The Book That Held Her Heart

Chapter 1

Anne

As a baby, Anne had taken her first ever steps among the aisles of what her grandfather called his library but was in fact a second-hand bookshop. It wasn't even his, since his mother, the Hoffman matriarch, was still alive, though you wouldn't know it to look at her. Anne had been told that Great-grandma Ruth was ninety-three, but she had seen, in one of the huge encyclopaedias that had to be lifted down for her, an engraving of an ancient queen embalmed with forgotten skill and preserved against the tide of nearly fifty centuries. Nana Ruth looked every bit as old as the queen amid her wrappings.

In any case, it was within these musty aisles that Anne had taken that first step, and later read her first word, which in retrospect had been a step of more significance, carrying her over an invisible threshold into a world much larger than that occupied by those who rarely choose to exercise their imagination.

As a toddler, and in fact until she was older than she was now prepared to admit, Anne had thought her grandfather's shop to be endless. She had believed that there would always be another corner to turn, another previously unknown aisle to discover, the shelves overfull, spine crowding spine, other books pushed in horizontally to rest atop their more orderly fellows.

She had of course, in the intervening years, discovered the rear wall and traced its entirety, which was unbroken but for a single door leading to a workshop where her father had once been employed repairing any book of sufficient rarity and value to deserve such attention. The shop stretched back much further than a casual visitor might imagine, but it most definitely had its limits. A fact that had simultaneously comforted and disappointed the young Anne, the balance between the two emotions varying across years as she grew older, or even from the morning of one day to the evening of the next.

At sixteen, she watched the shop when her grandfather's other business took him across town. Watching the shop mainly meant watching the door, since once a potential customer had disappeared among the shelves there was no telling where they might be. "Count them in. Count them out." This was her grandfather's instruction, written in a faded hand on yellowing paper pinned behind the till. The shop had to operate on an honour system since there was no way of knowing if someone were spiriting out a book under their jacket. Though if the person emerging from the aisles appeared considerably fatter than the one that entered, this was a pretty clear sign that they should be hoisted by the ankles and shaken until evidence of their crime presented itself.

Sadly, in Anne's view, no shaking took place, and any thefts went largely unnoticed amid the uncatalogued plenty of their stock. Replenishments for the books sold or stolen came largely from house sales where the occupant had died, and their descendants wanted easily divisible cash rather than awkward reminders of the lost relative. In the past, Grandfather had jokingly called himself and the others who converged on such properties "vultures." The unwanted furniture would go to Wagner or Fischer, the carpets and rugs to Hersch or maybe Wolf, and so on. Most often, Grandfather's offer on the books would be the best and he would return with his cart laden, a modest private library sheltering beneath the tarps.

But such joking had long since been abandoned, now that the townsfolk were stirred up against the tribe, and more than ready to throw the word as an allegation rather than the self-deprecating label originally intended. Anne had grown up with dirty looks and name-calling in the school playground. She'd become used to attending the birthdays only of the children who shared her temple. But more recently it would be a stone that was thrown at her rather than merely unpleasant words.

She tried to tell herself that it was because she'd grown into a bigger target, almost a woman now, but the Wagners' children came back from lessons crying or bruised or both often as not. Her grandfather said that evil men sought to use any difference to create fear, distrust, and hatred, all of which they would employ to advance their own position.

Anne had often wondered at the contrast between the way mankind divided its books and the way they divided themselves. For the former, they looked beneath the cover and considered what was written there, finding shelves for histories, for romances, for biographies, and for mysteries. For people, each far more complex than even the most profound of books, the cover often served. They saw her hair, the shape of her face, and they knew exactly how she fitted into their lives, regardless of her character. She was beneath them, unclean, an intruder into the town where her forebears had lived for many generations.


Anne sat at the counter, the mechanical crank-operated cash register hulking in front of her. They didn’t need a register of course. The customers came in twos and threes, or more generally these days in ones, with long, silent gaps in between. But Grandfather had inherited the register from one of his uncles’ shops and installed it with an owner’s pride, insisting that it made the place look modern and busy, even though the device was the best part of fifty years old, and the shop was largely deserted.

Despite the family's business being concerned primarily with old books, their takings run through an ancient register, it was the future that fascinated Anne's grandfather. His favourite topic of conversation was the pace of change. He would list the things that filled Anne's world, and which were wholly absent from his own childhood. It wasn't, he insisted, that he was jealous of the marvels she now had access to, be it mechanical adding machines or lights that burst into life at the flick of a switch, but that he envied her the next fifty years. If technology had delivered so much over the course of his own life and was still accelerating, what wonders were to come?

A familiar but unexpected noise startled Anne from her thoughts, tumbling the neglected book in her hands to the dusty floorboards. She stood up sharply from her stool. She'd been on edge lately-well, more than lately-her nerves tight-strung. A glance at the windows showed a gloomy, rainswept street, empty save for a lone figure in a raincoat, bent against the wind, quickly gone from view. The board that covered the hole from last week's half-brick rattled in the wind. The cracks spread beyond the board, catching whatever light escaped the clouds, glimmering, letting her know that the violence couldn't just be covered up, promising more.

Anne tore her eyes from the street. The noise had come from back among the aisles. It had been the sound of a book hitting the ground, much like the sound her own book had made a few seconds later. Count them in-count them out. She had done just that and knew herself to be alone. But still a book had fallen.

"Hello?" Her voice sounded small. She coughed and tried again. "Hello!"

Nothing. Just the peculiar silence of books. Fresh rain suddenly pattered against the window, spattering the legend Hoffman's Books, the painted letters offered to her in reverse. It seemed too dark for barely after noon, even for November. The electric lights struggled to fill the space. Two bulbs had blown earlier in the month, filling some of the aisles with sharply drawn shadows.

