The Secret Christmas Bookshop (The Secret Bookshop #1)

Chapter Four

S ophie was woken on Thursday morning by Clifton snuffling on the pillow next to her head. She had long given up trying to keep him out of the bedroom, but he was an intelligent dog, and she knew he’d sensed her unease at their precarious walk home along the clifftop path the night before.

‘OK, buddy?’

He crawled towards her and pressed his damp nose against her cheek, then followed it with a lick.

It was still early, and while Fiona let her keep her own hours at the shop, she liked to be there from opening until close whenever possible, to maximize her selling opportunities. But instead of pulling the duvet off, Sophie stared at the ceiling. There was hardly any light filtering under her soft blue curtains, suggesting another grey November day where the sea, clouds and sky merged into one.

Once she’d got safely home last night, she had cooked stir fry veg and chicken for dinner, ignoring the tantalizing smells from Batter Days. She’d found Pretty Woman on the TV, a film she loved, but she’d been distracted; she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her strange encounter with Harry Anderly. He was a puzzle, mostly cold and disinterested, but desperate to drive her home. He’d admitted naming his dogs Darkness and Terror, and told her about being labelled the Dark Demon Lord of Mistingham, so he was aware of his reputation in the village, but he didn’t seem bothered by it, certainly not to the extent of trying to change it. And yet he dressed his pet goat in knitted jumpers, and he’d been almost aggressively concerned for her safety. It was confusing, to say the least.

He shunned the village and its inhabitants, wasn’t even trying to meet them halfway when it came to using Mistingham Green for their traditional events. He didn’t seem particularly close to anyone except for May, and from what she’d heard he was working single-handedly to make repairs on his estate. Why had he come back to the village when everything about it seemed like such hard work: the state of the manor, interacting with the locals? He could sell up and move anywhere he wanted to.

These thoughts were still pinging around in her head as she got up and made breakfast for herself and Clifton, as she stood at her kitchen window, eating toast and Marmite and gazing at the sea. It was a flat grey tableau, the only spark of interest a tanker moving slowly across the horizon.

Fiona greeted them warmly when they arrived at Hartley Country Apparel, Clifton bustling over to his padded bed at the base of Sophie’s display shelves. ‘Did you have a nice evening?’ she asked.

‘It was fine, thanks.’ Sophie logged into her till and gave her display a critical once-over. She liked having the brightest notebooks at eye level, the cloth- or leatherbound ones just below, so customers could take them down and feel how smooth and soft they were. Once they were holding them, they didn’t usually want to give them back.

She realized Fiona was watching her, and wondered if news of her encounter with Harry had somehow made its way round the village, even though there had been nobody else there. The current of gossip in Mistingham was strong and constant, and she wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if someone had found out somehow.

‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.

Fiona held her gaze for another moment, then said, ‘Fancy a coffee?’

‘I’d love one.’ She breathed a sigh of relief when Fiona went to the back of the shop and the kettle burbled to life.

‘I was thinking,’ she said, returning minutes later with Sophie’s milky coffee, ‘we could put up the Christmas lights sooner rather than later.’

‘Inside the shop?’ Sophie thanked her and sipped her drink, the caffeine perking her up instantly.

‘Our twinkly gold lights aren’t too over the top, and if the days are going to carry on like this, with no hint of sunshine, we need to add our own sparkle.’

‘Sounds good to me.’ Sophie loved that the huge cherry tree outside the Blossom Bough was wound through with lights that Natasha kept on all year round, their silver-white bulbs spotlighting the delicate flowers in spring, brightening bare branches in winter, but she wasn’t sure they’d have such a romantic effect interspersed with waxed jackets and deerstalkers.

‘Is something wrong?’ Fiona asked.

Sophie looked up from the pot of jewelled ballpoints she was rearranging. ‘Why would you say that?’

‘You’re awfully distracted. And the other day I noticed you were looking up rental places in Cornwall on your phone.’

Sophie felt as if she’d had a bucket of seawater thrown over her. ‘You saw that?’

‘You left the screen unlocked when you helped Sian bring her buggy over the step,’ Fiona explained. ‘Your cup of tea was too close to the edge so I went to rescue it, and there they were. Tiny flats; nothing more enticing than your current place over Batter Days. Cornwall is ridiculously expensive.’

‘They were holiday homes,’ Sophie rasped out.

Fiona scoffed. ‘They were not. Are you seriously thinking about leaving?’ She sounded like she was trying to keep her outrage in check, as if Sophie’s decision was equal to setting the entire village on fire.

‘I don’t …’ she started, but what could she say? This was why she preferred to leave without warning – so people couldn’t try and change her mind. She didn’t often have a problem – excluding Bristol, which had been nothing but a problem – but that was because she stayed in places for such a short amount of time that usually nobody cared. Fiona, it seemed, was going to be the exception.

‘Are you unhappy here?’ Her friend sounded pained.

‘I’m not unhappy,’ Sophie rushed out. Fiona had been a good friend from the moment she’d arrived, but it was too complicated – inexplicable to anyone but her – why she had to do this. She thought of their conversation with Dexter the other day, about the importance of physical shops, how they were dying out. ‘It’s just that I need more space.’

Fiona frowned.

‘You have been so kind,’ she went on, the words tumbling out of her. ‘I couldn’t have imagined having all this room for my business a year ago. But because I’ve been able to expand here, and word-of-mouth has done wonders, it’s growing steadily – online orders too – so I just … I need more space for it.’

‘You need your own shop,’ Fiona clarified.

Sophie sighed in relief. It was such a plausible reason. ‘I really do.’

‘That’s easy,’ Fiona said. ‘I don’t suppose you’re big enough yet for the old bookshop, but there’s Ye Olde Sweete Shoppe, and that’s been empty since Delores moved away two summers ago. Such a dinky space.’

