Chapter 2
Despite her exhaustion, Aurelia couldn’t fall asleep after going back up to the flat.
Those voices had seemed incredibly real.
And yet, the way they’d disappeared almost instantly…
She would have heard the bell over the shop door if people had filed outside.
But instead, they’d vanished within seconds.
All evidence suggested that it was a very vivid dream. Or, Aurelia acknowledged, perhaps it was the emotional by-product of a tragic and terrible year.
She made herself a cup of tea and sat in one of her aunt’s cozy armchairs.
Fezz the cat, having apparently forgiven her for waking him up in the middle of the night, hopped up and created room for himself at her side.
Aurelia petted him absentmindedly as she looked out over the square that bordered the front of the building.
She’d grown up loving her visits to the bookshop and had worked there on and off over the years.
True, she’d always imagined she would take over the shop one day, but it was all too soon.
Her aunt was supposed to retire in a dozen or so years, giving Aurelia time to write a few novels of her own before she started selling other people’s books.
The shop, once as beloved as one of her favorite novels, had become an anchor weighing her down, tying her to a future she wasn’t yet ready to face.
All the same, Aurelia hadn’t written so much as a haiku recently.
Her aunt had died three months ago, and her mother nine months before that.
One year ago, yesterday, in fact. It had been an unbearable year; each week brought a new high or low as first her mother and then her aunt worked their way through various treatments that seemed promising before, each time, they failed and cancer took its hold.
Grief seemed to ooze out of her every pore these days, and she was afraid of the very real possibility that it might spill onto the page.
She was sad enough living through it all without subjecting an audience to her misery.
Part of her longed to write again, but another, stronger part of her felt almost repelled by the thought of opening her emotional floodgates any further.
A year’s worth of grief—maybe that’s what had brought on last night’s hallucination.
She’d spent the day walking around the city and visiting her mum’s favorite spots: Chelsea Physic Garden and tea in the café; a walk down the hidden lanes tucked off ancient Fleet Street; then sitting alongside the Thames at dusk.
Aurelia and her sister, Antonia, had debated whether to travel to Yorkshire to spend the day with their father or meet in Paris, where Antonia lived with her husband and three children.
In the end, they’d decided to wait to see each other at Christmas as it was just over a month away.
Trudging home yesterday in the chill air of late autumn, Aurelia thought maybe she should have spent the day with her father and sister after all.
Now, after last night’s misadventure, she felt certain of it.
Those voices, that light under the door—her mind returned to it all again and again.
Could it have been real, as it had seemed to her then?
But she’d heard them talking about Pemberley, which wasn’t a real place at all.
Aurelia frowned and drew her knees up to her chin, chiding herself for thinking that last night could be anything other than the result of being overtired and overly sad. She felt a sudden need to talk to her sister and, almost as soon as she had the thought, her phone rang.
“It really is amazing,” Aurelia said as she answered. She smiled and nestled deeper into her chair.
Antonia gave the slightest pause as she processed this. “Did we do it again?”
“We did. I was just about to call you.”
“I know you think it makes us special—”
“And I know you think it makes us freaks,” Aurelia laughed.
She could hear the faint sound of children’s voices raised in either a game or an argument; she couldn’t tell which. Her heart ached to hear how distant their voices sounded.
“How are my darling niece and nephews?”
“Well, Julia’s been reading Little Women and is now making up her own plays.”
A shriek made Aurelia pull the phone from her ear.
“As you can no doubt hear, she and the boys are in the other room practicing one right now,” Antonia added.
“Aw, Mum’s favorite book. I’m glad Julia likes it.”
“Yeah, it felt like the right time to share it with her.” Antonia paused, her signal for a shift to serious talk. “How are you doing?”
“Fine? Fine, I suppose,” Aurelia said before adding the obvious. “Sad.”
“Me too.”
“It’s not like I haven’t missed her all year, it’s just hard having it be the end of the first year. ‘The first anniversary.’” Aurelia swallowed down a few threatening tears.
“I know,” Antonia said softly just as the children’s voices reared up through the phone again, punctuated by a high-pitched scream. “It helped having the kids to distract me. I talked to Dad—did you?”
“I did. He sounded okay, didn’t he?”
“I might have rung up a few of his friends to remind them to check in on him,” Antonia said without a hint of guilt. “What did you get up to after we talked yesterday?”
“Oh… I went on a sort of pilgrimage and walked around some of Mum’s favorite places.”
“Did it help?”
“I don’t know.” Remembering last night’s events, Aurelia amended that, saying, “I don’t think so.”
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah, it’s just… The strangest thing happened. I woke up convinced people had broken into the shop. But I checked and no one was there.”
“You checked?”
“I called the police,” Aurelia reassured her. “But the shop was empty—there was no sign of anyone breaking in.” She gave a mirthless laugh and added, “I thought I heard them talking about Pemberley.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember—Darcy’s place! From Pride and Prejudice.”
“Oh, right. Well, leave it to you to have literate burglars.”
“I know,” Aurelia said, rolling her eyes at herself. “Still, it did spook me a bit. I’m just getting used to Aunt Marigold’s flat, the different noises.”
She thought again of those voices. They weren’t exactly the hum and creak of an old building, but she was determined to move past it.
“I’ll bet after another week or two I won’t even notice.”
“How are you managing? I mean, it’s a great flat and all, but everything in there must remind you of her.”
“It does,” Aurelia admitted, looking around at the mess of her moving boxes mixed in with her aunt’s things. “But it’s free. My old lease was up anyway, and it doesn’t make sense to pay rent somewhere else when I’m here running the shop every day.”
There was an awkward silence. The shop had been in their family for generations, passed down from aunt to niece since the early 1900s. With Antonia’s life firmly rooted in Paris, Marigold had left the shop to Aurelia—giving her no choice but to keep the family business going.
“I know I’ve said it before,” Antonia said sincerely, “but I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to sell the place.”
“I can’t let it go. And what if Julia wants to run it one day? I’ll make it work.” Aurelia tried her best to sound convincing.
“Are you at least keeping up with your writing?”
“No.” Quickly cutting her sister off, she added, “Not right now anyway. I’m not in a good place these days.”
“Exactly. You’re tucked away with all of Aunt Marigold’s old things.”
The children’s voices reached fever pitch; Antonia’s teasing tone was gone when she spoke again.
“I’d better go. Try to think happy thoughts, Relia. Know I love you.”
Aurelia held her breath, trying not to let loose her tears.
“I do. You too.”
She hung up and rested her head on the back of the chair as she closed her eyes.
She and her sister had started saying ‘know I love you’ whenever they spoke.
It had been their mother’s way of saying goodbye ever since they were little, her way of sending them off into the world safe in the knowledge that they were loved.
A tear slid down her cheek and Aurelia swept it away before opening her eyes and sitting up in her chair.
“Right, then.”
Nodding decisively, she stood and walked toward the kitchen.
As she passed a box filled with her old notebooks and journals, she paused, brushing a hand across their spines.
Would she ever again feel that need to hold a pen in her hand and scribble down her ideas?
Pursing her lips in frustration, she turned from the notebooks and resolved to start her day in earnest.