Chapter Seventeen
CHAPTER
Seventeen
AFTER ROTH’S VISIT, Cassandra braces herself for another of his attempts to enter the bookshop, less discreet than the first. For days afterwards, she flinches every time the door opens. But weeks pass with no sign of him.
As autumn deepens its grip on the weather, the bookshop has grown busier, with flurries of customers drawn to it, whether by the river’s invitation or their own intuition.
When Cassandra’s not manning the desk, she’s calling on dozens of sellers and book binders, trying to make tedious small talk while dodging their questions about Chiron: what happened—did you ever find out?
Do you know why he was so… difficult, towards the end?
How did you end up with his bookshop, anyway?
Elsewhere, she spends hours in the back of the shop chasing down Chiron’s elusive paperwork, unknotting customer queries and complaints that should have been dealt with months ago.
Not to mention the insurmountable task of cleaning out the rooms upstairs.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that there were once enough booksellers to inhabit each of the empty bedrooms ringing the reading room, but their detritus is everywhere.
There are old love letters, scraps of poetry written on spare catalogue cards, reams of fraying twine and empty ink bottles, alongside all the other odds and ends deemed unimportant enough to leave behind.
But despite Cassandra’s best efforts, the bookshop’s discontent hums in the back of her head, the discordant language of the books a whine underneath the whisper of the river.
Books are no longer found where she left them; sturdy shelves crack under no weight at all; important papers vanish and reappear half-scorched on the floor.
She’d blame a poltergeist, but Cassandra knows she doesn’t need ghosts to be haunted.
If the bookshop had accepted her as its owner, perhaps it’s now changing its mind. Perhaps it really would prefer Lowell Sharpe and his grey-clad booksellers. In the back of her mind, the few requests for the impossible books—still unsolvable—worry at her.
She’s in the back, looking over the latest intake of stock—two nineteenth-century fairy-tale collections, and a Baedeker’s guide to Paris from 1914 with a shifting map of the city—when Byron slams open the door triumphantly. She thrusts a stiff envelope at Cassandra.
“You have an invitation,” she says.
Cassandra stretches out the crick in her neck. “To what?”
So far, the only post she’s received has been mostly junk, or the requests for impossible books that she still can’t decipher.
This envelope, however, is a shimmery gold, with her name hand-printed in a serif type.
When she turns it over, the flap is secured with a red wax seal, a sigil she doesn’t recognise.
The invitation is on expensive card stock, with the name of the shop in glistening gold ink.
Byron leans close to read over her shoulder. “I suppose it’s about time.”
Cassandra frowns at the invitation. “For what, exactly?”
Byron gives her a sideways glance—a sign that she’s somehow slipped up. “The auction.”
“Oh, right,” Cassandra says, too casually. “Of course.”
Byron reads out the finer details of the invitation, while Cassandra’s mind churns.
She does remember Chiron grumbling about these biannual events: how useless they were, how performative.
That it was just another excuse for the booksellers to get drunk together, and for the owners to shamelessly eye up the competition.
Yet he’d go, all the same, and return clutching hard-won spoils, whether it was an unexpected lot from the auction itself, or a particularly interesting bit of gossip.
For Cassandra, it would be an opportunity to cement herself as an owner in front of the booksellers, Lowell Sharpe be damned. Perhaps find out what Chiron might have been doing, to leave the bookshop in such a state.
When Byron finally closes up and leaves, Cassandra picks up the invitation again to study it. Her fingers touch something tacky on the back. She flips it over. Where the invitation had been empty, it now bleeds black, ink slithering across the card stock.
DO NOT COME.
Cassandra drops it as though she’s been burned, and it lands on the desk. The message lingers for a moment, then dissolves. She stares at the invitation, the words seared into her mind.
She’s endured threats before, and she’s dealt her fair share, too. But only ever as Cass Holt. Cassandra Fairfax has slipped under the radar—until now, it seems.
Well, she’s not afraid of a fight. If someone’s petty enough to tamper with her invitation, she’d rather know who.
And if that means attending the auction, even better.
Two weeks later, Cassandra and Byron arrive at a mansion off Regent’s Park, invitations in hand. There’s no hum of the river here, but Cassandra supposes it’s only fitting for booksellers to meet on neutral ground.
