“I’m not the only one who’s at risk of crumbling, it seems,” Anne said as she reached forward and grasped Beatrix’s hand, her gaze flickering to her sister’s face as she noticed for the first time the red trails where tears had frozen to ice against her skin.
“I still haven’t been able to think of a single sentence,” Beatrix whispered, her voice shaking now. “And Mr. Stuart wants the story even earlier than he did before.”
The house wanted to rattle its pots and pans then and push Beatrix toward the nearest wingback chair in the front parlor so that she would finally rest, but Violet acted first.
“You need to stop thinking so much about what you’ll write next,” she insisted. “You’ve grown to view storytelling assomething that comes from checking off a neat list of steps instead of remembering what it truly is: magic.”
“How can I sit back and do nothing at a moment like this?” Beatrix asked as she shook her head, unconvinced.
“Resting is the best thing you can do when searching for inspiration,” Violet argued as Anne nodded in agreement. “How can you expect a tale to come to light if you don’t make room for it to grow?”
“Any distractions would be too risky now,” Beatrix insisted. “Not when we don’t have any time to lose.”
Violet’s gaze shifted from Beatrix to Anne then, a plan obviously stitching itself together beneath the startling hue of her eyes.
“What if Anne promises to try again with Vincent,” Violet said, “so long as you agree to let yourself rest, Bee? You can’t keep staring at a blank page in your notebook or you’ll go mad.”
Anne sighed then, understanding what Violet was up to.
They would both need to take a risk, Anne pushing beyond her boundaries to see how far she could go and Beatrix falling back to discover if what she’d lost could be reclaimed.
Neither would step away, so long as it meant leading their sister down the right path.
“Then it’s settled,” Violet said happily as she shifted away from the table and toward the cauldron bubbling in the hearth, where the scent of mulled cider had grown stronger beneath the current of their conversation.
At Violet’s declaration, the strain that had seeped into the floorboards began to ease and notes of cloves and apples saturated the kitchen as the Quigleys sipped from their mugs and thought of the days ahead.
They could still feel something tightening within their own chests, but tucked in the warmth of the kitchen with the curtainsdrawn against the night, the sisters thought it was merely their own worries tangling together.
The house let its awareness shift beyond the front door, though, and instantly recognized the sensation for what it was: a sign that things were continuing to slip out of place beyond the safe confines of the Crescent Moon.
CHAPTER 22
Snowdrops
Appear when hope is about to be found after a period of difficulty.
When Beatrix stepped into the bookshop the next morning, she was struck by the icy chill that crept into the gaps between her knit scarf, making her shiver.
Startled that the room seemed colder than the streets, Beatrix walked swiftly toward the front windows, worried that the frigid temperatures may have deepened a crack in the pane that she hadn’t realized was there.
But everything was sealed shut, and when she moved her hand along the edges of the glass, Beatrix didn’t so much as feel a soft breeze.
Wondering where the source of the trouble was, Beatrix’s gaze flitted about the shop, her eyes catching every now and again on details that must have slipped her notice before.
It may have been because the sky was cloudier than it had been yesterday, but she could have sworn that there were moreshadows creeping inward from the corners of the room. And she thought there had been books stacked neat as pins along the top of the shelves, their covers facing outward, as if to tempt passing hands to pull them closer. But now, they were scattered across the floor, their spines cracked down the middle and splayed on the dirty boards.
As Beatrix strolled from one shelf to the next, finally taking a moment to focus beyond the confines of her own thoughts, she began to notice something else beneath the veil of neglect that seemed to cover every inch of the shop.
Though coated in dust, the shelves were crafted with care, as if they’d been built with the intention of having them last several lifetimes. And when she ran her gloved finger along the peeling wallpaper, Beatrix realized that the colors beneath the grime must have once been vibrant. Her touch left behind trails of green, blue, and pink, remnants of handpainted floral buds that would have looked beautiful against the warm walnut of the shelves.
Before the boards were nailed to the windows and the sign out front started to fade, someone had loved this room and the books within it, that much was clear.
But now the shop felt like it was grieving, a sense of loneliness and loss of hope having settled into the wainscoting and cracks in the plaster.
The weight of it brushed against Beatrix’s shoulders, reminding her of what it had felt like to sit at the desk for hours the day before, only to walk away without having put a single word on the page.
Is this what she would become, the dusty memory of a story that had touched someone’s soul but couldn’t quite be remembered?
