‘Listen,’ Edie said.

Gilly looked up from the workbench at which she was sitting, working quietly on the drawing the artist had instructed her to make.

Edie hesitated a moment, and then said, ‘There’s a job for you at the bookshop if you want it. Who knows how long it’ll last for, but – if you want some work, go up there later and talk to Rachel. I told her you might come by.’

Gilly took in this information silently for a moment. It was the polar opposite of what she’d expected Edie to say. ‘You told her I might come by?’

Edie shrugged and went to the sink to clean the ink from the block she’d been printing. ‘At the funeral she said she needed someone to help out in the shop because she’s got to start sorting out the gatehouse, and I suggested you.’

Gilly put down her pencil and leaned back. ‘You suggested me?’

Edie made a sound in her throat, speaking over her shoulder as she said, ‘Are you going to repeat everything I say like an annoying child?’

‘I’m a bit surprised, that’s all,’ Gilly said. ‘I know you didn’t really want to teach me. Now here you are getting me a job.’

‘I just thought you might as well be doing something useful,’ Edie told her, clattering about in the Belfast, ‘and we both know you could use the money, so don’t bother lying about that.’

Gilly looked down at the sketch she had been working on. ‘Is this a new way to get rid of me?’

‘No,’ Edie turned impatiently. ‘Of course not.’

‘Good, because we had a deal, remember? And it doesn’t matter how much you make me run around, I’m going to make you live up to it.’

Edie dried her hands with a sigh. ‘I have not once tried to get out of our deal, Gilly.’

‘Could have fooled me,’ Gilly grumbled. ‘I’ve been coming here for days now and you still haven’t actually showed me how to do what I asked you to do.’

‘You know why that is,’ Edie snapped impatiently. ‘A good print relies on a good image,’ she said, repeating what she’d told Gilly when she had turned up at the print room door for her first lesson. ‘You’ve got to get that stage right first, or you’ll be wasting my time and materials and will probably end up discouraged into the bargain.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Gilly said, picking up the pencil. The first few times Edie had said this, Gilly had not been at all impressed. In fact, that first lesson, the artist hadn’t even let her stay. Instead she had immediately handed Gilly a pencil and notepad and shooed her back out of the door.

‘You need to work out what you want to make a piece of art out of first, then you start sketching,’ she’d said. ‘An artist’s job is not just to look at the world but to really see it, and then find a way to communicate what they’ve seen to other people. Go out and look at things. Find something you want to draw. We’ll take it from there.’