‘How did you—？’
‘Mein liebling, I beg of you, stop speaking and kiss me.’
Chapter Fifty-Six
MARTHA
I had the strangest dreams that night. I was walking through an old Italian village, hot and dusty with summertime sunshine. I stepped inside a cool, dark building that was lined floor to ceiling with old books. There was a man there and he handed me a key, then as quick as lightning I was back in Ha'penny Lane. Everything was the same but different. There was a woman inside, a familiar stranger. She told me that she had been waiting for me. That the shop had been waiting for me also.
‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘Wake up.’
In the morning light, I could see the light brown strands of Henry’s hair on the pillow beside me. If he had been disappointed with not finding the bookshop, he hadn’t let on. The narrow passageway led directly back to my flat. It wasn’t a secret pathway to another dimension, it was just an old servants’ tunnel or something. He took me back to bed and said that he had already found everything he wanted. I had found more than I had ever dreamed of, and yet something felt incomplete.
‘The tree!’
‘I’m awake, I’m awake,’ Henry responded to my scream, one eye still shut, his hair standing on end.
‘It’s gone.’
‘Okay. The very fact of the tree growing here was odd in the first place, but this is just … what are you doing?’
I was getting dressed. Fast.
‘Well, aren’t you coming?’
Henry blinked, then reluctantly pulled on his jeans. I ran up the stairs ahead of him.
‘Martha? Were these words always here on the stairs? Strange things are found …’ he shouted up, but I had found something stranger still.
I had expected to find the hallway of number 12 Ha'penny Lane at the top of the stairs, where it always was. Instead, I found myself standing in a place I had never fully believed existed up to that point – Opaline’s Bookshop. Daylight streamed in through the glass shopfront, creating rays of sunshine, glittering with dust motes falling like confetti. I hardly dared breathe in case the whole thing would evaporate. Slowly, I let my eyes readjust to what was in front of me. There were wooden bookcases from floor to ceiling lined with soft green moss and with ivy creeping along the edges. Fallen leaves swept silently across the tiled floor, and floating overhead were toy hot-air balloons. It felt as though the place had just woken up from a long slumber, like Rip Van Winkle, and was shaking off the years of hibernation. I blinked, but it did not disappear. The scent of warm wood and paper filled the air, along with a sweetness like a golden September apple. It was full of brightly coloured antique books and curiosities, all waiting for our arrival.
I’d come home.
Henry bumped into me at the top of the stairs and then took in the view.
‘Please tell me you’re seeing this and I’m not having an episode.’
‘It’s real, Henry.’ I turned to look at him and smiled.
‘I’m seeing it, but I can’t believe it,’ he whispered. ‘How is this possible?’
I took a long, deep breath and tried to think of the last lines in Opaline’s book.
‘Maybe it was I who was lost all along and not the bookshop.’
I reached out for Henry’s hand and he clasped it tightly.
‘We did it,’ I said. ‘We found the bookshop.’
His smile was beautiful and unguarded, like that of a little child.
‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing to the stained-glass panels at the top of the windows that were like nothing I’d ever seen and yet inexplicably familiar.
‘Is that—？’ Henry stepped closer and pointed to a design at the very edge. A woman, wearing a long coat and trousers, with very short hair, holding hands with a soldier.
Epilogue
The rain had eased off outside and the bank of grey clouds that had huddled over the city like a lumpy duvet was breaking apart and revealing small, irregular windows of blue sky.
‘Is all of that really true?’ asked the little boy, openly stuffing a teacake in his pocket for later.
‘Every word,’ said Martha. She began shuffling the envelopes and letters. It was time to get back to work.
‘What happened to the house and the old lady?’
‘Number 12? It’s still there. But someone else lives there now.’
He nodded his head, as though this explanation were perfectly satisfactory.
‘So the book told you that you’d become a bookseller?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I suppose it did, in a way.’
His eyebrows scrunched up in concentration.
‘What is it?’
‘I wish I could find a book that would tell me what I’m supposed to do when I’m old.’
‘Older,’ she corrected. ‘Besides, I think it’s already found you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You already know what you want to become.’
‘Do I?’
She nodded her head patiently. ‘Didn’t you feel your heart jump? At a certain point in the story, when I told you about Matthew Fitzpatrick?’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes. That!’
He slid off the stool and dragged his feet along the tiled floor, back to where his schoolbag was abandoned. He hefted it up on to his shoulder, as though it held all the worries of the world within it.
‘Teacher says it’s a silly notion.’
‘They’re the best kind to have, if you ask me.’
He gave her a curious look. It was almost as if she was challenging him. Grown-ups hardly ever listened to him, and when they did, they certainly didn’t encourage him to believe in silly notions.
‘The thing about books,’ she said, ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.’
With that, the bell rang over the shop door and a tall man with hair falling into his eyes breezed into the shop. He went straight over to Martha and gave her an altogether prolonged smooch on the cheek, which the little boy thought was gross.
‘Who do we have here?’ he asked eventually.
‘Shall we tell him?’ Martha asked the little boy. ‘Shall we tell him who you really are?’
He looked a little uncertain at first, then seemed to gain some confidence and puffed out his chest.
‘I’m a magician!’ he announced.
‘Is that so?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes,’ Martha said. ‘And for his first trick, he is going to make that magic book he’s been reading all morning disappear.’ She nodded her head for him to retrieve it.
‘For free?’ the little boy asked.
‘The first one is always free,’ she replied, and within moments he had it stuffed into his schoolbag before charging out the front door with sparks at his heels and, in the strange morning light, what could have been mistaken for a cape flowing in his wake.
‘You’ve done it again,’ Henry said, sliding his arm around Martha’s waist.
‘Done what, Mr Field?’
‘Made someone, very, very happy, Mrs Field.’
This time they kissed for so long that they had to close the shop.
And that is where the story ends. Although they never did find Emily Bront?’s manuscript. To this day, it lies hidden inside the vault of an Irish bank, just waiting to become a part of someone else’s story.