Chapter Nine
Rhys had settled their tab at the counter, lingering to compliment the fare and ask if they sold bread by the loaf, which they did not.
“You ought to,” he told the woman at the till, winking at her. “You’d make a killing.”
Seph only watched and sighed as the woman giggled and promised to consider it, batting her lashes and watching wistfully as Rhys spun and loped toward the exit.
He was always doing that.
Making people fall in love with him.
She wanted to slap him.
“My shop’s just across the street,” he told her, using his body to push the door open and holding it for her to pass through. “If you don’t mind shuffling our respective visits for the sake of geography.”
“Lead on, then,” she said, flicking her fingers at him. “No one’s stopping you.”
“You can try if you like,” he told her, wiggling those thick eyebrows of his before turning on his heel toward the shop he’d stopped to peer into on their way to Gordon’s workshop. “I’d like to see it.”
She chewed on the insides of her cheeks to stop herself from smiling. “I still have quite a collection of ropes,” she told him.
“Ah, but the point of those was always that the knots fall out when wrapped around my fine form,” he reminded her. “People liked it better when you were the one tied up and escaping, anyhow. You have to give the people what they want.”
“Do I?” she replied, batting her lashes.
It got another giggle out of him as he led her to a faded yellow door and pushed it open. This shop had windchimes over the entry, rather than a single bell, and they sang in an otherworldly tinkle as they entered.
For a moment, a very brief moment, Seph was frozen in horror. It took several blinking moments for her to adjust to where he’d taken her.
They were surrounded by dead animals, preserved and frozen in a variety of lifelike poses. Some were fully fleshed and vibrant, with the only hint that they were not still alive in the glassy flatness of their false eyes.
Others were skeletons, arranged on posts, carefully reconstructed to demonstrate their delicate and unusual reticulations.
“How do?” came a gravelly, feminine voice from a woman bent over a pair of birds near the window. She popped up, one eye still magnified by the contraption she was wearing over her head, and smiled widely. “New friends?”
“I hope so,” Rhys answered. “I couldn’t help but notice your pretty birdies when I passed by. I had to come in and see them closer.”
“Well, come on then, handsome,” she said, beckoning him closer with a chuckle as she jiggled her magnifier off her head, letting several grizzled curls of hair loose from her bun in the process. “This here’s a hoopoe. Ever seen one? Ever smelled one?”
Rhys bent down to observe the birds, vibrant orange from the shoulders up, and striped in long, black-and-white lines below that. Their heads were crowned with a spray of feathers that stuck straight up, spread apart like a fan. “They don’t smell like much.”
“That’s because I washed the buggers a dozen times,” the lady said with a cackle. “Stinky, little beauties, they are. You can see ’em in the trees sometimes near the Ouse if you’re patient.”
“Those live in England?” Seph heard herself asking, drifting forward despite her initial misgivings. “They look rather … exotic.”
“Aye, they do,” the lady agreed. “Even stranger, this is a male and a female. Usually, lady birds are plain as burlap sacks, but not the hoopoes. Beauties, all of ’em.”
“Can I touch it?” Rhys asked, his fingers already ghosting above the plume of head feathers.
“If you’re gentle,” the lady said. “This pair won’t be done for another day or so yet, though, if you’re looking to buy.”
He stroked the feathers delicately, his eyes shining in wonder. “Do you have anything else as magnificent?” he asked. “My lady here collects the rare and bizarre. She has a shop in Brighton. Ever been to Brighton, missus?”
“Margaret,” the woman corrected. “Or Mags, if you like. And a few times, when I was young and spry. Not much cause for it now. ‘The rare and bizarre,’ you say?”
“Yes,” Seph answered, still moving closer in the slowest, sliding footsteps, her curiosity piqued and stoked despite herself. “I’ve never carried anything … erm … like this.”
“Taxidermy,” the woman said, grinning again. “It’ll be all the rage soon, you mark my words. I mostly sell to London. Toffs love the dead ’uns, kept pretty and safe. I did a whole wolf this summer.”
“I don’t have space for a wolf,” Seph said immediately, directly to Rhys, whose head had popped up excitedly at that. “Or likely the seed investment.”
“What’s the strangest thing you have?” Rhys asked, still twirling orange feathers through his fingers.
“I have a platypus,” she said, raising her thin brows, “but she’s not for sale. Oh! I’ve got a few armored fellas from far afield. Ever seen an armadillo? Or a pangolin?”
“Those aren’t real words,” Rhys said, nudging her like an old friend.
