Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
Any one of them could have killed Chiron, she realises.
Cassandra doesn’t shiver, though she’d very much like to. Instead, she picks her way through the stalls, scanning through the books quickly. She’ll get what she came for, and then she’ll leave.
She’s nearly at the stall she’s after when a figure suddenly blocks her view. Tall and imposing, with a stern nose that’s reminiscent of Byron’s. Very little else reminds her of her brilliant bookseller, however. The crow’s feet at the edge of his eyes weren’t made from smiling.
“Septimus,” she says, startled.
“Enjoying yourself?” he says, a touch of sarcasm in his tone.
Cassandra finds herself shrinking under his gaze and forces herself to stand upright. She’s had no problem telling Lowell and Eveline exactly what she thinks. But Septimus has always had a way of making her feel as though she’s on the verge of trouble.
She is an owner, she reminds herself, and beholden to no one. Even Chiron’s most senior bookseller.
Septimus’ expression is inscrutable. His gaze rakes over her, and Cassandra imagines everything he’s seeing: the disgraced protégé, a usurper; a child with ink-dark hair, then a teenager, and dyed an aggressive blonde; Chiron’s biggest mistake.
“I assume Chiron left you instructions on how to manage the bookshop,” Septimus says.
Cassandra shrugs. “Not really.” She hesitates. “Did you know that he would leave the bookshop to me?”
The question is one that rattles around her head late at night, when she can’t sleep and the bookshop groans in the wind.
Or early in the morning, when she’s making her coffee and remembering the precise way that Chiron had dipped his spoon first into the sugar then his own coffee, or sometimes just the sugar twice by mistake, when deeply engrossed in a book.
He had loved reading. Not the magical kind, but fiction of all sorts: weighty historical yarns, the sprawling worlds of epic fantasy, tender-hearted romance with windswept women on covers shearing off spines. Maybe it was Chiron the man, and not Chiron the owner, who had left her the bookshop.
“No,” Septimus says, and there is the tight bitterness she expected.
When she’d been in her early teens and prone to eavesdrop on gossipy booksellers, she’d discovered something deeply unpleasant.
That she might have been Chiron’s only protégé at the time, but she wasn’t always.
Before her, there had been others, cast aside or deemed unsuitable in ways that Chiron refused to elaborate on.
Septimus had been the one before her: tipped to inherit everything, until he suddenly wasn’t.
She draws herself taller. “Thank you for sending me Byron.” Then, before she can stop herself, she asks, “Why?”
Something passes over Septimus’ face, too fast to decipher. “I thought you might have changed.”
The ensuing silence tells Cassandra exactly what Septimus thinks of that. Has she changed? Since her protégé days, certainly. And now, as owner?
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
As far as she’s heard, he’d retired from bookselling when Chiron had kicked everyone out.
Septimus looks at the books in his hands, as though weighing them up. “Trying to balance the scale.” His gaze snaps back to her. “Enjoy the fair.”
“You, too,” she says, but he’s already gone, scything a path through the crowd.
She tries to shake off the feeling that follows her as she makes her way towards the stall she’s after.
Tonight, it seems that Lady Fate is determined to remind her of her past, no matter how bruising.
This is why she’d avoided the fair for so long.
Get the book, she thinks, and get out. Before something worse than Lady Fate’s remonstrations collides with her.
She reaches the stall without further incident, and immediately sets to work finding the book on Maud and Chiron’s list. Characteristic of the other sellers, the books aren’t organised in any meaningful way, so she spends fifteen minutes parsing through them meticulously.
Her hands brush over recipe books trailing smoke from their interiors, a book of fables with a unicorn that leaps in and out of the cover, a book bound in what looks to be some form of dried seaweed, with a formidable padlock wound across it.
Then she finds it: the book on ink. She puts her hand on it—at the exact same time as another hand descends.
“Excuse me, but I—” Lowell glances up. “Cassandra.”
Lowell’s glasses are slightly fogged from the warmth of the station, but he makes no motion to wipe them free. Because that would mean removing his hand from the book.
“I see we’re at an impasse,” she says lightly.
Lowell has the grace to look almost apologetic. “I can’t give this one up, I’m afraid. It passed through the bookshop a few months ago, and I made the mistake of selling it on.”
“Lowell Sharpe,” she says, “you’ve never made a mistake in your life.”
He laughs, quick and self-deprecating. “You have no idea.”
They both look down at their hands, Lowell’s so much larger than her own. When she glances up, a faint frown appears on his forehead. But his hand stays in place.
“Why do you want it?” he asks.
“Why do you want it back?”
Lowell looks at her, his gaze unnervingly steady.
Slowly, with one hand still on the book, he reaches for his shirt.
His fingers touch on a button—and then frees it.
Cassandra finds herself drawn to the movement, unable to look away.
