Chapter 9
“Say what you like about those Montbeaus,” Flo said the following morning, when Jules recounted the tale, “that Roman did
the decent thing, at least.”
There was no way Jules was going to worry Flo by reporting back on Roman’s devastating revelations about his intentions toward
Capelthorne’s, so she just grunted, sipping her coffee, relieved that her headache had released her from its grip. Normally
her migraines dragged on for days. Today, she determined, she would put the final details to her marketing plans for the next
few months, including a summer of celebrations to mark Capelthorne’s one hundred years in business. It might also be their last year of trading, but Jules was going to do everything she could to make sure it was memorable. For Flo’s
sake. And maybe, a little bit, to prove a point against Roman, she admitted to herself, remembering what her aunt had said
about revenge.
Charlie was waiting patiently outside when Jules went to unlock the door. Today, his trousers and rainbow braces had been
replaced with a capacious pair of dark green dungarees, a cozy yellow sweatshirt in deference to the crisply cool spring morning,
and a clumpy pair of Doc Martens with stripy yellow-and-black laces.
“Jules!” Charlie declared in greeting, waving his arms extravagantly, as if acknowledging her from a vast distance, even though there was barely six feet between them.
Flo’s face lit up. “The entertainment’s arrived,” she observed dryly from her perch at the till. “Jules, darling, you had
better put the kettle on.”
Arming Charlie with a strong mug of tea—oat milk, two sugars—Jules settled him upstairs among the old books, envying his environment
and his task for the day. The plan was that Charlie would start to catalog the books in an Excel spreadsheet, evaluating each
in turn and collating a list to upload to BookFinder.com with minimum bids in place to make sure nothing potentially valuable
slipped through their fingers. Charlie, it was agreed, was essentially doing himself out of a job, by steadily clearing the
whole floor to leave space for Jules’s expansion plans.
Jules loved that Capelthorne’s had something Portneath Books didn’t. She had Charlie, plus who knows what treasures lurked
on those dusty shelves?
Roman was troubled. His brow furrowed with more than physical pain as he ran, driving himself, pounding through his normal
early-morning route, up the hill from the chapel where he lived, onto the ridge where he stopped, wiping sweat from his brow.
From there, he could admire Middlemass village, nestled in the valley with the silver ribbon of the river running through
it. The river was narrow here—not much more than a stream—as it ran past the little shops and then on to the village pond
by the green. It started to froth and surge just beyond the green, running fast and deep under the humpbacked stone bridge
as it flowed through the village, before widening and slowing on its way to the sea at Portneath.
This was his home.
Much of the farmland he was running through was Montbeau land, owned by the family for hundreds of years.
They didn’t farm directly anymore. All the land was rented out for others to work, but the influence and control of this single family—his family—was absolute.
And that mattered, didn’t it? Maintaining that power had always been important, or at least it was to his father.
Wasn’t that why he had had it drummed into him from an early age?
Somehow, after more than ten years away in the wider world, at college, then work, the eternal “truths” of home felt, well, maybe just a bit more nebulous.
That said, it was what he had returned home to achieve. And whatever Roman set out to do, he generally achieved it.
As he set off running again, his breath clouded in the air as he crunched across the frosted grass on the verge, breathing
in time with the relentless pounding of his feet. There was one thought that preoccupied him: he was regretting his conversation
with Jules, admitting he was going out of his way to shut Capelthorne’s down. What had possessed him? Was he confessing? Warning?
Taunting? He wasn’t sure what he had been doing, but it had meant giving away the advantage of surprise—and, from a business
perspective, it had been an idiotic thing to do. It was not like him, not to keep his counsel, but he had been filled with
a desire to keep her talking at any cost, to keep her looking at him with those huge, strange green eyes that were so quick
to fill with tears and quick to flash with anger—hatred, even...
His trouble was he had been too long without a relationship, he told himself.
He had not wanted to complicate his life in New York with women—or, at least, not with anything serious.
No, the last thing he wanted was the distraction of having a woman in his life—not least one who, in any case, loathed and despised him, understandably enough.
What on earth was he expecting from her?
He needed to get a grip, to get the new business onto an even keel, to prove to his family—especially his father—that he was worthy of their faith in him.
