The bus wheezed to a stop at the corner of Maple and Birch, its brakes groaning in that particular way that diesel engines did when they had opinions about rural Vermont. June Hartley stood in the aisle, one hand gripping the overhead rail, the other clutching a battered leather satchel to her chest. Through the smudged window, Pine Hollow waited for her, unchanged in all the ways she had feared and altered in ways she had not yet noticed.
Two suitcases sat in the luggage compartment beneath the bus, and in a padded box wedged between her feet, a glass jar held what remained of her mother's last living project. Mildred, the sourdough starter, had survived three time zones, two security checkpoints, and an unsettling amount of turbulence, though the starter itself remained impervious to such concerns. June had named it on the worst night of her life, three weeks after the funeral, when she found herself talking to dough because the alternative was talking to no one.
The bus doors folded open with a hydraulic sigh. September air rolled in, sharp with pine resin and woodsmoke, carrying the faint mineral tang of approaching rain. June took a breath that tasted of home, and her chest did something complicated that she chose not to examine.
"One stop, miss. End of the line."
The driver, a man with a grey beard and the patient expression of someone who had driven this route a thousand times, nodded toward the open door. June gathered her things, descended the two metal steps, and stepped onto cracked asphalt that still bore the faded yellow lines of a long-painted crosswalk.
The first thing she registered was the silence. London had taught her the texture of constant sound: the hush of traffic, the murmur of a hundred overlapping conversations, the distant rumble of the Underground. Here, the quiet was a presence, a weight in her ears, broken only by a robin somewhere in the maple tree overhead and the tick of the bus engine cooling.
The second thing she registered was the man.
He was backing out of the hardware store across the street, arms full of brown paper packages tied with twine, a ladder balanced precariously against one shoulder. He was tall, late forties perhaps, with the kind of face that looked like it spent too much time indoors and not enough in front of mirrors. Wire-rimmed spectacles sat slightly askew on his nose. His shirt, a pale blue button-down rolled to the elbows, had a small tear near the collar that he either hadn't noticed or had decided to ignore.
June, still adjusting to the solid ground beneath her feet, did not see him until the collision was inevitable.
They met at the edge of the sidewalk, her satchel connecting with the stack of packages in his arms. The result was immediate and comprehensive. Packages cascaded. The ladder, freed from its precarious balance, clattered against the pavement with a sound that brought two pigeons up from the nearby awning in offended flight. June stumbled backward, her ankle turning on a piece of broken asphalt, and only the man's quick lunge, one arm abandoning its cargo to catch her elbow, kept her upright.
The jar of Mildred wobbled in the box at her feet. June lunged for it with the focused intensity of someone who had recently lost everything that mattered and refused to lose one more thing.
The jar survived. The man's packages did not.
"Oh, blast," June breathed, the word arriving before she could soften it. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I wasn't. I didn't see you."
He was already on his knees, gathering parcels with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this before, though perhaps not in quite these circumstances. His spectacles hung from one ear now, and a streak of dust marked his cheek where he had evidently wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
"No harm done," he said, and his voice was a surprise: smooth, unhurried, with the quiet precision of a man who chose his words the way other people chose their clothes, carefully and with a certain stubbornness about fit. "Well. Slight harm done. I believe this one contained a packet of wood screws, and they appear to be in pursuit of freedom."
He gestured to a small rip in the brown paper, from which a stream of brass-coloured screws was indeed making a slow but determined escape across the pavement.
June knelt to help, her skirt pooling around her in a way that was going to leave dust marks she would not be able to explain later. "Here. Let me."
For a moment, they gathered screws in companionable silence, her hands occasionally brushing his as they both reached for the same small brass cylinder. June felt the absurdity of the moment settle over her like a light blanket: she had been in Vermont for approximately ninety seconds, and she was already on her knees in the street with a stranger, collecting hardware.
"My fault entirely," she said, not for the first time in her life employing the social reflex of preemptive apology. "I was. Distracted. It's been a long few weeks. Months, really. Years, if I'm being thorough about it, which I'm not, because thoroughness in self-pity is a terrible idea, and my mother would have been the first to tell me so."
