Chapter Text
As little as six months ago, Charlie probably would have considered the bookshop charming.
It’s housed within a narrow three-storey building sandwiched between an apothecary and a butcher's shop festooned with garlands of glassy eyed pheasants and partridges strung beneath its gables by their feet. All three appear to be slowly collapsing under their own weight, listing decrepitly towards the cobblestoned street and in danger of overbalancing if one too many pigeons happened to roost atop their steeply pitched roofs.
Inside, the warped floorboards ripple like the waters of a storm-churned lake – perilous underfoot, given that the pallid light trickling in through the thin, diamond-paned windows is not strong enough to stir the shadows lurking around the baseboards.
The mismatched bookcases and tables dotted around the room are groaning beneath the enormous mounds of equally mismatched books piled upon them – huge leather-bound folios, pasteboard-backed popular novels, and paper-leafed penny dreadfuls thrown together as though they're all one and the same – and once Charlie would have naïvely thought of it as a 'treasure trove' and anticipated an enjoyable hour or two of combing through this literary detritus in search of hidden gems.
But that was back before Jack had conceived of his mission, which had already ruined a hunting expedition to Caledonia, a fishing excursion in Cornubia, a so-called theatre trip to Londinium, and looks set to blight the entirety of their family holiday in Cambria, too.
Now, Charlie doesn't anticipate anything more than boredom, frustration, and Jack being mardy for the rest of the day after their search inevitably ends in abject failure, and he doesn't see anything delightful, special, or magical about the shop itself, which looks much the same as every other second-hand bookdealer's he's been dragged around in Caledonia, Cornubia, and Londinium, right down to the proprietor himself.
He's a gnarled little man of indeterminate age, with watery eyes and a long, straggling beard which is stained brown at the corners of his mouth and below his nose by smoke from the pipe he has clamped between his teeth. He puffs on it contemplatively as Jack approaches the cluttered little desk which seems to serve in lieu of an actual shop counter.
"Excuse me, sir," Jack says, swinging his whole body forward into a bow more elaborate than any he's ever offered up to actual royalty. "Do you have a copy of My Travels with the Fae by Dylan Evans?"
"Mayhap," the man says unhelpfully, his lips barely moving around the stem of his pipe.
"Do you have a catalogue or record book we could check?" Jack asks, indefatigably optimistic even now, despite all their failures of the past couple of months and despite the evidence of his own two eyes, surely.
The bookseller's desk is strewn with letters, invoices, and receipts all muddled up together, half of them crumpled and creased, the other half covered with tea ring marks from one of the many unwashed mugs that are dotted about in and amongst the papers. It does not look like the desk of a man who keeps meticulous records of his stock.
Predictably, the bookseller shakes his head. "You'll have to take a look around and see for yourselves," he says.
Jack's shoulders slump, just a little and only very briefly, but then he stands up tall and lifts his chin, eyes narrowed in determination.
"You take this floor and work up," he tells Charlie, "I'll take the top floor and work down, then we'll meet in the middle when we're done."
He dashes away up the staircase at the back of the shop; Charlie wanders across to the nearest set of shelves and begins shifting through the books deposited there. Aside from a book of love poetry containing some extremely racy engravings he unearthed in Londinium, he's never come across much of any interest in any of the shops he and Jack have combed through of late. Their father's own book collection is extensive enough to already contain most volumes of any note, and he's halfway convinced by now that the book Florian so yearned for was actually some manner of scholarly campfire story, a legend passed in respectful whispers from bibliophile to bibliophile whenever they gathered together in a darkened library.
Still, for Jack's sake more than Florian's, he methodically works his way from shelf to shelf, table to table, from the front of the shop to the back, where he pauses at the foot of the stairs and, heavy-hearted, peers up them at the room above.
In the small square of the upper floor revealed by the stairwell, he can see another rank of laden bookcases lined up against the far wall, but no sign of Jack besides, though he can hear him stomping about.
