Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER
Nineteen
ARRIVING AT MAUD’S bookshop feels like trying to reach the end of the world.
It takes Cassandra two trains: one that snakes from London to Leeds, and then another that pushes through countryside to Hebden Bridge.
On the map, it had seemed perfectly logical to drag Chiron’s rusty bike with her, rescued from some dark corner of the bookshop, to complete her journey.
But when she steps out of the station, her heart sinks at the golden hills sweeping the valley.
By the time she arrives at the edge of the forest, her muscles ache from pushing the bicycle up a long, hard incline.
Somewhere in there is Maud’s bookshop.
Chiron, murdered. Cassandra can’t stop thinking about those two words.
She’s spent a long time hating him from a distance, and years before that seething with resentment, until it’s a wonder that they ever had a relationship that didn’t hinge on mutual frustration.
He had wanted so much from her: discipline, ingenuity, intelligence—and all on instinct, as though she was born to the role.
She can no longer pick out a distinct memory where he lamented over her inability to do a complex task, or the anger when she flat-out refused to follow his rules, because they all blur into one: Chiron throwing her out of the bookshop for breaking one rule too many—or perhaps the most sacred rule of all. For stealing.
Of course it was theft. What else would it be?
Put like that, it should have been more than easy to leave Chiron behind.
But just as there are the cruelties, there are the kindnesses, too, no matter how many times she’s tried to forget them.
Chiron taking her to flea markets, even though he had dozens of urgent tasks clamouring for his attention, just to watch her linger for hours amongst the crates of second-hand books.
Chiron telling her stories about the bookshop’s prior owners underneath the ancient sycamore in the courtyard.
Chiron promising her that she would succeed him one day, in everything, because she was meant to be his protégé. How wrong and how right he’d been.
She should let it go. But she can’t.
The rest of the walk to Maud’s bookshop continues up a narrow footpath, distinctly bike-unfriendly.
The stand breaks off the first time she kicks it into position, so Cassandra abandons the bicycle behind the low stone wall on the slim chance anyone with a penchant for thieving ancient rusty equipment ambles past. Then she starts walking.
She has no idea why someone would build a bookshop so difficult to reach.
All around her, the forest rustles quietly, brilliant in shades of russet and amber.
It would be beautiful if it wasn’t so cold, the air thick with mist. Maybe it’s out of the owner’s hands, the way so much seems to be.
Cassandra barely remembers before Chiron’s bookshop was tucked away in its street, but there was a time when it had haunted elsewhere along the river’s shores.
She recalls the feeling of being rocked to sleep, the floor pitching back and forth underneath her feet, salt spray crusted onto windowsills.
Maybe Maud, or whoever owned the bookshop before, just liked peace and quiet. Maybe it’s that some bookshops should be difficult to find.
If Chiron’s was harder to find, maybe he’d still be alive.
The footpath narrows, until Cassandra has to place one foot in front of the other, with little room for error. The trees press in on her, the silence stifling. Every footstep crackles loudly on dead leaves.
Then abruptly, the path widens, and a generous cottage rises up in a clearing.
It doesn’t look like a bookshop at all. It looks like it’s been there since the beginning of time, with its hewn-stone walls and thatched roof, pleasantly lopsided.
But Cassandra can suddenly hear something else alongside the quiet: a faint whisper of books.
She’s also not alone.
A tall, dark figure is waiting in the shade of the doorway, peering through the warped windows.
But even if he was facing her, Cassandra would recognise the pin-straight precision of Lowell Sharpe anywhere.
He glances towards the new source of noise, and his mouth parts in genuine surprise before his expression settles into a frown.
“Oh. It’s you,” he says.
“We really must stop meeting like this,” she says drily.
Lowell’s frown deepens, as if to suggest he agrees.
“I don’t suppose I can ask why you’re here,” she adds, a little more pointedly.
He shrugs. He’s sacrificed his trademark monochrome for a dark leather jacket and matching gloves, which Cassandra eyes enviously. She pulls her cardigan and scarf around herself tighter, biting back the first shivers. She hadn’t banked on a long walk through a chilly forest.
Her gaze drifts to the well-wrapped, rectangular package at Lowell’s feet. “A present?”
“Only if you like them prone to setting fires. Maud deals in especially challenging books.”
