Rain hit the gutter above the shopfront in a staccato rhythm, loud enough to pull June Hartley from the half-sleep she had been drifting in at the back desk. The second-hand clock on the wall read quarter past seven. Outside, a steady West Country drizzle was turning the cobbles dark. She pressed her palm flat against her cheek, feeling the creased line the notebook had pressed into her skin, and listened.
Something was moving up there. Something alive.
She stood, pushing the chair back with her hip, and crossed to the front door in her wool socks. The bell above the frame gave its small, bright jingle as she stepped out onto the wet step, the cold of the stone soaking straight through. She tilted her head back.
A raccoon. Of course a raccoon. It sat hunched at the junction where the cast-iron gutter met the downpipe, its masked face turned toward her with the wide, accusatory stare of a creature that had made a series of poor decisions and refused to apologise for any of them. Its small paws gripped the lip of the gutter. Its whiskers twitched.
"Oh, hello," June said, which felt inadequate. She tried again. "How did you even get up there?"
The raccoon offered no explanation. The gutter, however, gave one: a faint, suspicious bowing along its middle span, a soft metallic complaint whenever the animal shifted its weight. June pressed her hand to her forehead and laughed, a short, helpless sound that turned into a sigh.
She went back inside, fetched the stepladder from the cupboard under the stairs, and set it against the wall beneath the offending gutter. The ladder was older than she was and had a charming wobble on the third rung. She climbed it anyway, holding a biscuit tin in one hand because she had read somewhere, once, that the smell of something sweet might coax a raccoon downward. She was not sure the information was reliable. It was, however, the information she had.
The animal watched her come up. Its nose worked. It did not move.
"I'm not going to hurt you," June said softly, in the voice she used to use on the more anxious authors who phoned the office. "I just want you to come down before that gutter decides to come down with you."
The raccoon sneezed.
"Right," she said. "I'll just wait here, then."
The doorbell jingled again, and a familiar, crisp voice came sailing through the shop with the force of a small brisk wind.
"June Hartley, are you standing on a stepladder in the rain holding what appears to be a tin of shortbread? I have been in this village for sixty-three years and I have never once seen that particular combination of behaviours. I am delighted. Dottie Marsh, reporting for duty."
June, who had been mid-sentence to a raccoon, turned her head. Dottie Marsh stood just inside the doorway, shaking out a tartan umbrella with the efficiency of long practice. Her coat was a deep bottle green. Her handbag was the size of a small suitcase. Her face, creased and sharp-eyed, was already tilted up toward the gutter, taking in the situation with the calm of a woman who had seen worse and suspected she would see worse again before lunch.
"He's been there since about five," June said. "I only woke up just now."
"Of course he has. Bert Frobisher's cat has been escalating for weeks. I told him, I said, that cat of yours has ambition, but I meant the cat, not the cousin. This one's different. This one came down from the allotments, you can tell by the way he holds himself. Allotment raccoons are a different class entirely."
"He's a raccoon, Dottie. They don't have classes."
"They do in this village, sweetheart, and you'd do well to remember it." Dottie set her umbrella in the stand and came to the foot of the ladder, looking up with her hands on her hips. "Have you tried the shortbread?"
"I was about to."
"Try the ginger ones, then. The chocolate ones are for emergencies and this is, I grant you, an emergency, but we don't want to set a precedent." She paused, considered. "Also, give him a name. It helps."
"I'm not naming a raccoon in my gutter."
"You absolutely are. I can see it happening. You'll call him something literary and then pretend you didn't."
June cracked the tin, took out a ginger biscuit, and broke a piece off. The raccoon's nose went into overdrive. The whiskers trembled. It shifted one paw forward, considered the downpipe, and decided against it. June held the biscuit piece out on her flat palm.
"Hello, you," she said. "This is very stupid, but I'm going to trust you anyway."
The raccoon took the biscuit. Then, with the decisive air of a creature who had decided that this particular arrangement suited him, he climbed down the downpipe, dropped the last two feet into the laurel bush, and vanished into the morning.
