Chapter Thirteen
CHAPTER
Thirteen
ONE WEEK LATER, Cassandra leaves the bookshop in Byron’s hands, an errand on her mind.
She navigates the twining alleyways of Soho up to Marylebone, picking her way across narrow pavements and through packs of slow-moving tourists.
Chiron had mentioned years ago that these streets used to be crowded with bookshops—gathered like fireflies to the power of the river.
But even the ghost of their presence has vanished, the song of the river inaudible over the traffic.
After a forty-minute walk, Cassandra turns a corner and finds herself standing outside of Lowell Sharpe’s bookshop, clutching his umbrella.
I’m just going to give it back, she tells herself.
It certainly has nothing to do with any burning desire to see what Lowell’s bookshop looks like, or why he’s so desperate to pry Chiron’s from her.
Cassandra’s first impression is that of a coffin. A slight gunmetal building wedged between two fatter counterparts, the bookshop barely has enough space to display its sign, hung underneath an iron rod with crisp white lettering: Sharpe’s.
Of course he would name the bookshop after himself.
Unlike Chiron’s bookshop, there’s no pact with nuns and Lady Fate writ invisible across the building, so anyone is free to enter, regardless of what they seek.
But Sharpe’s seems to have its own defences against the casual browser.
The door is closed, squashed between two equally slim windows, all painted in formidable are you sure you can afford this grey.
It’s almost enough to make Cassandra turn back.
But the second she considers this, a customer walks through it, leaving the door swinging wide open.
A man in a dark suit catches her eye—Aloysius.
“We’re open,” he says cheerfully, in a tone that’s entirely the opposite of what she’d expect from one of Lowell’s assistants. “Please, do come in.”
Gingerly, Cassandra steps over the threshold.
She waits for lightning to strike her, or a malevolent floorboard to spring her back into the street—or even to feel nothing at all.
Because how could the river bestow its grace to someone like Lowell Sharpe, for whom the word magic is probably anathema?
Instead, there’s only a slight resistance as she passes through the doorway, and the quiet gurgle of water somewhere below her feet. A reminder that it’s Lady Fate’s ground, and she’d do well to tread accordingly. Her traitorous body unwinds at its familiarity, tension leaving her shoulders.
The rest of Lowell Sharpe’s bookshop is…
ordinary. Apart from the dark, monochromatic panelling and library silence, it looks like just about every other bookshop she’s walked into.
Rows upon rows of shelves, crammed into every imaginable space.
A proper till point, with a modern computer where she’d expected to see a mechanical cash register.
It perfectly matches up with Lowell’s aesthetic, and yet she can’t help but feel let down.
“What can I do for you today?” Aloysius asks, as though he’s forgotten all about last week’s tussle. “We’ve just had in some eighteenth-century quill-tip illustrations, or if you’re looking for something else…”
“I’m here to give—” she just about manages to avoid the eye-roll “—Mr. Sharpe’s umbrella back.”
Aloysius barely glances at her before waving her through. “Go on, he’s in the back.”
“I don’t need to see him,” she says, but Aloysius has already moved on.
With a fair amount of trepidation, she walks past the bookshelves, towards the dark hallway and even darker doorway beyond.
Lowell doesn’t look up when she enters, so she has a long few seconds to take him in.
So far, he’s never been without a suit, pressed to razor points.
But now he sits at his desk with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his brow harassed with frown lines.
His hair, normally combed into severe submission, is mussed, and there are several ink splatters across his face.
In front of him are what look like several ledgers, heaped on one another with no thought to their poor spines.
So Lowell Sharpe is human after all, she muses.
She takes a step back, and the floorboards, which had been quiet on her arrival, groan enthusiastically. Lowell’s pen pauses, but he doesn’t look up.
“Have you heard from the Templetons yet?” he says. “Or are they still pretending they don’t know how to pick up a phone?”
Cassandra’s hands tighten on the umbrella. She opens her mouth to say something, anything—but now that she’s here, the pretext of giving him back the umbrella seems woefully inadequate.
“If they don’t want to talk, I’ll go over myself and—”
Cassandra finds her voice. “It’s me.”
Lowell finally looks up and his entire face tightens with weary displeasure. “So it is.”
