“I couldn’t,” I say.
“You’ve never tried.”
I stare at my hands for a moment. It doesn’t matter anyway; I’m here now. “Anyway,” I continue, “you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. I can’t even imagine life without you.” And it’s true. Honey’s been my closest companion since I left the nursery: She’s been my mentor, my secretary, occasionally my lady’s maid, and most of all, my friend. For most of my life. She wouldn’t actually be executed; capital punishment’s been illegal for two centuries. We don’t evenhavea headsman. But she might certainly be struck off. And banished from the realm. My heart quails at the thought.
“I’m sure it’s safe here. What harm could sheep-farmers and barleymen do me?” I add. “For however long I’m here, I mean.”
She snorts.
“Nevertheless, we need to be prepared,” she says, sounding a little more like herself. “We’ll eat, and we’ll make plans. And then…then I’ll go see your parents.”
“And I…” I look around the bookstore, the shelves crowding around us. “I’ll run a bookshop.” Despite my very real concern about Honey and my parents, I can’t keep the excitement out of my voice.
Beside me, Honeyrose sighs.
Chapter 7
Things are more or less arranged by nightfall. We are brought food and my trunks are transported over from the inn where we’d slept last night. Honey spends an hour at the cramped desk, pushing the cat away while she writes notes and makes arrangements. I compose a letter to my parents, one that hopefully walks the fine line between apologetic and reassuring, while also making very clear that I’ll be expecting Honey to return to me once her business with them is concluded—her jobandher body intact. And then, while Honey huffs and sighs over her correspondence (she has a royal tour to cancel, after all), I explore. The bookshop itself I’d seen some of this morning, so I go looking for the apartment where Mrs. Gooch must have lived.
It doesn’t take much to find it: A door, half hidden behind a precariously leaning bookcase, leads to what must be the oldest part of the building—which is saying a lot. It’s one largish room, down a small flight of stairs, with an open fireplace on one wall,tables and chairs in the middle, and a sideboard along the second wall. Shelves line the space above the sideboard, filled with books and plates and cups, all jumbled together. The third wall opens up to a closet-style bed, one of those incredibly old-fashioned box beds that’s really just a bed inside a tiny room, with doors to close it off from the world. It looksextremelycozy. The fourth is bookcases, a window, and a door; vines have overgrown the glass panes. I have to push the door—hard—to get it to open. It scrapes open into a sunken courtyard, overgrown with vines, heavy with grapes.
I put out a hand, tentatively, to see if the curse means that I won’t be able to go outside, into this lovely little garden, but I meet no resistance, and step outside. I suppose I’m stillin the bookshop, in a way, since I’m in the bookshop’s garden. It makes as much sense as any curse ever does.
The garden is perfect. Beautiful. I couldn’t imagine a more delightful place. I reach up and pluck a grape and pop it into my mouth. I should be careful about, well, everything, but I’m already cursed; I might as well trust that the grapes aren’t going to kill me. The grape is a burst of sweet moisture on my tongue. I pull the rest of the bunch from the vine and eat the grapes as I wander about the garden, which is small but tidy: rows of herbs and vegetables are growing in raised stone planters, fleabane and violets and ferns cascade from the stone walls, and moss softens the sharp edges of the stones. I spot that the wall is wet in one corner; there must be a little spring somewhere behind it. I breathe deeply. The air smells divine: earthy and damp and so veryalive. This garden is small and beautiful, and it is, for however long I’m here, all mine. I’ve never had a garden before—not myowngarden. Certainly not a garden that isn’t full of enormous talking pansies and glowing tulips. I love it.
In the spirit of experimentation, I step onto one of the raised planters and try to push myself up, over the top of the courtyard wall. As I’d pretty much expected, I feel the strange, invisible force overhead. I press against the resistance with one hand, but it doesn’t budge. I can enjoy the garden, it seems, but I can’t leave it.