That had to be his only focus. The rest was just dreams and fantasies.
Chatting over lunch a few hours later, Jules and Flo with toasted cheese sandwiches and Charlie with a bento box he had brought
with him filled with pasta salad, Charlie brought the two women up to speed.
“Okay, so, find of the morning is this early set of Dickens,” he enthused. “Not first editions, obvs—they were originally
serialized in magazines anyhow, of course—but it’s a sick-looking stack of books. Leather bound. Handsome. Very covetable.”
Jules perked up. “Hundreds?” she asked hopefully.
“Easy,” said Charlie. “Maybe more,” he added. “Probably to an interior designer working for a client with deep pockets. Good-looking,
readable books always sell.”
“I know we’ve asked you to clear the whole floor if you can,” Jules explained, “but that doesn’t mean necessarily that we
will ditch the antiquarian books angle altogether. It’s one of our main points of difference with Portneath Books, and I’d
love to show we can have an income stream they are not exploiting themselves.”
“So, um, what if I created enough income to pay me—or someone else—a tiny salary?” Charlie suggested shyly.
“Totally worth considering,” said Jules.
“Let’s get some stock shifted, see where we are, and then decide whether to get you actively buying as well as selling.
We could look at buying from BookFinder.com for a start, if you can identify something we can make a margin on.
Probably more promisingly, we could even get in touch with some house clearance companies and find stock from there.
Not too much, mind. We don’t have the storage, as you know,” she went on.
“That’s retail space we need to be working hard for us, but—if it’s primarily online—we could be trading secondhand books out of some warehouse space nearby.
Everything could be logged and cataloged.
You’re setting up a system to do that anyhow. ..”
“Coolamundo,” said Charlie, through a mouthful of pasta. “Watch this space.”
In truth, Jules didn’t really think the secondhand bookselling idea was going to make enough of a difference to avoid closure,
but she had other ideas up her sleeve and definitely wasn’t going to go down without a hell of a fight.
She kept remembering, with a shudder, Roman’s expression when he came clean about his plans the previous night. The hard look
in his mesmerizingly blue eyes: laughing and charming normally, they had been suddenly ruthless and cold. Shark eyes. Like
he said, it was nothing personal; it wasn’t, or so he claimed, even linked to the feud between the two families. It was “just
business.”
Spring continued with its typical blustery showers and sunshine. The fat, furry buds on the magnolia stellata in Flo’s courtyard
garden burst into masses of pure white flowers almost overnight, and Finn’s deli down the road started putting galvanized
buckets of tightly bunched and papery narcissi on the cobbled pavement outside the shop.
Flo’s tired old bones knitted at last. She had first her leg cast and then, finally, her arm cast removed, revealing limbs that were distressingly stiff and weak.
It had taken a handsome young physiotherapist at Portneath Hospital to flirt gently with Flo before she could be persuaded to try a walking stick.
With it, Jules could tell she felt more secure on her feet, but she couldn’t help watching her aunt anxiously, terrified she would fall again, perhaps when Jules was not around to help her.
Flo, on the other hand, was chipper: she was able, after a fashion, to get back up the stairs to her own bed, and trade, despite their omnipresent competitor, was picking up as tourists flooded back into the town over the Easter holidays.
“You look pasty,” Flo berated Jules as she came out of the office to put the kettle on midmorning. “Never mind tea, take a
proper break! Get outside into the fresh air for a bit, why don’t you?”
“Too tired,” complained Jules, yawning.
“You’ll feel better for it, I guarantee you. Go and have a walk on the beach, that’ll blow the cobwebs away. Take my mac,
mind, it looks as if it could rain.”
“I’ve got the Gardners delivery coming in this morning,” Jules replied. “You know you can’t manage those enormous heavy boxes
they send. And there’s a pallet coming from Hachette too, that remaindered stock I told you about.”
“Charlie is upstairs,” said Flo. “He’s strong. We’ll manage just fine. Now go. I don’t want to see you for an hour at least.”
Jules considered. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Some fresh air would probably nip this headache in the bud, and she
hadn’t once managed to make it down to her favorite walk along the beach since she arrived.