Chapter Twenty-Nine
CHAPTER
Twenty-Nine
WINTER IS SNATCHING sunlight from them in greater handfuls by the day. So even though the bookshop is still open, the sun is already long gone when the last customer hurries in. A young woman—or an older girl; Cassandra can’t decide.
Even though the woman doesn’t say anything, Cassandra knows instinctively what she’s come for: the Napoleonic War volumes at last. Byron brings them out from the back, as the woman pulls out fistfuls of cash and dumps it all onto Chiron’s desk.
It’s not often that cash is considered a high enough price for the bookshop, but Cassandra doesn’t say anything as the meagre pile grows, automatically calculating its rough value.
Not more than a few months’ rent, really, but…
Enough to take a train somewhere far away. Enough to escape.
“It’s everything I have,” she says.
Cassandra believes her. She touches each volume and feels its narrative play out underneath her fingertips.
Power and ambition, underlined by charisma and a terrible capability for violence.
Not a set she would sell to just anyone, not anymore.
But Lady Fate brought this woman here—and who is Cassandra to defy her?
Still, Chiron’s ghost must be rattling around somewhere because even though the customer closes her hands over the topmost book, Cassandra doesn’t let go. She surveys the woman as she knows Chiron would have, considers her the way he’d taught Cassandra.
“What will you do with it?” she asks.
The young woman looks up at her, narrowed eyes in a narrow frame. Her face has that hollow, hungry look, as though she has been starved of the world itself.
“Do you ever wish to be something more than you are?” she says quietly.
Cassandra thinks about the more she had sought, at Chiron’s insistence. More diligent, more clever, more attuned to the bookshop’s moods and desires. How she would have given everything for that slow, warm nod of approval and know that she had reached a zenith of herself.
How easy it had been to take the razor point of Chiron’s more and turn it upon him, and then herself. Lowell has already given her more grace than she deserves.
“Think carefully about what you would become,” she says.
The customer’s smile is wary but genuine. “Thanks.”
As the customer leaves, Cassandra wonders what will happen to her, if the river is really vanishing. Whether she’ll get the opportunity to find out what it is to be more. Whether she’ll have the chance to regret it.
Cassandra finally locks the door and heads upstairs for a cup of tea. By the time she returns, Byron is already noting down the sale, the price written in her steady hand. Byron, who would have been everything Chiron asked of her.
“Where was your last bookshop?” Cassandra asks suddenly.
This is dangerous territory, asking questions. But she’s been wondering for months now about Byron, and the theft for which she’d been blamed. Whether a slip of detail might jog Cassandra’s memory.
“The Green Knight, in Cornwall. They say the Pearl Poet himself worked there.” Byron snaps the ledger shut. “Where was yours?”
“Well, I grew up here,” Cassandra says—an easy line because it’s the truth.
“I know—you’ve already told me that,” Byron says, rolling her eyes. “But Septimus said you took some time off.”
Cassandra shrugs. “Oh, here and there, really.”
There’s an awkward pause, Byron looking at her like she knows there’s another, more truthful answer. And there’s an insane second where Cassandra thinks: maybe. But to spill Cass Holt is to spill it all. The thefts, the bad deals, the bad people who came with them.
The reading, and the man dead at the end of it. Because of her.
“What was the Green Knight like?” Cassandra says quickly.
Byron immediately breaks into a smile. “It was gorgeous. Right by the sea, so you could hear the spray kick up on the cliffs. All these delicate, stained-glass windows with the green dude himself. The kind of place you can’t forget.”
Yes, Cassandra thinks, unforgettable. She remembers it now: the creak of wood softened by salt spray and ocean wind; the whitewashed exterior; the sigh of home as she’d stepped like a ghost through the doorway.
It had been during the summer, so even though it was late, the sunset streamed through the windows, throwing rainbows across the floor.
Chiron had been friendly with the owner, Hartley Benson, or at least not so gruff, and so she’d already been inside once before, when Chiron still liked her enough to take her travelling.
She tries to remember the theft—the books, the buyer, whether she had been paid in cash or something else—but she’d been stealing a lot at the time.
All she recalls is the painful yearning, the sense of coming home again because to step into a tributary bookshop was to come home, and then the awful homesickness as she’d slipped back into the night.
“Is this where you thought you’d end up?” Cassandra says.
Byron tilts her head as if considering. “I mean, not this bookshop, no. I thought… I don’t know.” She sighs. “I really loved that one.”
