Chapter Eight
CHAPTER
Eight
FOR TWO DAYS, Lowell Sharpe’s business card burns a hole in Cassandra’s pocket.
The corners prick her thigh as she mops the last of the water from the bookshop floor.
Every time she reaches for something—her keys, her phone, stray change—her fingertips brush against its edge.
Yet no matter how many times she takes it out to glare at it, she still finds a reason not to throw it away.
Past the indignation, she knows he’s right. The whole encounter was too shaming to convince herself otherwise. And isn’t that what she believes, truthfully? Chiron was as formidable as owners came, his booksellers teeth in the jaws of an orderly machine.
To be a bookseller is to be authority itself. Cassandra knows it—and so does Lowell.
Close to midnight, she sets the business card down on the countertop in the reading room and looks at it, heart pounding.
One hand rests on the receiver of the old landline, fingers twining around the wire.
It’s the only damned thing that sticks, Chiron had grumbled.
Other, more determined booksellers had tried to introduce various technologies to the shop; usually, they would vanish overnight, leaving a thin miasma of disapproval the next morning.
But the phone was deemed a regretful necessity, and so it survived.
She wants to do this. She has to do this.
Her hand refuses to pick up the phone and dial.
Instead, her gaze strays to the rest of the reading room, the fire smouldering in its grate.
In the half-light, it’s so easy to picture Chiron and one bookseller or another in deep discussion across from each other: Chiron in his favourite sagging armchair with a book by his side, glasses forever being pushed up the bridge of his nose; the bookseller perched on the armrest of another, body scrunched like a comma, more likely than not to have a needle and scrap of something in their hands, mending a frayed binding.
Abandoning the phone, she pulls on Chiron’s second-favourite dressing gown, three sizes too big and patched in a dozen places.
It’s cold in the shop below, so she pulls on an equally threadbare pair of fluffy socks.
If she’s going to give up the bookshop, she might as well reckon with what she’s losing.
Downstairs in the shopfront, the shelves are quiet, the books murmuring at Cassandra’s footsteps, but no longer disagreeable to her presence.
No ominous thunderstorm or lightning flashing against the walls.
Somewhere in the recesses of the bookshop, a clock chimes midnight.
The carpet has mostly dried out, and apart from several watermarks she’d planned to paint over in the timeline where she isn’t giving up the bookshop to Lowell Sharpe, it looks like it always does.
Well, almost.
Where the blank wall had been, an open archway now stands, flanked by the glistening wet stone of carved ivy and delicate roses. Beyond it, a staircase vanishes into darkness. For a long, breathless moment, Cassandra looks at it.
The stacks.
For all her years here, Chiron told her so little about the deeper recesses of the bookshop, or the river flowing beneath it.
Maybe the bookshop, sensing her hesitation, has deemed her worthy to witness this secret.
Or maybe this is its last test for her to fail.
Quietly, she listens for the sound of dissent from the shelves, but all she can detect is the eerie silence of the shop itself.
It’s the only place Chiron ever forbid her to go.
One of so many of his rules—most of which she’s broken.
Might as well break one more.
She glances behind her one last time before she descends.
The staircase is tight and winding, the darkness a tangible creature that ripples in front of her.
When she finally reaches the bottom, the floorboards creak dangerously underneath her feet.
There’s no light switch, but a dim glow emanates from wall sconces, illuminating a long corridor and a pair of double doors at the other end.
Her stomach tightens at the lights switching on by themselves, conspicuously silent.
Silver larkspurs wink at her as she walks along the corridor, the wallpaper spotted with water stains that bloom like ghostly after-images.
Underfoot, puddles swell and recede, green moss creeping across the floorboards.
The presence of water is everywhere: a trickle passing between two cracks on either wall, pooling ink-slick on the floor; or else a constant drip that has Cassandra feeling the back of her neck for wet spots.
The river, its current washing through like a second heartbeat alongside her own.
At the end of the corridor, she rests her hand on the doors, straining to hear anything beyond the eerie silence. But there’s nothing—wait. A shiver of movement, beyond the tessellated windows. Her heart pistons in her chest.
The bookshop upstairs is, if not friendly, then familiar. But this is a stranger’s land, with a stranger’s wariness.
She considers Lowell Sharpe, striding arrogantly through the corridor, and something hard clenches inside her.
Then her thoughts reluctantly stray to Chiron.
What he would have made of her, slinking through such an obviously sacred space like the thief she is.
How easy it must have been to write that first letter to Lowell, and how grudging that second letter must have been for her.
How he would have hated to find her here.
Quickly, before she can take it back, she shoves open the doors.
The warm, reassuring book scent of vanillin washes over her, as she stumbles into an atrium.
Bookshelves line the walls, interspersed with stern portraits of men and women—owners, presumably, though Chiron’s face isn’t amongst them.
The silence is that of a tomb, deadened by the faded red carpet.
Above, a glass ceiling roils with watery shadows.
The river, suspended high over her head.
Part of her brain knows that this is physical space transmuted into something more, that there cannot possibly be this much room underneath the bookshop. But this is a thought easily shunted aside in favour of awe, magic—albeit of the more ragged kind.
