The driver stuck his head out the carriage window. “Stupid cow!” he shouted to her. Jane shrieked and sat down on the bench. Her fingers tingled with shock.
Jane took a moment to assess the situation and evaluate her chances of succeeding in this mission. She sat alone in the middle of London, intending to navigate her way through a city that had moved two hundred years beyond her. She composed a list of ways she might be killed and arrived at a dozen methods. Forgetting the geographical challenges of her predicted journey east for a moment, she decided the bigger risk lay in her dying somewhere along the way. Attempting to leave the bench on which she sat posed a risky enough proposition, let alone forging a path to Cheapside.
Chapter Twenty-One
Further up the street, a man in rumpled trousers struggled to open the front door of some sort of shop with one hand while balancing a pile of books in the other. He wore a red woolen coat and his gray hair protruded from his head in a bushy mop. Grasping the bundle under one arm, he turned the key. The books came loose and tumbled to the ground.
Jane walked over. “Allow me to help,” she said. She collected the books that had fallen and handed them to the shopkeeper. Paint peeled from an elegant old sign above him that read Clarke’s Books & Periodicals.
“Thank you,” he replied, reaching out to take the books from Jane. Another book came free from his arm and fell. Jane caught it in midair, preventing it from landing in a puddle on the sidewalk. “Good catch! Please, come inside.” He ushered her into the shop. Inside was an astonishing sight. It was a tiny space, no larger than a bedroom, but the man had made the most of it. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Books burst from every shelf and spilled to the floor in glorious streams of red, blue, and yellow. Greek columns of novels rose up from the floor and almost reached the ceiling. It resembled a cave, or a little underground chapel, consisting entirely of books. A warm mustiness filled the room, and it smelled of ink and wood.
“A bookshop!” Jane said. She had never beheld a store dedicated to the purpose.
The old man laughed. “Indeed,” he said, watching Jane look around the room in happy amazement. “Will you take one?” he said.
“No, thank you,” Jane said. She ran her eyes over the shelves, envious. She had read no books in three days, when often she read one a day. She could devour some literature. But books were expensive, and she needed to conserve the money Fred had given her.
“I meant for free,” he said then, as if sensing her hesitation. “As a thank-you for helping me. I’m George.” He held out his hand for her to shake. Jane was still adjusting to strangers calling themselves by their first names, but she smiled. The name belonged to her father.
“Jane,” she replied. She shook his hand. His skin bore an old man’s softness, like her papa’s. “Thank you for the kind gesture, but I cannot accept,” Jane said.
“You can accept, and you must, for you rescued a treasure from death by puddle.” He held up one of the books Jane had collected. The title read Tess of the d’Urbervilles. “A second edition,” said George. “Do you like to read?”
“Yes,” Jane said. She scanned the nearest shelf’s contents and recognized fewer than one title in ten. The sight delighted her; usually she walked into a library and slumped at having already read its contents. She would need years to make her way through these books.
“What do you like? Fiction? Thrillers, science fiction, romance?”
Jane stiffened with curiosity. “Science fiction?”
He showed her to a shelf by the window. The books bore thin, colored covers in shades Jane did not recognize. “Have you read this one?” He handed Jane a book titled Dune.
Jane shook her head. “I have read little in this area.”
“This is a classic,” he said with a smile. A well-stuffed armchair squatted at the back of the shop; love-worn green leather covered the seat and arms. “You’re welcome to sit and read for as long as you like,” said George. “You will be keeping me company.”
Jane grew excited. Instead of sitting on a bench and wallowing in her failure, she could sit in this shop in the twenty-first century and read a book.
“Do you . . . have anything by Jane Austen?” she asked on a whim.
“Of course. She’s not science fiction, though.” He led Jane across to the opposite side of the shop where a hand-painted sign read Classics. Nervous anticipation suddenly filled her. George handed Jane a small book. Its red cloth cover had faded to orange and small gold letters embossed the cover. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Jane ran her hand across the title. “This is a seventh edition, I think. Printed in 1912.” Jane nodded and said nothing, bewitched by the contents of her hand. She opened the book; the spine made a crackling sound and a glorious smell of almonds rose up. The pages felt crisp, like someone might have left them in the sun to dry.
“I picked that up from a high school in Walthamstow,” George said. “They were renovating their library. From the looks of it, this poor little one took a beating.”
Jane turned to the title page. Someone had written Property of Hilary Dawe, 12F across the corner. Jane stared at the detail. “Who is this person?” she asked him. She pointed to the inscription.
“That’s a student, I suppose. It’s in the syllabus.”
“The syllabus?”
“Pride and Prejudice is taught in schools. You did not