“Give me a tick, I’ll get them from the back. I have a nice, big snake too, just skeletal, mind, but with his fangs in.”
Seph took a breath and turned, taking in the rest of the shop. Near the windows were large, framed displays of various insects, butterflies an unnaturally vibrant and iridescent blue, beetles with spears sticking out of their heads, moths covered in fuzzy pink and yellow fur.
“Goodness,” she said. “I could spend a fortune in here.”
“And make it all back twice over,” Rhys agreed, still keeping vigil next to the orange birds. “It’s brilliant. You ought to get something today, at the very least, and stay in touch for your next trip out here.”
She frowned at him over her shoulder, already half sold on the odd insects. “You might be right.”
By the time she’d seen the marvels from storage, Seph had committed to two insect frames, the snake skeleton, and a decision pending in her next fiscal month between the armadillo or the pangolin.
“Write me here and I’ll tell you when new things come in,” Mags suggested. “And maybe tell me what’s in that shop of yours as well sometimes. Perhaps we can trade.”
“She wants the hoopoes too,” Rhys put in, already digging out a crumpled wad of bills from his pocket. “Can you finish it by tomorrow morning?”
“Aye, of course,” the lady answered, eyeing the money.
“‘Tomorrow’?” Seph repeated. “Are we for certain not leaving tonight? I did pack a change of clothes, but I thought if we finished quickly enough …”
Rhys paused, blinking those long dark lashes at her. “Of course we’re staying. Meeting starts at midnight. You think I’m just going to have Mr. Cagney sit in the cold coach into the wee hours, and then drive us back besides?”
And then to Mags, he said, “Deliver it to the Hoppy Hare when it’s done, if you please. Our coachman is there for the day.”
Seph was frowning as she followed him out. She had brought things to sleep in, just in case, but she hadn’t really considered that they wouldn’t return immediately after finishing their mysterious summons unless something dire kept them here. And furthermore …
“Mr. Cagney?” she exclaimed, the name finally clicking into place. “That’s Errol’s da who drove us here today?”
Rhys turned to her, his face scrunched up like he hadn’t heard the question correctly. “Yes, of course it is,” he said. “Stablemaster, isn’t he? We’re still staffing up the Rest. There wasn’t anyone left when we all came home and we use the coach sparingly enough.”
She gave a stiff nod, still unsettled by it.
It seemed wrong, somehow, to be driven by Errol’s father, though of course she could not think of any reason why it should be. It was and had always been his vocation, after all.
“Where to next?” Rhys asked, tilting his head back to consider the long rows of possibilities down this lane of the Twittings. “Or shall I pick the next one too?”
“How much was the hoopoe display?” she asked instead of giving him an answer. “I’ll pay you back when we return to the shop.”
“You certainly will not,” he told her. “And you won’t be selling that, either. It’ll be a centerpiece of your shop for the other creatures to huddle around. A gift.”
“I do not want a gift,” she returned, wrinkling her brow.
“Too bad,” he said. “Oh, a lapidary! Let’s go in there next.”
By the time the sun had started to set, Seph had spent triple what she’d set out to this morning.
She had her dioramas and her puzzle boxes and an assortment of kaleidoscopes that she’d gotten from the stained glass workshop’s leavings near the big church in the center of town. Those had been planned.
But now she also had several preserved exotic creatures, a barrel of tumbled stones, and jagged pieces of fool’s gold—and still one shop to go before dinner.
“Rhys,” she whined, trailing after him. “I really don’t think I can afford any other spontaneous investments.”
“Last shop’s not necessarily for you,” he told her over his shoulder. “Just a place Willa took me a few times when I was younger. You’ll like it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she muttered, but she followed along, anyway, watching her own shadows grow long as the light dimmed around them.
The final stop was on the high street, tucked at the very end, between the linen shop and the apothecary. It was long and deep and had fresh paint on its door, which already set it aside from their other stops today.
“A bookshop?” she said in surprise, as soon as he’d pulled the door open. “We have bookshops in Brighton, Rhys.”
“Not like this one,” he told her. “Novels and reference are up front for the normal folk, but there’s magic in the back.”
“‘Magic,’” she repeated flatly.
“Magic,” he assured her. “Come on.”
She could see before they’d even reached the shelf he was aiming toward that there was a sign hanging above it, much like her edible oddities sign, in wood with grooved, painted words for the passerby.
Hidden Histories, it read. England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
Seph sighed, her eye already drawn to several thick tomes with gold-brushed pages between their leather bindings.
She reached for her coin purse yet again.