Contents (57)
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Also by Sharon Gosling
‘I’m not a freeloader. I won’t stay if you don’t let me pay.’
‘All right,’ Edie sighed. ‘You give me what you think is fair, then.’
‘There have to be ground rules, too,’ Gilly said.
Edie raised her eyebrows. ‘Ground rules?’
‘If I’m paying to live here, you don’t get to ask me questions.’
‘Okay…’
‘You respect my privacy and I’ll respect yours.’
Edie nodded. ‘Fair enough. Deal?’
Gilly hesitated before she said it. ‘Deal.’
Edie turned away and lifted a small set of keys from a hook on the wall, holding them out. ‘Here you are. Front and back. Make sure you lock them both if I’m not here.’
Gilly stared at the proffered keys.
‘Go on,’ Edie said, rattling them. ‘Or do you expect me to fit my schedule around yours so that I can open the door every time you want to come in?’
Gilly took the keys. Edie turned back to the kitchen.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Come on. I’ve got some bacon that needs using. You’ve time for a sandwich before you go to work.’
Twenty-Five
Rachel now thought of Eveline MacDonald every time she stood behind the shop counter and looked up at the cavern of books. She could imagine the woman who had built the tower standing at the centre of her finished library, surveying what she had created. What a mind she must have had. Rachel wished she could have known her, could have talked to her. If only she could understand how the woman who had built this place had become known for burning her husband to death instead of for this achievement. Rachel also wished she could ask her why she had put a camera obscura at the top of the tower instead of a light, not to mention why she had wanted it to be kept secret. Rachel still had so many questions and the only person who could answer them had been gone for two hundred years, so successfully consumed by the fog of history that they had struggled to even find her name.
The call that Rachel had been waiting for came a few days after her discovery of the Austens, as she was showing Gilly how to package the Internet orders. They didn’t sell a lot online as the reactionary in Cullen had never been keen on the idea (‘A person needs to see a book, Rachel! To smell it! To hold it!’), but Rachel had found that it was often the only way they could keep paying the bills on the lighthouse. Since Cullen’s death, she had begun to assemble a wider selection of volumes from the bookshop’s collection that she thought would sell quickly online and planned to get Gilly to begin listing them while she continued the task of clearing the gatehouse.
Rachel tried not to think too deeply about her reasoning for increasing their online sales. The idea that at some point in the future she would have to clear out the bookshop entirely filled her with dread. She couldn’t imagine the lighthouse empty of books. It would look like a hollowed-out ribcage, devoid of what it had been created to hold. What would Eveline MacDonald have thought about that?