"How're you doing up there, Jack?" he says.
For a long while, he gets no answer, but then all of a sudden Jack cries out, "Fucking hell!", and the heavy creak of his footsteps speeds up and grows louder, hurrying towards the stairs.
He jumps down them three at a time, fetching up at Charlie's side red-faced and struggling to catch his breath. His frockcoat is covered in a patina of dust and there are cobwebs caught up in his hair, but his eyes and broad smile are gleaming, alight with triumph.
The small book he's carrying must be the book – he wouldn't look so exultant about any other – so Charlie only asks him, "How much is it, then?"
"Don't know; don't care," Jack says, hurrying over to the desk to present the book to the shop's proprietor.
The man lifts one shaggy eyebrow when he opens the book and looks at its flyleaf, as though surprised by the steepness of the price he himself must have written there. "That'll be five pounds," he says.
It's almost half of Jack's yearly allowance, but he doesn't even blink at the figure before handing over the requisite banknotes.
The bookseller doesn't offer to wrap the book as most do, so Jack carries it from the shop clutched close to his chest, handling it with the same conscientious devotion that a more pious person might show to a holy relic.
"We should go back to the inn so I can put this somewhere safe," he says. "I don’t want it to get damaged."
To Charlie's mind, it's a bit late to be worrying about that – the book's leather binding is cracked and peeling, and, close to, smells faintly of cat piss – but there seems little point in remonstrating against the idea. Jack doubtless won't rest easy until the book is stowed away under lock and key, secure from the vagaries of the weather and passing thieves with a penchant for volumes of magical esoterica.
The restaurant lunch his brother had promised as an inducement to accompany him on yet another shopping trip will just have to be postponed to another day.
The inn in which they're lodging, like the bookshop and most other buildings in Y Gelli, is half-timbered and sagging with age – they date back, Da read out from his guidebook over breakfast that morning, from before the Roman invasion and had stood intact, if not exactly firm, throughout the long, bloody years of war that followed – but its interior has been so diligently maintained that it almost looks newly furbished. Everything about it gleams, from its well-swept – and smooth – floorboards to the spotless white plaster on the walls.
The snug that takes up the greater part of the ground floor is scented with beeswax, wafting up from the highly polished tables there, and liberally endowed with both thick rugs and plumply upholstered armchairs.
Ma is seated upon one of the chairs clustered about the broad iron fireplace, her glass-topped oak day cane propped up against one of the arms. She glances up at Charlie and Jack as they pass her by en route to the stairs that lead up to their room, nods to them in greeting, and looks set to return to reading her medical periodical before her eyes catch upon the book Jack's cradling.
"Is that it?" she asks. "The mythical tome? Can I take a look at it?"
Jack's fingers tighten around the book slightly, as though reluctant to relinquish his hold on it, but he does eventually hand it over along with the warning that: "It's pretty delicate."
Ma opens the book with light, careful fingers, and then sucks a shocked gasp of air through her teeth when she spots the sum pencilled on the flyleaf.
"You do understand that your father and I won't make up the shortfall in your allowance, don't you?" she says, eyes still fixed rigidly on that lightly scored '£5'.
"Aye, Ma," Jack says solemnly.
"If you need any more money, you'll have to earn it," Ma says. "I believe George Turner needs some help taking care of his pigs now that his nephew's moved to Vinovia. Your father would pay you the normal rate for a farmhand if you took over their feeding and mucking out for the rest of the summer."
"Aye, Ma; I'll do it," Jack says without hesitation, even though George Turner is a belligerent old bastard whose stringent demands for perfection in pig husbandry have driven away every farmhand who's ever been employed to work with him, his nephew included.
"Well," Ma says, handing the book back to Jack. "That's all settled, then."
She both looks and sounds baffled, but then she's never been quite able to grasp the reasoning behind Jack's behaviour when it comes to Florian.
