Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER
Eleven
CASSANDRA DOESN’T NOTICE the few curious onlookers wandering past the bookshop—or indeed, the much more furious one standing across the street like a particularly funereal pencil.
Instead, she sets another coffee cup on her desk, to coincide with the half a dozen other mugs with dregs in the bottom, to be guiltily carried back up the stairs at the end of the day.
Her hair is tied up in a messy knot, and she’s wearing her oldest, most-loved T-shirt, with moth holes lining the hem.
Dust streaks her cheeks, and her fingers are grey with dirt.
For a week’s worth of work, she hasn’t done too badly, she thinks.
Hands on her hips, she surveys the shopfront, feeling ridiculously proud even as she stifles a yawn.
There are still dozens of half-empty boxes to take out, and she hasn’t done a stocktake yet, and the ragged curtains will need to be replaced, not to mention painting the walls, and removing the dead plants from their boxes outside…
Really, this is just the cusp of the work.
But for the first time, light spills into the bookshop from clean windows, illuminating a floor that’s been scrubbed to within an inch of its life and is now air-drying.
Every brass fitting shines with new polish.
At least several of the shelves gleam with books gently wiped free of dust. The floorboards creak in cautious reconciliation—a symphony that used to sing throughout the bookshop, but has so far only echoed at best.
For the first time, it looks a little like how Cassandra remembers it. Loved, if not new.
Venturing into the back, she dips a chipped mug into the pool and drinks from half of it, using the other half to wet the back of her neck.
She imagines Chiron’s ghost behind her, disapproving, but she all too well recalls her younger self splashing in with him on hot days when even the windows couldn’t tempt a breeze.
She cracks her knuckles and rolls her sore shoulders. If only this was the extent of the work required. But not everything can be solved so easily.
That afternoon, Cassandra eyes the phone in the reading room.
Next to it, Chiron’s ledger is splayed out on the countertop, where she’s dragged it from the desk downstairs.
On the inside—most of it in Chiron’s handwriting—is a list of phone numbers, attached to familiar names that still fill her with a childish dread.
The chances of them accepting a phone call from her, much less holding a conversation, are slim at best. But they might know what happened to Chiron, after the sticky interval of asking Cassandra who the hell she thinks she is to be asking such questions in the first place.
They might even be willing to come back, if he hasn’t so thoroughly burned bridges with them.
More importantly, there’s no one else to ask.
Over the next two hours, Cassandra conducts a series of increasingly painful phone calls.
And that’s if someone even picks up at the other end of the line.
Booksellers who don’t remember her are one thing; it’s the booksellers who do know her, who perhaps know her a little better than she herself recalls, who are the most eviscerating.
“Why the fuck would I work for you?” one of them asks her.
Cassandra doesn’t really have an answer to that, so she can’t say she blames the bookseller when she hangs up the phone.
None of them had liked her in the end, for a myriad of reasons: she was too cocky, instinctively familiar with the bookshop in a way they could only envy; she didn’t take instruction well, and if she wouldn’t listen to Chiron—well, she definitely wasn’t listening to anyone else.
She was Chiron’s favourite, destined to run the bookshop no matter her misdeeds; she was Chiron’s torment, and why he’d kept her around was a mystery to all.
When she’d finally been thrown out, she’s pretty sure more than one of them had toasted the occasion, and every anniversary thereafter.
Finally, there’s only one name left on the list. The last for a reason.
Chiron’s most trusted bookseller, the natural successor to his shop once Cassandra was out of the picture.
Out of all the booksellers, he’d possibly disliked her the most. And how he might hate her now, when she’s snatched the bookshop from underneath him.
The phone rings and rings into oblivion. But just as Cassandra’s about to give up, someone answers.
“What?” The voice on the other end is just as gruff, as irritable as she remembers.
“Hi, Septimus.”
Silence on the other end.
Then there’s a long, drawn-out sigh. “You’re back, then.”
“I am.”
“So… he’s gone.”
Cassandra twists the cord between her fingers tighter. “I’m looking for a bookseller. I thought you might come back. Just for a few days.”
Another silence.
“No.”
The syllable hits her with its finality.