I return to the little apartment and smile. Like the shop itself, it’s simply bursting withthings, all stacked haphazardly about; drying herbs and onions and flowers are nailed to the chimney breast and hang in bunches from the low ceiling. The walls have been whitewashed and painted with flowers and vines; ragged but pretty rugs line the floor. There are drawers beneath the box bed; I pull them open and smile again. Mrs. Gooch—I’ve come to think of her quite fondly in the past few hours—kept her clean linens in one drawer, neatly folded with little lavender sachets to keep away the moths. In the other drawer I find her clothes, some clearly worn often, some very old-fashioned and clearly long unworn. I pull out one dress, gray with black-and-white embroidery up and down the arms and bodice. It’s absolutely lovely. It’s a gown a young woman would have been very proud of, many decades ago. I feel a twinge of guilt as I hold it against myself and wonder if it would fit me; after all, she did leave me the entire shop, but perhaps it’s a little ghoulish to wear her clothes, too. I fold it up and set it back in the drawer, and promise myself I’ll ask Honey to do some research to find out if Mrs. Gooch has any relatives, anyone who’d want the bookstore and her things, once I’m gone. My heart sinks a little at the thought, but I push it away. I could be here for weeks, maybe longer. Curses are so tricky to break, and this is such a big one.
There’s not much space; my trunks have filled up roughly half the room. I decide to ask Honey to take the bulk of my clotheshome with her. I’ll keep one or two of the most practical of my traveling gowns. I won’t, however, need to ask her to bring me my books. The thought makes me smile more broadly. This little apartment will be a lovely place to tuck up next to the fire and read. As much as I want. For as long as I want. Until the curse is broken.
I return my attention to the fireplace. It’s small and tidy, with a carved mantel and plain green tiles lining the hearth. A spit hangs over the grate, and I can already imagine myself making tea and soups and toasting crumpets over the fire.
I make a note to myself to find a book about cookery. If I can’t leave the shop, I’ll have to learn to shift for myself.
I stick my head into the dark little box bed and pull back in surprise: it’s notdark. Not really. There’s some sort of blue, glowingthingsuspended in the darkest corner. Well, what would be the darkest corner, if it weren’t blue and glowing.
I pull back and look around for something I can use to cast a bit more light on the thing, but unless I were to start a fire—I’ll have to ask Honey to show me how—and then use some sort of burning brand as a torch to illuminate the corner, which doesn’t strike me as a very good idea, there’s nothing available to use. I stick my head back inside and try to let my eyes adjust to the darkness to make out what it is.
And pull back again, breathing hard. Whatever it is, itmoves.
I gently close the doors to the box bed and head back out to Honeyrose. She’s bent over the desk, moving things about, and looks up in surprise as I approach, raising her eyebrows in an obvious question.
“Can you come look at something with me?” I look around. “Maybe bring a candle?”
We dig around for a moment and finally Honey emerges from under the desk with a stub of a candle in a brass candlestick.She murmurs a little spell to light it—I’ll have to ask her about that—and follows me back to the little apartment. The thought makes me a little giddy. I’ve never needed to learn even the simplest spells before, so I haven’t.
“Everything’s fine,” I say, in what I hope is a reassuring tone. “It’s just that I found something…surprising.”
“Surprising,” she echoes, her voice neutral. I usher her inside and lead her to the box bed. Honey doesn’t like surprises.
“I haven’t seen one of these in years,” she says, smiling, when we reach the box bed. She runs a hand down one wooden panel almost lovingly. “My granny had one. It was massively old-fashioned even when she was a girl, she said.”
“Inside,” I say. “The blue thing. You can’t miss it.”
“The blue thing,” she repeats, and peeks inside. Then pulls out to look at me. “That is…let me look again.” She climbs all the way inside and holds the candle up, examining the thing. I can see it more clearly in the light from her candle, but that doesn’t explain much. It looks a little like a wasps’ nest, if wasps built nests out of the pages of old books, hanging in one corner.
She blows out the candle and moves closer.