She'd met Da when they were both students at the university in Durolipons and, by her account, they'd been taken with each other from the start. As she told it, they'd still be stuck stealing glances at each other across lecture halls to this day if it was up to Da, but she'd put up with exactly a fortnight of ambiguously suggestive conversations, fleeting touches, and chance meetings that weren't anything of the sort before taking the bull by the horns and inviting him to take dinner in her dorm room whereupon she made her own feelings plain.
They were courting before the month was out and married before the end of the following year.
She cannot understand why Jack doesn't do the same and, honestly, Charlie can't either. If he was a few years older, he'd ask Florian out himself – he'd most likely say no, Charlie's under no illusions on that score, but then at least he'd know for sure and could move on accordingly. He wouldn't want to keep wondering and worrying like Jack does, but then Jack seems to want to avoid the finality of a definitive rejection.
He wants to still be able to hold onto some thin thread of hope that he might someday do or say something, make the right sort of grand gesture, that will lead to a sea change in Florian's own feelings towards him before laying his heart open.
And right now, all his hopes are pinned on the book.
Later, in their room at the inn, as Jack's reverentially tucking it away inside his travel chest, wrapped snugly about with two of his thickest jumpers, he asks Charlie, "Do you really think he'll like it?"
Charlie has listened to Florian natter on – inasmuch as Florian ever natters on about anything – about the book for over three years now, with the sort of breathless excitement he rarely displays about anything else.
"Aye," he says, but: "I'm not sure it'll make him like you any better, though, Jack."
He'd hoped to temper his brother's expectations, but Jack simply ignores his well-meaning concern.
"I don't mind, either way," he says breezily. "I think it'll be worth it just to see the look on his face."
His certainty about that erodes rapidly over the coming weeks, and he's all but decided that Charlie should be the one to present the book to Florian and pass it off as his own idea when they both receive – most unexpectedly, on Jack's part – invitations to Florian's coming of age party.
Jack seems to take that as a sign from the gods he doesn't even believe in – the invisible hand of fate pushing him towards some imagined perfect moment.
"I'm going to tell him how I feel about him," he insists, and repeatedly, but though he sounds resolute enough, Charlie suspects that it'll come to nothing.
He's made the same grand proclamation with the same determined intensity several times over the last five years, and never once gathered the courage necessary to act on it.
Nevertheless, he dresses with more care and attention to his appearance than he usually does on the night of Florian's party, and he pockets the now neatly wrapped book instead of pushing it off on Charlie, which does suggest that he does still at least intends to make good on his promises.
After they've eaten dinner, been soundly trounced at cards by Florian's ma and entertained by Florian's startlingly proficient turn on the pianoforte – a skill Charlie had hitherto not even known he possessed – Jack slips out into the back garden with the excuse that he 'needs some air'.
Florian follows on after him a moment later, leading Charlie to believe that they must have had a rendezvous planned.
He's distracted from fretting about what the outcome of that meeting might be by Florian's grandma, who demands, in her grandson's absence, that Charlie stand up with her to dance whilst Florian's ma accompanies them on the pianoforte.
She's very sprightly for her age, and Charlie's so hard-pressed to match pace with her that he doesn't have room in his head for anything other than keeping track of his next steps.
After two dances, Charlie's short of breath, wrung-out and exhausted, so she leaves him to recuperate on the drawing room sofa whilst Olivia takes his place as her partner.
Jack joins him shortly thereafter, his face flushed even more deeply than Charlie's own feels to be.
"You told him, then?" Charlie asks, deducing from the small, pleased smile his brother's sporting that he not only made his confession at last, but that – somewhat unbelievably – it had also met with some success.
"Naw," Jack says, confounding his expectations. "I couldn't go through with it in the end. He looked so happy that I didn't want to risk spoiling the moment." He shrugs loosely, unconcerned. "It doesn't much matter, though. I'll have plenty of chances to take a shot at it again later; I'll just have to wait until the timing's properly right."