The man paused in his gathering, looking at her with an expression that was difficult to read. Curiosity, perhaps. Or recognition, though they had not met, as far as she knew, unless he had been someone her mother had mentioned in one of the letters June had only recently begun to read.
"Pine Hollow's specialty," he said, "is the long view. If you've been travelling for years, you'll fit right in."
He held out a screw. June took it, and their fingers touched briefly, his hands cooler than she expected, the calluses on his palm speaking to some kind of manual labour that did not match his slightly scholarly air.
"Henry Fitzwilliam," he said, and the name arrived with a certain formality, as if he had introduced himself a thousand times and never quite got used to the rhythm of it. "I own the hardware store. Such as it is. Fitzwilliam's Fixings, though my mother wanted to call it Fitzwilliam's Follies, and some days I think she had the more accurate instinct."
"June Hartley," June said, and the name of her own family, spoken aloud in this place, felt strange and heavy, like carrying a book she had read so many times the spine had cracked. "I'm. I'm here to take over the bookshop. The one on Linden Street. Hartley and Daughters."
Something shifted in his expression. The curiosity sharpened into something more particular.
"Mary's girl," he said.
It was not a question. June nodded, the motion requiring more effort than it should have.
"I knew your mother," Henry said, and his voice had softened, though she could not tell if it was deliberate. "Not well, but well enough. She bought odd screws from me. The kind that don't exist anymore. Said she was restoring something that didn't want to be restored."
A laugh escaped June, sudden and slightly wild. "That sounds about right. She had a complicated relationship with anything that resisted her plans."
"Mrs. Marsh will be pleased you've come," Henry continued, gathering the last of the packages and standing. He offered her a hand up, and she took it, finding his grip firmer than she had expected. "She's been ringing the shop every other day asking if I'd heard from you. I believe she's constructed an entire theory about why you were delayed, and none of them involve the postal service."
"Dottie," June said, and the name brought with it the smell of chamomile tea and the sound of a voice that had been telling her she was brilliant and hopeless in equal measure since June was seven. "How is she?"
"Unchanged. Which is to say, formidable." Henry glanced at the bus, which was now pulling away with a cheerful wave from the driver, and then at the two suitcases still sitting forlornly on the curb. "Do you need a hand with those? I'm heading back across the street regardless. Today's delivery appears to have achieved its primary objective of reminding me why I should have been a librarian."
"I think the books would have been safer," June said.
"Books have their own dangers," Henry said, with the mild gravity of a man who had, she was beginning to suspect, spent a great deal of his life in their company. "But at least they don't roll underfoot."
He loaded her suitcases onto a small handcart that had been waiting by the hardware store door, its wheels slightly buckled from years of service. The jar of Mildred he handed to her with both hands, as if the contents were of particular importance, which, June reflected, they were.
"I can manage from here," June said. "I think. Possibly. The bookshop is just down the street?"
"Two blocks. Past the tea shop. You'll see the green awning." He paused, then added, with the air of someone who was not accustomed to giving advice and was handling the responsibility with appropriate caution. "The key is under the third brick from the left, in the flower bed. Your mother told me. Said if she ever found herself locked out, she expected the village to conspire to let her back in."
June stared at him. "She told you where the spare key was?"
"She told everyone where the spare key was. Said it was only sensible." A faint smile crossed his face, the first she had seen, and it transformed his features into something unexpectedly warm. "She also told Mr. Chen at the post office, and the Wilkins sisters, and I believe the cat. I wouldn't be surprised if the brick itself knew."
He tipped an imaginary hat, gathered his handcart, and crossed the street with the slightly distracted gait of a man who was already thinking about the next task on his list. June watched him go, the ladder now balanced expertly on his shoulder, the packages tucked under one arm, and thought that her mother, who had opinions about everyone, would have liked him.
The thought hurt, in the way that all thoughts about her mother hurt now, a bright sharp thing that lived just behind her sternum and made itself known at the most inconvenient times.
June picked up Mildred, slung her satchel over her shoulder, and began the slow walk down Maple Street toward the bookshop she had not entered in seven years, carrying a jar of sourdough and the particular loneliness of returning to a place that still expected you to be the person you used to be.
