Chapter Thirty-Three
CHAPTER
Thirty-Three
THAT NIGHT, CASSANDRA has a nightmare for the first time in the bookshop.
It starts out slightly different, as it always does. Cassandra in the back of the bookshop; Cassandra in the courtyard underneath the enormous sycamore tree; Cassandra in the reading room, surrounded by booksellers.
In the nightmare, she’s always nineteen, though.
This time, she’s in the front of the bookshop, dusting and listening resentfully to Septimus discuss something with Chiron in a low voice.
He’d done that a lot, around that time, and the two of them would disappear into the office, leaving Cassandra to deal with customers.
But it should have been her who was with Chiron in the office.
She was the protégé. She was the inheritor.
In the dream, the old knot of anger resurfaces. Just like it always does.
They had been fighting a lot, she remembers.
Constant bickering over small things, like whether she mis-shelved a book, or hadn’t noted down a customer request properly.
Several booksellers complained about her; the reading room, normally her charge, had fallen into untidy chaos.
More than once Chiron had thrown up his hands and declared her unmanageable.
It had got worse, though, just before. And it had been too easy to break Chiron’s careful rules—to practise reading from more powerful books, or to sneak out for entire days, leaving the bookshop short-handed.
She overreached; she underperformed. Because she would never be free of Chiron’s disappointment, and so the rules became irrelevant.
In that dreamlike way, the scenery shifts, so that now she and Chiron are standing in his tower. Chiron’s gaze is disdainful, his posture one of complete control. Every time she speaks, he cuts her off loudly, and it doesn’t take long for them to be screaming at each other.
This part happened. This part she remembers.
“You want to disobey my rules? You think you know better than everybody else under this roof?”
I want you to trust me, she’d shouted back. I don’t want to be dusting shelves for the rest of my goddamn life. I want you to treat me like the protégé you said I was.
But in the dream, she stands there, motionless.
“Every single bookseller in this bookshop has more discipline than you. How can I trust you when you can’t follow simple instructions? You have had years to understand this.” He shakes his head. “I should never have made you my protégé. You are not worthy of the river.”
The chill that steals over her goes through to the bone. Followed by rage.
What did she steal that day? In her dreams, it’s always something different, that she would go on to steal years later: that first edition of The Birds of America; a collection of secret letters between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley; a copy of Cardenio. Extraordinary artefacts, worthy of the theft.
The book that Cassandra had walked out of the bookshop with wasn’t extraordinary at all. An early twentieth century edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, with most of the river’s magic already wrung from it. Barely worth anything.
She’d sold it, just to spite Chiron, and had kept the pitiful amount of money in her bedside table drawer.
For two days it had gone unnoticed, and the squeamish, unsettled feeling in her stomach began to fade.
Then Chiron, standing in the doorway with the book in his hand and thunder across his face.
In the dream, he’s taller than he ever was in real life. He’s older; he’s younger. The booksellers stand behind him to watch, Septimus at his shoulder; he’s alone. He shouts at her; he’s silent.
Then, without fail, he says, “No bookseller of mine will be a thief.”
Cassandra, watching herself from a distance, tries to stop her. If she can stop this, she will change everything.
But this Cassandra—Cassandra before Cass Holt and every damning thing after that—is still full of headstrong rage. Young enough to be foolish; old enough to bear consequences.
“Then tell me to leave,” she spits.
He looks at her, like she’s just confirmed everything he already believes. There’s a gentle touch on her shoulder, and without turning around, she knows it’s Lady Fate.
“Get out of my bookshop, Cassandra.”
Years and years later, she’s gone back to this moment. Analysed her fraying memories, which were already pretty hazy in the cloud of her anger. She tries to pry apart his expression, the inflection of his voice, every choice of word.
She tries to decide if he meant it.
Or if he was bluffing, if he’d expected her to back down as she often did.
Because at the end of the day, he was the owner and she was the protégé, and they’d been family for as long as she’d been alive, to the extent that Chiron was capable of being family with anyone.
He was not good with children, he often said, but he tried to be good with her.
Tonight, this version of Chiron means every word.
In the dream, she swears at him. In the dream, she packs up as much as she can carry. In the dream, she is cleanly, purely angry, and there’s no grief, no tears, so that when the booksellers see her storm down the staircase with an overfull backpack they don’t know she’s been crying.
From there, it’s so easy to track the downwards fall. Cassandra Fairfax morphing into Cass Holt. Or maybe she was only ever Cass Holt, and this was simply her, stepping into herself and discarding a future that she was never meant to have anyway.
In the dream, she walks away—and then she is awake.
In the darkness, in this bookshop that seems to hold so many of her ghosts, she wipes her eyes, takes a shaky breath. Reminds herself that this has already happened, and Chiron is dead. She can no longer make him proud, but she can no longer disappoint him either.
Still, she doesn’t sleep for a long time.
Ledger no.462, p.78—Hedwig Archer
0004137—2 pamphlets on debriding snakebites; 2 yellow-bellied sea snake fangs 1 cask of red wine received N.B. must leave to age for 10 years—return to on… [here, a smudged fingerprint has obscured the date.]
4423246—Paradox book: Helena’s Gambit by Scholastica Moyer. For HRH—payment waived.
1134664—1 cookbook, slightly singed; 1 lock of hair received N.B. retrieval outstanding.
4423246—Paradox book: journal of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. For HRH—payment waived.
4423247—Paradox book: Helena’s Thrust by Scholastica Moyer. For HRH—payment waived. [Is this… erotica?]
4423248—Paradox book: Helena’s Hunt by Scholastica Moyer. For HRH—payment waived.
[Fools. Bloody, bloody fools. They knew they were taking without giving back. And for what? To read erotica from a woman they had already hanged? To glean historical gossip? Paradox books were meant to move mountains. To be a last resort, for the weight of the price extracted.
Did they know, then, what they would do to us?]