The Lost Bookshop
Evie Woods
Prologue
The rainy streets of Dublin on a cold winter’s day were no place for a young boy to dawdle, unless that very same boy had his nose pressed up against the window of the most fascinating bookshop. Lights twinkled inside and the colourful covers called to him, promising stories of adventure and escape. The window was packed with novelties and trinkets; miniature hot-air balloons almost reached the ceiling, while music boxes with mechanical birds and carousels twirled and chimed within. The lady inside spotted him and waved him in. He shook his head and blushed slightly.
‘I’ll be late for school,’ he mouthed through the glass.
She nodded and smiled. She seemed friendly enough.
‘Just for a minute,’ he said, having fought the urge to go inside for all of three seconds.
‘A minute it is.’ She was behind the counter, taking more books out of a big cardboard box. She glanced over at his untucked shirt, his mop of hair that had managed to evade a comb for quite some time and mismatched socks. She smiled to herself. Opaline’s Bookshop was a magnet for little boys and girls. ‘What class are you in?’
‘Third class in St Ignatius,’ he replied, craning his neck to look up at the wooden airplanes suspended mid-flight from the vaulted ceiling.
‘And do you like it?’
He scoffed at the thought.
She left him leafing through an old book of magic tricks, but it wasn’t long until he approached her desk and began looking at the stationery.
‘You can help if you like. I’m sending out invitations to a book launch.’
He shrugged and began mimicking the way she folded the letters and stuffed them into the envelopes with a little too much enthusiasm. He wrinkled his nose with the effort, changing the constellation of freckles that spread out to his cheeks.
‘What does Opaline mean?’ he asked, pronouncing it with far too many syllables.
‘Opaline is a name.’
‘Is it your name?’
‘No, I’m Martha.’
She could tell that he wasn’t satisfied with that as an explanation.
‘I can tell you a story about her, if you like? She didn’t like school very much either. Or rules.’
‘Or doing what she’s told?’ he suggested.
‘Oh, she especially didn’t like that.’ Martha smiled conspiratorially. ‘Here, you finish jamming those letters into envelopes and I’ll make us some tea. A good story always begins with tea.’
Chapter One
OPALINE
London, 1921
I let my fingers run along the spine of the book, letting the indentations of the embossed cover guide my skin to something tangible; something that I believed in more than the fiction that was playing out before me. Twenty-one years of age and my mother had decided that the time had come for me to marry. My brother, Lyndon, had rather unhelpfully found some dim-witted creature who had just inherited the family business; something to do with importing something or other from some far-flung place. I was barely listening.
‘There are only two options open to a woman your age,’ Mother pronounced, putting down her cup and saucer on the table beside her armchair. ‘One is to marry, and the other to find a post in keeping with her gentility.’
‘Gentility?’ I echoed, with some incredulity. Looking around the drawing room with its chipped paint and faded curtains, I had to admire her vanity. She had married beneath her station and had always been at pains to remind my father, lest he forgot.
‘Must you do that now?’ my brother Lyndon asked, as Mrs Barrett, our housemaid, cleared out the ashes from the grate.
‘Madam requested a fire,’ she said in a tone that showed no inflexion of respect. She had been with us for as long as I could remember and only took orders from my mother. The rest of us she treated like cheap imposters.
‘The fact of the matter is that you must marry,’ Lyndon parroted as he limped across the room, leaning heavily on his walking stick. Eighteen years my elder, the entire right side of his body had been warped by shrapnel during the war in Flanders and the brother I once knew stayed buried somewhere in that very field. The horrors he held in his eyes frightened me, and even though I didn’t like to admit it, I had grown fearful of him. ‘This is a good match. Father’s pension is barely enough for Mother to run the house. It’s time you took your head out of your books and faced reality.’
I clung tighter to my book. A rare first American edition of Wuthering Heights, a gift from my father, along with a deep love of reading. Like a talisman, I had carried the cloth-covered book, whose spine bore the duplicitous line, tooled in gold, ‘by the author of Jane Eyre’. We had come across it by complete chance at a flea market in Camden (a secret we could not tell Mother). I would later discover that Emily’s English publisher had permitted this misattribution in order to capitalise on Jane Eyre’s commercial success. It was not in perfect condition; the cloth boards were worn on the edges and the back one had a v-shape nicked out of it. The pages were coming loose, as the threads that sewed them together were fraying with age and use. But to me, all of these features, including the cigar-smoke smell of the paper, were like a time machine. Perhaps the seeds were sown then. A book is never what it seems. I think my father had hoped my love of books would instil an interest in my schooling, but if anything, it only fuelled my loathing for the classroom. I tended to live in my imagination and so, every evening, I would race home from school and ask him to read to me. He was a civil servant, an honest man with a passion for learning. He always said that books were more than words on paper; they were portals to other places, other lives. I fell in love with books and the vast worlds they held inside, and I owed it all to my father.
‘If you tilt your head,’ he told me once, ‘you can hear the older books whispering their secrets.’
I found an antique book on the shelf with a calfskin cover and time-coloured pages. I held it up to my ear and closed my eyes tight; imagining that I could hear whatever important secrets the author was trying to tell me. But I couldn’t hear it, not the words at least.
‘What do you hear?’ he asked.
I waited, let the sound fill my ears.
‘I hear the sea!’
It was like having a shell to my ear, with the air swirling through the pages. He smiled and held my cheek in his hand.
‘Are they breathing, Papa?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the stories are breathing.’
When he finally succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918, I stayed up all night by his side, holding his cold hand, reading his favourite story. The Personal History of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. In some silly way, I thought that the words would bring him back.
‘I refuse to marry a man I’ve never even met purely to aid the family finances. The whole idea is preposterous!’