Dottie gave a small, satisfied nod. "Told you. The ginger. They've got no backbone, the chocolate ones. Too rich. Goes to their heads." She picked up the stepladder with the ease of long use and folded it shut. "Right. In you come. I'll put the kettle on. You look like a woman who has been lying on a notebook."
"It's not a notebook, it's a ledger."
"June."
"It might be a notebook."
"I keep telling you, the grief will come out sideways if you don't let it out head-on. Grief and the aubergines and the squash, you mark my words, they all do the same thing. They wait until you're holding a tin of shortbread on a stepladder and then they have their say." Dottie bustled toward the back, her voice floating out from the kitchen. "Now then. Are we going to talk about Henry Fitzwilliam, or are we going to pretend we aren't?"
June closed the tin. "Who?"
Dottie's laugh rang out, bright and unkind. "Oh, lovely. Good. That's a good start. I approve. Tea first, then the inquest."
The kettle took its time. June sat at the back desk, where a folder of unpaid invoices sat beside a teetering stack of stock returns, and watched the rain trace its slow calligraphy down the back window. The bookshop smelled, as it always did, of paper and dust and a faint undercurrent of damp from the cellar, which Dottie had been promising to help her sort since September. There was a tin of toffees on the desk that Peggy had left behind at half term, a glitter pen, and a single rubber band. June straightened the rubber band. She did not know why.
"Now then," Dottie said, returning with two cups and setting one down in front of June. "The thing about Henry Fitzwilliam is that he has arrived."
"He has."
"And that he is, by all accounts, a gentleman."
"He seems to be."
"And that he has come to take over the museum, which has been a tip for forty years, and is now apparently going to be the making of the place. They say he's an Oxford man."
"Someone said that, yes."
"I have it on very good authority."
"From whom?"
Dottie waved a hand, a gesture that encompassed at least three of the village's most reliable information conduits. "Peggy."
"Peggy's eleven."
"Exactly. Nobody tells you the truth at eleven. She's a national treasure." Dottie sipped her tea, watching June over the rim. "She's in love with him, of course. The boy. Not Henry, the boy. Tom. The one who does the reading at the church. There's a whole thing. She's told me everything. I cannot repeat it, obviously."
"Obviously."
"But Tom has his eye on someone else, and Peggy is coping with this in her own way, which involves a great deal of staring out of windows and a notebook she won't let anyone see." Dottie set her cup down with a small, decisive click. "Now. I am going to tell you something, and I want you to sit up and take notice, because it is important."
June sat up, half against her will. Dottie had that effect. "All right."
"Peggy has been running an information network out of the back room."
"Information network?"
"A network of information. It's very sophisticated. There's a rota. She's recruited two of the children from the primary school, the postman's boy, and Mrs. Fenwick, who does not know she has been recruited but has been recruited nonetheless. They have a chart. It has push pins. There is a cork board involved. I have seen the cork board, June. It is the work of a serious and dedicated mind."
June pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. "She's eleven."
"She's a visionary. Do not interrupt. The point is this." Dottie leaned forward, her eyes bright. "Peggy knew that you were going to be in the gutter with a raccoon before you knew it yourself. She told me on Tuesday. She said, Auntie Dottie, mark my words, by Friday Auntie June will be up a ladder. I said, Peggy, what on earth are you talking about. And she said, It's a feeling I have, and also Mrs. Fenwick's cat has been on the roof for two days. I put two and two together. Three and three, more like, but you take the point."
"You put two and two together. I thought you said it was Peggy."
"Peggy gave me the framework. I filled in the details. That's how it works. Now, the reason I am telling you this is that Peggy would very much like to see you. She is in the back room, in point of fact, and has been since half past six. She came through the garden gate. She has a flask. She says she has something to tell you about Mr. Whiskers."
"Mr. Whiskers?"
"The cat. Henry Fitzwilliam's cat. He's at the museum, apparently. Came in the luggage. Peggy has been feeding him bits of ham through the letterbox, which is either charming or a breaking and entering charge waiting to happen, depending on how you look at it. She would like to brief you. Personally. Behind closed doors. She was very firm about that part."
June got up. The tea was only half drunk, but Dottie was already on her feet, brushing crumbs from her coat with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had delivered her message and considered the matter closed.
