I was glad, though, to have your more recent letter, with the news that Leo Rosendale is safe, although I fear the disappearance of the twins is likely to distress him. Those three were extremely close, and at times Leo seemed almost to share the twins’ disconcerting gift for sensing the thoughts and emotions of others.
I have made the decision not to tell the Reiss family yet that their daughters have vanished. Letters are almost impossible between this country and England now, and I believe the Reisses will not be overly concerned if they do not hear from their daughters for a little time. This is a decision I may regret, but at the moment the deceit seems justified. It will be a heavy secret for me to bear, but I will spare them the pain and the fear as long as I can.
Kindest regards, as always,
J.W.
SEVEN
Nell thought the trouble with becoming extremely close to another person was that you started to sense that person’s thoughts and emotions. She was finding she was doing so with Michael, more and more. On the whole, this pleased her. She had had something similar with her husband – almost a subliminal sensing of emotions. On the day he died in the motorway pile-up, Nell, alone in their house, had felt a sudden overwhelming sensation of panic and immense confusion before the phone rang. In the crashing pain and anger that followed Brad’s death, she had thought she would never experience that shared understanding with anyone again. She had not, in fact, wanted to experience it, because it had been something between her and Brad exclusively. And then Michael had walked into her antiques shop. Nell smiled, remembering. ‘Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight,’ he had once said, hiding behind a quotation, as he often did when he was feeling deeply emotional. But the meeting had been a happy one, and it had led to delighted intimacy. She thought Brad would not have minded her closeness with Michael, not after four years, and she liked to think he would have approved of Michael.
But that mental closeness meant you sensed the other person’s thoughts and sometimes that could make for a difficult situation. Particularly if there was something you wanted to keep to yourself.
‘I’ll be devastated to leave Quire Court,’ Godfrey Purbles, from the antiquarian bookshop adjoining Nell’s shop, had said, two days earlier. ‘But I’ve always wanted to have a shop in Stratford – well, who hasn’t? It’s going to cost me an utter fortune and I dare say I’ll end up in a debtors’ gaol – do they still have debtors’ gaols nowadays? – but the premises are quite near the Rose Tavern, which couldn’t be much better, on account of the tourists flocking and cavorting everywhere. And as a hunting ground for rare books and theatrical memorabilia it’ll be tremendous.’
‘You’ll probably end up discovering the famous unknown play,’ Nell said, smiling.
‘Yes, and I’d probably pay several fortunes for it, only to find afterwards that it’s a Victorian fake.’
‘I’m glad for you, but I’ll miss you.’ Nell liked Godfrey and found him companionable.
‘Oh, you’ll visit me, of course. And I’ll come back to Oxford. But here’s the thing, Nell. The shop.’ He looked at her hopefully, clearly wanting her to voice an unspoken thought.
Nell said, ‘The shop? Your shop, d’you mean?’
‘Yes. It’ll have to be sold, because I can’t afford both places. At least, the lease will have to be sold. Assigned, they call it, I think. How would you feel about taking it over? I mean in addition to yours, not instead of.’
Nell was very aware that life often presented you with odd twists, and quite often you had long since seen or suspected what those twists might be. But this was not a twist that had ever occurred to her.
‘The lease is probably the same as your place as far as ground rent and repairing obligations and whatnot,’ said Godfrey. ‘But there’s about thirty years left to run on mine. And the two shops adjoin – I’ll bet you could knock them into one.’