Byron has dressed for the occasion in a silver sequinned suit, embroidered at the edges with blue metallic thread.
Her lipstick—bright, dangerous red—matches her stilettos.
Cassandra herself spent an hour fighting to clip back her hair, before struggling into a slinky emerald dress, hastily dug out from the depths of her wardrobe.
It had all seemed a little like overkill, squinting in the bookshop’s small bathroom mirror, but now standing underneath a crystal chandelier, surrounded by opulence, she’s grateful for the armour of an elegant outfit.
And there’s more than one reason to be ready for warfare. As she takes in the grand hall, her gaze lingers on each person, trying to discern which of them might have sent her the message on the back of the invitation. As though she would have changed her mind at the first murmur of threat.
Byron waves. “Aloysius, hey!”
Cassandra’s attention is dragged towards Lowell’s assistant. He’s still in uniform grey, but without the gloom of Lowell beside him, it’s dashing rather than undertaker.
Byron gives him a fist bump. “They handing out free champagne this year?”
“Sure are.” Aloysius glances at Cassandra. “He’s not here, by the way.”
Cassandra blinks. “Who? Oh, I’m not—”
“He’s over in the auction hall, I think. Or somewhere in that vicinity.” He pulls a face. “Lowell hates these things.”
Her heart sinks. “I see.”
Of course she’d known that Lowell would have received an invitation.
But she’d hoped, somehow, that Lady Fate would deal her a better hand and that he’d be called mysteriously elsewhere, by some other unscrupulous member of the nobility.
Or that gatherings were beneath him, and he’d chosen to sit this one out in his monochrome office.
It’s crossed her mind that he might have sent her the message: a threat to make sure she remembers her place. But it feels like the opening hand in a gambit, not the next move in an ongoing game. And she has to admit, it lacks his punishingly straightforward style.
As Byron and Aloysius sink deeper into conversation, Cassandra drifts away from them.
She wanders in and out of the side halls, lingering just long enough to assess its occupants.
In one hall, booksellers crowd around a single book, in quiet conversation with one another.
The book itself seems unremarkable, except for a faint oozing along its spine.
Cassandra catches a glimpse of a bookseller delicately lifting the book to lick it, and decides that she’s better off not asking questions.
In another, two men stand on opposite sides of the room, restrained by a handful of people. One nurses a black eye, the other a bruised jaw, but both of them are still going in what’s evidently an often-played argument.
“If you think that Kit bloody Marlowe—”
“If you were capable of intelligent thought, I’d explain—”
“Explain this!” A cheap paperback of The Tempest flies across the room, clipping its target. “Marlowe was already dead, moron—”
The men wrestle free of their captors and lunge for each other. Cassandra backs away slowly, as the people on either side attempt to pry them apart.
A bookseller catches Cassandra watching and rolls her eyes. “Shakespeareans.”
For a job mired in old-fashioned tradition, the booksellers clean up nicely, fistfights notwithstanding.
More than a few of their faces are familiar: Chiron’s old booksellers, before he threw them all out; visitors and sellers alike, who had taken to bringing little gifts for the small protégé; the book binders who’d shown her their awls and thimbles.
Not one of them looks at Cassandra.
It’s for the best, she tells herself. They probably don’t remember her, or if they do, it isn’t a memory worth recounting.
Better that no one recalls the protégé, or considers what she might have done with so much knowledge and so few scruples after she was thrown out.
As Cass Holt, she’s stolen from more than one of them.
The auction is up a flight of stairs, at the end of a long, carpeted hallway, laughter spilling out of the room.
Groups of booksellers chat with the amiability of colleagues who’ve known each other forever.
Few of whom Cassandra recognises. But even if the people in this room are strangers, she can pinpoint the owners: scattered at the edges of the room, watching the booksellers with narrow-eyed suspicion.
One of them, a man with fair hair and a mouth made for scowling, catches her gaze, and she forces herself not to glance away.
It’s been so long since she’s had to play by these rules, where she hasn’t walked into a room with at least some command of authority.
The auctioneer materialises on the stage, and the crowd immediately slides into seats, the conversation dying to a murmur. Cassandra finds a chair in the very back, as the auction gets underway.