The Bookseller's Secret

by Michelle Gable

  “I’m glad all three restaurants we tried were full,” Cecil said, and poured himself more wine. “This is better—it’s like a vaguely bawdy midnight salon.”

  “Aw, Cecil,” Nancy said. “Always the right thing to say, at the right time.”

  “I’m serious. Here we are, in the middle of the war. Everything is bleak and grim, but you’ve turned this hodgepodge bookshop into a very gay place.”

  “Please come by more often,” Nancy said. “You’d balance out all the malcontents.”

  “Enough niceties,” Lord Berners said. “Let’s get back to the gossip. What are the Mitford girls up to?”

  Nancy sighed, her brief high spirits now dashed. “Nothing to report,” she said. “Everyone’s still tilling the fields of their same old misdeeds.” She thought, and not for the first time, that if Farve had bothered to set aside funds to educate his clutch of very smart girls, maybe they wouldn’t have been so predisposed to extreme political views and mustachioed madmen.

  “Your sister told me she’s pregnant,” Hellbags said, and Nancy whipped in her direction. “She seems very excited!”

  “Sister?” Nancy blinked. “Which one?” Despite the dark, Nancy could discern the befuddlement on Helen’s face. Debo and Decca were the two Mitfords who might qualify, but Decca was in California, which left only one. Hellbags was like an older sister to Debo, a better one than Nancy had been. She’d even put up funds for Debo’s wedding dress, after Farve refused. “Debo?” Nancy said, feeling choked. “She’s pregnant, again?”

  “Gosh, Nancy,” Hellbags said. “I didn’t mean to spoil the surprise. I’m sure she would’ve told you, had I not guessed. Poor thing is having a helluva time. She’s so sick. Plus, knowing what happened with Mark...” Helen froze. “Oh, no. Nancy, I’m so sorry.”

  “You don’t need to keep apologizing,” Nancy said.

  “She lost Mark, and you...” Hellbags fanned her face “I’m so sorry! I should’ve been more sensitive. I know how devastating it was. You were staying at my house!”

  “How devastating what was?” Cecil asked.

  “Nothing! Old news!” Nancy said. “I’ll pour everyone the last of the wine, but then we should lock up. It’s late and I don’t like to leave the Colonel waiting. You know that old wolf, he’ll just find someone newer and better to ‘drive home.’”

  * * *

  Later that night, Nancy lay awake in bed, staring into the blackness. When the Colonel flipped over, she braced herself for his snuffles and snores, but the room stayed as quiet as it was dark.

  Nancy wasn’t startled by Debo’s news. In some ways, she’d been waiting for it all along. Her sister was only twenty-two years old, and it’d been a full year since the stillbirth of her first child, a son she’d named Mark. At the time, Nancy was at West Wycombe recovering from her own tragedy. The sisters had timing in common, but their losses were different, and Debo had the chance to move on from hers.

  Nancy glanced over at the Colonel. She detected the fluttering of his eyes.

  “Yes, darling?” the Colonel said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I cannot have a child,” Nancy blurted. “I know you haven’t asked me to bear you any. Imagine! But you should know I’m strictly barren, and not merely because I’m one hundred years old.”

  The Colonel inched closer and burrowed into her side. “You are not so old,” he said.

  “Well, I’m younger than you are,” she said. “Which is a very low bar!”

  “You are also in your thirties,” he pointed out. “The same cannot be said for me. What is this about, Non-cee? Are you worried about the Titanic?”

  “The Titanic? What?” Suddenly, Nancy remembered. “Well, yes. Figuratively speaking. This old body’s hit an iceberg and is now dry docked. I had surgery a year ago,” she said, fiddling with a stray ribbon from her nightdress. “I’d suffered many miscarriages before but, this time, the little bugger implanted himself into one of my tubes. A fine mess!”

  Nancy squeezed her eyes shut and was at once hurtled back to that horrible day last November, when she was staying with friends in Oxfordshire. At first, she mistook the pain for indigestion—Billa Harrod was a miserable cook—but she was soon dizzy, almost blind in agony. After muttering something about appendicitis, Nancy packed her bags. She hoofed it to the bus station and, upon arriving in London, proceeded directly to University College Hospital, and into emergency surgery. Nancy begged her doctor to spare her the second tube, but he wiped her clean out.

