Chapter 24
Heathcliff
“I’ll have this key copied.” I thrust the shop key across the table at the locksmith, who is also the village post master, the vegetable seller, and the wedding celebrant. Because I live in hell.
He peers at it with disdain. “I don’t do keys like this. This is practically an antique.”
This is the thanks I get for doing a good thing.
Growling with frustration, I stomp out of the post office and narrow my eyes at the antique shop across the green.
I’ve had an ongoing rivalry with the owner, Rochester, ever since he emerged from a book a few months back.
He lived at the shop for a couple of weeks, but I kept finding him in Quoth’s attic bedroom.
The birdie kept waking in the middle of the night to find Rochester looming over him, and the terror made him moult feathers everywhere.
When I informed Rochester that it was my attic and he was forbidden from entering it, he had the nerve to give me a diatribe about how it was his birthright.
“After all, my chum, what would we classic literature characters do without the attic? Where else does one hide one’s haunted portrait, hallucinogenic yellow wallpaper, or, say, just to pick an example out of thin air, a secret first wife?
We can’t very well use the cellar if it’s full of Amontillado. ”
Morrie laughed, because of course he did, but I don’t find a bald Quoth so funny.
So I kicked Rochester to the curb, and he’s had it in for me ever since.
That’s why he set up his poxy antique shop around the corner from Nevermore and makes my life hell on a regular basis.
Just last week, he tried to swoop in on a first edition Dickens at an estate sale that he knew I had my eye on.
And then there’s the fact that he suggested the Bronte Society have its monthly meeting at the bookshop.
As if I want those strange Visigoths hanging about, eating all of my cheese, swooning over me just because I happen to be the antihero of their dreams.
But he does do repairs, which means he has all kinds of tools, including ones that can cut an antique key.
You’re doing this for Mina.
I picture her face, her soft features breaking into a smile when I give her a key.
I think of what this key has meant to me, how it’s been a second chance at the life I should have had, one where I don’t have to descend into a grief- and revenge-fuelled madness.
From the way Mina’s eyes widen and the stress slides from her shoulders when she enters the shop, I know she feels the same way.
With a growl of resignation, I stomp across the green towards Rochester’s Antiques.
Halfway there, I stop in my tracks. My eyes catch something in the soft grass of the village green that fills me with more dread than an entire busload of American tourists arriving at the shop door in search of books to match their soft furnishing.
A fresh hoofprint.
Don’t panic.
It could be nothing. It could be strange old Mrs Beatle with her Shetland pony. It could be some kids with a horseshoe on a stick and a sick sense of humour. It could be Mina’s mother’s new money-making scheme of a horse-drawn Uber service.
Morrie’s always telling me not to blow up without evidence. So I square my jaw, step over the horseshoe, and shove my way into the antique store.
“Earnshaw. What could you possibly want with me?” Rochester growls from behind the desk.
“What’s the matter, Rochester? The wife in your attic haunting your dreams again?”
“Hugged any skeletons lately?” He peers at the key in my hand. “I recognise that key. Have you come to concede defeat and hand the bookshop over to its true dark lord?”
“You can have it once you pass a fire safety course… oh, wait a second…” I scoff. “Can you copy that key?”
Rochester picks up his eyeglasses and inspects the key. “Aye. Give me a couple of hours. Come back and bring a fine whisky and several hundred dollars. I’m going to overcharge you like I’m Emily Bronte’s therapist during peak brooding season.”
I step outside, pondering a pub lunch while I wait for Rochester to finish copying the key, when I catch a flash of tail in the stables behind the Rose & Wimple.
A hard lump rises in my throat as I jog over. I flatten myself against the pub wall and peer around the corner. My cold heart falls into my boots.
Lancelot, dressed in his knightly attire and with a bright red apple in his hand, lovingly coaxes Peaches into the old stable. Once the horse is safely inside, he feeds him the apple and hangs a sign over his stall, declaring him the property of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
I duck into the kitchen doorway as Lancelot strolls by, whistling under his breath as he swings his sword over his shoulder.
Not good.
Very not good.
Morrie said he got rid of the do-gooder knight.
He said that Lancelot would be distracted in Europe for weeks.
But he’s returned, which means that as well as clearing Mina’s name, we’re going to be cleaning horse shit from the carpet and trying to keep one of literature’s greatest lovers away from Mina.
“You’d better hurry home, Morrie,” I mutter under my breath. “Because I need to kill you.”