Chapter 13 #2
her offer to put the kettle on, but instead of arriving at Capelthorne’s at the bottom of the hill, the two of them peeled
off across the road at the last minute. Jules watched in disbelief as they went toward the open door of Portneath Books and
slipped inside. Barely six in the morning, and they were open? Outrageous! And breaking the embargo too. Jules was going to be more than happy to report the misdemeanor to the publisher.
With a sense of growing outrage, Jules watched as a few others arrived. A handful took up position outside Capelthorne’s,
but even then, when they saw what was happening opposite, they were lured away. A lump formed in Jules’s throat. If she thought
she could manage it without embarrassingly crying and screaming, she would have gone over the road and remonstrated, but pride
stopped her from making an exhibition of herself.
Portneath Books didn’t have signed copies. Portneath Books hadn’t spent hours posting an enticing pictorial countdown on Instagram over the previous week... But it didn’t stop them getting sales. Stealing them. Her hard-earned sales.
Eventually, in a burst of energy, Jules said, “To hell with it.” Fumbling with the locks, she flung open the door, just as
a bleary-eyed father, holding hands with two little girls, walked up the street from the direction of the harbor. The movement
of Jules opening the door seemed to catch his eye, and he came into the shop, grinning tiredly.
“I’ve given up my lie-in, and it’s costing me money,” he told Jules, equitably enough. “My two love this stuff. It’s what got them reading independently,”
he added proudly, as, clutching their books, they dragged him over to the till to pay.
After that, there was an intermittent flow of people into the shop, buying the Cressida Cornworthy and, some of them, buying
other stuff while they were there: greetings cards, maps, the latest Dick Francis novel, which Jules had put out on the “New
Releases” table. Overall, she would say Capelthorne’s got half of the early-bird sales. Far too many customers had disappeared
through the door of her sworn enemy opposite, and every lost sale was like a physical pain.
Flo came into the shop just before nine thirty as usual and complimented Jules on the very healthy turnover she had already
generated for the day. Feeling calmer, but still furious at Portneath Books’—Roman’s—underhanded tactics, she popped into
Finn’s for her routine flat white in her reusable cup and took it—not back to Capelthorne’s but to Portneath Books, where
Roman, seeing her approaching, came out to speak to her.
“Good morning,” he said, giving her a little courtly bow.
He was looking particularly hot that morning, with a pristine white T-shirt and slicked-back hair, for all as if he had just rocked up, fresh from the gym shower.
Jules couldn’t help checking out his muscly arms with their bulging biceps, but not ridiculously so, and how had he managed to get so brown?
She, Jules, was still pasty white from long hours in a shady bookshop.
Roman looked like he had already spent a whole summer surfing.
“That was a low move,” she said, dragging her eyes away and working hard to keep her voice level and calm.
“What? The early opening?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “The embargo said a minute past midnight, but that seemed a little
extreme, plus I like to actually sleep at night—unconventional, I know... I mean, that’s not everything I like to do, when I’m in bed, but—”
“What do you mean?” Jules interrupted, furious now. She was talking about business and he was—what?— flirting ? “Publication day is this morning ,” she raged.
“Indeed, it is,” he told her patiently, “and this morning started”—he glanced at his watch—“just over nine and a half hours
ago.”
Jules narrowed her eyes at him. Was he right about the embargo? Either way, he seemed to feel the conversation was at an end
as he turned to greet another gaggle of wizards with their parents in tow.
Back in the office, she scrabbled through the files, looking for the press release. Damn! He was right. There it was: today’s
date, and then 12:01 a.m.—a minute past midnight. How had she not noticed? She had been so certain it had specified normal
opening hours.
Okay, fifteen–love to Roman. With great reluctance, she would let him have that one, Jules told herself, her heart still pounding
in her chest at their encounter.
“So, it’s quite a read,” said Charlie about the grimoire, when the three of them got together for their midmorning coffee
the next day. “There’s something weird, though.”
