CHAPTER ONE
Wanted: Assistant/shelf stacker/general dogsbody to work in secondhand bookshop. Must be fluent in classical literature, detest electronic books and all who indulge them, and have experience answering inane customer questions for eight hours straight. Cannot be allergic to dust or cats – if I had to choose between you and the cat, you will lose. Hard work, terrible pay. Apply within at Nevermore Bookshop.
Yikes. I closed the Argleton community app and shoved my phone into my pocket. The person who wrote that ad really doesn’t want to hire an assistant.
Unfortunately, he or she hadn’t counted on me, Wilhelmina Wilde, recently-failed fashion designer, owner of two wonky eyes, and pathetic excuse for a human. I was landing this assistant job, whether Grumpy-Cat-Obsessed-Underpaying-Ad-Writer wanted me or not.
I had no options left.
I peered up at the towering Victorian brick facade of Nevermore Bookshop – number 221 Butcher Street, Argleton – with a mixture of nostalgia and dread. I’d spent most of my childhood in a darkened corner of this shop, and now if I played my cards right I’d get to see it from the other side of the counter. It was the one shining beacon in my dark world of shite.
I don’t remember it looking so… foreboding.
Apart from the faded Nevermore Bookshop written in gothic type over the entrance, the facade bore no clue that I stood in front of one of the largest secondhand bookshops in England. A ramshackle Georgian house facade with Victorian additions rose four stories from the street, looking more like a creepy orphanage from a gothic novel than a repository of fine literature. Trees bent their bare branches across the darkened windows and wisteria crept over grimy brickwork, shrouding the building in a thick skin of foliage. Cobwebs entwined in the lattice and draped over the windowsills. There didn’t appear to be a single light on inside.
Weeds choked the two flower pots flanking the door, which had once been glazed a bright blue but were since stained in brown and white streaks from overzealous birds. A pigeon cooed ominously from the gutter above the door, threatening me with an unwelcome deposit. Twin dormer windows in the attic glared over the narrow cobbled street like evil eyes, and a narrow balcony of black wrought iron on the second story the teeth. A hexagonal turret jutted from the south-western corner, where it might once have caught sun before Butcher Street had built up around it.
When I used to hang out as a kid, the first two floors were given over to the shop – a rabbit warren of narrow corridors and pokey rooms, every wall and table covered in books. The previous owner – a kindly blind old man named Mr. Simson – lived on the remaining two floors, but for all I knew, the new owner used that space as an opium den or a meat smoker.
At least the flaccid British sun peeked through the grey clouds, which meant I could make out these finer details of the facade. The buildings on either side of it were cloaked in the creeping black shadow that now followed me everywhere. I squinted at the chalkboard sign on the street, hoping for some clue as to the new owner’s personality, but all it had on it were some wonky lines that looked like chickens’ feet.
This place is even more drab than I remember. It could use a little TLC.
That makes two of us. I squinted at my reflection in the darkened shop window, but I could barely make out the basic shape of my body. At least I knew I looked fierce when I left the house, in my Vivienne Westwood pleated skirt (scored on eBay for twenty-five quid), vintage ruffled shirt, men’s cravat from a weird goth shop at Camden market, and my old school blazer with an enamel pin on the collar that read, ‘Jane Austen is my Homegirl.’ Combined with my favorite Docs and a pair of thick-framed glasses, I’d nailed the ‘boss-bitch librarian’ look.
That is, if you ignored the fact that I pushed my nose up against the glass to see my reflection, and twisted my head in order to see all the details of my outfit because of the creeping darkness in the corners of my eyes.
Please, Isis and Astarte and any other goddess listening, let me get this job. I can’t deal with any more rejection.
I smoothed my hair, sucked in a breath, pushed open the creaking shop door, and stepped back in time.
As the shop bell tinkled and the smell of musty paper filled my nostrils, I became nine years old again – the weird outcast kid whose mother was banned from school events after swindling the chair of the PTA with a Forex trading mastermind program that was really just a CD-rom of my mother comparing currency trading to doing the laundry. (It was his own fault for getting swindled. Who even uses CDs anymore?)