"I have to go and tell Mrs. Fenwick about the gutter," Dottie said, as if she had not been the one to cause the entire sequence of events by mentioning it in the first place. "She'll want to know. She'll want biscuits, too. People always want biscuits when there's been a drama. Bring the tin. And June."
"Yes?"
"Name the raccoon. You'll feel better."
She was gone before June could answer, the bell jingling her out into the rain with the air of a general retreating from a successful campaign. June stood alone in the middle of the shop for a moment, the tin of shortbread still in her hand, and then, because there was nothing else to be done about any of it, she went to the back room door and knocked.
"Come in, Auntie June," Peggy called, in the bright, conspiratorial whisper of a child who had been waiting for exactly this moment and intended to make the most of it. "I've got a lot to tell you. I've drawn you a diagram. I need you to not tell Dottie about the diagram because Dottie will take the credit and it was my diagram, entirely my diagram, and I did the research."
The back room of Hartley's Books had not been redecorated since approximately 1987, which was the year June's mother had pinned a poster of a Persian cat reading Shakespeare above the desk and declared the matter settled for the next three decades. The wallpaper was a faded rose pattern that had gone the color of weak tea. The carpet was the kind of practical green that institutions favored. And somewhere beneath the desk, in a fortress constructed of mismatched cushions and a sleeping bag June's sister had bought for a camping holiday that never happened, lived Mr. Whiskers.
Mr. Whiskers, for the record, was a raccoon of approximately middle age, considerable girth, and an expression of permanent philosophical grievance. He had been a temporary resident of the bookshop for the past three weeks, ever since a traveling animal show had gone bankrupt at the village fête and Peggy had spotted him in a crate marked PROPERTY OF ACT OF GOD EXOTIC ANIMAL HIRE, DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT PERMISSION, MOSTLY BECAUSE HE BITES.
Peggy had opened it. Mr. Whiskers had not bitten. A bond had been forged.
Now Mr. Whiskers sat upon the desk itself, which was an indignity he reserved for moments of supreme displeasure, and he regarded June with the weary patience of a man who had been asked to comment on the affairs of others for too long.
"He says hello," Peggy translated, gravely. "He's very worried about the developer."
"He told you that, did he?"
"He has a look." Peggy pointed at the raccoon. Mr. Whiskers blinked once, slowly, which could have meant anything. "That one means developer. I did a whole chart."
The chart was, indeed, on the desk. It was drawn in colored pencil on the back of a paper bag from the greengrocer, and it was titled, in Peggy's careful, looping handwriting, MR. WHISKERS' FACE WORDS AND WHAT THEY MEAN. There were nine expressions catalogued, ranging from the standard blink to what Peggy had labeled THE SQUINT OF DREAD, illustrated with a small, slightly lopsided drawing of a raccoon that June suspected was meant to be Mr. Whiskers but bore a passing resemblance to Dottie Marsh.
"This is very impressive," June said, and meant it, because the chart was. "The bit about the squint is particularly thorough."
"The squint is for when someone says the word bulldozer," Peggy explained. "Or luxury. He doesn't like luxury. He says it's gaudy."
"Does he."
"He does. Also, Auntie June."
"Yes, love?"
"Large Marge is coming at eleven and it's ten forty-seven and you haven't even done your hair."
June looked at the clock. Peggy was right, which was the worst part. She sat down at the desk, displacing Mr. Whiskers, who made a noise like a wet leaf being stepped on, and began the complicated business of looking like a woman who had not, in fact, spent the previous evening lying on the shop floor reading a biography of Sylvia Plath and eating custard creams directly from the packet.
"What do I say to her?" June asked.
"You say no."
"Brilliant. I'll lead with that. Hello, I'm June, no."
"You can do it nicer than that. You can do it like Dottie does when Mrs. Fenwick asks about the jam. You say, that's a lovely idea, I'm sure it would suit somebody else very well, and then you change the subject to her shoes."
"You've been taking lessons."
"I have." Peggy nodded, very seriously. "I've also been practicing in the mirror. I have a face I do. It means politely no but actually absolutely not."
