Page 30 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

Stories and sustenance indeed.

Novels and nibbles.

It’s early. The rest of Applethwaite still sleeps. In days gone by, at this hour in the morning, her mother and grandmother before her would have already been in the kitchen, toiling away to produce a wonderful array of baked goods. Now, Louise stands in the window, looking out onto the empty street. The autumn sun shines low in the sky, casting a golden light over the fields opposite.

She turns a hundred and eighty degrees and gazes into the bakery.

Lattes and literature.

Muffins and mysteries.

Cakes and crime fiction.

Biscuits and…

What genre begins with B?

Bildungsroman.

She shakes her head.

Bildungsroman. How pretentious!

Rocky roads and romance.

Appropriate. Given that romance often is a rocky road, or at least, always was in her experience.

The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery.

She likes it. It has a certain ring to it. Maddie is definitely onto something.

Louise thinks back to the previous day, to how they’d sat together on that shiny steel worktop. Maddie is noisy and chaotic and has at times got on Louise’s nerves, but you can’t fault her enthusiasm and energy. She’s always gone through life fizzing with ideas, ever since Louise has known her. Most of them impractical, impossible, but some of them verging on genius.

Which one is this?

It’s commercial. It’s cosy. A bit of nostalgia, a bit of aspiration. She imagines herself pitching the idea as a novel. You’ve Got Mail meets The Great British Bake Off. The sort of high concept that gets a commissioning editor nodding before you’ve finished the sentence. It would definitely make a good romance novel, but in real life? Could she do it? And could she do it here? Is it possible to fit both a bookshop and a bakery into this space? Where on earth would all the books go?

Her original plan had been to remove the commercial kitchen, doubling the floor space of the shop area. But if she’s serving coffees and cakes, she’ll need to keep the kitchen, and the tables and chairs. Thankfully, there hasn’t been much response to that Facebook ad.

What would the place look like? She thinks of her favourite bookshops, of the many she’s visited over the years, the ones that have, for one reason or another, stuck in her mind.

Scrivener’s Books in Buxton with its winding staircase revealing floor after floor of literary treasures. Barter Books in Alnwick, situated in part of an old railway station, still retaining many original features like the ticket office and waiting room. The Book Shop in Wigtown, Scotland’s famous book town, with its bookish quotes adorning the walls, its old-fashioned typewriters and its inviting book nooks. They’re the kinds of places that make a booklover’s heart skip a beat when they first step through the door. Places where you can easily lose an entire day, browsing shelf after wonderful shelf, where you’re torn between wanting to search for hidden treasures or hunker down in a cosy corner to while away an hour or two. That’s the kind of magical space that Louise would love to create.

*

‘Shall I turn the sign to “open”?’ Maddie asks later.

‘Sure,’ Louise says, but before Maddie can do so, the door opens, and two older gentlemen appear, one of them doffing his flat cap to Louise before they take their seats in the table in the window.

As Maddie fires up the coffee machine, Louise heads into the kitchen. There’s a batch of scones in the oven, and some freshly baked ginger cake. A huge Victoria sandwich cake too.

‘Two slices of ginger cake please.’ Maddie pokes her nose through the serving hatch.

‘Coming right up.’

As the men at the window table sip their coffees, Maddie and Louise stand behind the counter, watching them.

‘See how popular it is,’ Maddie says. ‘You have customers every single day and you aren’t really open. With a bit of marketing, this place could be full all the time.’