As soon as the school bell rang I’d sprint into town, duck through this same door and escape into another world. I’d curl up in the cracking leather armchair in the World History room with a huge stack of books and read until my mother finished her shift and came to collect me. Books become my friends – characters like Jane Eyre and Dorian Grey the perfect substitutes for the kids who were horrible to me. When I was older and the guys at school sneered at me and fawned over my best friend, I fell into books again – this time to fall in love with the bad boys, the intelligent boys, the boys filled with anger and lust and pain. Dark horses and anti heroes like Heathcliff and Sherlock Holmes, and melancholy authors like Edgar Allan Poe spoke directly to my soul.
Mr. Simson barely said a word to me, but he never seemed to mind the fact that I read every book in the shop but couldn’t afford to buy any. Sometimes he’d even let me riffle through the boxes of rejects before he sent them away for recycling. People would come into the store and try to sell Mr. Simson’s stacks of airport books – James Patterson and John Grisham paperbacks that no one buys secondhand. When he refused their generous bounty, they’d creep back at night and shove the volumes one by one through the mail slot, so Mr. Simson always had stacks of them lying around. I would smuggle the books home to our housing estate – If Mum caught me reading she’d lecture about how men didn’t like smart girls and we’d have a big row – and read them under the covers at night or hidden in my textbooks during class.
It was in Nevermore Bookshop where I first discovered punk music. I found a box of battered 1970 zines in the Popular Music section, and I lost myself in faded photographs of bored teenagers with bleached mohawks. None of them fit in, and they didn’t give a shit. I was in love.
Teenage Mina threw herself into punk music and fashion, bought a second-hand sewing machine, and started cutting up all her clothes. Fashion became a way to express myself, and opened up a world that was bigger and brighter and more fun than the council estate and my shitty school and lack of tits and the tiny village of Argleton.
When you don’t have any friends and have an entire bookshop for research, you get a lot of schoolwork done. At the end of my last year at secondary school, I was offered four scholarships to prestigious universities. But there was only one thing I wanted – to become a punk-rock fashion designer. The next Vivienne Westwood, thank you very much. So when I was awarded a place at New York’s infamous Fashion Institute, I packed up my Docs and sewing machine and left Argleton behind me for good.
Or so I thought.
For four glorious years I lived in New York City, working my arse off, living it up with my best friend Ashley, and learning everything there was to learn about the fashion industry. Last year I finished my degree and Ashley and I landed the same year-long internship with Marcus Ribald, our favorite designer of all time after Vivienne.
Then I noticed a faint blur in the corner of my eye and I fell down the stairs three days in a row. I would reach for my coffee cup and knock it over, or sign my name on a document and miss the line completely. I thought it was nothing – I walked through life constantly hungover and running on coffee and discounted day-old hot dogs, which I assumed explained the pounding headaches that stabbed me day and night. But I kept pushing, kept working, kept drinking. I was living the dream. Nothing could stop me.
Wrong. All it took was a harrowing doctor’s appointment and Ashley’s betrayal to stop me.
Bye bye internship. So long, crappy rat-infested apartment I secretly loved. Nice to know you, dreams of future success and dressing celebrities for the red carpet. Now I was back in Argleton, sleeping in my crummy old room and getting nervous about a job interview as a bloody bookshop dogsbody.
I stepped into the gloomy interior. My boot landed on a thick carpet in the wide entrance hall, flanked on either side by tall shelves crammed with books. A small line of taxidermy rodents peered down at me from tiny wooden shields nailed along the moldings. I don’t remember those. The new owner sure had strange taste in interior decor. But then, he had written that acerbic job ad…
I ran my fingers along the spines of the books, moving carefully to avoid tripping over the stacks of paperbacks littering the floor. Must and mothballs and leather and old paper caressed my nostrils. The air practically sweated books.
“Hello?” I called, coughing as dust tickled the back of my throat. Was the bookshop always this dusty?
Hello, beautiful. A voice croaked from behind me. I whirled around, a retort poised on my lips. But no one was in the doorway. I twisted my head to peer into the corners of the room, but I couldn’t penetrate the shadows.
Where did that voice come from?