The bell above the shop door rang at eleven exactly, because Large Marge was, above all things, a woman who understood punctuality as a form of territorial claim. June heard the front door open and then the particular sound of a voice that had been built to fill auction houses and not, in any reasonable sense, a small bookshop in a small village in Somerset.
"June Hartley? Marge Cavendish. I've come about the property. I am so sorry I'm not sorry I'm late, the lane past the church is a disgrace, somebody should really speak to the council, I nearly took the wing off a Vauxhall Corsa, but here I am, where's the kettle, is that the kettle, lovely, milk no sugar, and you must be June, you have your mother's eyes, everyone says so, I've seen the photographs in the post office window, isn't that sweet, isn't that just the sweetest tradition, I cried, I won't lie to you, I cried the first time I saw the Christmas display, the little rocking horse, oh my heart, I'm a terrible person for what I'm about to suggest, I'm a monster, but June, June, June, darling, this is prime real estate, this is the kind of opportunity that comes once in a generation if you're lucky and twice if you're a friend of mine, and I have to tell you, I have to, because I am a professional and professionals tell the truth even when it tastes like battery acid, this building is, and I say this with love, it is crying out, June, it is weeping, it is begging on its little Victorian knees for somebody to come in here and make it something, do you hear me, something, something with steam rooms and a juice bar and a meditation pod, I have a contact in Bristol, the pods are very reasonable now, the market has corrected, and the footfall, June, the footfall from the walking holidays alone, I have a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet will make you weep, but in a good way, in a profitable way, sit down, sit down, I have visuals, I have mood boards, I have a man called Stefan who does my landscaping, Stefan is a genius, Stefan once turned a former launderette into a finalist in the Bath in Bloom competition, Stefan is wasted on me, Stefan needs this site, June, Stefan and I have been talking, we have been dreaming, we have been losing sleep over this site, and now I'm here, and you're here, and the kettle is on, and I think, I really think, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, oh is that a shortbread tin, darling, you are an angel, an absolute angel, I will take two, no three, the third one is for emotional support, now then, where were we, yes, the demolition, sorry, the sensitive redevelopment, the sympathetic reimagining, I have all the right words, I have been on a course, the course was expensive but worth it, I can say sensitive and sympathetic and heritage-compliant in the same sentence without flinching, look, look at my face, I am not flinching, give me the shortbread and let me show you the plans, June, the plans are going to change your life, I am going to change your life, you are going to thank me on bended knee, I know you are, I can feel it in my water, now tell me about the building, tell me everything, every crack, every quirk, every leaking pipe, don't spare me the ugly bits, I love the ugly bits, the ugly bits are where the money is, and the raccoon, is that a raccoon, I am not going to ask, I am a professional, I am above raccoons, although he is rather sweet, in a feral sort of a way, does he bite, never mind, don't answer that, tell me about the foundations, the foundations are key, I once walked away from a site in Frome because the foundations were Victorian brick and do you know what that means, it means expense, it means weeping expense, but here, June, here I am feeling optimistic, I am feeling bullish, I am feeling like a woman who is about to make a very good friend a very rich woman, or at the very least a woman who can afford a better kettle, no offense to the kettle, the kettle has served bravely, I respect the kettle, now then, the asking price, let's not be coy, let's not play games, I have my checkbook, I have a pen, the pen is a Montblanc, the Montblanc is a gift to myself for my last commission, I closed a farm in Devon for a wellness collective, the farmers wept, I wept, we all wept, it was terribly emotional, and now the farm is a retreat and the retreat is booked solid until November and the farmers have bought a house in Spain, which is, when you think about it, the whole point, June, the whole entire point, money is just a way of keeping score, and I like to keep score, and I think, I really do, I think you and I are going to keep score together, what do you say, darling, what do you say, shall we tear this place down and build something the village will be proud of, the village will weep, the village will send you flowers, the village will name a footpath after you, not this footpath, a better footpath, a footpath with a view, June, darling, June, are you all right, you look like you've seen a ghost, has nobody offered you a biscuit, here, have one of your own, two of your own, take the tin, I insist, I have said too much, I always say too much, it is my curse, it is my gift, now drink your tea and tell auntie Marge everything."