  “Muv was shocked to learn of my gynecological demise,” Nancy told the Colonel. “She had no idea that two ovaries were all anyone had. She envisioned hundreds, packed in like caviar. Stands to reason, I suppose, given how many children she produced.”

  While Nancy was in hospital, she spoke to her mother several times on the phone, but Lady Redesdale never came to visit, not a single time. Debo was recuperating from Mark’s stillbirth, and Muv thought she needed the company more. Nancy was tougher, she reasoned, and her pregnancy had not been as far along.

  “Come to me instead,” Hellbags said, when Nancy blubbered down the line. “I’ll nurse you back to health.”

  West Wycombe proved the solution, in the end.

  “My little silkworm,” the Colonel said, when Nancy unspooled her tale. He stroked her arm. “It is awful you were punished in this way.”

  “A punishment. What a stunningly accurate description.”

  “Was your husband very sad?”

  “Peter? Lord, no. He didn’t ring me once while I was in hospital,” Nancy said. “Or at West Wycombe, or since. The surgeon told my mother-in-law that my condition was grave, and I’d be in danger for three days, but Lady Rennell didn’t bother to call or stop past, or even send a bloom!”

  “Ah. So this is why you were so upset you have not heard from this tedious man.”

  Nancy pressed her lips together to think. “Maybe,” she said. “With Prod, it’s impossible to know what’s most bothersome at any given moment. It’s probably for the best. I’m sure I was carrying a boy, and two Peter Rodds in one household is unthinkable.”

  “Absolutely horrible,” the Colonel said, and kissed Nancy’s shoulder. “If a man doesn’t have the decency to care for his wife, he could at a minimum muster the sympathy for his unborn child.”

  Nancy opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say. Technically, the child was not Peter’s, but Captain André Roy’s. For the first time, Nancy wondered if Prod somehow knew. He was good with sums, and it would explain his long silence.

  “Sympathy for his unborn child,” Nancy said, and forced a laugh. “You really are a terrific Catholic.”

  “Enough of Peter Rodd!” the Colonel said. “Quick! I need a story to lift my mood. Something from your childhood. I command it!”

  Nancy held her breath, as if trying to suffocate the frightening recollections swimming in her head. “All right, dear Colonel,” she said with a long exhale. “What will it be this time? The secret Hon Society? Our beloved Asthall, with its nursery overlooking a graveyard?”

  “Au cimetière? No!”

  “Oui.” Nancy grinned at the memory. “We weren’t supposed to spy on the funerals but couldn’t help ourselves. People seemed to be dying all the time, and I was always getting scolded for pushing my sisters into open graves.”

  “Non-cee!” the Colonel cried. “No! This is too much! Even for you!”

  “They didn’t mind,” Nancy assured him. “It was all a big tease.”

  “I pray you will take me to this Asthall one day.”

  “Sadly, I can’t,” Nancy said, and shook her head. “We moved out ages ago, into woeful Swinbrook, which Farve designed and built from the ground up.”

  The gray, blocky manor possessed all the charm of an institution, especially compared to Asthall’s weathered, lichen-covered stone. It was a pitiful de
cline in accommodation, and they’d been depressed to move.

  “I called it Swine-brook,” Nancy told the Colonel. “It was enormous, and cold, and no fires were allowed upstairs. Our sponges and facecloths were frozen solid, all winter long, and the Hons met in the linen cupboard because it was the only warm spot in the house. Poor Farve. He did feel terribly that we all despised the place. He sold it a while back, to pay off his debts.”

  “I did not know your Farve had a sympathetic side,” the Colonel said. “I thought he only ever screamed and threw things.”

  “Farve’s bark is worse than his bite,” Nancy said. “He’s tall and ghastly, yes, but was always ready to ride out with us, or play games. Fat chance getting that level of attention from Muv.”

  “Tell me, Non-cee, what would this barking, biting father think of me?”

  Nancy snorted. “Farve would not fancy you at all. First things first, he’d jot your name in the book of people he doesn’t like, alongside every other person I’ve ever brought into the house.”

