The Lost Bookshop(55)

‘I remember when Muriel was pregnant with little Ollie. He used to perform all of his gymnastics at night.’

The baby wasn’t really kicking, I’d only said it as an excuse, but when Matthew took a step closer, he asked if he could touch my stomach. I wanted him to, but I couldn’t even speak. I just nodded. As soon as he put his palm gently on the curve of my belly, she began to move.

‘Ha! There she is.’ He grinned. ‘That’s real magic.’

He hadn’t judged me when I told him about the pregnancy. He didn’t even ask for any explanation about who the father was, or where he was. He simply asked if there was anything he could do.

‘Why didn’t you take over the shop?’ I asked. ‘You must have wanted to, when you were younger.’

He took his hand away and I felt the absence keenly.

‘I grew up,’ was all he said, shrugging and looking over the place with misty eyes. ‘Besides, it’s in the right hands now.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, running my hands along the shelf, wondering if he could hear the spines creak and pages sigh as I did.

‘My father was never a wealthy man, Opaline. At least not financially. Yet I remember when times were hard he would never doubt himself, he would simply say that perhaps the shop was waiting to become a library again. And seeing your books here now, I believe he was right. It didn’t want to be a nostalgia shop or even a magic shop.’ He reached out and patted the wooden walls. ‘It has returned to its roots.’

When he left, I filled the silence with a seasonal recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker on the Victrola and took down a copy of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the ballet was based. I recalled a note from the library in Yorkshire, which remarked that he was one of Emily Bront?’s favourite authors. If I remembered correctly, she had read his novel The Sandman in its original German. And it was this simple thread of thoughts that brought to mind a possession I had put away and given no further thought since my trip to London. The sewing box.

The little purchase I had made from Mrs Brown was so plain and uninteresting that I had never given it more than a cursory look. And since I also suspected it had never truly been a part of the Bront? household, I had carelessly dropped it in the bottom drawer of my bureau, untouched.

I leaned down and took it out, placing it in front of me on the desk. I let my fingers run across the surface and closed my eyes as if I could somehow divine its provenance. It wasn’t even a proper sewing box, but an old tin cash box. Inside was a collection of bobbins, needles, thimbles and thread. I removed them all, one by one, as I had done the first time on the boat back from Liverpool. Perhaps I had missed something – a name scratched in the metal or a clue of some sort. Nothing.

I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance and when I looked up, fat drops of rain began to hit the windowpane. I stroked my belly. ‘Don’t worry, little one, the gods are playing games in the clouds,’ I said gently. Normally I hated storms, but I was determined not to pass this on. Besides, there was a magical feel to the air, as though something exciting might happen.

I got up to close the shutters on the windows and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. I took the sewing box into my hands and again tried to feel the past somehow. I had read of people who could touch an object and have a vision of the previous owner. Silly, of course, but I closed my eyes and as I turned it over in my hands, I found something. I hardly dared to open my eyes, reluctant to prove my sense of touch incorrect, but there it was – an almost invisible groove at the base of the box. If anyone passing by the shop could see my face, I’m sure that I resembled a treasure hunter at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb!

Slowly, I slid the outer cover back and out slipped a tiny black notebook, the size of a playing card. I gasped. What had I discovered? How long had it been secreted in this hidden compartment and who had put it there? All of the possibilities crashed into one another and for quite some time I was frozen into inaction. I hadn’t even realised how my hand pressed hard over my beating heart while my head bent low to the desk, as if the notebook would somehow speak to me.

While I savoured that delicious moment just before the unknown becomes known, I could delay no longer. My curiosity was at its peak. I reached tentatively for the cover and began to carefully open it. It released a dry, woody smell. Immediately I imagined a young woman scribbling notes by the fireside – as though its fragrance was still imbued with the environment in which it was created.

1846

I have devoted an entire lifetime to escaping the confines of this wretched place, only to find myself further entangled in its gnarled roots and oppressed by its looming towers. I am now satisfied that no one born on this land can wipe the dust of it from one’s heels.





I held my flushed cheeks with the palm of my hands. Was this it? What I had been searching for all of these years?

Wrenville Hall is a spectre that haunts us all from one generation to the next …

I was almost too afraid to touch the paper – I had some irrational fear that, having survived all these years, it might somehow crumble in my hands. I searched the drawer for a magnifying glass, as the script was so small and squashed on the page, it was difficult to make out. I brought my desk lamp closer and leaned over the little booklet. The black ink was messy and words were crossed out with new ones pushed out into what remained of the margins. Having viewed some of the sisters’ original diary entries at Haworth, I felt sure that this was the penmanship of Emily, but I would need to have it authenticated. Unless …