Sophie cursed silently. ‘I’m not sure …’

‘I’ll give you a tour,’ Fiona went on. ‘It smells like diabetes, but other than that I think it’ll suit you perfectly.’

‘Maybe,’ Sophie replied, hoping she hadn’t just created a brand-new problem for herself. The door opened and a young family came in, a Dalmatian on a lead sniffing curiously at the mat. She could have kissed them all for such a well-timed interruption.

Sophie’s chat with Fiona set off a simmering anxiety that stayed with her all morning. She couldn’t backtrack on her declaration that she needed more space and hope Fiona would forget about it, because Fiona never forgot about anything. She should have denied that she was moving, then carried on with her plans in secret the way she’d always done. One moment of panic had complicated everything, and in a small, unfair way she blamed Harry Anderly for scattering her thoughts.

She went to Dexter’s bakery at lunchtime and came back with two chicken sandwiches bursting with freshly cooked breast meat, juicy tomatoes and mayonnaise. She pushed open the door with her shoulder, realized Fiona wasn’t behind the counter, and assumed she was making tea in the back. She left her friend’s lunch next to her till, and then saw that, sitting in the middle of her own counter, there was a parcel, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string.

Sophie put her sandwich down and ran her hands over the smooth, thick paper. Most people used Jiffy bags these days: brown paper and string seemed very old-fashioned.

‘Here’s your tea.’ Fiona put the mug down. ‘Oooh, what’s that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sophie said. ‘Who dropped it off?’

‘It wasn’t here when I went to make the drinks, and I didn’t hear the door open. But the kettle was loud, so … I haven’t got the foggiest.’

‘There’s no name or address on it,’ Sophie said, ‘so it’s probably for you.’ But she was reluctant to hand it over. She wanted to be the one to loosen the string, to gently peel off the paper and discover what was beneath.

‘It’s on your counter,’ Fiona pointed out. ‘Everyone in Mistingham knows how this shop’s set up.’

‘Maybe it’s from the postman?’

‘Without an address label? Are you going to open it, or stand there exfoliating your hands with it?’

‘The paper’s smooth,’ Sophie protested, but she pulled at the string, the bow loosening easily. She turned the package over, finding the neat folds secured with Sellotape, and slid her finger under the edge. She could feel that the object inside was slightly rough, and for a second she thought she was the most stupid person on the planet: it was clearly the book boards she’d ordered. She had a couple of orders outstanding, so that must be it.

But as she removed the paper she realized she wasn’t being stupid, because inside was a single, thick book. It had a cloth cover, the scarlet material slightly scratchy to touch, with gold foil details: a wind-blown tree, some leaves still attached, some scattering to the bottom edge of the cover. Written on the front, also in gold, it said:

Jane Eyre

by

Charlotte Bront?

‘That’s gorgeous,’ Fiona murmured. ‘I’ve never seen that edition before.’

Sophie turned it over. There was no summary on the back, just more falling gold leaves. She tipped it to look at the spine, which had the title, and then a logo at the bottom. It looked like a tiny house, with a pointed roof and a chimney either side: it wasn’t a publisher’s logo she recognized. That, too, was gold, and so was the ribboned bookmark peeking out at the bottom.

Sophie leafed gently through the pages, and found they were incredibly thin, like the dusty hymn books she’d had to sing from when she’d lived with a foster family in Surrey who never missed the Sunday service. In places, some of the ink was so dark it seemed smudged, and the pages were yellowing at the edges.

Inside, it looked and felt like an old book: good quality but around for a long time, exposed to wear and tear and the elements. But the binding – the cover and the foil detailing – was pristine. She could tell it had been expertly bound, and imagined the meticulous steps that had been taken: carefully extracting the old pages that were split into sections – signatures – from the original cover, putting on new tape, then cotton mull over the top to reinforce the adhesive, before adding the book board and then the fabric.

She was about to say all this to Fiona, to tell her about the discrepancies, when a card slipped out of the book and slid onto the counter. Sophie put Jane Eyre down and picked it up.

It was a cheerful scene of Mistingham Beach in summer, the sand dotted with brightly coloured parasols and windbreakers, tiny figures in the sea, the offshore wind farm a silvery smudge against the bright blue sky. It was incongruous, this shiny, modern postcard next to the classically bound book.

‘Come on then,’ Fiona said. ‘What does it say?’

Sophie turned it over. The handwriting was small and neat, written in biro. ‘It is for me,’ she said. ‘Or, at least, it’s for someone called Sophie.’

It read:

Dear Sophie, sometimes you have to look closer to home to find what you’ve been missing. Please accept this gift as an early Christmas present – love from The Secret Bookshop.

‘Goodness!’ Gleeful curiosity dripped from Fiona’s voice.

‘What the hell?’ Sophie murmured. The message brought her anxiety back in full force. Who in Mistingham would send her something like this, and how could they possibly know that she was looking for something new? It was unsettling and disarming and, although she wanted to think of it like a message inside a fortune cookie, applicable to any situation if you only put your mind to it, someone had left it for her along with one of the most beautiful books she’d ever seen: a novel about a woman who had no family, who struggled to find somewhere she belonged. She glanced around the shop, as if she might see a pair of eyes peering at her through the rows of winter jackets, watching her reaction.

‘That settles it, then.’ Fiona bent to stroke Clifton, who had woken up from a long nap and was blinking sleepily.

‘Settles what?’ Sophie picked up Jane Eyre and looked for pen or pencil marks, scribbled annotations, any hint of who it had belonged to or where it might have come from.

‘You can’t leave Mistingham now,’ Fiona said. ‘Not until you’ve discovered who’s behind your gift … The Secret Bookshop ,’ she repeated with relish. ‘What a wonderful mystery to have, just before Christmas.’