Page 49 of The Bookshop Book

I escaped the clutches of bramble and bush, boosted myself from the ground-floor windowsill to the top of the wall, and then leaped back again, slamming into the brickwork and barely keeping my grip on the sill of the open window. With straining arms and my trainers scrabbling wildly for traction, I managed to push the window up and crawl through.

Any idea of stealth had been knocked right out of me when I hit the hospital wall on my second leap. I’d resigned myself to tumbling into a room in full view of whoever occupied it. In fact, anyone paying attention in the adjoining rooms probably would have heard my entrance. It turned out that I was whatever the opposite of a ninja is. An ajnin?

The room I’d fallen into was lit only by the dying sunlight. It looked to be unoccupied, waiting for a new patient, the bed made, the walls unadorned, surfaces uncluttered. I’d very nearly knocked over a bedside table. The narrow-necked vase on it had fallen on its side, but any water had long gone. The single withered rose it contained now spread dusty crimson petals on the tabletop.

I stood, rubbing at my scratches and aches. The desk against the far wall had several objects on it, which turned out to be an unopened laptop box, two fountain pens still in their packaging, and three brand-new, expensive-looking notebooks, neatly stacked on top of each other. Set apart from all these was a book or journal whose leather cover was tooled with roses, the design marred by a dark and ugly stain just off-center. Some urge had me open it, but every one of the thick, faintly yellow pages was blank. Before I closed it, I noticed traces of words here and there, handwritten but almost entirely erased. In fact, on close inspection the traces were everywhere…

“Hmmm.” I didn’t know what to make of that, but it clearly wasn’t my mother’s room. I turned toward the door, wondering how many patients the place had and whether they were locked in.

That was when I saw her, and although I’d like to tell you that the shriek that escaped me was a manly one, I would be lying.

“Fucksake!” I startled back against the desk, nearly falling onto it.

The woman was sitting in a straight-backed chair in the darkest corner of the room, pushed back right against the built-in wardrobe, not invisible in the shadows but so pale and motionless that somehow my mind had patterned her into the furniture.

I opened my mouth to let the excuses out, to start bargaining and explaining, but her silence, her lack of reaction, stopped me. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see me—her eyes tracked me as I stepped away from the desk, rubbing my hip—just that she didn’t care.

“Hi…” I raised my hand.

The woman just watched me, incurious. She wasn’t much older than my mother. Nice-looking—I don’t mean pretty, though she was, I guess in a sort of washed-out, uncared-for sort of way, but as if she might have been kind once.

“I…I’m looking for my mum, Caroline Archer. I’m her son…obviously.” Great, now even the mental patient thinks I’m an idiot. “You don’t know where her room is, do you?”

Voices in the corridor brought the ensuing silence to a premature end. Two people, three? Loud, confident, not patients. Coming closer. I glanced around for an escape route, the window, a door that might lead to a bathroom, the wardrobe…Closer still. No time. Rabbit in a trap. The door handle turning…

Too late for the bathroom—they’d hear the click of the door. I reached the window without the time to exit it. I dropped as the door started to open and rolled under the bed, which fortunately proved not to be a divan.

At the last moment I saw two loose sheets of paper on the floor between the bed and the wall beneath the window. I must have knocked them off the windowsill, and rather than have someone reach down to recover them, I snagged both.

Two people entered, a man and a woman, without a break in their conversation.

“—don’t expect to see the sister either,” the man said.

“Did you expect to see the boy?” the woman asked. That accent again, Lefevre.

“Mrs. Penrose,” the man boomed with manufactured good humor, as if whatever load she was laboring under might be sidestepped with an increase in volume and a fake smile. “How are we feeling today?”

“This is Director Smith, Lucy,” Mademoiselle Lefevre explained, in the same tone she might have used with the very youngest children at Hernden Primary School.

“Hello.” Again, the overloud director. I remembered the headmaster at my school had been a Mr. Smith, but it couldn’t be him. Smith was such a common surname. After all, the judge who had kept Sophie and me from our father’s custody had been a Smith—Mr. Justice Smith. And the founder of the Togetherness Trust too. Another Smith. “Sorry to intrude and all that, Mrs. Penrose. I just felt we needed to meet again. We met on the day you were brought here. Do you remember? No? Well, you were in quite a state. It was before our doctors were able to help you with all their pills and potions, eh?” He coughed. “Does she ever speak?”

“Not to me.” Mademoiselle Lefevre sniffed. “She thinks too highly of herself, this one.” The accent: too ighly, zis one.

Hiding under beds is never a good idea for people with allergies to house dust. Only an idiot would do that. The battle not to sneeze escalated from a tingle to an epic struggle in the blink of an eye. Whatever was being said above the bed was lost in my desperation. Sensing imminent defeat I rolled to my side, facing the window so that the sneeze would be directed away from them, as if that might help somehow, and so that my scramble to escape stood a better chance of success.

The drawing on the topmost of the two sheets of paper grabbed my attention with such ferocity that the sneeze evaporated. There, drawn in what might be eyeliner, was Rose. Not a girl like Rose. Not an older sister or younger version, but Rose as I had left her in that shop, minus the writing all across her skin. Not idealized or posed, but as if a photograph had in some manner become the drawing. And underneath the image, scored in angular letters as if they were runes carved into stone:

GOSH

Gosh? It seemed a strange, inappropriate word, too light, too old-fashioned, too out of place.

“—many failures, so very many.” The man again, Smith, attempting to sound sad. “But not your girl, oh no. We thought the good doctor had been overzealous with his knife, cut too deeply, left us with another discard. But it seems between you, mother and daughter, something miraculous happened.” He sighed theatrically. “And still she won’t speak. Still she won’t call to her child. Have I been misinformed about ‘mother’s love,’ mademoiselle? Is it less strong than I had been led to believe?”

“We could try the other one,” she answered. “The boy came for a reason.”

“The boy.” I’d been dismissed many times before that, but never so comprehensively and in just two words.

“It might be connected though…” She gained confidence. “Must be connected.”