The tea shop was exactly as she remembered it: a small building with lace curtains and a hand-painted sign that read Dottie Marsh's Tearoom and Lending Library, though the lending library portion had been, as far as June could recall, a pretext for Dottie to keep track of who was reading what. A bell jangled as June passed the window, and a moment later the door burst open and Dottie herself appeared, as if summoned by June's mere proximity.
She was smaller than June remembered, or perhaps June had simply grown. Her hair was still pinned up in a precarious arrangement of combs and determination, and she wore a green apron over a lavender dress, and her face, when she saw June, went through a series of expressions that might have been rehearsed if Dottie had been the sort of person who rehearsed, which she was not.
"Well," Dottie said. "Look what the bus brought."
"Dottie," June said, and her voice caught on the name, because some names were not just names but whole landscapes.
Dottie crossed the distance between them in four swift steps, her arms already opening, and for a moment June was seven again, and thirteen, and twenty-two, and every age she had ever been in this woman's presence, all at once. Dottie smelled of lavender and strong tea and the particular starch she used on her aprons, and her hug was fierce and unapologetic and exactly what June had not known she needed.
"Oh, child," Dottie said, and her voice, that crisp bright rasp, wavered only slightly. "Oh, look at you. Skinny as a rail. Don't they feed you in England?"
"They do," June said, into the shoulder of Dottie's apron. "I just forget to eat when I'm sad."
"Well, that's not on." Dottie pulled back, holding June at arm's length, her eyes bright and assessing. "We'll have none of that here. I've got scones in the oven, and you're coming inside this instant, and that is not a request."
"I should. The bookshop. The key."
"The key's where it's always been, and the bookshop will keep for ten more minutes. Scones will not. Come along."
Dottie took her by the elbow, in the manner of a woman who had been taking June by the elbow since June was old enough to have elbows, and steered her firmly toward the tearoom door. June went, because she had forgotten, in the years away, how impossible it was to resist Dottie Marsh when Dottie Marsh had decided upon a course of action.
The tearoom was warm and dim and smelled of butter and cinnamon, and June sat at a table by the window while Dottie bustled behind the counter, and she thought: this is it. This is what I came back for. Not the bookshop, not the village, not the spare key under the third brick. This. The smell of a place where you were known, where someone was going to make you eat whether you wanted to or not.
Dottie set a scone in front of her, still warm, with a small pot of clotted cream and a jar of something amber and glistening that June knew without asking was her mother's damson preserve.
"Eat," Dottie commanded. "Then talk. Then we'll see about the bookshop."
June ate. The scone was perfect, as Dottie's scones always were, and the damson preserve tasted of September and her mother's hands and the particular sweetness of things that had been preserved against the coming dark.
When she looked up, Dottie was watching her with an expression that June could not quite name, something between satisfaction and a kind of fierce, protective sorrow.
"There," Dottie said softly. "That's better. Now. Tell me everything, June Hartley, and don't leave out the difficult bits. I've been waiting eight months to hear them."
June told Dottie the difficult bits, or most of them, in a voice that started out careful and grew rougher as the story went on. She told her about the flat in London that had felt, after her mother died, like a room with the air let out of it. She told her about the publishing house, and the manuscripts she had loved, and the editor who had told her, with the particular kindness of people who mean to be helpful, that her instincts were good but her nerves were not built for the work. She told her about the train north, and the particular grey of the county line, and the way the village had looked when she had stepped off at the small station, smaller than she remembered, as if it had been waiting for her and had decided, in the meantime, to shrink.
Dottie listened without interrupting, which was, in itself, a kind of gift. She poured more tea. She pushed the damson preserve closer. When June finally stopped talking, Dottie sat back in her chair and folded her hands on the table, and her eyes were bright with something that June, after a moment, recognised as unshed tears.
"Right," Dottie said, in the brisk voice she used when she was about to say something that mattered. "That's the difficult bits. Now the useful bits. How much money have you got?"
June blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Money, June. In the bank. Don't look at me like that, it's a perfectly reasonable question. Your aunt left you that shop and everything in it, and I can tell you now that the roof leaks in two places and the front step has been a lawsuit waiting to happen since your mother was a girl, and if you've come back thinking sentiment is going to keep the lights on, you are very much mistaken."
"I have some savings," June said, feeling, absurdly, as if she had been called before the headmistress. "Enough to make the shop habitable. Enough to keep going for a while."
