“I’ll see what there is to find upstairs while you get to work,” Violet continued, a cry of triumph punctuating the end of her sentence when she managed to find the correct key.
The word “work” sent a ripple of panic down Beatrix’s spine, causing her hands to grow clammy beneath her woolen gloves.
She began to slip into the same worries that had consumed her at the writing desk the previous afternoon. But before she could conjure the feeling of dread that always made her stomach drop, the door clicked open at the same moment a strong gust of wind whipped down the alleyway, knocking Beatrix offbalance and nudging her forward.
She didn’t remember turning the knob, but as the world within the shop came into focus, Beatrix found herself drawn away from the threshold and toward the sight that awaited her.
The boards that had covered the windows the night before were gone, allowing the faint rays of light that managed to slip through the clouds and snow to filter into the room. The aisles between the shelves were still littered with open books, but the dust drifting up from the pages was now illuminated in such a way that it seemed to sparkle. As if all the possibilities that had remained hidden between the covers of the stories were finally making their way into the world again.
Bewitched by the subtle transformation, Beatrix slowly set the velvet bag she’d carried with her on a wooden counter justnext to the door. She hadn’t brought much, only her notebook, a pen and ink, and the novel that Jennings had given her, still wrapped in parchment paper. But as she put the bag down and took a step toward the glittering books, Beatrix couldn’t help but think that a heavier weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
How would it feel to lean forward and pull one of the books from the river of stories that spilled between the shelves? When she opened the cover and her eyes settled on the page, would she find that she’d fallen into the middle of a romance? Or the lines of a biography? Or a stanza of a poem? Would the texture of the words cast their own kind of spell, making her heart slow or race to meet the rhythm of the sentences?
Before Beatrix could think to stop herself, she was sinking onto her knees and reaching into the chaos of covers, her fingers dancing along the spines as she decided which to choose.
A tingle of excitement tickled the delicate skin along her collarbones, and for a moment, Beatrix felt just as she had long, long ago when the house revealed an entire trunk of books that it had been hiding until the girls were old enough to read. As her little hands had flitted over the colorful covers, they’d shaken ever so slightly in anticipation.
Even then, Beatrix had known that reading was magic. It transported her to places both within and beyond herself, where the flat words of the page took on a texture that felt more tangible than the boards beneath her feet.
Her hands were trembling now in that exact same way, not out of fear but from the pure rush of possibility. All she had to do was close her fingers around the spine, crack open the cover, and she’d be drawn again into that same sensation that sometimes drifted to the forefront of her memory when she thought about her childhood—the one tinged with the scent of aged paper and the promise of losing herself between the chapters of a book.
The title of a novel caught Beatrix’s eye then, its gold foil practically winking at her when she reached forward and pulled it closer. As her fingers touched the spine, the light changed, as it does when a cloud shifts to reveal the sun, and when Beatrix glanced up, her gaze fell on a blue wingback chair sitting at the front of the shop just beneath the window. It was positioned so that the rays poured directly on the worn fabric, and Beatrix instantly envisioned herself leaning back into the soft upholstery and drifting further from her worries.
Beatrix was moving toward the chair now, her fingers running over the letters of the book’s title as she shifted away from thoughts of her empty notebook and toward promises that she’d read only one chapter before finally sitting down to work.
But just as she was imagining how it would feel to ease back into the curved spine of the chair and turn the cover, she caught the sound of something trailing across the boards.
Shifting her gaze to the floor, Beatrix noticed that a loose paper was pierced through the heel of her boot.
She crouched down to save it, but when she pulled the page free, it started to crumble beneath her touch, the material damaged beyond repair from the snow that was dripping off her shoes.
She watched the ink bleed, the words blooming until they fell apart in her hand, like petals that hadn’t clung strongly enough to the stem.
It was her birthday vision come to pass, a warning of what might happen if she failed to knit together another story.
In an instant, Beatrix’s chest was aching from the weight that had settled back into place, and she flung the book down, wincing at the loud thump that it made against the floor.
Though Jennings had tried to convince her otherwise, now wasn’t the time to lose herself in stories that had already beenwritten, not when the pages of her own notebook begged to be filled with her familiar scrawl.
Releasing a tight sigh of frustration, Beatrix marched toward the office in the back room, grabbing her bag from the counter along the way, and shut the door behind her with a decided click.
If she had bothered to turn back, she may have noticed that the dust dancing up from the books no longer twinkled, their shimmer fading with every step that Beatrix put between her and the stories that she’d left sitting in the shadows.
CHAPTER 16
A Sunflower
Suggests that something important will soon come to light.
Brigit had been right to warn Violet about the rickety steps, but there was more to watch out for than a few loose floorboards.
The moment she opened the door and stale tendrils of dust poured into the alley, Violet felt it: years of memories bottled up and ready to be freed once more. Even someone without a hint of magic could have sensed the heavy layers of recollections that clung to the plaster like wallpaper, though most would have stumbled back and shut the door behind them, bewildered by the odd jumble of emotions that seemed to fill the stairwell.
As she pressed her hand to the railing and climbed the steps, Violet could feel the layers of memories pulsing beneath her palm: trinkets of the past that had sunk into the very foundation of the house and refused to fade no matter how thorough the spring cleaning.
And though some of them were dark and lonely, she could sense happiness there, too, and laughter that had settled into the cracks of the wainscoting, waiting to slip into the empty echoes once more. For though built of brick and mortar, the walls of old houses have a habit of capturing the best moments for safekeeping, soaking them up as quickly as a cake that’s been covered in caramel.
But these ripples of joy were buried so far beneath dust and disappointment that Violet doubted anyone else would be able to sense them at all. Perhaps the pleasures of life that lingered beneath all that neglect were more palpable to her because she’d been longing to lose herself in forgotten places.