  Farve loathed all of Nancy’s friends, in particular the effeminate men who roared up in noisy, open sports cars and spent weekends lounging about in loud Fair Isle sweaters, stinking up the house with their violet hair cream. Farve called Nancy’s friends “sewers,” and Tom’s were “Fat Friars,” but the insults and disparaging remarks went on and on.

  “Lord Redesdale believes in country, king, and guns,” Nancy said. “He’s patriotic and abhors foreigners, so you wouldn’t stand a chance. He does view Frogs as slightly better than Wops, who are preferable to Huns, but he doesn’t like anything that smacks of the abroad. Of course, he also hates bankers, aesthetes, and Roman Catholics. He cannot be satisfied.”

  The Colonel chuckled from deep in his belly. “I love this all so much,” he said.

  “Enough about Farve,” Nancy said. “Enough about me. I believe it’s your turn. You’ve hardly told me anything about your mysterious former fiancée.”

  “About her, I’ve revealed everything of importance.”

  “You’ve told me almost nothing!” Nancy said. Though she tried to remain unbothered, Nancy often found herself weighing the likelihood that the Colonel had a wife squirreled away in some Parisian flat. Then again, he’d joined the Free French openly, and under his own name. If there was a wife, or anything else in his home, the Germans would’ve taken it ages ago. “The only thing I know about the fiancée,” Nancy said, “is that she’s deceased.”

  “Tragic,” the Colonel said. “There’s not much to say. You know my rule. Never discuss someone else with a person who’s never met them.”

  “You really are incorrigible,” Nancy said, and sighed. “One day, you’ll tell me everything.”

  “Perhaps, my little silkworm.” He kissed her head. “Perhaps.”

  The Colonel turned onto his back and a hush fell over the room. As his breathing grew heavy, and sleep felt near, Nancy spoke one last time. “Do you mind?” she said. “That I can’t have children? Surely you must want them someday.”

  “Oh, Non-cee,” he said with one of his deep, weighted sighs. “You must know I don’t care about children, or my family name. You are worth far more to me than that.”

  Thursday Afternoon

  G. Heywood Hill Ltd.

  “Shoot,” Katie says. “Felix told me he’d be in Essex, but I’d totally forgotten. I’m sorry for bothering you!”

  “It’s no bother at all,” says Erin, Felix’s right hand in the shop. “He and Zoë left midday. They should be back in...an hour, maybe? Is there anything I can do?”

  “No, that’s all right,” Katie says, but quickly reconsiders. She can’t afford to blow an entire afternoon. “Actually,” she says, with a meek smile, “there is something, but only if you have the time! I don’t want to get in the way.”

  “You’re not in the way at all,” Erin says and smiles back, though hers is brighter, infinitely more assured. “Books and customers—that’s why we’re here! Is this about Nancy Mitford? Felix mentioned you were writing a novel about her?”

  “I’m not writing anything yet,” Katie says. “But Felix was letting me dig through some of Nancy’s files in the storage room? I ran out of time the other day and never made it to the bottom drawer. Think I might be able to have a peek?”

  As she speaks, Katie’s heart sprints, and she is shocked by her own sneakiness. Maybe all criminals start this way, with one slightly shady act. What might she get up to next?

  “Not a problem,” Erin says, and scrambles around the sales counter. “Let me grab the keys.”

  She ducks behind Andrew, the reedy bookshop manager, and Katie tells him, “Hello.” He responds with a nod, and a confused and crumpled brow.

  Erin reappears, rattling the keys overhead. “Ta-da!” she says, and motions for Katie to follow. “What are you going to write about?” she asks, as they make their way down the hall. “Nancy’s time at the shop?”

  “That’s the idea,” Katie says. “Though, admittedly, I’m feeling stuck. About Nancy Mitford, there’s just so much to know.”

  “If only there was a lost manuscript to help,” Erin says with a wink.

  “Ha! If only!” Katie is afraid to say more, nervous about on whose toes she might tread.

  “Seriously, though,” Erin says. “How fit is that Simon bloke?”

  “Uhhh, yeahhh... He’s pretty cute.”

