Page 1 of The Book of Lost Stories
PROLOGUE
Cleo Finch
July 2024
The old-fashioned brass bell jangled as Ambrosial Books’ first customer of the day scurried out, clutching his purchase to his scrawny chest as if he thought I might leap over the counter and snatch it back.
Before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of a shaft of sunlight in the narrow street of the ancient Shambles in York, where the upper floors of the Tudor buildings overhung the lower, so that I often felt like some shy creature looking out of its burrow. Even on a bright day, the lights needed to be on to illuminate the maze of crammed bookshelves.
The door to the storeroom behind me swung open. Uncle Ambrose had been unpacking his latest finds from a country house auction, and now he backed out, carrying a large and battered cardboard box.
As always, since his sartorial taste had been set in his youth, Unks’ long silver hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he was dressed in the waistcoat and trousers of one of his ancientvelvet suits, this one a dark plum colour, rubbed somewhat shiny around the knees and seat, and teamed with a striped shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up. The odd addition of a smooth fur scarf that hung limply around his neck was actually his elderly Siamese cat, Tilly, who usually spent her afternoons playing dead in the shop window, to the consternation of passing tourists.
‘I just sold the Alexander Pope from the glass case,’ I told him as he plonked the box down on the counter in front of me, where it exuded a familiar blend of old books and immemorial dust.
‘It’s the early bird who catches the first edition,’ he said, then gestured to the box, looking pleased with himself. ‘Happy birthday, Cleo.’
‘You remembered!’ I said, astonished, because he was usually forgetful about these things and he hadn’t mentioned my birthday at breakfast.
‘I only remembered it was today when I opened this box, because it’s something I spotted at the last sale that’s just up your street,’ he confessed.
‘Well, this is exciting,’ I said, opening the flaps to reveal one of those small wooden desks, the antique kind that could be carried about and put on top of tables. It was resting on a layer of old books.
‘Late eighteenth century or early nineteenth, I’m sure,’ said Uncle Ambrose. ‘It needs a good clean and waxing, but it is a nice piece.’
‘I love it,’ I said, lifting it out and opening the top, to reveal a slightly ink-stained interior. ‘I could imagine Jane Austen using something like this, and it’s around the right period.’
He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘It was a late additionto the auction, brought in with some other lots from elsewhere, so I haven’t examined all the books yet, although the top ones seem to be by Mrs Radcliffe and her ilk, so you may find some you haven’t already got.’
I collect early Gothic novels and, in fact, was just in the later stages of finally finishing my PhD thesis on the subject.
‘I’ll go through them, Unks, and if there are any I don’t want I’ll add them to the stock catalogue,’ I promised, dying now to excavate the lower layers of books. ‘I might find a treasure trove.’
‘You never know,’ he replied, then vanished back into the stockroom, where I could hear Tom, the long-suffering student who helped out at weekends and in the university holidays, having a coughing fit over the rest of Unks’ latest dusty finds.
Left to myself in the empty shop, I put the little desk carefully to one side and began to delve into the box …
*
‘How’s my little Birdie?’ Tris asked, when his face popped up on the screen later that day. ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Womancoming along OK?’
I replied that my PhD thesis,Dark Reflections: the mirroring of the struggle for female emancipation in Gothic literature,needed a little rewriting but was almost there.
‘And how is Tristram Shandy and “A Vindication of the Rights of Man to Appropriate the Genesis of the Horror Novel From Women”? Still on hold?’ I asked, although personally I didn’t think Tris’s thesis,From Monk to Monster: How Matthew Lewis walked, so Mary Shelley could rampage,would be a great loss to the literaryoeuvreif it was never completed.
These preliminaries over, we grinned at each other. We’d been best friends and verbal sparring partners ever since my parents were killed in a climbing accident when I was thirteen, and I came to live with my Uncle Ambrose over his shop in York.
Now Tris was living on the other side of the Atlantic and we were FaceTiming most days, it helped that he had always been nocturnal by preference. He’d been too busy yesterday to talk, but today I had something I was bursting to tell him.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said, before I had the chance. ‘Did Freddo send you a card?’
‘Yes, with a hoofprint on it,’ I said, for every year we sponsored a donkey at a nearby sanctuary for each other’s birthdays. Tris’s was called Martha. ‘What’s more amazing, though, is that Unks remembered it was my birthday too, and he bought me a present.’
‘Let me guess – it’s a book.’
‘It’s a whole box of books – Gothic novels he got from the last auction he went to – and a sweet little wooden desk, the sort without legs that just sits on a table.’
‘I know the kind of thing,’ Tris said. ‘Any of the novels interesting? Ones you haven’t got copies of?’
