Chapter Six
CHAPTER
Six
OUTSIDE, IT’S A beautiful early autumn day, warm and languorous.
The kind of day that would entice someone into a stroll they perhaps didn’t intend, to one of the numerous coffee shops dotted across Soho.
They would wander past boutiques and restaurants, weaving in and out of the West End’s alleyways with idle pleasure.
And it’s there that they would stop to join the small but curious crowd gathered to watch Cassandra frantically sweep water from her doorstep.
She waves her broom in the air unhelpfully. “It’s fine! Don’t worry about it! Just a burst water pipe. But it’s handled.”
Never mind that she has pulled on rain boots.
The sun burning her eyes, Cassandra gives up on pushing water into the gutter and wades back into the shop.
The bookshop could be on fire, could be submerged within, and no one outside would notice—not unless they had drunk from the river, same as any bookseller, or unless the bookshop deemed them fit.
The finer points of who, exactly, receives entry and how have been lost over time; Chiron had once mentioned something about a complex pact between Lady Fate, a nun and the bookshop itself when they had needed to hide during more turbulent times.
But here the bookshop is, parading its annoyance with her for all to see, with no other intent except to display her inadequacies.
The shelves at the front of the bookshop are swathed in hastily erected plastic sheeting she’d found underneath the desk.
And where there isn’t plastic, she’s propped umbrellas to cover the worst areas.
But there’s no umbrella for her, so water plasters her hair to the back of her neck.
In the shadows of the ceiling, thunder rumbles.
The rain must have started overnight because when Cassandra woke, there was already a thin mist over her bedsheets.
By the time she’d flung on clothes, the rain was falling in earnest, and a small river was snaking its way down the stairs, soaking the carpet runner with wild abandon.
Even though outside is gorgeous sunshine, inside, it hasn’t stopped raining all day.
Cassandra abandons the broom, slumps into the desk chair and leans her head in her hands.
Around her, the books rustle and whisper, their disquiet manifesting as a headache and a dull throb at the base of her spine.
How quickly she’s forgotten all of this: the other side to being a gifted reader, attuned to every ink drop of magic in a page.
Even a few upset books set her teeth on edge; here’s an entire shop of them, sparse as the offering is.
Beyond her own discomfort, it’s been years since she’s called herself a bookseller.
Years since she’s had to contend with a bookshop, and all of its finicky, unpredictable moods.
And never alone. Never without the guiding hand of Chiron, or another one of his booksellers—presumably well versed in architectural temper tantrums.
Carefully, she presses her hands flat against the desk and closes her eyes, exerting her will.
Compelling the bookshop to return to its slumber, the river beneath to still.
A trick that she’s used before to slip into bookshops charged by the restless magic of the river, and purloin whatever she wanted from their shelves.
Her mouth moves soundlessly, rolling over words for calm and peace.
Lightning flashes underneath her eyelids and she startles. The rain pours as if tipped from a bucket. It could be her imagination, but she’s pretty sure nowhere is raining harder than the spot directly over her head.
The bookshop, it seems, won’t be compelled. At least not by her hand.
She’d thought coming back would be different. That she could slip into the life she’d left behind. But the bookshop has other ideas, clearly. Her skin itches with the urge to cast everything aside and run like hell. If the bookshop wants her to leave—well, fine, let it drown without her.
Chiron must be laughing in his grave. How he loved to be proven right.
“Well, fuck you, too,” she mutters, just as the doorbell chimes, heralding a customer.
Wearily, Cassandra gets up from the desk, shuddering as more icy water sloshes into her boots. God knows what this is doing to the bookshop’s structural integrity. If she’s even supposed to be concerned about that. Yet one more question she might have asked Chiron, if he was around to speak to her.
“Good afternoon—I’m sorry about the flood, but there’s a burst pipe upstairs and…” She flutters her hands uselessly. “Anyway.”
It’s hard to tell in the blinding sunlight pouring through the door, but the first glimpse she has is of a tall, narrow man in a crisp suit, all shadowed angles and hard lines.
Yet there’s something handsome about the sharp outline of his face, framed by the glint of glasses.
Then he comes into focus, and she sees his severe expression, eyebrows furrowed into a puzzled frown underneath ink-black eyes. Her heart sinks a little.
“My name is Lowell Sharpe,” he says.
“Well, Lowell, please—”
“Mr. Sharpe, if you don’t mind.”
Cassandra suppresses an eye-roll. “Mr. Sharpe,” she says, using all her teeth. “What can I do for you?”
Despite the inches of water swelling around his ankles, he seems unperturbed.
In fact, he’s already rolled up the hem of his trousers with a neat tuck.
Instead of answering her question, Lowell Sharpe—Cassandra can feel her eye-roll coming on again—strides neatly past her, to the desk strewn with waterlogged papers and the shelves behind it.
“What are you doing here?”
Cassandra checks behind her to make sure he’s actually speaking to her. “There’s a leak, so I—”
Lowell Sharpe cuts her off. “No. I mean what are you doing in this bookshop?”
“I’m the owner.”
Even as she says it, the words ring hollow. Chiron was the owner; she’s just some temporary nobody. She hasn’t signed anything—the bookshop is only hers as long as she resides here, and even that’s a tenuous agreement at best. Lowell Sharpe’s right eyebrow slides upwards.
“As I understood it, Chiron was the owner,” he says.
She’s not sure why she’s startled by this question, formed within a statement.
Perhaps it’s the rain pouring through the ceiling, or that she’s yet to have coffee on account of the aforementioned rain, or that she’s having to explain herself to a pompous stranger.