“Hello?” I called out. The first thing I’m going to do if I get the job is brighten this place up a bit.
Something rustled in the dark corner above the door. I glanced up. My eyes resolved the shape of an enormous black bird perched on the top of the bookshelf. At first I assumed it was stuffed, but it unfurled a long wing and flapped it in my face.
“Argh!” I flung my arm up, slamming my elbow into a stack of books, which toppled to the ground. The raven croaked with satisfaction and folded its wing away.
What is Astarte’s name is a raven doing in here? It’ll poop over the books. I wonder if it’s roosting in the roof somewhere? We’ll have to find that if we want to chase it out…
“Croak,” said the raven with an accusatory tone, as though it had heard my thoughts.
“I guess you kind of suit the place.” I glared at the bird as I bent down and fumbled for the books. “A raven in Nevermore Bookshop. Once upon a midnight dreary—”
“Croak.” The raven’s yellow eyes glowed. Something in that croak sounded like a warning.
“Fine. Fine. I didn’t come here to quote poetry to a bird.” I stood up and rubbed my throbbing elbow. “I want to talk to the boss. Do you know where I might find him?”
As if it understood the question, the raven dropped off the shelf, swooped past me, and flew around the corner, disappearing through an archway on the left. I followed it into what would have once been a drawing room and was now a jumble of mismatched shelves and junkstore furniture. In the middle of the room were two heavy oak tables – one holding a large globe, the other a taxidermy armadillo. Books stacked so high it looked as though the armadillo was building itself a border wall. Old cinema chairs and beanbags under the window formed a reading area, and the large lawyer’s desk that had served as Mr. Simson’s counter still took pride of place beside the grand fireplace, although the brass plaque on the front now read “Mr. Earnshaw.”
The raven swooped around me and perched on the desk lamp, its talons clicking against the metal. It took me a few moments to register the man hunched over the desk – the dark, wavy hair that spilled over his shoulders obscured his face, and his black clothes faded into the wood behind him.
“We’re closed.” A gruff voice boomed from inside the hair.
“Your sign still says open.”
“Well, flip it over for me on the way out,” the voice managed to sound both exasperated and uninterested.
“Um, sure. Mr. Earnshaw, was it?” I waved. He didn’t even look up from his paper. “I saw the job ad you posted on the Argleton app, and I wanted to—”
“App?” The head snapped up. Eyes of black fire regarded me with suspicion from beneath a pair of thick eyebrows, deep set in a dark-skinned face of such remarkable beauty I sucked in a breath.
The new proprietor was younger than I expected him to be – Mr. Simson had been an old man even when I was a girl – and far too handsome to be working in a bookshop. His exotic features and sharp cheekbones belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. The defiant tilt of his chin and twitch of his haughty lips concealed a storm raging inside him.
Danger rolled off him in waves. Danger… and desire.
Thick muscles bulged at the seams of his shirt. He’d rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, one thick forearm graced with the tattoo of a barren, gnarled tree and some words in cursive script below.
Even though he was an Adonis, this Mr. Earnshaw also looked like a complete wanker. He scrunched up that perfectly-sculpted nose, his lips curling back into a sneer. “What the devil is an app?”
What kind of weird question is that? “Um… you know, an application for your phone, so you can get the bus timetable or talk to your mates or—”
“Don’t talk to me about phones,” Earnshaw snapped. “People spend too much time on their phones.”
Right. I’d forgotten about the part in the job ad about hating ebooks. This guy must be one of those weirdos who eschewed technology. “Oh, I agree. I mean, phones should only be used for calling people. And checking social media. That’s it. I would never read on mine,” I blubbered, shoving my phone behind my back. “I mean, studies have shown it can cause long-term eye damage and—”
“No matter how long you keep talking, it’s not going to change the fact that we’re closed. What do you want?”
“I’m applying for the assistant’s job.” I fumbled in my purse for the envelope I’d carefully sealed, trying to avoid accidentally showing him the ereader tucked behind my makeup case. “I’ve got my resume in here for you with all my qualifications and—”
“I don’t need that. If you want the job, tell me why I should hire you.”
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