Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
A fter the meeting dispersed, Esme asked Luke if he wanted to come back with her.
He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, his face strangely blank. ‘I’d better head back to the shop. I don’t know whether Lewis will go back there or…’
‘Okay,’ Esme said. ‘That makes sense.’ She wanted to ask if she should go back to the shop with him. She felt as if things ought to be more certain with Luke. They had slept together and that had felt like a seismic shift for her. Maybe it wasn’t the same for him, though? Even before that, they had been in an easy routine. Spending evenings together, at her place or his, but there was something about Luke’s manner that told her today was different. Of course it was different, she chided herself. His long-lost twin was here.
‘I’m sorry,’ Luke was pushing a hand through his hair, shoving it away from his face in a gesture that seemed almost angry. ‘I can’t leave him in the shop on his own.’
Esme’s stomach dropped and her skin had broken out in goose bumps. ‘It’s okay,’ she said quickly. She remembered placating Ryan. Trying to placate Ryan. Failing to placate Ryan and all that came after.
Luke looked away, his gaze on the sky above the cottages. When he turned back, his face was softer, more familiar. ‘I don’t know how to handle this.’
‘You two need some time,’ Esme said, her speech automatic as she struggled to calm her haywire central nervous system. ‘You’ll catch up. You’ll talk. It will be okay.’ She shoved her shaking hands into her pockets.
He nodded, distracted, and already turning away. ‘I hope so.’
Once she was home, Esme sat at the kitchen table with a mug of lemon balm tea and talked to Jet. He was sitting on the table, where he wasn’t really supposed to be, washing an outstretched leg. She updated him on the arrival of Luke’s twin brother and the ensuing village meeting. Then, without realising the words were coming, she told Jet that Luke didn’t seem happy to see Lewis. That, after him spending so many months searching and worrying, it seemed a bit of a strange reaction. ‘And then,’ she finished, ‘I wonder if I actually know him at all.’
Bee knew she had to approach Lucy carefully. Her youngest sister was skittish. And dangerous. She didn’t usually pay attention to the humans on the island, but the arrival of The Book Keeper’s twin might be enough to change that, especially with them all off kilter from Tobias’s absence. Diana had pointed to the back garden when Bee had asked where she was and so that was where she went.
The day had been overcast, but the sky had cleared in time for the sun to set. Dramatic purple and red bled across the remaining clouds and the air was scented with the undergrowth. Foliage and flowers tangled from the crowded pots and the small mossy green rectangle of the old lawn was dotted with small specimen trees that had grown together, branches mingling until they were one big biomass and it would be impossible to say where one species ended and another began.
Lucy was sitting in the middle, underneath the tangled branches and bright green leaves. Her sister looked well. Her skin was smooth and untroubled, her lips a luscious red. These two facts hardly ever changed. The real indication of her health lay in her eyes. They could become entirely black until they appeared to sink into her pale face like stones beneath a deep lake.
Before Bee could broach the subject of Lewis, Lucy spoke. ‘I don’t feel him.’
‘Tobias?’
Lucy nodded, quick. Her head tilted as if listening for something. ‘Do you?’
Bee wished she had a different answer, but she could only give the truth. ‘No. Not since he disappeared.’
She turned her face to the setting sun and wondered whether Tobias could see the same one. It wasn’t likely, she knew. He was Elsewhere.
‘When will he come back?’
‘I don’t know. The witch tried a spell, but she doesn’t think it worked. We might have to get him ourselves.’
She wasn’t looking at Lucy, but could sense her fear. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Hopefully he’ll find his own way.’
‘Maybe it would be better if he didn’t.’ Diana had arrived in the garden on soft feet.
‘Don’t say that!’ Lucy rose from her seated position. Her hands were curled into fists.
‘I want him back,’ Diana said. ‘But if Tobias can walk a path back to us, all on his own, that means something else could do the same.’
‘We should be looking for him,’ Lucy said. ‘He would look for us.’
‘Would he?’ Bee wasn’t sure. Tobias was even older than The Three Sisters. And he had been half-asleep for the last couple of centuries. It would be a mistake to assume they knew anything.
‘I said we should look,’ Diana said.
Bee closed her eyes. Two against one. She knew when she was defeated.
They kept the mirrors shrouded. If any one of them sat in the middle, the other sisters would appear in the mirrors on either side. They didn’t need to be physically together, they were always inseparable, but when they sat together, each looking into their own mirror, they could see further than any of them could alone.
‘He is Elsewhere,’ Bee said as she pulled the thin fabric from the mirrors. ‘What more can we hope to know?’
‘When he will return,’ Lucy said, the pout threatening again.
‘You might not like the answer,’ Bee said. ‘Are you sure you want to know? The islanders are upset as it is. I don’t want you making things worse.’
Sharp white teeth in a red, red smile.
‘Sisters,’ Diana said, placating as always.
Lucy skipped to her place on the left and then looked challengingly at Bee.
Bee sighed. She took her place on the right and waited for Diana to sit in the middle.
They looked at their reflections, three women representing the three stages of life. Some argued there were four stages, wanted to include death, but that had never made sense to Bee. Birth and death were doorways, not stages. You arrived and you departed. Between was everything else.
‘When was the last time we did this?’ Diana asked.
‘Years,’ Lucy said with a sigh.
Bee closed her eyes and took a couple of slow breaths. When she opened her eyes, she knew she wouldn’t see her reflection. The truth was, Macbeth had been onto something with his walking shadow. Humans strutted and fretted upon the stage, but she and her sisters and Tobias were made to play a different part.
The Three Sisters disappeared from the mirrors. Their images obscured by thick fog, not unlike the haar that had rolled across the island when Tobias disappeared. In the glass, the dark islet rose from an unnaturally calm sea. In the flat water, a mirror image of the island was reflected. It was bright white, the inverse to the black island above.
