Page 24 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“Bridgerton?” suggested Flo, giving Jules the side-eye and threatening to make her laugh. Flo was superb at finding books with nothing but the most tenuous clues.
“NotBridgerton, the other one,” the woman was saying.
“Sanditon?”
“Yes!Likethat, but not that... And I’ve actually seen the book—the cover has a picture of a woman in a pink dress...”
Jules pretended to be totally absorbed in a catalog from Gardners, the book wholesalers, but was stifling a grin, thinking Aunt Flo might have met her match at last, when they all heard a shout from Charlie on the floor above.
“I’ll go,” Jules told Flo, thundering up the stairs seeing apparitions of Charlie having fallen off one of the library ladders, breaking bones or worse.
Instead, she found Charlie crouched at the foot of the wonkiest, dustiest set of shelves they had up there. Someone in the very distant past had constructed shelves from rough-sawn oak planks—probably floorboards originally. Charlie was staring transfixed at a spot between the back of the lowest shelf and the floor, where there was a gap just big enough to insert a hand.
“Is it a massive spider?” called Jules, coming over to him gingerly. “I absolutely hate them. We might be able to persuade Merlin to hunt it down. That’s what I do when I’m desperate.”
“Not a spider,” said Charlie, “although I can feel webs in the crevice—gross. I don’t suppose you can remember when these shelves were last empty?”
“A million years ago probably,” admitted Jules. “There are definitely some books on that shelf that predate me and, chances are, Aunt Flo as well.”
Charlie nodded grimly, now more or less lying on the floor with his arm outstretched, fingers exploring the dusty gap between the skirting and the no-longer-whitewashed plaster.
“I’m just...” he panted. “Aha!” And with that, Charlie carefully withdrew his hand, clutching a wad of what looked, at first sight, like folded parchment.
“What is it?” asked Jules. Now she could see, as Charlie brought it over to the light, he was holding a book, perhaps A5 sized, with a dark, possibly leather cover.
“Let’s see,” said Charlie, laying it gently on the table under the window. He reached into his pocket and produced a pair of white cotton gloves, all the while not taking his eyes off their curious discovery.
“White gloves?” Jules smiled. “So, you’re a magician in your other life?”
“Mime artist, actually,” he shot back with a grin.
The book was about the heft of a Jilly Cooper bonkbuster, but with thick yellow pages and what Jules could now see was a dull, dark, embossed leather cover, cracked with age.
Charlie was clearly enthralled. Jules watched as he gently folded back the cover and looked intently at the first page. It was heavily foxed and stained, particularly at the margins, and was inscribed with an elaborate handwritten script, the ink faded so much it was a reddish brown barely darker than the outer edges of the paper.
Jules leaned over to try to decipher it. “The first word is ‘A’ I think—that’s simple enough—and then, what? B, O, O, K, E... oh, that’s just ‘Book,’ presumably.”
“‘Of,’” contributed Charlie excitedly.
They both huddled, shoulder to shoulder, trying to make out the next word.
“It looks like F, P, E, L, L, F,” said Jules, confused. “‘Fpellf’? What’s that, for heaven’s sake? Dutch?”
“Double Dutch,” said Charlie. “No. Remember in older manuscripts they tend to write their S’s like F’s.”
“Of course, so it’s ‘Spells,’” Jules quickly surmised. “What? It can’t be a book of spells... can it?”
“Amazeballs,” said Charlie, his eyes flashing in excitement.
“Worth anything?” said Jules, quickly cutting to the chase. Even a small cash input to the business would be very useful.
Charlie shook his head. “I wouldn’t get excited. Although it’s def got some age about it...”
“A book of spells, though! It’s got to have belonged to a witch. What do you reckon? ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog’?”
“Let’s just take a step back,” said Charlie. “I need to handle it as little as possible, but...”
Together they examined it, in the light from the little latticed window, as Charlie delicately turned the pages with his gloved fingertips. Some pages were more faded than others, but all were tough to decipher.