"A while," Dottie repeated, in a tone that suggested she considered the phrase a personal affront. "We'll see about that. Now. The shop. Have you been in yet?"
June shook her head. "I came straight here. I thought..." She trailed off.
"You thought you'd need feeding first," Dottie said, and the softness in her voice was so unexpected that June had to look away. "Your mother would have done the same, and then she'd have sat here telling me about the state of the world and not eating a crumb, and I'd have had to threaten her with the wooden spoon. You Hartley women. Honestly."
She stood, and began to clear the table with the efficient movements of a woman who had been clearing tables for a very long time. "Come on, then. I'll walk you down. I've got a key, because I have a key to everything in this village, and you might as well know that now as later."
The village was quieter than June remembered, or perhaps she was simply listening to it differently. The cobbles under her boots, worn smooth by generations of feet, gave a particular low sound that was not quite a ring and not quite a hum. A blackbird sang from a chimney pot. Somewhere, a door closed. Dottie walked beside her, slightly ahead, slightly to the side, the way a shepherd walks beside a sheep that is not, strictly speaking, in need of shepherding, but might be, given the chance.
The bookshop was at the end of the lane, where the lane bent and became, for a hundred yards or so, the high street, and then bent again and became the lane. It was a narrow building, older than most of the others, with a bow window that had been painted, June's mother once told her, the precise green of a particular kind of apple, and a door of dark wood that had been there since the shop had been a shop, which was, according to the deeds that June had never seen, longer than anyone could reliably remember.
Dottie stopped in front of it, and June saw that the window had been cleaned recently, and that someone, Dottie presumably, had put a small pot of ivy on the sill. The sign above the door, in gilt letters that had been retouched at some point in the previous century, read: HARTLEY AND DAUGHTER, BOOKSELLERS.
"Breathe," Dottie said, and unlocked the door.
The smell hit her first. It was the smell of the shop she remembered, and also not. The familiar notes were there: paper, both old and new, the faint sweetness of binding glue, the particular dry warmth of a room that had been closed for a while but had not, in any important sense, been abandoned. But there were other things in the smell, too. Lavender, perhaps. A thread of woodsmoke. Something floral that June could not name and that made, for a reason she could not have explained, her eyes sting.
The shop was small, and it was very full. There were shelves, of course, floor to ceiling on two walls, and a table in the centre of the room, and a second table by the window that had clearly been added later, and chairs, and a rug that had been worn thin in several places and had, in one corner, a patch that June recognised as her mother's handiwork, a small embroidered heart in red thread. There were books in piles on the floor. There were books in baskets. There were books in a glass-fronted cabinet that had once, June knew, held her mother's collection of first editions, and which now held, she saw with a small shock, a different collection, and there was a card in front of one of the shelves in Aunt Vera's handwriting, in pencil, in the slanted, slightly impatient script that June remembered from birthday cards and the occasional terse note.
Dottie was watching her. Dottie had her arms folded, and her head on one side, and the expression on her face was the one she used when she was about to say something she had been saving up.
"Well?" Dottie said. "Say something. You look like a ghost has walked through you, and not in the nice way."
June laughed, or made a sound that was meant to be a laugh. "It's very full."
"It's very Vera. Your aunt had a system. I'm told. I never understood it, and I wasn't about to try. She was a menace with a label maker. She used to put little coloured dots on the spines, and if you asked her what they meant, she would look at you as if you'd asked her to explain the second law of thermodynamics to a cabbage."
Dottie paused, and her voice softened. "She talked about you, you know. In the last few months. She would come into the tearoom and she would sit where you're sitting, and she would order a scone, and she would say, my June, my clever girl, she'll be back one day, wait and see. And I would say, Vera, the girl has a life, and she would say, Dottie Marsh, that girl has a vocation, and she's wasting it on other people's books."
June, who had been moving towards the counter, stopped.
"She said that?"
"She said a lot of things. Some of them made sense. Some of them were the ramblings of a woman who had eaten too much cheese for lunch and not enough for dinner, and I told her so. But the vocation part, she said that more than once."
