Page 52 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“I hoped she’d come, but she says she’s got to go and see our solicitor—something about the lease on the shop,” she told him, reaching for her wine.
Tucking back into her steak, Jules initially didn’t notice the sudden change in mood, but when she glanced up, she gasped in shock. Roman’s eyes were filled with tears.
“Oh, no, please don’t!” she gasped, reaching and grabbing his hand, holding it between both of her own. “I’m so sorry we argued. You’re my best friend in the world. Please... tell me. What is it?”
Roman hung his head for a moment, and when he looked up, his eyes blazed with such intensity Jules gasped again.
“We need to go!” he said. “We need to leave here—get out of Portneath andnevercome back... you and me... we can get married if you want. Whatever you want, but please, let’s go.”
“What do you mean? When? How?” she whispered, getting up and coming around to his side of the table, kneeling so she could meet his gaze, still holding his hand in her own.
“Tonight,” he told her fiercely. “Don’t go back to the flat. Whatever you need, we can buy it on the way. Wherever you want to go, we can go there, but together, just the two of us, forever. No more families, no more Portneath, no more Middlemass. Done. Say yes, I beg you!” He squeezed her hand so tight, she nearly cried out.
“I... I can’t just go,” Jules told him. She was crying now too, infected by his abject despair. “I’ve got to look after Aunt Flo, the shop...Youcan’t go either,” she reasoned. “Look, this thing between our families, we can sort it out. We’ll just tell them we’re together. They’ll have to accept it. My mother will come ’round,” she said, clearly unconvinced.
“So, you won’t come with me?” He hung his head again, his face unreadable in the candlelight.
“Not ‘won’t,’ ‘can’t,’” said Jules gently. “I mean, yes, it would be lovely to travel. We’ll definitely do it,” she went on brightly. “Maybe next year. In the spring, yes?”
Whatever this was, this distress, it would pass, she was sure of it. What mattered was they loved each other. She saw that clearly now. She felt it, he felt it. That was the only thing that mattered.
Everything was going to work out fine.
Jules insisted on getting Terry the Taxi to take her home. Roman had been drinking, and he was clearly exhausted. His fatigue was making him irrational, she decided, and he wasn’t making any sense. She left, promising she would be back to see him the following evening, to tell him about her meeting in Exeter. That would distract him from... whatever this was, she was sure of it.
“So, I absolutelylovethe grimoire,” Charlie’s friend Brynlee said, when they met in the university library. With her pink hair and multiple piercings, she wasn’t Jules’s idea of a professor, but she was quick, warm, funny, and friendly. Jules could see why she would make an immensely listenable podcast and made a mental note to look it up.
“It’s one of the finest I’ve seen. Also, there’s some content that has a lot in common with a couple of others I’ve been lucky enough to have access to, which date from a similar time. There’s definitely evidence of communication and sharing of remedies, possibly just from the process of passing information down the generations, but I’m working on this thesis that these ‘wisewomen’”—she did the quote marks with her fingers—“I don’t like to call them ‘witches’ because it feels potentially pejorative—were sharing ideas with other professionals. It’s amazingly generous when you think that a) they might have been competing for customers, and b) most of them never traveled more than a hundred miles away from where they were born.”
Jules listened, rapt. This was her ancestor. A Capelthorne woman.
Brynlee continued: “And what I really, really love is that it’s not just a book of spells but kind of a journal too. Those insights toward the end when it goes a little weird? It’s like we’re in this poor woman’s head. Astonishing. I have actually seen that elsewhere, and I have my theories... but, yeah, it’s a fabulous find.”
“Those last bitsdomake uncomfortable reading,” admitted Jules. “I’d love to know what happened. I’ve looked everywhere. I can’t find a record of her death or burial, but, obviously, she died, so now I suppose the focus is onwhyI didn’t find it. Did Charlie tell you I searched the gravestones in the local cemetery too?”
Brynlee nodded. “Good work,” she said. “That would have been my next question. So... I have a theory...” She paused, assessing them both.
Jules cracked first. “What?” she asked.
“Look, before I say more, there’s someone I’d like to bring in on this,” Brynlee went on. “I know a guy—a colleague I work with sometimes—who has access to all the records stored in Exeter around that time, not just births and deaths but court records too.They might be relevant if Bridget ever had any dealings with the justice system, such as it was in those days. I’m going to tell my guy everything we know about Bridget Capelthorne and see what he can dig up. If he comes up with nothing, then...” She paused again to look at them both.
“Then what?” asked Jules.
“If not, then I’m not sure there’s much else we can do,” Brynlee admitted.
Back on the train, Charlie was quickly immersed in checking the latest old book sales on his phone, giving Jules a chance to think as she gazed out the window, watching the craggy heathland of Dartmoor pass by as the train took them back to the coast. Inevitably, she was preoccupied with her conversation with Roman the previous night. He had been so intense, so certain that the two of them should cut and run, leave Devon together, forever... get married even—it hadn’t exactly been the most romantic proposal she had ever heard, if that’s what it was, but thinking back on the strange encounter, Jules realized two important things. First, she was absolutely, deeply, and permanently in love with Roman. And it was more than an infatuation inspired by the idea he was, as a Montbeau, forbidden fruit. It was so much more than that, she knew now. Love, she realized, was more than a pounding heart and physical attraction. It was a steady glow. A quiet elation. He was her person, for as long as they were both alive. Through thick and thin, highs and lows, they were going to live their lives together now. And it feltsoright. She felt as if there was a bubble of joy expanding in her chest, making her have to contain herself not to blurt out to Charlie how she felt.
But the other thing she had absolutely learned since that winter was that Devon was home. Her heart was in Portneath. The business, Aunt Flo, this beautiful landscape, the sea... even her mother,tricky as she was. So, there was a feud between the two families? So what? She and Roman would overcome that together. They would run their businesses, join their lives, start a family to ensure the next generations of the two families would be united at last. The rest of Jules’s life felt as if it were laid out before her, so clear and so certain.
And Roman was not the only one who could do the marriage proposal thing. She had promised she would go see him tonight, and she knew he was working from home. She would go to him, and thenshewould propose. Properly. It was the twenty-first century, after all. A smile stole across her face. She could hardly wait.
Chapter 22
It would have been easy to spend the rest of the journey pleasurably daydreaming about the future, but there were practical things to address. Jules wondered, with everything else that was going on, whether it was worth the time and energy pursuing more information about Bridget. Surely it would make little difference to the value of the grimoire, and did it really matter how much it was worth, with business going so much better? Although perhaps it would be a relief of sorts for Flo to know more about what happened to her and why information around her death seemed so elusive.
When she got back to the shop, having said goodbye to Charlie at the station, Jules was perturbed to find the shop door wide open to the street. Weirder still, the shop was in darkness, with no sign of Flo there or even in the office behind. Her heart accelerating by the second, she called, hearing a faint reply coming from the flat upstairs.
“Aunt Flo!” she exclaimed, when she found her, sitting bolt upright in a chair, not reading, not having a cup of tea, just sitting. She looked deathly pale. “What is it? What’s wrong?” She knelt in front of Flo and grabbed her hand. It was freezing cold, despite the sunshine outside.