But she can’t accept no. She can’t do this on her own, much as she would like her humiliations to be endured without witnesses.
If she wants to keep Lowell Sharpe out of Chiron’s bookshop, she needs more than a handful of long-disused skills and some extra luck. She needs help.
She rallies herself, thinking of all the ways she could persuade Septimus—hell, anyone at this point—to say yes—
“But I’ll send you someone,” he continues.
She blinks. “Oh.”
Relief, a second later, floods through her. Septimus might hate her, but he won’t let the bookshop fail. The bookshop must always come first—above owner, above bookseller. Above everything.
“That’s it, you understand?” he says sharply. “And I think it’s a bloody mistake that he left you the bookshop. You are a mistake, Cassandra.”
The phone goes dead. Cassandra lets the bite of his words wash over her, then shrugs. He could think she’s the worst thing to ever happen to this bookshop, but it doesn’t matter. He’s sending her someone.
It’s a bitter victory, but she’ll take it.
It takes a week for Septimus’ someone to show up.
Cassandra is in the middle of dusting—always endless dusting—when the door bangs open. A lanky woman is doubled over, heaving in breaths as though she’s run a mile. Cassandra starts to approach, but the woman raises her hand and sucks in one more breath.
“Goddamn—Tube! Here—for—bookseller job,” she gasps.
The woman finally unfurls, and Cassandra’s first thought shrieks blue.
Midnight blue twists, striking against umber skin.
Dark eyes framed by licks of blue eyeliner, chipped electric-blue nails, a vest that might have been blue at some point in its over-long life, and navy jeans.
Cassandra has no time to contemplate this particular fashion choice—or all of these fashion choices put together—because the woman thrusts out her hand with a smile that seems to take over her whole face.
“Byron,” she says, no longer breathing quite so heavily. “My uncle sent me.” Seeing her expression, she adds, “Septimus.”
Cassandra blinks. She’d expected a younger version of Septimus, some miserable bookseller already well versed in the many ways Cassandra’s disappointed her forebearers. But it seems like he hasn’t divulged her failures to the bookseller in front of her.
“I pounced as soon as he mentioned it,” Byron is saying, already halfway through a conversation Cassandra has yet to join. “I’ve always wanted to see what the inside looked like. He used to talk about it all the time. He worked with the last owner, you know. Chiron.”
Chiron’s name is like a lance through Cassandra’s chest. She swallows and finds her voice. “I don’t need to explain to you how the books work, then?”
“No, I’m familiar.”
Cassandra breathes out a quiet sigh of relief.
How impossible it would be to explain the give and take of the books on these shelves, the magic contained within.
There are books dipped into the river itself, emerging with the cordite crackle of magic; books written by long-ago hands with the silvered fingertips of river water, their authors beyond memory; books from no discernible origin whatsoever and yet possessed by the same force that lures readers to a tributary bookshop.
And it doesn’t end there. Letters, poetry, notes, petty ephemera, scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, hammered metal, worn rock.
All with the potential to transform fortunes.
The weighing of the scales between what is asked for and what’s owed has always felt innate to Cassandra—and it must have been true of Chiron, too, as well as the owners who came before.
How else could you reckon the price of a secret letter to turn the tide of war, a scrap of verse for lovers, a long-lost family recipe?
How else could you measure the value of a life changed?
Byron touches the stack in front of her. “These are pretty neglected, though. Shabby workmanship, leather needs oiling, mould inside—no wonder they’re unhappy.”
Around them, the shelves rustle. Cassandra winces, thinking of Lowell’s damning comments. Even though the shop has been spruced up, she knows she’s only dealt with the symptoms. Like cleaning teeth, without fixing the decay within.
Byron must notice Cassandra’s wince because she adds hastily, “Not that you’ve done a terrible job or anything! No, this is great, really, I—” She groans. “It’s just that—”
“You’re right,” Cassandra says. “That’s where you come in.”
She asks a few more questions, testing Byron’s aptitude for books, the way she’d seen Chiron do dozens of times. How to spot the troublesome title in a shelf, how to mend and stitch and patch, how to discern when a book has been dipped in the waters of the river in the first place.