June did not trust herself to speak, so she moved behind the counter, where her mother had stood, and where her mother had taught her to stand, on a small wooden box, so that she could see over the top. The box was still there, slightly to the left of the till, and it had a small worn place on the top step where her foot, or her mother's, or both, had rested.
The till was old, a heavy brass thing with a bell that rang when you opened the drawer, and the bell rang now, and the sound was so exactly the sound she remembered that she had to put her hand flat on the counter to steady herself.
There was a post-it note on the register, in Vera's slanted hand, in purple ink. June had been in the shop for ten minutes and had not, until that moment, noticed it, because it was small, and it was in the precise place where the register met the wood, and it was the precise colour of the wood, so that it had been, in a sense, hiding in plain sight.
She peeled it off. The ink had not smudged. The note read: Don't trust the squash, June.
June stared at it. She turned it over. There was nothing on the back.
"Bad penny," Dottie said, from the doorway, and June startled, and dropped the note, and then picked it up again, because whatever it was, it was a message, and she had a feeling, sudden and sharp, that it was not the only one, and that the others, if there were others, would not be so easy to find.
"What does it mean?" June said. "The squash?"
Dottie came further into the shop, and stood beside her, and looked at the note, and her face, which had been a particular kind of bright, went quiet.
"I don't know," Dottie said, and then, after a pause, "I don't know, and that, June Hartley, is not a thing I say often, and you would do well to remember that I have said it now, in this shop, on this day."
She put her hand, briefly, on June's arm. "She was your aunt. She was a peculiar woman. She left you the shop, and whatever else she left you, and we will find it, and we will sort it, and in the meantime, you will come back to the tearoom for your supper, and you will not, under any circumstances, eat the squash."
"The squash," June said.
"I have made a soup," Dottie said, with dignity, "and the soup contains, among other things, a squash of uncertain provenance and slightly aggressive temperament, and I am not at all sure it should be trusted. I have said so. Vera, apparently, agreed."
June looked at the note again. Don't trust the squash, June. Six words. Purple ink. A small square of yellow paper, the kind you could buy in any stationery shop in the country, and which, in this shop, on this day, in the slant of light from the window, looked for all the world like a small, polite, and very deliberate warning.
She put the note in her pocket. She would keep it. She would, she thought, keep everything, for a while at least, and sort it later, when the shop was less full, and the light was different, and the bell on the till had not just rung for the first time in eight months.
Dottie was watching her, and Dottie's face had gone back to its usual brightness, but there was something underneath it, a thread of something that June could not name, and that she suspected, if she pulled on it, would unravel a great deal.
"There's a woman," Dottie said, in the voice she used for announcements, "who wants to meet you. She's been waiting, in fact. She's in the back, and she has been there, I am sorry to say, for the better part of an hour, because I told her to wait, and she is not a woman who is used to being told to wait, and so we are all, I think, about to have a slightly uncomfortable conversation."
"A woman," June said.
"The landlord," Dottie said, and her mouth did a small, complicated thing. "The shop is hers, technically. The building, the freehold, the whole thing. Vera rented from her for thirty years, and now the lease, such as it is, passes to you, and she has come to discuss terms, and by discuss terms, I mean she has come to tell you what the terms are, and by terms, I mean she has come to tell you what you will and will not be doing with the premises, and I would advise you, June Hartley, to remember that she is a good woman, and a fair woman, but she is also a woman who has opinions, and who keeps her opinions in a jar by the door, the way other people keep umbrellas."
A floorboard creaked, at the back of the shop, behind a door that June had not, until that moment, registered, a door that was painted the same green as the window frame, and which was, she now saw, slightly ajar.
Dottie raised her voice, slightly. "Dottie, stop talking."
A voice, from behind the door, low and dry and a little amused, said: "I have been here for an hour, Mrs Marsh. I have heard you stop talking precisely once, and that was when you were eating. I have formed a view, and the view is that I should like to speak to Miss Hartley alone, and that you, Mrs Marsh, should go and do something useful, and that something useful might be, for example, a pot of tea and three cups, since I am not a monster, and since Miss Hartley looks as if she has been travelling since Tuesday."
Dottie drew herself up. "I am not a Mrs Marsh. I am a Miss Marsh, and I have been a Miss Marsh for seventy-one years, and I do not see why you need to start now."
