beautiful as mathematical equations but Oskar knew that she only thought that because she did not really understand mathematics.
    The first thing in
Volume
6
was a shiny colour plate of the Solar System, the planets suspended in their orbits like swirly glass marbles. Oskar knew about the Solar System. He knew that the rings of Saturn were made up of small particles of ice and rock and that Jupiter was two and a half times the mass of all the other planets put together, with its largest satellite, Ganymede, bigger even than Mercury. He knew that, from where he was on Earth, the Sun was ninety-three million miles away. It puzzled him when other people remarked to his mother on how clever he was to remember so many things. Facts were like books or socks. If you put them back in the same place you always knew where they were when you needed them.
    Opposite the picture of the Solar System was a list of all the things in
Volume
6
. Oskar ran his finger down the list until it came to
THE BOOK OF WONDER
. Oskar wondered what
THE BOOK OF WONDER
was and if that was why it was called that, because it made you wonder. His mother said that words were like chemistry because each one reacted with the one next to it to make something new, but Oskar just found them confusing. He nearly put the book back on the shelf. Then he saw that beneath
THE BOOK OF WONDER
was written in smaller letters,
BY THE WISE MAN
. Then he wanted to know who the Wise Man was too.
    He took the book to his window seat. There were eight windows all the same down the length of the library, or actually twenty-four because each one was made up of three arranged in a bay, but Oskar’s was the one furthest from the door. It was guarded by a marble bust on a pillar, a man with a curly beard and blank blind eyes. Oskar supposed he was a Roman because he wore a sheet tied on one shoulder so he called him Mr Albus because he was white and
albus
was white in Latin. He always said hello to Mr Albus as he climbed into the window seat, just to let him know he was there. The window had a seat underneath it with a long silk cushion and panelled shutters that, when you closed them, made a little room inside just big enough to sit in or even to lie down in if you were ten and not very tall for your age.
    It was peaceful in the window. Oskar wanted to live in a castle more than anything but, though he looked forward to going to Ellinghurst for weeks, when he was there he often wanted to go home. He liked it in the early mornings when the only other people who were up were the servants busy with their work, and he could walk around and look at things properly without someone asking him what he thought he was doing. But a lot of the time he wished he was sitting with his mother in front of the fire at home, Oskar with a book or a scrap of paper and a pencil, his mother with her spectacles on the end of her nose, writing or reading or folding stacks of letters and putting them into envelopes, not talking but looking up at one another from time to time just to make sure. At Ellinghurst he only saw his mother after tea when Nanny took the children