The bookshop below, p.37
The Bookshop Below, page 37
Byron complains about the damp weather, and suggests there might be a leak in the shop. Cassandra says she’ll look into it, but she doesn’t.
Instead, she waits. She’s become very good at waiting.
The summer continues. The bookshop swells with customers, who don’t ask for dark miracles in return for teeth, firstborn children, terrible secrets—or anything else of priceless value. But Cassandra is surprised to find that they love the books, all the same. They slump into comfortable armchairs, and she realises that there’s joy in a bookshop that’s made for lingering. Some days they come in for nail-biting thrillers, or an armful of picture books, or door-stopping fantasy.
Every time she puts through a romance, she thinks of Chiron.
Water appears in puddles on the shop floor, vanishing into the floorboards as the day’s heat climbs. A spray of white flowers appears on her desk, laid like a peace offering, though Byron swears she didn’t leave anything behind. The books murmur to themselves, in a language that’s forever on the tip of Cassandra’s tongue.
Edmund stops by every so often. Customers scatter in his wake, a storm cloud threatening the sun, until Byron makes him settle in a corner. For a while, he observes the bookshop, his gaze catching but never quite resting on Cassandra. Although she still can’t say she likes him, she tolerates him, just as he tolerates her. Maybe it’s grief shared; maybe it’s pity. Cassandra walks past Sharpe’s most weeks, and every time, it’s closed.
Today, with autumn chasing on summer’s heels, Edmund seems out of place in his charcoal attire. But there’s a rare absence of his frown. He shoots Cassandra a suspicious look and she shrugs.
“Smells like rain,” is all he says.
It’s a chilly evening when Cassandra and Byron close up the bookshop together. A time of slumber, hibernation. Of things settling into themselves, as the weather turns. Cassandra has never paid so much attention to the time of year before.
“You know, it feels…” Byron spools out the sentence. “Good.” She grins. “I like what you’ve done with the place, Fairfax.”
Cassandra smiles back. “What we’ve done.”
Lately, they’ve had to hire another two booksellers, and Byron’s looked into the cost of the empty building next door. They’re not quite there yet, but Cassandra’s started to imagine a larger bookshop, with more space for customers to settle down and read, maybe even a coffee shop if she’s feeling ambitious.
She could be happy here.
Byron punches her gently on the arm. “And don’t you forget it.”
She’s just about to leave when Cassandra stops her.
“Do you ever miss it?” Cassandra asks.
And Byron must know what she means because she pauses, a complicated expression on her face. Like she’s weighing up the truth and deciding how much of it Cassandra can handle. Which is a fair question, these days.
Eventually, Byron smiles sadly. “All the time.”
After Byron leaves, Cassandra normally goes up to the flat, where she’ll settle into the evening routine: dinner on the finicky gas stove, some light reading, an early bedtime to compensate for the early morning. But tonight, she lingers in the bookshop, listening to the faint gurgle of water somewhere. Another leak, Byron had suggested, a little less convincingly than the first time.
She wonders if Chiron would be proud of this life she’s carved out for herself. Maybe he would be proud of how she’s thrown herself into the bookshop’s running, the way the floors gleam and windows sparkle. Maybe he’d be just a little proud that she’s continued to do anything at all, given everything that’s happened.
That night, Cassandra falls asleep to the sound of rain.
For the first time, she dreams that she’s back in Chiron’s bookshop, walking through the buttery sunlight of an afternoon. She lets her hands glide across the shelves, listens to the soft creak of old floorboards, polished to a high shine. But in this version of Chiron’s bookshop, the tree in the courtyard has wound its way through the interior, the trunk soaring upwards where the staircase should be. And every flower is a delicate white.
The daylight shifts rapidly around her to dusk, then night. Stars hang above her, suspended in mid-air. On the right-hand side of the desk, where normally a plain wall stands, an archway appears. She takes a step towards it, then another—
She bolts upright, awake. Something is moving in the dark under her bed.
Her heart pistons, fear briefly eclipsing every rational thought before she remembers that the society are long dead, their only member defanged and brooding at Sharpe’s. She leans over her bed, breath held.
Two bright yellow eyes stare back at her quizzically. A plaintive meow from a fuzzy void. Errata.
Cassandra is about to scoop him into her arms—tearfully, ecstatically; every word she can think of that means joy and heartbreak and then even greater joy—when she notices a piece of paper slipped inside his collar. The first few lines she recognises as a story from her favourite author’s collection. Something in her seizes.
Slowly, she begins to read.
Epilogue
A scrap of prose, somewhat burnt, attached to Errata’s collar
From The Fairy Knight’s Daughter & Other Stories, collected by Hyacinth Watson
… settled by the fire, and he said to her, “Have you ever heard the story about the two birds? They are the only two of their kind in the world. White as moonlight, black as the night sky, with lives as long as the earth is old. Their call is like no other; they answer in no language we can decipher. But by their song, they could find one another anywhere in the forest. Until poachers visited the forest, and plundered its rarities for the wealthy, the spoilt, the cruel.
“When the sun rose on that day, the white bird sang. Yet for the first time in millennia, there was no response. The bird was alone.”
Lowell, I’m sorry
If I could take it back
If you could see my nightmares—if you could know how much I regret it all—
You weren’t wrong about me.
Do you really think that’s how the story ends, Cassandra?
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Robbie Guillory for once again being the steady hand on the helm of my career, unflappable in all weather. Thank you to Molly Powell for being an editor extraordinaire, fearless logic wrangler and publishing champion. Thank you, too, to Sophie Judge, Kate Keehan, and all the fabulous people at Hodderscape, who have continued to make publishing such a joy. Thank you to Micaela Alcaino for yet another stunning cover. Across the pond, a huge thank you to my U.S. editor, Angelica Chong, and the team at Orbit U.S., as well as to my foreign publishers overseas. I wouldn’t get to do this without you, and I’m so deeply appreciative of your hard work.
Thank you to Book Camp for walking this road with me—how tremendously lovely that we’ve all been able to cheer each other on. Thank you to Word Camp for indulging my increasingly manic pleas for sprints. Thank you to Laini Taylor and her Patreon group for being such a friendly, supportive community—I’ve so loved seeing so many people in the midst of their writing and publishing journeys, and I’m so excited to cheer on even more of your successes. Create-along for life!
A huge thank you to Tori Bovalino, Nadia Saward and Annabel Campbell for your patience, reassurances and read-throughs, and for listening to my unhinged voice notes about That Scene. Thank you, too, to Alice Chao, Kate Dylan, Tasha Suri and so many others for lending me your ears and your wisdom, and for your incredible generosity in friendship. You have made the publishing road so much fun—may we all keep travelling together.
Thank you to the booksellers, bloggers and readers who have been such champions! I can’t overstate how much I’ve enjoyed hearing from you, whether it’s seeing my book on carefully curated shelves, tagging me in your lovely photos, or just dropping me a line.
Finally, thank you to my family for your unwavering support and love from all the way back to the very beginning.
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By Georgia Summers
The City of Stardust
The Bookshop Below
Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below