There is a long pause, during which Cassandra has ample time to study the shadows under Lowell’s eyes framed by his glasses, the severe line of his nose, the curve of his throat, dusted with stubble, disappearing into his collar.
In this light, surrounded by dark-panelled wood, the pall of his skin is a tired alabaster. His eyes meet hers.
“Are you quite finished?” he says.
Cassandra flushes. “You left your umbrella. So I came to give it back.”
She thrusts it at him, and after a second, he accepts. He tucks it underneath his desk and surveys her coolly.
“Thank you for my umbrella. Though I admit I’m a little puzzled as to why you needed to come all the way here to return it.”
“Common courtesy?”
Aloysius bursts into the room. “Lowell, you’re going to have to chase them, I’m afraid.”
Cassandra looks disbelievingly at Aloysius. Wait, he gets to call him Lowell?
On the other side of the desk, Lowell is already unrolling his sleeves, and buttoning up the cuffs.
He throws on his suit jacket, and runs his hands through his hair, teasing it back into shape.
From somewhere within his desk, he procures an ink-stained handkerchief with which to wipe his face.
In less than a minute, he’s back to Mr. Sharpe, with all the charm of a stainless-steel cube.
When he puts the ledgers away, Cassandra can’t help but note the way that the shelves seem to tilt them at just the right angle, the pages riffling into pin-sharp order.
Lowell may lack charm or manners—or really anything that would denote a person capable of being pleasant—but he has his bookshop at his command.
Cassandra thinks of all the trying mornings where Chiron’s bookshop has played hide-and-seek with the coffee, or every single fork, or the packet of biscuits she’d been coveting during her break. Not angry, but… testing her.
It’s not unusual for an owner to hold more than one bookshop—or at least, it hadn’t been, when there were more bookshops and skilled booksellers to helm them.
But the golden days of bookselling are long gone, and were probably dying when Chiron was a young man.
Now there are too few bookshops—and too many who would covet them.
She doubts very much that Chiron’s bookshop would ever feel the need to test someone like Lowell.
He stops at the threshold and glances at her irritably. “Well, are you coming or what?”
Cassandra blinks. “Excuse me?”
“Aloysius has to watch the shop. And I suspect this will be a two-person job.”
Cassandra gives herself just enough time to imagine all the reasons for which she should probably say no.
The delight to be able to say no to Lowell Sharpe at all.
She considers saying no and stealing a book, just to revel in his annoyance that a ghost has snatched something from underneath his nose—because even Sharpe’s is vulnerable to Cass Holt.
And truthfully, it would be satisfying to flex her skills one more time. He would never even know it’s her.
Then she thinks of what Chiron would say, what he would do, burdened by the responsibility of being a fellow owner. So she sighs and follows him.
Lowell’s car is surprisingly nondescript. The back seat is filled with cardboard boxes of varying sizes, books spilling over the edges. Cassandra opens the passenger door and a receipt falls out.
“This… is not what I expected,” Cassandra says, as she climbs in.
He glances at her, frowning. “What did you think I drive?”
A hearse. A Victorian carriage. One jet-black horse that only appears during full moons. Cassandra turns towards the window to hide her smile.
As Lowell manoeuvres away from the kerb, the silence in the car turns oppressive.
For an hour, they crawl in traffic before the streets open into verdant countryside roads, the golden autumn sun streaming past the window.
Cassandra fiddles with the fraying hem of her shirt, thinking of all the conversation starters she could subject them to.
What do you do for a living? Oh, I harass booksellers I don’t like.
What’s your favourite colour? Black, obviously. To hide the blood of my enemies.
“You’re fussing,” he says tersely.
Cassandra knits her hands together. “I was thinking.”
The silence stretches.
“Do enlighten me,” he says.
Cassandra opens her mouth, then pauses. What she’s really thinking is that she’s alone in a car with someone who very much dislikes her, on a journey to a destination she doesn’t know.
That she should have probably asked him to pop the trunk to check for the bodies of other rival booksellers, or better yet, to have never climbed into the car in the first place.
“About this two-person job,” she says.
Lowell drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
“It’s not our usual speciality, but we have a small collection of fairy-tale chapbooks, including one sold to us by Sir Templeton in 1912.
Now his grandson, George Templeton, would quite like it back.
But he’s not interested in paying for a family heirloom. ”
“So he didn’t,” Cassandra guesses.
“He did not.”