Mary gave the shiny new remembrance a final approving glance, then shut it away in the box with the others. “Thirty minutes,” she said, putting the box away.
Edwina didn’t need to glance at the cloisonné clock on the pedestal table by the washbasin to know her sister was right. She’d often wondered how the cogs and gears ticked away in that clockwork brain of her sister’s to be able to announce the precise moment each morning exactly thirty minutes before the shop was to open. But she imagined it was akin to her own ability to understand the rise and fall of the tide in conjunction with the phase of the moon. Another odd tic of their nature.
“Right, we better get on with the day, then,” she said and slipped her feet into the black ankle boots she reserved for shop work.
Mary sat and did the same, doing up the buttons with a small hook. “We’ll have customers today,” she said and tossed her muddy boots in a wicker basket at the foot of her bed. “Wednesdays are always good for selling tin and brass.”
“And hopefully a little gold.” Edwina scooped up the ring and followed her younger sister down the corkscrew staircase that led to a modest kitchen and cozy snug. There, two upholstered chairs faced the stove while two hard-back chairs made of oak sat tucked beneath a crude wooden table. Edwina had draped white lace, a secondhand tablecloth she’d accepted in exchange for a pair of wrought-iron finials a month earlier, over the bare wood. It went against her nature to barter away shop merchandise, but the idea of a real tablecloth with a vase full of roses atop was too tempting to deny. And, too, it distracted from the exposed bedsprings of the folding bed against the wall where their father had slept before he left.
The sisters shared the flat above the shop with their absent father. He wasn’t dead, merely gone walkabout for a time. Before he left three months earlier with a curious tip of his hat, he’d rented the odd three-story corner building that sat at the point where two diagonal streets met at an acute angle in the shabby end of a semirespectable street in the city proper. He’d left money enough to cover one month of living expenses, but the sisters had run the shop on their own ever since with the expectation their gray-headed father would one day walk back through the door. Or perhaps not. When their mother had left in similar fashion with a wave and a hand-blown kiss one year earlier, they’d never seen her again. Not a letter, a telegram, or even a whispered word carried on a trail of smoke.
The sisters each cut a slice of brown bread and smeared it with boysenberry jam while their tea water came to a boil on the gas stove.
“Ten minutes,” Mary said, scooting her chair closer to the table.
Edwina agreed with a nod. When they finished their breakfast, they descended the main staircase to the small storeroom behind the shop. A curtain divided the back room from where the merchandise was sold, keeping Edwina’s personal books and a small cupboard stocked with jars of dried bits of this and a wing or whisker of that out of view. Up front in the shop, most of the semivaluable and easily stolen objects were displayed in glass cabinets, while most everything else was stacked on bookshelves or arranged atop the pair of end tables their mother had left behind. But because Edwina and Mary had been avid collectors of lost items for most of their lives, there were a number of finds that simply had to be hung on the walls. After three months of the sisters hammering nails into the plaster to display yet another object, the walls of the shop had taken on a mosaic quality from the mishmash of small frames, round-faced clocks, skeleton keys, trivets, belt buckles, spoons, and assorted gardening tools. Mary had even managed to secure a brass elephant with glass jewels embedded in its caparison on a hook above the back curtain.
The shop front had curved paned glass windows trimmed in black, which their father had insisted made them appear a respectable business to mortals. Gold lettering that had been painted on the woodwork above the door a decade or more earlier read MERCIER & SONS. The lettering had also proclaimed the shop to be an apothecary at the time, but their father had that part painted over, though he never bothered to remove the rest—either out of a sense of transience or perhaps because he thought people would trust the original name more than “Blackwood and Daughters.” Inside, the shop had become a sanctuary for the sisters, but from the outside, as the eye traveled up, Edwina often remarked that the top floor, which overhung the other levels below, was reminiscent of a cage balanced there by a child tempting the laws of gravity. One little nudge, she thought, and the whole thing would topple over. But it was a comfortable home and shop and not one she had any plans to vacate anytime soon, stars willing.