But even though she’d planned to lie, the truth slips out. Just like that.
“He died,” she says.
Lowell Sharpe’s eyes widen fractionally. So it’s news to him, too.
It happens; of course it does. Booksellers, and especially owners, might live long lives, their extra years gifted by proximity to the river, but Fate’s hand reaches for them eventually.
And for as long as Cassandra remembers, Chiron’s worn his age in frown lines and creased knuckles, in the slow, effortful way he’d eased himself out of his chair.
But still, to say it out loud is… hard.
She clears her throat. “It’s just me now.”
They both look at the river pouring through the bookshop, the rain hammering helplessly onto the shelves below. Lowell’s severe expression deepens.
“I’m working on it,” she adds, half-heartedly.
To her relief, Lowell’s eyebrow descends, and his dour expression clears.
Then he hands her a business card. It’s matte black, with silvery-grey letters pressed into the card stock.
Lowell Sharpe. Bookseller and purveyor of rare, antiquated and curious books.
Then an address, a telephone number, and an email in fine print at the bottom.
Another owner. She searches his face again, a little more warily, but he doesn’t seem to register her as anything but Chiron’s inadequate replacement.
She doesn’t recognise him, or his name, but then she was never interested in the owners.
Just the contents of their bookshops, and what she might take.
“We might have mutual interests, Ms….”
“Cassandra,” she finds herself saying. “Cassandra Fairfax.”
She does not add, it’s just Cassandra, please, even though her mouth almost shapes the words. But if he wants to play at this neo-Victorian bullshit, so can she.
“You’re clearly in over your head,” he continues, gesturing to the water around them. “A competent bookseller would have stopped this hours ago. But then a competent bookseller would never let this happen in the first place.”
Abruptly, he strides towards a row of shelves in the back, ripples gliding outward. Cassandra sloshes after him in a decidedly less graceful fashion. Forget that this is Chiron’s bookshop; even he wouldn’t have tolerated this behaviour.
“Listen, I’ve had more than enough of your—” Cassandra begins.
Lowell Sharpe holds one hand up. “Observe, please.”
He moves out of the way just enough for her to see what he’s found.
A book titled Rains of the Autumn is resting on its side, crushed underneath several heavy atlases.
She’d moved the books a few days ago to dust, and then forgotten to put them back, caught up in some minor crisis.
Carefully, as though handling a glass object, Lowell prises the book from the atlases and sets it upright in the shelf.
He murmurs something too low for her to hear, but the tone is suspiciously close to an insult.
The rain fades to a drizzle, then stops. Within a few seconds, the water is disappearing through the floorboards and into the depths of the shop. The last of the raindrops drip from Cassandra’s sodden clothes. Lowell fixes his terrible gaze on her.
“This bookshop needs good hands, experienced hands. As luck would have it, I’m searching for new premises, and I’m willing to pay a fair price. We will both benefit.”
Cassandra looks down at the business card again. Lowell Sharpe. Bookseller. Everything she is not, in one word.
“I’m not selling,” she says.
Lowell’s gaze rakes across her. “You think you’re the only one who received a letter?”
He pulls out an envelope that looks as though it’s been immaculately ironed, even though most of the words are blurry from water damage. He hands it to her, but she doesn’t take it. She doesn’t need to hold it to read the address scrawled across the front in Chiron’s writing.
Her heart stops in her chest. Chiron, howling in his grave.
Not one letter to her, the protégé given a second chance. Not Chiron reaching out a posthumous hand of sincerity, of not-quite-apology, but a truce. No, he’d known she would fuck this up, and he’d planned accordingly. If she wasn’t so angry, she’d laugh ruefully: you got me.
“So?” she says, raising an eyebrow back at Lowell.
“The bookshop needs an owner,” he persists.
Cassandra folds her arms. “That would be me, Mr. Sharpe.”
He looks at her, through her, as though he can see the stain of misdeeds bleeding across her skin.
“Yes, the tributary bookshops need owners,” he says.
“To be the balance between fairy tale and reality, to put magic into the hands of those who need it, and extricate magic from those who would be unworthy.” He touches the shelf, and Cassandra notes the callouses underneath his fine, tapered fingers.
“To mend, to care, to guard—and to receive its gifts in kind. But in return, the bookshops must come first. They must always come first.”
Cassandra thinks about the shitty morning she’s had. Having her coffee in the morning instead of dealing with this mess, or deciding that, actually, she’s going back to bed, after all—that would be putting the bookshop in second place. But she’s here, isn’t she?
“Who do you think he really meant to own the bookshop?” he continues. “An established, experienced bookseller—or some nobody?”
She stares at him, disbelieving. He might have Chiron’s seal of cautious approval, and a letter to prove it, but she got here first. And even though there’s a little voice in her head suggesting gently that perhaps it would be best to admit defeat, it’s entirely drowned out by the compulsive urge to ruin Chiron’s careful plan.
“I may be some nobody to you, but I’m the nobody who owns this shop.”
Lowell sighs impatiently. “If you would just see reason—”
Underneath her own fury, she tastes burnt caramel in the air, hears a dissatisfied hum. The books rustle on the shelves, and thunder rumbles ominously upstairs.
“I think you should leave.”
“But—”
The burnt sugar taste thickens. “Now.”
Lowell gives an exasperated snort, as though she’s an unruly student. As though he’s extending the offer for her benefit, and it’s only her own idiocy in the way.
“You will regret this, when this is all over,” he says. “That, I promise you.”
With that, Lowell Sharpe turns on his heel and descends the stairs into the street, leaving Cassandra to stare after him.