The kettle, which had boiled approximately four minutes earlier, clicked off with the small, defeated sound of an appliance that had given up. Mr. Whiskers, who had retreated at some point during the speech to the top of the filing cabinet, made a noise that was either a hiccup or a warning. Peggy's chart was still on the desk, and June, who had by now acquired the fixed smile of a woman being buffeted by a small, well-dressed hurricane, could see, from where she sat, that the squint of dread had been joined by a new expression, one Peggy had helpfully labeled THE FACE FOR WHEN IT IS TOO LATE TO ESCAPE.
"Yes," said June, when the silence finally arrived, which it did, briefly, in the way that silences do arrive after a Large Marge, gasping for air and dignity. "That was. Yes."
"So you'll think about it?"
"I'll think about it," June said, which was, she had learned from her mother, the only phrase in the English language that was both completely true and completely meaningless, and which Marge Cavendish, being a professional, would recognize as such, and which, being a professional, she would accept with grace and a business card.
The card was cream. The cardstock was heavy. The font was the font of a woman who had not come down a country lane to hear the word no.
"You ring me," Marge said, patting June's hand in a way that suggested the patting of a coffin. "You ring me anytime. I am available. I am always available. I have a contacts list that would make your eyes water, June. I know people. I know people who know people. I know a man in Taunton who can get planning permission for a lemonade stand in a conservation area. He is a genius. He is also my brother-in-law. We do not speak at Christmas, but we speak about planning permission, and that, my darling, is the kind of family you want. You ring me."
She was gone in a cloud of perfume that smelled, improbably, of both gardenias and commerce, and the bell above the door jangled twice in her wake, as if it, too, required a moment of recovery. June stood in the middle of the back room with a shortbread biscuit in one hand and a business card in the other, and Mr. Whiskers descended from the filing cabinet with the slow, suspicious grace of a man who had seen empires rise and was unimpressed.
"She wants to knock us down," Peggy said.
"Yes, love."
"Are you going to let her?"
June looked at the shortbread. She looked at the card. She looked at the Persian cat above the desk, who had been reading Shakespeare since 1987 and showed no signs of stopping.
"I don't know," she said. "I really don't know."
Mr. Whiskers, who had been listening to humans make promises for what appeared to be his entire natural life, climbed into June's lap, which he had never done before, and was immediately, profoundly asleep.
Three days passed in the way that days pass in a village: slowly at the edges, quickly in the middle, and with an inordinate amount of discussion about the weather. June restocked the poetry shelves. She wrote a polite, carefully worded letter to a publisher in Bristol about a consignment order and then lost her nerve and did not post it. She fed Mr. Whiskers twice, and was twice rewarded with the particular honor of being ignored by him, which, in Mr. Whiskers' economy, counted as high praise.
On the third morning, a letter arrived with the post.
The envelope was crisp, cream-colored, and faintly formal in a way that made June's stomach do something complicated before she had even opened it. The return address read Pine Hollow Veterinary Surgery, and beneath it, in careful blue ink, the name of the only veterinarian in the village, Dr. Henry Fitzwilliam. Not the new curator of the heritage museum. Not the historian with the kind eyes and the quiet voice. A different Dr. Henry Fitzwilliam, she reminded herself, and then realized she did not know if they were the same Dr. Henry Fitzwilliam, which was the sort of thought that had been plaguing her since the bookshop, and which she was trying very hard not to examine.
She carried the envelope into the back room and stood over Aunt Vera's desk, not opening it, turning it over in her hands. The paper was good stock. The address was typed. The sum total of the invoice, she knew, would be roughly the cost of a reasonable lunch for one in London, and she had no idea how Aunt Vera had managed, month after month, to pay it on a pension.
The cat in question was asleep on the desk blotter, which now had a faint ring of orange fur around the perimeter of his presence, like a territorial marker. Mr. Whiskers opened one eye as she set the envelope down, assessed her, and closed it again. He had been doing this for nineteen years, and bills, in his experience, were not his problem.
