Josef. The snow falling gently on his head and shoulders.
A sigh of relief escaped my lips and I could have sworn the books on the shelves sighed too. The bookshop had let him in when I had first escaped St Agnes’s and needed him the most. Now he had returned, everything felt hopeful again. He stepped closer to the window and I followed. We were separated only by the thinnest pane of glass. My eyes searched his eyes, his lips, his entire frame. Was he real?
‘Are you going to let me in?’ he asked, a lopsided smile on his face. ‘It’s a little cold.’
I burst out laughing and it sounded like silver bells to my ears, bells that hadn’t rung for years. I opened the door and we both stood at the threshold, the stained glass overhead blooming with flowers.
‘Are you back for good?’
‘My father passed away in the autumn.’
I placed my hand over my heart. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can repair some of the old music boxes that were in the attic. Anything that is broken—’
‘You’ve already repaired what was broken in this place,’ I said, rushing into his arms.
‘So many nights I have dreamed of you and this place,’ he said, holding me tightly, as though nothing would tear us apart again.
‘This bookshop is rooted in my heart,’ I said. ‘I have to find a way to keep it alive. For my daughter.’
He pulled back and searched my face for answers.
‘She’s alive. My baby is alive.’
He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. The joy in his eyes was enough.
‘Please, come inside,’ I said, finally.
All he carried was a large canvas duffle bag with a book poking out of the pocket at the front. Red leather, gilt-edged pages. It was so familiar to me, but so utterly incongruous that I hardly dared to hope.
‘For you,’ he said, following my eyeline and handed it to me. ‘I found it in an old bookshop in Austria.’
I took the time-worn book into my hands and felt the magic of childhood rushing back to greet me. I searched for the inscription and gasped when I saw it. Alfred Carlisle. My real father.
‘How did you—?’
‘Mein liebling, I beg of you, stop speaking and kiss me.’
Chapter Fifty-Six
MARTHA
I had the strangest dreams that night. I was walking through an old Italian village, hot and dusty with summertime sunshine. I stepped inside a cool, dark building that was lined floor to ceiling with old books. There was a man there and he handed me a key, then as quick as lightning I was back in Ha'penny Lane. Everything was the same but different. There was a woman inside, a familiar stranger. She told me that she had been waiting for me. That the shop had been waiting for me also.
‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘Wake up.’
In the morning light, I could see the light brown strands of Henry’s hair on the pillow beside me. If he had been disappointed with not finding the bookshop, he hadn’t let on. The narrow passageway led directly back to my flat. It wasn’t a secret pathway to another dimension, it was just an old servants’ tunnel or something. He took me back to bed and said that he had already found everything he wanted. I had found more than I had ever dreamed of, and yet something felt incomplete.
‘The tree!’
‘I’m awake, I’m awake,’ Henry responded to my scream, one eye still shut, his hair standing on end.
‘It’s gone.’
‘Okay. The very fact of the tree growing here was odd in the first place, but this is just … what are you doing?’
I was getting dressed. Fast.
‘Well, aren’t you coming?’
Henry blinked, then reluctantly pulled on his jeans. I ran up the stairs ahead of him.
‘Martha? Were these words always here on the stairs? Strange things are found …’ he shouted up, but I had found something stranger still.
I had expected to find the hallway of number 12 Ha'penny Lane at the top of the stairs, where it always was. Instead, I found myself standing in a place I had never fully believed existed up to that point – Opaline’s Bookshop. Daylight streamed in through the glass shopfront, creating rays of sunshine, glittering with dust motes falling like confetti. I hardly dared breathe in case the whole thing would evaporate. Slowly, I let my eyes readjust to what was in front of me. There were wooden bookcases from floor to ceiling lined with soft green moss and with ivy creeping along the edges. Fallen leaves swept silently across the tiled floor, and floating overhead were toy hot-air balloons. It felt as though the place had just woken up from a long slumber, like Rip Van Winkle, and was shaking off the years of hibernation. I blinked, but it did not disappear. The scent of warm wood and paper filled the air, along with a sweetness like a golden September apple. It was full of brightly coloured antique books and curiosities, all waiting for our arrival.
I’d come home.
Henry bumped into me at the top of the stairs and then took in the view.
‘Please tell me you’re seeing this and I’m not having an episode.’
‘It’s real, Henry.’ I turned to look at him and smiled.
‘I’m seeing it, but I can’t believe it,’ he whispered. ‘How is this possible?’
I took a long, deep breath and tried to think of the last lines in Opaline’s book.
‘Maybe it was I who was lost all along and not the bookshop.’
I reached out for Henry’s hand and he clasped it tightly.
‘We did it,’ I said. ‘We found the bookshop.’
His smile was beautiful and unguarded, like that of a little child.
‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing to the stained-glass panels at the top of the windows that were like nothing I’d ever seen and yet inexplicably familiar.
‘Is that—?’ Henry stepped closer and pointed to a design at the very edge. A woman, wearing a long coat and trousers, with very short hair, holding hands with a soldier.
Epilogue
The rain had eased off outside and the bank of grey clouds that had huddled over the city like a lumpy duvet was breaking apart and revealing small, irregular windows of blue sky.
‘Is all of that really true?’ asked the little boy, openly stuffing a teacake in his pocket for later.
‘Every word,’ said Martha. She began shuffling the envelopes and letters. It was time to get back to work.
‘What happened to the house and the old lady?’
‘Number 12? It’s still there. But someone else lives there now.’
He nodded his head, as though this explanation were perfectly satisfactory.
‘So the book told you that you’d become a bookseller?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I suppose it did, in a way.’
His eyebrows scrunched up in concentration.
‘What is it?’
‘I wish I could find a book that would tell me what I’m supposed to do when I’m old.’
‘Older,’ she corrected. ‘Besides, I think it’s already found you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You already know what you want to become.’
‘Do I?’
She nodded her head patiently. ‘Didn’t you feel your heart jump? At a certain point in the story, when I told you about Matthew Fitzpatrick?’
‘Oh, that.’