Another soft noise from the rear of the shop. Not a book falling, not this time. The scuff of a shoe perhaps? Anne lifted the divider and came out from behind the desk. She'd asked her grandfather why the shelves weren't arranged in long straight lines. A brief walk across the storefront would reveal any intruder were that the case. Instead, the arrangement was closer to labyrinth than linear.

"Mystery!" had been the old man's answer. People want to get lost in a book, he said. Let them get lost in the act of finding one too. Add some wonder and excitement to that part of the process in order to remind them why they should part with both their coin and their time. Choosing a book should be a private business, conducted in the secrecy of the aisles, not on display for strangers' judgement.

Anne currently had very specific views on the value of mystery. She was against it. "Come out!"

The sudden jangle of the bell above the street door made her jump. She spun towards the entrance, feeling almost guilty, as if caught doing something she shouldn't have been.

A policeman stood there, rainwater dripping from his shoulder wrap and beading on the gleaming leather bill of his cap. He pushed the door closed with his heel, the bell's jangling intensifying again.

For a long moment he stood, taking in the store with a sliding gaze that slipped across Anne as if she were of no more interest than the furnishings.

"Can I help you, sir?" Anne didn't recognise the man. He was young, tall, clean-shaven. But for the close-set meanness of his eyes he might be handsome were he to smile. The shop's infrequent visits from the law usually came in the rather portly form of Officer Muller who would pop in every now and then on sunny days. Or used to. Anne hadn't seen him for maybe two years now. Grandfather said the man's superiors hadn't approved of his fraternising.

This new officer clearly hadn't come to chat, and his silence unnerved Anne. "Have you come about the window?"

The question made the man sneer. "If a broken window is the limit of your trouble, you will have done very well."

"It's against the law to-"

"The law is made to serve the people. And the people don't want your kind here." The officer snapped at her as if she were a child in class. He wouldn't use that tone if her grandfather was here, Anne was sure. Though it was her grandfather who had told her never to talk back to a policeman. He'd given her a lot of instructions lately. Stay behind the counter. Don't argue with customers. Don't leave the shop.

"Where is your father?" Cold blue eyes fixed her.

"He's dead, sir." Anne remembered that her grandfather had also told her to be scrupulously polite. "My grandfather runs the shop."

"And where is he?"

"Out on business, sir."

"Business . . ." The officer removed his cap. He had a blunt head, his fair hair cropped short. "With your sort that means stealing." He advanced on her, an unreadable malice in his stare.

Anne stood paralysed by indecision. She wanted to run for the security of the counter, however illusory that might be. But running from a policeman in her own shop would be silly. But then again, whatever his uniform promised, she could see that the man meant to hurt her in some manner.

"How long do you think you can last here?" His head tilted with the question, a smile edging thin lips. "They piled the books higher than a man in Babelplatz and burned them all. Degenerate filth!" His eyes swept the shelves, perhaps imagining a similar blaze here.

Anne cringed as the man loomed above her, standing far closer than a stranger should. He raised a gloved hand towards her face, and, hating herself for flinching before him, Anne found herself filled with a strong instinct to bite the reaching fingers. Instead, she turned her head away as he touched her hair.

"How old are-" His voice fell to nothing, and he took a sharp step backwards.

Anne turned in the direction of his stare, and also took a step away. The figure emerging from the aisles was both impossibly tall and somehow alien, as if perhaps a lion had taken to its hind legs and come in search of a good read. She blinked and saw that her eyes had deceived her. The man was merely outrageously tall, so tall that she shouldn't have been able to miss him among the bookshelves, but not so tall as to defy reason. And the mane was merely an unruly expanse of darkly curling hair falling to his shoulders.

"Is there a problem?" The stranger's voice rumbled out so deep that at first it seemed as if he were speaking a different language, but a moment later Anne's mind rotated the sounds into something that made sense.

"You're so tall!" Anne hadn't meant to say anything so stupid. The words had just fallen out of her open mouth. She belatedly remembered to close it. She opened it again. "I'm so sorry. You surprised me. Us." She glanced towards the policeman.

The officer had retreated another step, his amazement equal to hers. Now, realising himself the subject of scrutiny, he drew himself up to his full height, scowling. "Who are you? A gypsy?" Contempt shivered through his words. "Is the circus in town?"

The tall man's clothes certainly had an odd look to them, a patched leather waistcoat with metal buckles, trousers seemingly made the same way. He looked young but something gave his face a peculiar gravitas, as if a king in rags had stepped among them.

The stranger advanced and the policeman retreated, running out of places to go. "You seem angry, my friend."

"Who the hell-" The officer shook his head. "Papers! Show me your papers!"

The tall man made a strange crooning noise, dipping his shoulder in an odd manner. Anne, fascinated, couldn't take her eyes from him. He set an overlarge hand to the policeman's arm, just above the elbow. "Come."

Astonishingly, the policeman let himself be drawn away to the far side of the shop, the other man, head and shoulders above him, like a father leading an errant son. He kept talking the whole time, his voice so low and deep that Anne couldn't separate the words.

Freed from the stranger's hypnotic presence Anne glanced away towards the street, wishing her grandfather would come. For a moment she thought she saw him, ghostly through the rain, only to realise with a start that she was seeing the reflection of someone behind her.

She spun around to find that a second stranger had emerged from the aisles, this one short enough that she could believe him to have passed among them unseen. In his way, this other man was no less strange than the first. What she'd mis-seen as a charcoal grey robe was in fact a sensible business suit of the same colour. The dark grey only served to accentuate the unhealthy whiteness of his skin. Anne had read about the condition but had never seen someone who suffered from it.