"You're not helping," June said.
Mr. Whiskers did not disagree. He simply did not engage.
"June Hartley, you have got that look," said a voice from the doorway, and June startled badly enough to knock the envelope off the desk.
Peggy appeared around the frame in her school uniform, satchel over one shoulder, and what she had on her face June could only describe as intent. The satchel, it should be noted, did not contain books, but rather a pair of binoculars, a notebook labeled EVIDENCE in red crayon, and a half-eaten apple, which was, by Peggy's own accounting, a perfectly reasonable set of contents for any serious investigation.
"I do not have a look," June said.
"You have the look you get when you are thinking about that man."
"I am not thinking about any man. I am looking at a vet bill."
"An invoice," Peggy said, which was correct, and which June hated.
"From a vet," June said firmly.
"For a cat."
"For a cat."
"Which is very boring," Peggy said, in the particular tone of a nine-year-old who has decided something is not boring at all and intends to make it everyone's problem. "And you are staring at his name."
She hopped up onto the edge of the sofa, legs swinging, and fixed June with a gaze that was uncomfortably reminiscent of her grandmother, God rest her.
"Dr. Henry Fitzwilliam," Peggy read, leaning so far forward that June made an instinctive motion to catch her. "That is a very long name. That is a lot of name for one person. Are you sure he is not a king?"
"I am quite sure."
"Because kings have a lot of names. And also crowns. Does he have a crown?"
"He does not have a crown."
"That is a shame. A crown would help." She thought about this. "Auntie June, are you going to marry him?"
June, who had been in the process of sitting down, sat down rather harder than she had intended. Mr. Whiskers opened both eyes at the sound, and then, apparently satisfied that the situation did not yet warrant evacuation, closed them again.
"I am not going to marry anyone," June said, "least of all a man I have spoken to twice, and once of those times was about cat food."
"Twice is plenty," Peggy said, with the unearned confidence of the very young. "In my class, Lily-May got married to a boy called Owen in about ten minutes, and they have been married for a whole term. They are very happy. He gives her half his biscuit at break."
"That is," June said carefully, "not quite the same thing."
"It is the same principle. You see someone. You like them. You give them half your biscuit. That is the whole plan." Peggy paused for effect, which she had clearly been working on. "I read it in a book."
The thing was, and June would not have admitted this under torture, the principle was not entirely wrong. It was the part about Henry Fitzwilliam specifically that was the problem. Or, rather, it was not a problem, because there was no problem to have. He had complimented a book. He had rescued a cat. He had paid for a bookshop's worth of poetry without flinching. These were, individually, the actions of a man who was merely being polite, and June had been a London editor long enough to know that politeness, in strangers, was not the same thing as anything else.
But he had said I will read them. I will give you my honest opinion. And he had said it in a way that had suggested he meant it, and June, who had spent three years reading rejections of other people's most precious work, and who had spent the year before that watching her mother slowly disappear, and who had spent the three years before that trying to be the kind of person who did not hope for too much, had felt something loosen behind her ribs that she had not realized was clenched.
The sound of her own breathing was, suddenly, very loud in the back room.
"June," Peggy said, softer now, swinging her legs more slowly. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, love."
"You have gone a funny color."
"I have not gone a funny color."
"You have. You have gone the color of the inside of a biscuit." She thought about this. "The plain ones, not the chocolate ones."
"Thank you, that is, ah, very specific."
"I am very observant. Granny Dottie says I am a menace." She said it with obvious pride. "She says it with love, though. She says it in the voice she uses when she means it."
She was, June reflected, not wrong about that, either. Dottie Marsh said many things in the voice she used when she meant it, and most of them were, on balance, affectionate.
"Read me the bill," Peggy said.
"It is not interesting."
"I want to know how much the cat costs."
"He does not cost. He is a family member."
"Family members cost more. That is the whole point. Granny Dottie says if something does not cost anything, you do not love it properly. She said that about her husband, before he died." Peggy paused, swinging slower. "She said it smiling, though. The kind of smiling that means you remember."