‘Balance,’ Bee said.
The black island became darker as they watched. It was the colour of shadow. Of nothing. An absence. The white shape below seemed so white it glowed.
‘Tobias has gone through the door to Elsewhere. It leaves a gap,’ Diana said. ‘On this side. You know what happens when there is a space in a flower bed?’
‘The strongest plants take it over,’ Lucy said with some satisfaction.
Bee stood up and recovered the mirrors. ‘We need to close the door before the vacuum gets filled with something we can’t get rid of.’
After the meeting finished, Matteo made his way back to the shop. He had waved goodbye to the crowd at the pub, looking a little longer at Fiona. He didn’t know if she noticed.
He pottered in his shop, tidying up the already-neat shelves, and then sat on his stool behind the counter and attacked the crossword. He was trying to calm himself after the community meeting. He was pleased for Luke that his brother wasn’t dead. That was the right way to feel, so he made sure he felt it. Tried to make it deeper and more true than the competing feeling which told him that Lewis was trouble. That he didn’t like change on the island. That new people could mean new problems.
The island was his sanctuary. It had been largely unchanged in the twenty-nine years he had lived there. Now, something felt different. And it wasn’t just that Luke’s brother had arrived. There had been new people before; Euan’s birth, Esme arriving after Madame Le Grys had passed away, and Luke after they lost Alvis. But the island had never felt quite like this. Or perhaps it was him? All of his yesterdays had been the same. Now he wasn’t so sure about his future. He felt unsettled, and he couldn’t prevent his mind from turning over the most likely reason.
He finished the last clue and folded the paper. There was a card resting on top of the cash register and he picked it up. It was a simple white business card. Bold black type spelled the words ‘Crow Investigations’ and a mobile phone number. On the back, Lydia Crow had scribbled. ‘If you ever go home, call me.’
Luke met Lewis on the main street of the village.
‘Finished discussing me?’ Lewis smiled in the lop-sided way that Luke knew from his own reflection. ‘You people need more excitement in your lives.’
Luke didn’t dignify that with a reply. He had hated seeing Lewis arguing with Bee and wished his brother would drop the attitude. He was pulled between loyalty to his brother and the deep discomfort of seeing him with the islanders. Lewis had put on a sarcastic and cynical persona a long time ago and Luke wasn’t sure he would be able to take it off now, even if he wanted to. One thing was clear – Lewis belonged to the mainland and Luke hadn’t realised how much of a gulf that would put between them. He had been so focused on finding him, he hadn’t put much thought into what happened next.
He knew that he didn’t want Lewis inside the bookshop, but he couldn’t see any way around the situation. He had a tent and could ask his brother to camp on the beach, the way he had done when he had first arrived on the island. Lewis had been on the same trips with their father, after all. He knew his way around a tent peg.
The lights in the shop came on as he walked in. Lewis hadn’t spoken on the walk from the pub and he didn’t say anything now. His gaze roamed the shelves and the counter with the till. Luke wondered what scheme he was conjuring, what he was seeing. Lewis, like their dad, saw the world as split between people who were taking advantage of others and the marks who allowed themselves to be used.
‘What’s the deal?’
‘I run the bookshop,’ Luke said. He patted a nearby shelf. It had a new label. Black blocky writing on a piece of white cardboard and yellowed sticky tape that made it look as if it had been on display for years, when Luke knew it hadn’t been there a few hours earlier when he had left the shop. No smoking. No refunds. No hawkers.
‘He hasn’t smoked for years,’ Luke said out loud.
The lights flickered.
Lewis looked around. ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing.’ Luke went into the back room that held the tiny kitchenette. The fridge contained a block of cheese, a couple of pints of milk and a half-finished dish of lasagne, courtesy of Esme. ‘Tea? Coffee? Are you hungry?’
‘I’m all right,’ Lewis’s voice carried from deep in the shop.
Luke shut the fridge and went to find him. Lewis was scanning the bookshelves at the very back of the shop. The sections labelled esoteric and mythology. Luke noted that the bottom row of larger, older books was absent. The sections had been growing steadily with Esme’s regular presence, but they had shrunk considerably in the face of Lewis’s scrutiny. His brother turned and Luke braced himself for a question about magic.
‘Funny little place,’ Lewis said. ‘Smells.’
Luke’s hand shot out to pat the nearest shelf. ‘I love it,’ he said, partly to assuage the shop, but mainly because it was true and his brother’s attitude was pissing him off.
Lewis pulled a face. Luke realised that speaking honestly, using words like ‘love’, these were all things completely alien to their interactions. He wondered how well they really knew each other now. ‘The causeway will be open later.’
‘I thought I would stay,’ Lewis said. ‘For a bit. Catch up with my little brother.’
‘There’s nothing for you here.’ Luke made it a flat statement.
‘I don’t know about that.’ Lewis’s attention was distracted by something on a nearby shelf. He pulled out the book. ‘I remember this. Mum had it. Do you remember?’
Luke stared dumbfounded at the dog-eared paperback. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn it was the exact copy, the same book his mother had kept in the kitchen. It was an old Collin’s guide to garden birds. She had kept it on the counter near to the window and he remembered her picking it up when she had spotted a bird in the garden that she didn’t recognise, leafing through the pages eagerly and wondering out loud whether it was possibly a yellow siskin or a greenfinch. His throat was dry as he nodded.
‘She always wanted to see a siskin,’ Lewis said, echoing Luke’s thoughts. His voice sounded odd, as if his throat had gone tight too.
Luke sighed. ‘I have a bottle of vodka somewhere.’