Her gaze slips to the hollow of his throat, and a nervous laugh escapes her.
“Lowell—”
“Cassandra,” he counters pleasantly.
Slowly, his thumb finds the second button.
Cassandra tries to redirect her gaze back to his face, and she’s surprised to see his mouth tilted into a smile that’s just a shade too knowing.
But he surely doesn’t remember her attempt to take the Napoleonic War volume from him at the estate sale.
They had barely known each other then, with only the thinnest of mutual loathing between them.
Anyway, it had only been a flash of shoulder, whereas this, for Lowell, is bordering on indecent.
He isn’t going to do it. He won’t.
His hands slip lower.
“You can’t be serious,” she says.
His voice low, he murmurs, “Ask me again and maybe you’ll find out.”
He does remember. Cassandra’s face grows hot. It had been one thing to be a little daring in front of a stranger, but now that she knows Lowell, she can’t imagine doing it—and it working. She tries to gather herself.
“If you are going to strip-tease in front of all of these booksellers,” she says, her voice catching on the term strip-tease, “then you, Lowell Sharpe, will have to forever contend with that.”
His eyes flash, amused. “You mean, in front of you?”
Cassandra’s grip on the book grows sweaty.
She’s never been shy around bare skin before, but to see Lowell, of all people—Lowell, whose cuffs always hide the coy knuckle of his wrist bone—undressing feels like a taunt she can’t articulate.
He undoes a third button, then a fourth, and she catches the fine dust of dark hair, the faint ridge of muscle taut across his stomach.
She tells herself later that it’s because she’s tired. Because she’s already off-kilter from being here at all. So it has nothing to do, then, with the way Lowell’s fingers graze his chest, his gaze steady on hers.
His other hand, still on the book, touches hers, just the slightest slip of friction on the cover. She takes a reflexive step backwards—and her fingers touch air instead of board. Too late, she realises what she’s done.
“Thank you,” Lowell says, and it could be her imagination, but there’s a slight flush of colour across his cheekbones. “I’m sorry to say, but you’ve ceded your claim.”
Cassandra tries to feign a smile, but the part of her that isn’t furious with herself is still too busy trying not to study Lowell’s fingers as he does up his shirt again.
“So I have,” she echoes.
“Well,” he says, slightly awkwardly. “Next time, Cassandra.”
She lets him disappear into the crowd, clutching Chiron’s book.
The book she could have so easily taken from him if her mind hadn’t been elsewhere.
Distracted by the deft movement of his fingers, the pull and slide of fabric against his skin.
That half-smile that she sees so rarely, and yet has come to relish like a shared secret between them.
That Lowell Sharpe could be prim enough to button his shirt to the top every morning and never leave room to loosen the collar, but still strip down to nearly the waist in a crowded room, just for her—
Distracted. A mistake that she’d never make as a thief.
Cassandra walks up and down the platform for a while, but her gaze keeps sliding off the books. None of the other books on Chiron and Maud’s list have surfaced, and God knows how long it would take before they do. Ink, the river, Roth—and Chiron’s death.
She needs that book.
Keeping an eye on the press of the booksellers, she waits another ten minutes before she finds Byron, keeping a stack of books company, all in suspiciously black bags with an S. printed in grey across them.
“Aloysius is in the bathroom,” Byron says by way of greeting. “Told him I’d keep an eye on them.”
“Your uncle is here,” Cassandra says absently.
Byron glances at the crowd. “Septimus? I don’t see him.”
“He’s over there,” she says. “I’ll keep an eye on the books for you.”
“Really? You don’t mind?” Byron says, and Cassandra hates the brightness in her voice, hates the way that she shakes her own head as if to say no, I don’t mind at all.
Byron gives her a quick, teasing salute before disappearing back into the crowd. Leaving Cassandra alone with Lowell’s books. Including the one he won from her.
Quickly, before she can think about it too much, she slips the book from his bag into hers. The cover is surprisingly soft to the touch, almost waxy. But her fingerprints leave no residue, and the book makes no complaint. It’s always so easy.
The Keeper flashes in her mind, her expression unreadable. It’s not thieving if she returns it, she counters. Just an unofficial loan, for an indeterminate period of time.
Then a pair of dark, unforgiving eyes catch her, daggers flung across the platform. Septimus.
For a moment, they stare at each other. It’s too late to put the book back. Too late to pretend that she was simply examining it for her own curiosity. Too late to pretend she isn’t anything other than what she is.
She tenses, waiting for him to accuse her of thievery. But Septimus’ mouth thins, with the grim confirmation that after all these years, he’s still right, and Cassandra is still the errant child, the wayward teenager. Chiron’s shitty, unreliable, undeserving protégé.
I knew you hadn’t changed.
Then he turns and vanishes into the crowd, leaving her standing alone on the platform.