"Because," said the voice, "I have known you for thirty of them, and in that time you have never once been wrong about the number of cups, and I am relying on that, and on the fact that the squash, whatever else it is, will not have improved in the last ten minutes, and that you, Mrs Marsh, will want to deal with it before it deals with us."
Dottie made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a snort, and then she did, in fact, go, with a backwards look at June that was half warning and half encouragement, and that June interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as: this is the woman I told you about, and she is not what she seems, and neither, for that matter, are you, and we will talk about it later, over scones, when there is time.
The door at the back of the shop opened, and a woman came out.
She was not, exactly, what June had expected. She was tall, and broad, and she was wearing a pair of brown corduroy overalls, the kind that painters wore, and under them a green jumper that had seen better days, and on her feet a pair of boots that had been resoled more than once. Her hair was grey, and cut short, and her face was the kind of face that had been handsome and was now, in a different light, still handsome, and that had the particular quality of faces that have spent a great deal of time looking at the weather and not enough time, perhaps, at mirrors. She had a notebook in her hand, and a pencil behind her ear, and she looked at June with an expression that was not unfriendly, but that was, in its way, a kind of weighing.
"Miss Hartley," she said. "I am Dottie Marsh. I understand we are to be neighbours, of a sort, and that the shop is yours, in everything but the freehold, and that the freehold is mine, and that this, in the long history of arrangements between landlords and tenants, is either a recipe for cordiality or for litigation, and I am here to find out which."
June opened her mouth, and then closed it, and then opened it again, and said, because she could not think of anything else to say, and because it was, in its way, the truth: "I have just found a note from my aunt that says, do not trust the squash. I do not know what this means. I wondered if you did."
Dottie Marsh did not, exactly, laugh. What she did was, her mouth did a small, complicated thing, and her eyes, which had been weighing, went, for a moment, bright.
"Ah," she said. "Vera. Yes. I thought it might be something like that."
"You knew her," June said. It was not a question.
Dottie Marsh regarded her for a long moment. The breeze off the harbour stirred a strand of June's hair, and somewhere on the quay, a gull made a sound like a hinge that needed oiling.
"I knew her," Dottie said, "for fifty-three years. I delivered her first letter, and I delivered her last, and there are very few people in this village who can say as much. Vera Marsh was not my sister. She was my cousin, and she was the closest thing I had to one, and she was, in her way, the most infuriating woman I have ever had the privilege to know. She once sent a man a letter that was, in its entirety, the words, 'No.' No greeting, no signature, no explanation. The man in question had proposed to her on the Tuesday and received the letter on the Friday. He came into the post office on the Monday to ask if there had been a mistake. I told him the postmistress does not make mistakes. He married someone else in 1962. He was, by all accounts, happy enough."
June, who had been holding the teacup in both hands, set it down on the bench beside her, because her hands had begun, very slightly, to shake. She was aware that her face was doing something she had not authorised, a kind of trembling at the corners of the mouth, and she pressed her lips together, and looked at the sea, and then looked at Dottie Marsh.
"The note," she said. "The one in the jar. I do not know what it means."
Dottie nodded. The bright thing in her eyes had not gone out, but it had moved, somehow, to a different position.
"No," she said. "You would not. It was not meant for you. Or rather, it was meant for whoever came after, which is, as it turns out, you, but Vera being Vera, the message is not a message at all. It is a key. Or it is a door. Or it is both. You will have to forgive her. She was always terribly clever, and never terribly kind about it."
She said this with a kind of fondness, the way one might speak of a cat that has knocked a valued object off a high shelf and is now looking at one with an expression of perfect innocence.
"The jar," June said. "In the back room. Under the loose board. There was a note, and a key."
Dottie's hand, which had been resting on the handle of her umbrella, tightened, very slightly, and then relaxed.
"Ah," she said. "The key. Yes. I had wondered if she had put it there. She was always fond of the back room. She said it had good light, which is true in the summer and a lie in the winter, but Vera was not a woman to be deterred by the truth when a better story was available. Will you show me?"
June stood. Her knees were stiff, and the bench had been colder than she had realised, and the cup of tea had gone the way of all tea left in cups, which is to say, lukewarm and slightly resentful. She picked it up, and the dregs slopped a little, and she said, "Yes. If you would like."