A fist clenches around Cassandra’s heart.
“But it led me to yours, right?” she adds, her smile returning.
Byron shrugs into her coat before adjusting the lights, so they’re dimmed just right for the dark evening.
“See you tomorrow!” she calls out, shutting the door behind her.
For a while, Cassandra stares at the front door. Errata chirps as she scratches absent-mindedly between his ears.
“She deserves better than this,” she mutters.
In response, the bookshop ruffles her hair with a stray breeze, as if to say half-heartedly, I know.
Several days later, Cassandra finds herself on a detour from a supplier to Lowell’s bookshop.
She’s spent a fair amount of time going back and forth from Sharpe’s lately, she realises.
Maybe London is smaller than she’d realised, or maybe it’s that the weather has been slightly more gracious, but every time, the walk feels just that little bit shorter.
The part of her that should be worried—the thief—is surprisingly quiet in the back of her mind.
True to Lowell’s word, the book appeared the very next day on Cassandra’s desk, accompanied by a half-chewed note with Errata’s loving teeth marks and a not-inconsiderable amount of cat drool.
She hadn’t the heart to tell him she’d already read it and found nothing of note.
When Cassandra reaches Sharpe’s, the aftermath of violence has long been whisked away.
The only signs of anything amiss are the empty pane of the glass cabinet, and Lowell, walking around with Aloysius chasing behind, clutching a notebook.
If it weren’t for the remnants of Lowell’s black eye, and a new bruise disappearing down the collar of his shirt, it would be just another day.
Lowell glances up as she walks in, and it’s a credit to her that she barely flinches at his expression. His entire face is wound tight, his narrowed eyes a steel trap in waiting. If she thought she’d seen Lowell annoyed before, well.
She recovers quickly enough. “I know, my presence precedes me.”
Lowell runs a hand through his hair, exasperated, then sighs. “No, it’s not you.”
A series of clatters and curses echo from the back of the bookshop. Cassandra gives him a quizzical look.
Lowell heaves an awful sigh, as though summoning the remains of a very ragged patience. “My brother is here—”
Someone bangs open the door of the office and strides out.
“—Edmund.”
Cassandra looks from Lowell to the tall stranger in front of them.
Curly hazel hair to Lowell’s almost black, half a head taller with broad shoulders and pale, rough-hewn features, a mountain carved into the shape of a man.
Though they share no physical resemblance she can pinpoint, there’s something twinned in their matching scowls, their brows furrowed to points.
He also looks… familiar.
“Lowell, I can’t find the—” His gaze slides over to Cassandra, and something sharpens in it. “You.”
Cassandra’s stomach dives. Him.
“What the hell are you playing at, Lowell?” he says.
Out of the corner of her eye, Aloysius stops sweeping, all attention laser-focused on the argument that’s surely about to unfold. Cassandra’s body sweeps from hot to ice cold. Now she knows exactly where she recognises Edmund Sharpe from: the night of the fuck-up.
Death, like quicksilver in her hands. Poisoning everything she touches.
“Look, it was a break-in, it was unfortunate, and I dealt with it,” Lowell says.
Cassandra glances between them, but Edmund is studiously refusing to make eye contact. The panic shifts, settles into her limbs like lead. She’s already on thin ice, thanks to the book theft, but even if she wasn’t—
How will he frame it to Lowell? It was a terrible accident. It was no one’s fault. It was Cass’s fault. It was all Cass’s fault.
“You should inform me of emergencies,” Edmund says eventually. “For your own safety.”
Cassandra’s gaze flicks to Edmund again. A slight deepening of frown, a downward tilt to his mouth.
Lowell’s shoulders tighten. “It was handled.”
“If it was Arthur—”
Fury crackles in the air. “Don’t, Edmund. Just… don’t.”
Something between unease and dislike washes over Cassandra, and it takes her a moment to recognise its origins.
Between hiding in closets and confronting thieves, she’s become used to a less fearsome Lowell, all the edges sanded off by familiarity.
Now, though, she’s reminded of a diamond, every facet honed to razor point.
A Lowell who’s as much a stranger to her as he was the day he walked into Chiron’s bookshop, letter crushed in his fist.
“Anyway, if you’d like to actually look at what was taken,” Lowell says, now visibly angry, “I can pull a list from the back for you.”
Edmund waves a hand to suggest that yes, he’d like that. Lowell gives Cassandra a curious glance, but she just shrugs.