The carpet is moth-eaten and worn, the portraits little more than grimy smears against smoke-stained brick.
The shelves are almost bare of books, and entire spider colonies have lived and died on them, judging by the cobwebs.
A desk sits in the centre of the atrium, grey with dust. As above, so below, she thinks.
Yet there is a care here, too. Cassandra touches the lip of a bookshelf to run her hands across exquisite detailing.
Hand-carved phoenixes climb either side of the shelves, a dusting of feathers pluming behind them.
Grotesques watch over the entrance: creatures that begin as deer, twisting into something winged, finishing with a cat’s knowing gaze; and the cherub-esque faces of scribes, their faces pressed into caricatures of surprise, or scrunched with concentration.
It looks… a little like another bookshop. A bookshop below Chiron’s bookshop.
She takes a step back, and several somethings go skittering across the floor. Carefully, she picks one up and examines it in the dim light. A thin metal block, stamped with a C in a thick ornate font. A piece of type. Almost as if the bookshop has been waiting for her.
Behind her, something creaks loudly, and every hair on the back of her neck lifts.
Her heart hammering, she forces herself to turn. Somewhere behind the desk, a door has eased open.
The bookshop, dropping breadcrumbs for her to find.
The bookshop, leading her into a trap.
Chiron’s needling voice chases her: the rules are rules for a reason, Cassandra. But she’s already made it this far. She can make it a little further.
She holds her breath as she pushes the door all the way open, and it glides like butter, even though the wood underneath her hand is soft with rot.
Silky grey light envelopes her as she emerges into a workshop.
A wooden trestle table runs the length of the cramped room, flanked on either side by towering file cabinets, rust oozing from their metal components.
A small stool has been kicked under the table, alongside dozens of screwed-up pieces of paper and other detritus.
Then she turns her attention to the filing cabinets, each painstakingly labelled, and it suddenly clicks.
She knows exactly what they are: records of every owner, all the way back to the bookshop’s foundation.
When she opens a random drawer, every file is stamped with DECEASED, in enormous red letters.
Dread growing in the pit of her stomach, she approaches the last, most recent cabinet. The drawer is already cracked open for her, and without looking, she knows that Chiron’s file will be there. An entire life, relegated to ink and paper.
Reluctantly, she kneels to open the drawer—and draws up short. Slipped in front of Chiron’s stuffed file is a slim, almost empty volume. Another owner?
Curious, she picks it up, and nearly drops it. Because written in Chiron’s looping, messy handwriting is Cassandra Fairfax.
Not Lowell Sharpe, not another name, not blank and a dying wish for the bookshop to go to someone else, anyone else more trustworthy. Even though Chiron could never have known that she would return, that she would even receive his letter. Even though he’d doubted, in those final moments.
She would never have written her own name.
For a while, she sits there, tracing Chiron’s handwriting with her fingertips.
A memory comes back to her in pieces: he’d been sitting across from her in the reading room, as he usually did during one of his lectures.
She was a teenager, and already accustomed to shrugging off the weight of his disappointment.
London, after all, was right on their doorstep, and all he ever wanted was to keep her cloistered in the bookshop, trusted with nothing but dusting shelves and fetching tea.
Every rule an iron bar in a jail cell, built just for her.
That’s your problem, Cassandra. You never want to commit. You’d rather run, and to hell with the bookshop. To hell with responsibility. But when you run, you’re only ever taking yourself with you. And there’s no running from that.
It hadn’t stung at the time, but Chiron’s words had a way of coming around to bite harder, later on.
And it’s true that there’s still a part of her that could walk away from this.
Could take up Cass Holt once more: go back to writing students’ papers by the white glow of her laptop, and flirt her way back into the bar’s good graces. Pacify Roth, if that’s what it takes.
Let Lowell Sharpe deal with the ghosts of her past. Let the name Cassandra Fairfax become an old memory on a bad night.
But.
The bookshop let her in. The river guided her here. And Chiron—his handwriting—her name—
Cassandra Fairfax.
Cassandra climbs to her feet, her file in hand. Inside, there’s just one sheet of paper: the deed to the bookshop. Chiron’s name and signature are already on it, with a blank space for herself.
Ink and blood. That’s all it takes, really.
She finds the ink quick enough—there’s ink in just about every room of the bookshop above, and it’s true here, too—though most of it has congealed into a sticky mass at the bottom of the bottle, along with an awl sharp enough to draw blood.
Further rummaging produces an old-fashioned nib pen.
It’s rusty with disuse, and ink flakes off the tip, but it’ll have to do.
There are better tools upstairs: glossy new ink, a knife kept clean exactly for this purpose, fresh nibs at the end of fancy quills. But she touches Lowell Sharpe’s business card in her pocket; if she goes up now, she’ll never come back down.
For a moment, the scratching sound of pen against paper drowns out ghostly whispering. Then Cassandra steps back and examines her handiwork, pressing against the cut on her forefinger.
Her signature, written in ink and blood on the deed, indelible. Unflinching. Cassandra Fairfax.
At last, the bookshop has a new owner.