  “Pretty cute?” Erin says. “Wow. High standards. Good on you. He might be half bonkers, but I don’t even mind. He’s welcome to hang ’round here all he wants. Another imaginary document, you say? Why, yes, sir, I will look for it. I’ll look all day long.”

  Katie blinks. “Wait. So you don’t think there’s a manuscript?”

  Erin shrugs and turns on the storeroom light. “Probably not, if nobody’s found it yet. Then again, I doubt every stone’s been unturned, and things tend to go missing around here.” She slides a key into the drawer.

  “Missing?” Katie says. “What do you mean?”

  “Books, mostly, by certain authors, usually the contemporaries of a certain former bookseller.” Erin looks up at Katie and winks. “For instance, books by Evelyn Waugh routinely fall out of their shelves, and twice we’ve had Angela Thirkell novels straight disappear. Felix always chalks it up to an inventory problem, or general clumsiness, but the rest of us are convinced it’s Nancy’s ghost.”

  “Really?” Katie says, and the room temperature seems to plummet. “Well, unlike Felix, I do believe in ghosts, so please let me know if you see any around. As much as I love Nancy Mitford, I’m not sure I’d want her watching me.” Katie sets down her bag.

  “I dunno. Might be fun to be on the receiving end of one of her barbs.” Erin yanks open the drawer. “Let’s see... Yep, just as I remembered,” she says, and Katie cranes to look. Erin removes a folder about three inches thick and pulls off the rubber band. “These are letters Nancy wrote to her friend Lady Dashwood. Her estate donated them to us, in honor of the nighttime salons she attended in this shop during the war.”

  Erin extends the folder toward Katie, whose hands are now trembling. “Lady Dashwood?” Katie repeats. It takes her a second to piece it together. “Hellbags?”

  “That’s our girl. Funny.” Erin looks down, and Katie’s gaze follows. “I thought there was more in there.” The drawer is now empty save a few loose rubber bands and paper clips. “I told you things go missing,” she says.

  Katie opens the folder and riffles through the letters, which are not in any particular order. She pauses to read, with Erin peering over her shoulder.

  22 December 1942

  Dear Hellbags,

  Why do you insist on spending the holidays at West Wycombe? I can’t imagine Johnny is much good for Christmas cheer. How I miss you at our salons, and indeed in my home!

  The shop is madness right now, and everyone is acti
ng like a raving lunatic. Books are flying off the shelves, and customers are stomping about, accusing Heywood of hiding books, or selling them to social enemies. More than a few have resorted to plucking new releases from the front window, or tearing open boxes left at the door! Anne is a beast four times over, and sometimes I dream of reporting her for treasonous activities, just so somebody will contain her. Don’t worry—I’d never stoop to such depths!

  I do wish my autobiography was shelved beside the others. Anyone who has a book out right now is making a small fortune. Of course, I have to finish the damned thing first! I’ve been plugging and plodding—a few dozen pages so far. Though I’ve hinted at it, I’m thinking of asking Lea Toporek more directly to assist. Tell me, what do you think of this plan?

  Now for the good news: Heywood is letting me take off two weeks after Christmas to work on my book! Hester Griffin is here for the holiday rush, and she’ll stay on until I return. Do you know Hester? She’s a friend of Anne’s—ordinarily a real mousy type, but now that she has a book due out in the spring, she’s developed one of those tiresome chipper personalities. It’s the absolute worst. Oh, Hellbags, I am dying for a break. The Colonel and I are talking about spending the hol with Debo, up at The Rookery. Derbyshire is supposed to be splendid this time of year. A perfect place to write a book.

  More later.

  Love from

  Nancy

  “Pretty cool, innit?” Erin says.

  “Extremely,” Katie says. She is light-headed, tipsy on the notion that Nancy’s friends might have something to add.

  “Wow, would you look at that,” Erin says. “She references the memoir!”

  “And writing it with someone else.” Katie looks back at Erin. “Do you know anything about Lea Toporek?”

  Before Erin can answer, they’re interrupted by a series of footsteps, followed by a throat clearing and a scowl so intense it emanates from across the room.

  “What is going on in here?”

  “Hi, Felix!” Erin chirps. “You’re back early!”