Dottie Marsh took her arm, in the way of an older woman who is not, strictly speaking, in need of support, but who has decided, for reasons of her own, that this is the appropriate gesture. June felt the dry, papery weight of a hand that had sorted a great many letters, and the faint smell of lavender, and something else, something that might have been beeswax or might have been the particular dust of a house in which one has lived for a very long time.
They walked up the lane in silence, and June became aware, as they walked, of the small sounds the village made: the clink of a gate, the distant radio of the post office, a dog barking in a garden three houses away, the small, papery rustle of the ivy on the wall of the bookshop as the wind turned the leaves.
At the door, Dottie paused.
"I have not been in here," she said, "in eleven years. Vera asked me not to come, and I am a woman who respects a closed door. I have spent a great deal of my life behind closed doors, professionally speaking, and I have a certain feeling for them."
She looked at June. Her eyes, in the grey light, were the colour of slate, and they were, June realised, the same eyes that had looked out from the photograph in the jar, only older, only tired, only still.
"You will open it," she said. "I will wait here. If that is acceptable."
"It is," June said, and was surprised to find that she meant it.
She turned the key. The lock, which had been stiff, gave with a small, oiled click, as though it had been waiting. The door swung inward on its hinges, and the smell came out to meet her: dust, and paper, and the faint, sweet, almost floral scent of old bindings, and under it, something cooler, something that might have been stone, or the memory of stone, or the breath of a room that had been shut up for a long time and was now, cautiously, exhaling.
She went in. The back room was at the end of a short corridor, past the shelves of new paperbacks and the second-hand stacks and the small, sad display of local history pamphlets. The door to it was ajar, and the light from the high window fell across the floor in a long, pale rectangle, and in the rectangle, the loose board was still up on its end, and the jar was still there, and the key was still in June's hand.
She knelt. The floorboards were cold under her knees, and the dust rose, faintly, into the light. She set the jar on the floor beside her, and she looked into the space under the board, and the space was, as she had left it, empty, except for one thing, which was a small envelope, brown, and addressed, in the same careful hand, to Nobody in Particular.
She took it out. The envelope was unsealed, and inside were three sheets of paper, folded together, and a smaller envelope, white, and sealed, and addressed to a name that made June's breath catch in a way that was not entirely comfortable.
H.F.
She sat back on her heels. The light moved. Somewhere in the shop, a clock ticked, and she had not known there was a clock, and now that she had heard it, she could not unhear it.
She did not open the letter. She held it in her hand, and she felt the weight of it, which was nothing, and the weight of it, which was considerable, and she thought of her aunt, who had been a stranger, who had left her a shop, who had left her a key, who had left her a jar with a note and a screw of paper and a photograph of a man she had not known she had loved, and who had, it seemed, left her, also, this.
She got up. Her knees protested. She carried the envelope out to Dottie Marsh, who was still standing on the step, exactly as June had left her, as though she had not moved, as though she had been waiting for a very long time, and was prepared to wait a little longer.
Dottie looked at the envelope. She did not take it. She looked at it the way one looks at a thing one has been expecting, and dreading, and wanting, all at once.
"H.F.," she said.
"Henry Fitzwilliam," June said. "The new curator. At the museum."
Dottie was quiet for a long moment. The seagull on the chimney made its hinge-sound again. A woman across the lane came out of her house, saw them, and went back in, with the particular speed of a person who has decided this is not her business.
"Vera," Dottie said, at last, "was a great one for leaving things to the right person. She never said who the right person was. She just left them, and trusted that the village would see to the delivery. She did this with the cat, you will have noticed. She did it with the shop. She did it, it seems, with this."
She looked at June. The bright thing in her eyes had not gone out, but it had steadied, and was no longer bright in the way of a flame, but in the way of a thing that has decided to endure.
"You will have to give it to him," she said. "Henry Fitzwilliam. The letters are his, or they were his father's, or they are none of his business, which is the likeliest of the three. You will have to find a way to give them to him that is not an ambush and not an apology, because Vera would not have wanted either. She would have wanted, I think, a conversation. She was always, in her way, a great one for conversations, even when she was the only one in them."