Flo raised her eyebrows inquiringly, but Charlie demurred.
“I don’t want to say anything to direct you before I get your first impressions,” he said. “I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts, both of you.”
“Thank you so much for typing out the whole thing,” said Flo, taking the proffered sheaf of paper. “I could never have made
sense of the original, with that faded, swirly writing. Not with my ancient eyes.”
“It’s kind of okay, when you get used to it,” said Charlie, twiddling his lip piercing absently. Jules knew enough about Charlie
now to know this was a sign that something was preoccupying him.
“I’ll def read it,” Jules said, “but whet my appetite. For example, do we know the name of the writer yet?”
“We do!” declared Charlie, attention coming back to the two women with a snap. “You’re going to love it. The author is a woman
who refers to herself as Biddy, which I just thought meant ‘old woman,’ but it’s a shortened version of ‘Bridget,’ and—tada!—she’s
a Capelthorne!”
“Bridget ‘Biddy’ Capelthorne, how marvelous!” exclaimed Flo, clapping her hands together delightedly. “An ancestor! I suppose
I shouldn’t be too surprised, seeing as it was found here, and the Capelthornes have owned this place forever.”
Charlie nodded. “And that point matters,” he went on. “The fact it was found here is quite an important part of its provenance.
I need to look at local records, to see if I can find this Bridget Capelthorne in the births, deaths, and marriages. We might
even find her gravestone in the graveyard at the top of the hill,” he added, referring to Saint Thomas’s Church, the old Anglican
church adjacent to the ruined castle.
“But would she be buried in a Christian graveyard if she styled herself as a witch?” said Flo. “Wouldn’t she have been persona
non grata to the church?”
“Good point,” said Jules. “Aren’t witches supposed to be pagans? She might have been dancing around fires naked at midnight, that kind of thing.”
“Not in this climate, surely.” Flo shivered. “Anyway, I thought we decided being called a witch might just mean she was the
local wisewoman. She could have been quite conventional, I’m thinking?”
“There’s a lot of work still to do,” admitted Charlie. “I haven’t even started on analyzing and dating materials—the vellum
and so on—but we’ve got dates from the text, which is a good start. The earliest dated entry is 1635, and the latest is 1685,
although that’s not the end of the book, so...” He stopped, considering for a moment. “Anyhow,” he finished briskly, “I’ll
let you read for yourselves, but let’s just say there’s a sting in the tail.”
Flo insisted that Jules have first go, and she took the sheaf of printed-out A4 pages from Charlie with some reverence, promising
to read it that night and pass it on the next day.
“And keep your phone with you,” Jules exhorted Flo as she saw her off in the taxi to her lunch with Graham. “ Call me, and if anything’s the slightest bit weird, just get out, okay? You’ve got Terry’s number in your phone, and he’ll be
standing by—”
“Darling, I’m going for lunch with a friend, not backpacking around the world,” Flo reassured her with just a touch of impatience,
as she slicked on her lipstick without a mirror, before snapping the lid back on and dropping it into her bag. “And isn’t
the whole stranger-danger talk a bit over the top? We’ve been chatting in the shop for over a year.”
Jules sighed. “You’re right, Aunt Flo,” she said. “I just want you to have a lovely time.” She gave her great-aunt a peck
on the cheek. “Terry’s waiting, you’d better go.”
The shop was quiet that afternoon, with few customers.
Flo was with her hot date, and Charlie was doing a paid shift in the health food shop up the hill; Jules was glad the poor man had work he actually got paid for.
Bored and lonely, she did some dusting and restocking, then, settling down alone at the till with a mug of tea, Jules started on Charlie’s transcript of Bridget Capelthorne’s grimoire.
