Chapter Thirty-Five
CHAPTER
Thirty-Five
THE WEATHER TAKES a turn, cold and wet with the sharp tang of promised snow in the air.
Byron has a day off, so Cassandra takes the opportunity to close the bookshop and run errands. It makes a change, she supposes, from breaking into flats and fighting off henchmen.
On her way back, she pauses on the opposite side of the street, her eye caught by the bookshop. With the orange light spilling onto the street, dancing across the wrought iron railings, it has that postcard-perfect look. Almost beat-for-beat a memory.
Then her gaze snags on all the small inconsistencies: the lacquer of black paint on the iron, instead of Chiron’s unflattering grey-green; the new planter with bulbs hibernating until spring; the clean sweep of the pulled-back curtains, which Chiron had never particularly bothered with.
Little touches, either at her own hand or Byron’s, and often both.
What a miracle they’ve managed to create.
It’s a shame, she muses, that so few people stumble across it.
Then she realises that someone has, in fact, stumbled across it. Standing on the doorstep, waiting for her, is Lowell.
Even with his back mostly turned to her, she knows him by the line of his figure, so regimented, even against the buffeting wind.
He pushes his glasses up his nose, rosy from the cold, the collar of his coat popped so that it brushes the edge of his jaw.
He’s wearing a frown as he peers into the frosted window of the bookshop.
All those features she’d first taken to be signs of severity, rearranging themselves like a puzzle she’s only just skimming the edges of.
Then he turns to her, and his eyebrows soften from their crease to something that can’t be relief, but looks too much like it to be anything else.
“Cassandra,” he says.
Cassandra’s heart does that complicated swoop in her chest again. The one that she has tried so very hard to ignore. But after two weeks without Lowell Sharpe, the sight of him is such a delight she almost forgets she shouldn’t be talking to him.
“You never came back for the ink sample,” he says.
No, she didn’t, thanks to Edmund. And maybe there had been a very small part of her that knew once she did, it would be over.
“Then I started to wonder about those men. And I—” He bites off the sentence at the last second. “I thought, well—something might have happened.”
Cassandra has the helpless urge to laugh at the thought of Lowell worried about her.
She already has a list of excuses ready to reel off, each one somehow more implausible than the last. But then she notes the way that his hands twist against the edge of his coat, so unlike him, and her smile falters. He really was worried.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Anyway,” he says awkwardly, “I have the ink sample here.”
She brushes past him on the steps and opens the door. The chill hasn’t quite made its way inside, and she divests of her coat, hanging it on the recently acquired coat rack. Another of Byron’s small, clever purchases that have made the bookshop feel like home.
But Lowell stands on the doorstep, idling despite the cold. She gives him a questioning glance.
“Something something ‘never set foot in my bookshop again’ something something,” he reminds her.
She flushes. “Well, you were trying to steal it at the time.”
To her surprise, he looks a little guilty—a strange expression that doesn’t fit him. “I just wanted to be sure.”
He steps inside and closes the door behind him, shooing a cluster of fallen leaves outside with the breeze.
Cassandra can’t help but notice the way he scans the bookshop, with that same calm, assessing eye.
But he catches her looking and becomes studiously interested in peeling off his gloves instead.
“Give me a second,” Cassandra says, reaching for the ledger on Chiron’s desk.
She’d been going over Chiron and Maud’s list again, to see if there were any other books that had recently returned to the public eye. Instead, what she’s found is a curious… erasure. As though the books have simply passed through their new owners’ hands and vanished.
Or else have been destroyed.
“So that’s what he was doing,” Lowell says, leaning over her shoulder.
His nearness startles her. “What?”
“Chiron.” Lowell sets down the ink sample amidst the desk detritus. “I assume this was from him.”
Cassandra shrugs. “Something like that.”
“Well, I ran all the tests I could think of,” he says, the frown appearing again. “And it’s ink, definitely. But it’s been altered to mimic the river—read over somehow, to then be read over again.”
Oh, Cassandra can picture the how. The image of the gory silhouette blown wide flashes underneath her eyelids.
“Anyway, it clearly doesn’t work. The river is, well, the river.
” He hesitates. “But maybe with a competent reader, or some other connection to the river beyond the ink itself… It’s a paradoxical problem, though.