June looked at her niece, and felt, as she often did around Peggy, a complicated and almost unbearable tenderness that she did not entirely know what to do with. She had not known her own sister, really, not as a child, and not as an adult, and the small fierce person on the sofa was the closest thing she had to an heir, and June was terrified, in the quiet hours, of getting it wrong.
"All right," she said. "The bill."
She opened the envelope, because Peggy was watching, and because there was no point in pretense, and because, in the end, it was only paper. The sum was exactly what she had expected. The line items were reasonable, even modest: an annual check, a dental, a blood panel, and a small, handwritten note in the margin, in a careful, slanting hand, that read, Mr. W remains in rude health. Recommend continuation of current biscuits. HF.
HF. Henry Fitzwilliam. Vet Henry Fitzwilliam, or historian Henry Fitzwilliam, or possibly, and this was the part her mind kept snagging on like a thread on a nail, both.
"He has nice handwriting," Peggy said, reading upside down with the fluency of the young. "That means he is clever. And also patient. People who are in a hurry have horrible handwriting. Tommy Carver has horrible handwriting and he is in a hurry about everything. Even eating. Especially eating."
"Does he."
"Dr. Henry," Peggy read, slowly, savoring it. "Dr. Henry Fitzwilliam." She looked up. "Auntie June, that is the name of a man in a book. I am sure of it. He is definitely in a book somewhere, and when we find the book, we will know how it ends."
"How what ends?"
"The story," Peggy said, with the unshakeable certainty of a child who has not yet learned that most stories do not, in fact, end. "It always ends. That is what stories are for."
She hopped off the sofa and retrieved the apple from her satchel, and bit into it with a decisive crunch, and the moment passed, in the way that moments pass with children, completely and without warning.
June folded the invoice and put it into Aunt Vera's drawer, in the place where Aunt Vera had kept all the others, and felt the particular weight of inheritance settle more comfortably on her shoulders than it had in some time.
In the front of the shop, the bookshop settled around her: the creak of the floorboards, the particular hush of a thousand unread pages waiting, the bell above the door quiet for now. And on the doorstep, when she went to turn the sign for the afternoon, she found a small brown-paper parcel, left, she guessed, while she had been in the back, and addressed in the same careful slanting hand to June Hartley, Bookseller, Pine Hollow.
She brought it inside. She set it on the counter. She did not open it immediately. She made herself a cup of tea, and sat down with it, and looked at the parcel for what she was fairly certain was too long.
When she finally untied the string, she found inside a slim volume: a privately printed history of Pine Hollow, dated 1986, with a hand-drawn map of the village as it had been a hundred years before, and a note tucked into the flyleaf, in the same careful blue ink.
Dear Ms. Hartley, the note read, I came across this in the museum's store. I thought you might enjoy it. There is a chapter on the old bookbinders' lane. I believe your shop stands on the site of one of them. If you would be so kind, I would be grateful for your thoughts. With warm regards, Henry Fitzwilliam.
PS. Mr. Whiskers is, I am glad to report, an exemplary patient.
June turned the book over in her hands. It smelled, faintly, of old glue and older paper, and the map inside was hand-colored, the greens and browns of a vanished village still faintly bright. She traced a fingertip along the line of the lane, and found, sure enough, the small marked square of what was now her shop, and a name in faded ink, Webb and Sons, Bookbinders, est. 1847.
The shop, she thought, had a history.
She had not known.
She sat down, very slowly, in the reading chair, with the book open on her knee, and the tea cooling beside her, and the bell above the door quiet, and Mr. Whiskers a warm, indifferent weight on the desk, and felt, for the first time in a long while, as though she had not inherited a problem at all, but a place. And that someone, a man she had spoken to twice, had bothered to look, and had thought of her, and had taken the trouble.
Outside, the lane went on with its small businesses, and Large Marge's card sat in the drawer, and Peggy crunched her apple in the back room and read aloud, with great dramatic feeling, the first chapter of a book she had found on the lowest shelf, and the afternoon passed, the way afternoons do, into something gentler, and something more like a beginning.
And on the counter, the note lay open, and the name Henry Fitzwilliam, written in careful blue ink, looked, June thought, absurdly and unreasonably, like an invitation.