49
After dinner that night, they all sat up chatting until just after eleven, when Antonia announced that she needed to get to bed if she was going to make her train the next morning. Julia followed her mother into the guest room to say goodnight while Aurelia and Oliver washed the dinner dishes.
At eleven forty-five, Julia started pulling Aurelia toward the stairs to the shop. Aurelia looked around to say goodnight to Oliver, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or living room. She told Julia she would meet her downstairs and then went in search of him.
She found him in their bedroom. Fezz was nestled on her side of the bed while Oliver was tucked into bed on his side with a book that he seemed to be holding rather than reading.
“Everything alright?” Aurelia asked from the doorway.
“Yeah—fine,” Oliver said with a smile that had all the appearance of forced cheer.
Aurelia came in and sat next to him on the bed.
“You’re reading Harriet’s story?” she asked with a smile, recognizing the bound copy of the chapters that Harriet from Little Dorrit had written for herself the year before.
“I am. It’s very vivid—she sounds just like Dickens.”
“Well, David Copperfield helped her with it. He was constantly coming up with ideas from other Dickens novels. It was uncanny.”
“David Copperfield? He came to the shop?”
“It was right when you moved in. Do you remember? I had put out a few Dickens novels on the table, in your honor.”
“And you met the characters,” Oliver said vaguely.
“Yes. Harriet, David, Peggotty…” Aurelia trailed off, seeing a shadow of something—sadness?—marring his face. “Do you not want me to go into the shop tonight? I don’t have to. Julia can chat with them on her own.”
“No, I want you to go,” he said, reaching out a hand to reassure her.
They’d just talked about this last night and come to a good understanding, but they’d also agreed that it would be an ongoing conversation, something that wouldn’t and couldn’t be resolved with one chat.
Aurelia looked again at Harriet’s book in Oliver’s hands and realized that his feelings tonight might have less to do with their future and how they were going to navigate her nighttime routine and more to do with her history with the characters—all the stories she hadn’t shared with him yet.
Aurelia began moving her fingers through his, watching them interlock as she said, “Back when I first told you about the characters, you said I might have spent more time with them than with you.”
“I was just angry—”
“I know, but I’ve been thinking about it,” she began, looking up to meet his eye. “I don’t think it’s true, though I have spent a lot of time with them. And that means there are a lot of stories about them that I haven’t been able to tell you.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, too. The characters are sort of like work colleagues, aren’t they?
You work in the shop alone all day, but at night they’re here and you chat about their books and lives.
Just like I work in my office all day and chat with my colleagues about the books we’re publishing and our lives. ”
“Huh. There is a symmetry there,” Aurelia said, smiling.
“You know most of my work stories—which author doesn’t like which editor, which editor doesn’t like which editor, whose kid just had a birthday… But you’re right, I don’t know most of yours.”
“Tomorrow, if you want, I can tell you about the Dickens characters I met. I can tell you how much Harriet hated the story I’d written for her, and about Peggotty’s buttons, and David’s over-the-top ideas. Only if you want.”
“Peggotty’s buttons?” Oliver said, a smile replacing the shadow she’d seen there.
Aurelia waggled her eyebrows and teased, “Hmm… I could explain right now… or leave you curious to find out what I mean.”
He huffed a laugh, his smile growing wider.
“You’re too good at coming up with ways to torment people with literature.”
“It’s a very special skill,” she agreed as she leaned over to kiss him. “I can get ready for bed, if you don’t want me to go down tonight. I really don’t mind.”
“It’s okay,” he said earnestly, moving his hand to cup her cheek. “I want you to take advantage of it. I don’t want you skipping out.”
Aurelia waited to respond, giving him a chance to change his mind, but he just smiled at her.
“Alright. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Until then, I’ll be anxiously awaiting your story about Peggotty’s buttons.”
She laughed as she got up and walked to the door, turning at the threshold to look back and see him still smiling as he started reading Harriet’s story again.
Downstairs in the shop, Aurelia joined Julia at the Recommended Reads table.
“Who should I talk to tonight?” Julia asked as they waited for the characters to appear.
“What about Miss Clack?”
“No, she’s your problem,” Julia said with a cackle.
“You can’t pawn her off on me—” Aurelia began.
“I’m not! She came out after you put her book on the table. I had nothing to do with that one.”
At Aurelia’s look of defeat, Julia’s smile widened.
“Well, she came out with Sergeant Cuff, so I guess she’s not exactly unhappy with her ending.”
“She seems pretty unhappy to me,” Julia said.