To create something with the river’s power independently of it, the reader and presumably writer would still need the river. ”
This is what Edmund must have meant, about the other solution to save the river. So Chiron and Roth had somehow both stumbled across this… idea. But even looking at the vial sends a shudder of revulsion through her. No wonder Edmund had warned her that it wouldn’t work.
There’s a pause as they look at the ink vial.
This is the moment, Cassandra thinks, when they should be saying goodbye to each other.
And maybe there’ll come a time again when she needs Lowell’s help, or she’ll have a reason to drop by Sharpe’s.
Maybe not, and then if she ever passes by Lowell, it’ll be pleasant coincidence, nothing more.
She doesn’t want to say goodbye. Not just yet.
“Cup of tea?” she blurts out.
He nods, flexing his fingers. “That would be great.”
Cassandra puts away the ledger, then leads him past the desk, towards the staircase.
She hears Lowell’s quick intake of breath as he climbs the stairs, but he doesn’t say anything.
It’s too easy to forget, sometimes, that Lowell still wants a bookshop of his own, that this could be a great cruelty to present him with the world he can’t have.
He makes a little sound again at the reading room, somewhere between surprise and awe, sending a thrill through Cassandra.
He wanders the room while Cassandra busies herself with tea and mugs.
Her back turned, she allows herself a quick, secretive smile; it’s a rare feeling to be able to share this space with someone, and even rarer that he appreciates it just as much as she does.
When she turns around, she finds him carefully finishing a patch on an old shirt that she’s been meaning to do for weeks.
“You fix everything you touch,” she says. “And I break…”
Everything, she thinks.
“Well, I broke that,” she finishes, a little weakly.
She hands him a mug with I slay comma splices printed on it.
For a while, they stand quietly in the kitchen, braced against the countertops.
Cassandra studies him over the top of her mug, at the way his glasses fog from the shock of heat as he takes a sip.
Chiron’s bookshop is so different to Sharpe’s, and there had been a time when she’d thought Lowell would want nothing more than to remake it in his image.
But now, she wonders if the bookshop would remake him instead: softer lines, warmer colours, that rare laugh of his suddenly less rare.
He would have made an excellent successor, she thinks sadly.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asks.
He tilts his head in invitation.
“Why do you want the bookshop?” she says, then amends, “This bookshop, I mean.”
He turns the mug in his hands, a smile teasing the edges of his mouth. “Is it foolish to admit that I just like books that much?”
Cassandra doesn’t laugh. She waits quietly, watching him.
“Yes, I just like books. But…” he says, and the smile fades.
“I’ve heard the stories, you know. Of what this bookshop used to be.
And for so long, I thought I could fix it, make something more.
” He glances at her and flushes. “Not that you haven’t done a good job—I mean, amazing, really, especially with—”
“I know,” she says.
She’s walked through every inch of the bookshop above, seen the dust and detritus left behind from a more prosperous age gone by.
She’s stood in all those empty bedrooms, knowing that they’d once been full of booksellers, that the hearth had never gone out because there would always be someone to sit beside it.
“No, you don’t know,” he says vehemently.
“When I first met you, I thought you’d been set an impossible task.
The bookshop was a mess, barely hanging together.
I remember thinking it was a miracle that it hadn’t already burned down in Chiron’s absence.
But look at what you’ve done, and so effortlessly. ”
Cassandra laughs. “Oh, there was effort involved.”
He nudges her knee with his. “I know that. But still, it seems crazy to me now that I could have taken it on. Edmund told me I was being an idiot, of course.” He sighs. “He hates being an owner, tied down to the bookshop. I think he’d just about rather do anything else.”
“So why doesn’t he?”
Lowell shrugs. “He’s the oldest, now. That’s just the way it works.”
It doesn’t miss Cassandra’s notice the way he hangs on the now.
She lets his words linger in the silence, lets herself watch the way he watches her.
It feels like another one of his tests. Whether she’ll ask him what happened to make Edmund the oldest. Whether he’ll trust her enough to give her the answer.
“Come with me,” she says suddenly.
Before he can say no, she takes his hand and leads him back downstairs, past the rows of shelves, to the courtyard behind the bookshop. His hand is warm in hers, his fingers lacing snug.