Page 67 of Book People

I will love you till the day I die.

Kate

It was her. C was Kate Jones, my great-grandmother. And she had an affair with Sebastian’s great-grandfather. And she wanted to leave her husband . . .

The tragedy of it hurts. I can almost feel the sorrow and the longing rise physically from the letters in my hand. He must have asked her to come away with him and she must have refused. That’s why the letters stopped. Not because she stopped writing them, but because she stopped sending them. He then went off to war and, when he came back, her teashop was closed and she had closed herself off from him.

There’s one last note in the box. I pick it up. This time the script is in dark blue and in Sebastian the First’s strong hand.

I am taking a risk doing this again and I know it. Send this back to me if you want to hear from me again. If not, I will never contact you again.

I still love you. I always will.

H

But she didn’t send it back. He never contacted her again.

I ache all over at the thought.

The missing notes are here and they’re not missing, not really. Because hers were never sent. And she kept one of his and never returned it.

A tear drips slowly down my nose and onto the blue ink that has already been stained by over-seventy-year-old tears.

Chapter Eighteen

You are not well. Don’t lie to me. Is it him? Is he hurting you?

H

SEBASTIAN

I stand at my counter, trying to look busy with the laptop open. It’s right on closing and I’m still thinking about Miss Jones at Mrs Bennet’s not an hour earlier. Yes, she’s firmly Miss Jones now, not Kate. I can’t call her that, I can’t cross that line. I have to hold fast to it because I don’t want Dan to be right.

And he’s not right. He’s not. Of course I’m not falling for her, that would be preposterous. Ridiculous. Marriage and that whole domestic nightmare has never been something I’ve wanted for myself, and that hasn’t changed just because a pretty ray of sunshine of a woman has come into my life.

I have my bookshop. I don’t need anything or anyone else, nor do I want it.

This restlessness that’s been eating away at me for the past few days, such that I’m unable to keep still, making me wanderabout my shelves like the minotaur lost in his own maze, isonlysexual desire. Nothing more.

I need to get a handle on it, and the most obvious way to do that is to make a visit, as I so often promise myself I’ll do, to London. Find a woman in a bar and take her back to my hotel room. Easy. Problem solved.

Yet I can’t help but be aware that it’s not sex that’s making me restless now. It’s not Miss Jones in my bed that I can’t stop thinking about, but Miss Jones standing at the counter in Mrs Bennet’s shop looking almost . . . devastated.

And my own urge to reach out and pull her close in response.

She didn’t know any of the things Mrs Bennet had told her, I could see that, and if I’m not much mistaken, the thing that hit her the hardest was the knowledge that her mother and grandmother were at odds because of her existence.

It must have hurt. Doubly painful, too, knowing that, since Rose and Rebecca have gone, there will be no reconciliation. No way to make a connection to that past, either. A difficult thing to accept for a woman who is all about making connections with people.

I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about it.

I don’t know why it hurts me too.

The bell chimes and the door opens, and as I’m about to utter the immortal words ‘We’re closed’, Miss Jones comes in.

Instantly, I tense. I’m not sure what she’s doing here, since she told me we’d talk about the festival tomorrow.

She’s wearing a loose, white, oversized T-shirt that falls off one shoulder, exposing the pale-blue strap of her lacy bra. Her jeans are loose too and low on her hips. She wears a wide belt of distressed brown leather and gold sandals on her feet. She has hoops in her ears and her hair is just the way I like it, falling down over her shoulders and—

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