After the faded, scrolly-brown-inked original, the transcript was a miracle of clarity. Charlie had swapped F’s for S’s where
appropriate, which made the whole thing so much more readable, but mostly he had kept the original spelling. The majority
of entries bore little relation to the cliché-ridden witchy spells of Shakespeare’s hags, with not a single eye of newt or
toe of frog. Instead, with the aid of Google, Jules could see that many of the herbal treatments were more than just spells
and superstitions; they were either perfectly legitimate or, at least, probably harmless. Lavender and rosemary seemed to
be used for lots of different things, probably partly because both were readily available. There was a remedy for “the headache”
that instructed the sufferer to chew on the “barke of the willowe,” or, as an alternative, Biddy had written herself some
notes on steeping the bark in alcohol and giving the sufferer a spoonful of the resulting tincture. It must have tasted absolutely
disgusting, but Google informed Jules that Biddy had been onto something: willow bark had high concentrations of salicylic
acid—the chief component of aspirin.
Another remedy that might have cured, rather than killed, the patient was the instruction to give a person with “the fevere”
some cheese that was blue with mold and ripe with maggots. Again, not very palatable, and the maggots might have been de trop,
but Jules was pretty sure penicillin was a mold, so basically Biddy was giving a patient with a bacterial infection a primitive
antibiotic. Impressive.
In among the logical, there was some flaky stuff that made Jules smile, including a delightful but unscientific suggestion that a woman wanting a man to fall in love with her should smuggle a lock of her own hair under his pillow so he would have sweet dreams of her.
There wasn’t anyone Jules wanted to bewitch on that score, although if there was a way to make Roman develop horrendous warts or go bald overnight, she was more than happy to give it a whirl.
She snorted at the thought and her eyes, as always, were drawn to the shop across the road.
Just as she glanced up, several giggling teenage girls were trooping into his shop.
Damn him. Those customers would have been spending their money at Capelthorne’s by default just a couple of months ago.
Just then, Terry’s taxi pulled up outside, and Flo got out of the passenger’s seat, looking happy and relaxed.
“Well?” Jules demanded, as soon as Flo walked in.
“Well, what?” she retorted, an impish smile playing around her lips. And then she relented. “It was very pleasant,” she said.
“There were four of us—so, absolutely not a ‘hot date.’ Mungo and Diana were there, and we all got on famously. Diana’s such
a party animal. She could make a church coffee morning feel like a rave.”
“What did you eat? Has he really made himself into a good cook?”
“He certainly has!” exclaimed Flo, sounding proud of him. “We had roasted asparagus spears wrapped in Parma ham and homemade
hollandaise to dip them in—totally delicious—and then the most delightful Moroccan lamb, with couscous and things. It was
out of that Ottolenghi book I made him buy a couple of months ago. I tell you, that man has gone from someone who could barely
boil an egg to a chef who could give Freya a run for her money.”
“Really?” asked Jules, the mention of Freya reminding her that she really must go and iron the hated yellow dress for the
wedding tomorrow.
“Well, perhaps not quite Freya’s standard yet,” Flo admitted. “She is absolutely outstanding.”
“What did you have for pudding?” Jules asked.
“Oh, Diana very sweetly brought a huge, boozy trifle,” Flo told her. “Grown men do love their nursery puddings, don’t they?
The two boys absolutely lapped it up, and it was fine, but trifle isn’t really my thing.” Flo pulled a face. “I had a good
catch-up with Diana, though,” she went on. “The poor woman is mortified about her book club consorting with the enemy.”
“So she should be,” said Jules. “Tell her to inform her posse we’ll do bubbles and cake next time. Anything that man can do, we can do better... You look tired,” she added, noticing Flo
was a little flushed and bright-eyed.
“Think I’m a tiny bit tipsy,” Flo confessed. “I’m no good at this lunchtime drinking lark.”
“Go and have a nap,” Jules suggested. “I’m totally fine here on my own.” She was keen to get back to Biddy Capelthorne and
her enchantments, still wondering about the sting in the tail Charlie warned them about. In the end, with the shop suddenly
getting pleasingly busy, it wasn’t until she went to bed that night that she had time to finish her read-through.