Cassandra waits for him to tack on the insult that she knows is coming. Unlike some owners I can think of, she actually knows what she’s doing. But Lowell turns back to the door and its foggy window. His frown, for once, doesn’t seem to be directed at her.
“So are you going to go in, or…” she prompts.
“It’s closed,” he says. “Or, at least, Maud isn’t answering the door.”
It should be a simple enough thing—Chiron often opened and closed the bookshop at a whim—but the way Lowell says it gives her pause.
“Was she expecting you?”
His frown deepens again. “I only spoke to her a few days ago, and she rarely leaves the shop. It’s possible she’s just stepped out, but…”
Cassandra turns the door handle experimentally. “Well, it’s open.”
Lowell shoots out one hand, barring her entry. “You can’t just go in.”
“Watch me.”
She steps inside decisively, ignoring Lowell’s shocked disapproval.
Instead, she focuses her attention on the bookshop.
The sharp, clean smell of polish cuts through the air.
Dried herbs hang from the ceiling in bunches, and plants trail along the top of almost every bay, or climb up them in makeshift trellises.
It’s as though Maud has brought the forest inside with her, a real witch’s cottage to conduct real magic.
But there’s something unnerving about the bookshop that she can’t quite put her finger on, a hollowness underneath the quiet calm.
“You—you shouldn’t—we shouldn’t—” Lowell starts, already winding up for a lecture.
“It’s a tributary bookshop,” she says, exasperated. “The river knows its own. Besides, I’m not stopping you from going back outside to freeze if you’re so concerned about propriety.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he mutters, but she ignores him.
She walks through the bookshop, Lowell following doggedly as though expecting her to ransack the shelves.
And perhaps he isn’t too far off the mark; she has been here before, she realises.
She’d been chauffeured via a different route, at the request of a wealthy collector.
But now that she’s here, the layout of the shop is unmistakably familiar.
The theft had been of a very particular copy of Audubon’s The Birds of America, one that had spent too long in the hands of an eccentric reader with a penchant for experimentation on his collection.
A challenge for any thief. Double elephant folio, with all the implied heft, and prone to a riot of squawking whenever handled.
But for Cassandra, it had uttered not a single sound as she’d swept it into an overlarge bag and heaved it over her shoulder.
An easy, uncomplicated, even slightly boring job.
The collector had been pleased, she recalls. Maud, probably less so.
“Why are you here?” Lowell asks.
“The bookshop is playing up,” she admits, before she can think of a decent lie. “Maud said she could help.”
Might as well give him a half-truth. She can’t very well tell him about Chiron.
Maud’s office is in the back, half-swallowed by piles of books where it isn’t dominated by a hefty wardrobe. The hollow, uneasy feeling nags at her. Something isn’t right.
“It could be the river,” Lowell suggests.
She drags herself back to the conversation. “What else would it be?”
“Have you gone down to the bookshop below to check?” he asks. “How are the books faring? Are you—argh!”
Something black streaks past Lowell—a cat.
Absently, Cassandra reaches down to pet it.
As soon as her fingers meet fur, however, her mind splits in two.
One half of her is still in the bookshop, the cat’s fur silky between her fingers, but the other half touches paper and ink, feels the edge of a fabric spine. A book, somehow transformed into a cat.
Real or not, it purrs enthusiastically, twining around her legs.
“Looks like I’m not the only rule-breaker,” she says, gathering the cat in her arms. “It’s… a reading? I think?”
Lowell reaches out a hand and the cat hisses. Hastily, he withdraws it.
“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, you were saying about the river?” he says.
He looks at her with a frown she’s beginning to recognise as habitual, and she knows they’re both thinking of the day they’d met, when he’d saved the bookshop from its torrential deluge. Annoyance washes over her; she doesn’t need to justify herself to him.
“No, I haven’t gone down there,” she says irritably, setting the cat back down. “It’s…”
Lowell raises a curious eyebrow. “Awe-inspiring? Intimidating?”
“Creepy.”
She’s tried to go down twice already, but both times, she’d got halfway down the staircase before her nerves had failed her.
The river is already showing its displeasure towards her—and there’s all those stories of the owners who went down there and never returned.
Cassandra knows which category she’s most likely to fall into.
The river gives, Chiron had said, and it takes away.