“That’s true… It does seem odd that she didn’t come out alone. I guess I can ask Cuff—I’m sure he has a theory about her already.”
After the characters appeared, Julia and Kitty began chatting, as usual.
Aurelia was about to ask Cuff if they could talk together upstairs when she paused to watch the scene that was unfolding.
Blanche was edging toward Kitty and Julia, pretending to scan the bookshelves with interest when it was clear that she was hoping to either eavesdrop on them or join them.
“I’m almost done with Cranford, and then I’ll have finished all your books,” Julia was telling Kitty. “And I’ve already watched the film version of Jane Eyre, and next I’ll watch one of Cranford.”
Finding her opening at last, Blanche said, “I am not surprised to learn there is a play of my story, as well. Surely if someone saw fit to transform droll little Kitty’s story, they saw fit to transform my somewhat more dramatic tale of woe.”
Blanche’s tone had its typical edge, though Aurelia could tell that she was trying to temper it as best she could. Julia and Kitty, too, seemed to sense that Blanche was trying for civility and so made room for Blanche to join them.
Miss Clack and Mrs. Jamieson had begun talking in low voices—no doubt inventing something that someone had done wrong, Aurelia thought—giving her a chance to slip upstairs with Cuff.
As they settled on the mezzanine, Aurelia nodded down toward Miss Clack and said, “You’ve said that sometimes certain characters appear to us for certain reasons. Do you think that’s true for Miss Clack?”
Cuff merely raised an eyebrow as a smirk caught at the corner of his mouth.
“Of course you do,” Aurelia said with a smile. “I’m surprised she came out of your book with you. I would have thought she was unhappy with her ending and would have come out alone.”
“Is she really unhappy with her ending?” Cuff asked professorially, reminding Aurelia of her father.
“Julia says Miss Clack is unhappy about everything.” Aurelia paused, looking down to see her smiling gleefully at something Mrs. Jamieson was telling her. “But she seems to get a thrill out of other people’s misery and drama, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” Cuff agreed.
“Rachel got her happy ending at the close of your novel, which would seem to have made Miss Clack unhappy, but maybe there was enough drama in getting to that ending to make her happy? And she got to take part in the drama, so that must have made her practically ecstatic.”
“That is certainly true. I think, however, there is something else. Something that brought her here, to see you.”
Aurelia frowned, thinking.
“Miss Clack… Miss Clack… She’s sort of a loner, isn’t she?
She had family and was invited to their parties and things, but she didn’t really seem to take part in them—as if she only went to have something to do and a story to tell later.
And I got the sense that her family only invited her out of a sense of obligation, not because they liked her or wanted to spend time with her.
” Aurelia paused and looked embarrassed. “That’s unkind of me to say, isn’t it?”
“Unkind, perhaps, but accurate to my understanding of her.”
“What else, then? She likes to meddle and be in the middle of things, but she’s not, really. Like I said, she isn’t anyone’s best friend or favorite aunt or cousin. At least not that we know of, anyway.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Oh,” Aurelia said, sighing as she tried to reflect back on what she remembered of Miss Clack from her novel and from their nights together in the shop.
“For all those reasons, she doesn’t seem to share any part of herself.
She just wants to be in the mix so she can judge everyone else and let them know what she thinks of things.
I mean, maybe there’s more to her than that, but that’s how her author wrote her, and that seems to be how she is in the shop. ”
Aurelia looked to Cuff, hoping he’d give a hint as to whether she’d guessed his theory, but he just smiled.
“I’m someone’s favorite aunt, you know,” she said warily, raising her eyebrows at him.
“I can see that.”
“And I’m not a loner. Or a meddler. Mostly. Is she supposed to remind me not to be those things?” Aurelia hadn’t expected Cuff to answer, and she kept thinking before adding, “I said she doesn’t share much of herself… I guess I’ve been at risk of that—keeping my secrets about the shop.”
Cuff nodded slowly.
“Keeping people at a distance, sharing only what I had to—” Aurelia broke off, surprised to feel her eyes stinging as tears formed.
“It’s quite fortunate, is it not, that your niece visited when she did?”
“I guess it is. Everything’s still being sorted out,” she said, thinking of Oliver and their plan to keep lines of communication open about the characters, “but I think it’s worlds better than it was before.
Even though I thought it was all under control, now that there’s another option—letting Oliver, Julia, and my sister in on things—it’s much better having them know. ”
“Better for them, or better for you?” Cuff asked kindly.
“Well… both.”
Cuff nodded and looked at her with pride in his eyes. Aurelia felt a little proud of herself too, knowing she’d made things right at last.