Page 46 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“You’re welcome, that’ll be sixty-eleven trillion pounds, please,” said Jules, holding out her hand. “But whatIwant to know is how you’ve got budget for all this stuff,” she went on enviously. “You’ve got serious funding behind you, and it can’t be profit surely? Not after all your setup costs.”
“We’re doing all right,” said Roman seriously. “But, yeah, I do have some venture capital funding.”
“Family money?” Jules prompted. She knew she was being unfair. It was a well-known fact Roman’s dad was as rich as Croesus, mainly because he was not shy about flaunting it.
“Actually no,” said Roman, fiddling with the handle of his empty cup. “It was offered, but just getting a chance to rent the buildingwas all I wanted from Dad. I needed to show him I could do this—that I’d learned enough in the States to make a go of it without his financial support. Anyhow, if I’m completely honest, Dad isn’t as minted as he likes people to think. He’d hate me saying that.”
“Do you not get on?” Jules asked. She and Roman had not spent much time discussing each other’s families. Why would they? The less time Jules spent thinking about her mother, the better she liked it, remembering despondently that she had lunch at her mum’s cottage lined up again that Sunday. At least this time Aunt Flo would be there as well.
“No, we get on okay, I suppose,” said Roman tactfully. “We’re very different people.”
“Probably just as well,” said Jules. “I’m not sure I’d like you if you were too much like your dad, from what I’ve heard. Oops, sorry, that was so rude!” She clapped her hand to her mouth, but Roman just laughed.
“He’d like you,” admitted Roman. “Dad always turns on the charm for beautiful women. I’m not in a hurry for you guys to meet,” he went on, taking Jules’s hand and rubbing it absently with his thumb. “I prefer to keep my personal life private from my family as far as possible.”
“If they’re anything like my mum, that’s probably wise,” said Jules.
“They’re a lot,” Roman conceded, nodding and massaging her fingers one by one, frowning with concentration as he worked.
Finally, he raised his eyes to meet hers. As always, when their eyes met, Jules’s stomach did a little flip.
“I love this,” said Roman. “Us talking like this. About work. Family. Everything.” His blue eyes were intense. Serious.
“I love...” Jules hesitated for a microsecond, and then she bottled it. “I love this too,” she said.
The shop was pleasingly busy all day next day—too busy to leave Charlie on his own with it—so it wasn’t until later in the week that Jules was able to get to the public records office in Exeter.
It was a low gray 1960s building, fortuitously close to the station. Jules was soon ensconced, with a large hazelnut latte, at a desk in the corner where a kindly lady with a gray bun and spectacles had got her settled. After a crash course in wrangling microfiche, Jules took a deep breath and dived in. With only a vague date of death to go on, and wanting the fullest picture possible, she decided to start at the other end and look for female Capelthorne christening records.
Starting at 1600, Jules was soon going cross-eyed and becoming frustrated. The text was so faint and so loopy—the seventeenth-century vicar would win no prizes for his handwriting. Jules had got to 1612 with no sign of a Bridget or even another Capelthorne. She was seriously contemplating going out for another latte to wake herself up when she had her first hit.
The entry read: “28th of April, 1610. Reginald John Capelthorne, of High Street, Portneath, Cause of death: Dropsy,” whatever that was. Sounded painful. She took a quick snap of the entry on her phone and sat back with a sigh. He had been sixty-two. Was he Bridget’s father? Surely too old... more likely her grandfather. Enlivened by her success, Jules read on, using a pencil held horizontal to stop her from accidentally missing a line. She was soon rewarded. An Edwin Capelthorne married Elspeth Winner in Saint Thomas’s Church in May 1612. Now this was interesting. Jules pictured the scene at the little stone church at the top of the hill: there would have been blossoms on the fruit trees in the ancient orchard by the graveyard. The orchard bit was tiny now, with a large Victorian home called Orchard House now occupying the space where it would have been. Perhaps the rest of the land below the churchwould still have been fields then too. The oldest buildings in Portneath were at the dockside by the bottom end of the high street, with the bits higher up the hill mostly Victorian and Edwardian.
The couple would have come out of the church together, perhaps into the spring sunlight, and walked between the two yew trees—much smaller then—to the lych-gate, arm in arm, perhaps with friends and family scattering petals as confetti. In her daydream, Elspeth was herself and Edwin had more than a passing resemblance to Roman... but enough, she gave herself a little shake. What happened next in the young couple’s life, all those years ago? The treasures revealed were coming thick and fast now. There was a baby, Eileen, just a year after their marriage, then another, John, followed closely by a second boy, Joseph—but, devastatingly, Jules quickly came across a burial record for him: Joseph had died, at just six months, from “the fever.”
Of course, child mortality was brutally high at that time, but a lump had formed in her throat by the time she had seen the births and then the deaths of three more Capelthorne children. They were not alone. The register was littered with infant burials. In one dreadful year a large number of children and adults had died within weeks of one another—all from “the pox,” which was smallpox, presumably.
Jules was beginning to lose hope of finding Bridget Capelthorne and was starting to wonder whether the “Biddy” they were looking for wasn’t a contraction of “Bridget” after all. Perhaps she was one of the girls Jules had already found... ? Her heart sank at the thought of going back over old ground. And then, almost inconspicuously, there it was: the christening of Bridget Capelthorne in December 1621. She appeared to be the last of the children in that generation of Capelthornes, and an hour later, Jules had managed to sketch a rough family tree. The story that emerged was one of tragedy. Elspeth had a total of six children with Edwin. Only twochildren seemed to have made it to adulthood—surely that was bad even in those days?
By the 1640s, the oldest boy, John, had married and started having children of his own. The remaining girl, Bridget, survived both of her parents and did not, as far as Jules could see, get married herself. How on earth had she supported herself as a woman on her own in an age when it was the boys who inherited everything? Her education and work options would have been limited too. Jules was increasingly sure she had her woman. No wonder she had established herself as the town’s wisewoman, with her herbal remedies and spells. Jules had a vivid picture of Bridget in her mind’s eye. She imagined her as a strong, wiry, gray-haired woman in a dress and pinny, gathering her healing plants and concocting her remedies—those tisanes, cordials, and tinctures from the book of spells—in the tall, crooked town house where Jules now lived. Bridget looked a little like Aunt Flo in Jules’s mind, and she could picture her also in front of a blazing hearth, in a wooden rocking chair with a cat—just like Merlin—on her lap.
“Hmm. Not easy for a single woman in those days,” Flo mused, once Jules had brought her and Charlie up to date the following day. “She must have been a tough one, all right.”
The three of them were having lunch in the little office at the back of the shop, with ears on elastic for one of them to jump out and serve a customer if they appeared.
“And definitely no sign of a burial record?” Charlie double-checked.
“I looked right through to the end of the century,” Jules confirmed. “Mind you, I was going cross-eyed by then, so I’m not a hundred percent sure I didn’t miss anything. It looks like we might have been wrong about her reason for stopping writing the grimoire where she did. Perhaps she just got old and gave up herwork? It’s still odd there’s no record of what happened to her, though. Unless she moved out of the area for some reason, which would mean I was looking in the wrong parish record... and if she did that, where do I even begin?”
Then she remembered Martin the vicar’s throwaway remarks about crossroad hangings and burials.
“What if she was executed?” she asked in a low voice.
“For what?” exclaimed Flo.
“I dunno—but if the punishment was execution, then it would have had to be something pretty bad, maybe murder?”
“Most murders are men killing women,” said Flo stoutly, “not the other way around. ’Twas ever thus.”
