Love Like the Dickens: A Heartswell Harbour Romance

by Mavis Williams

  “Shenanigans?” Paisley snorted. “Move out of the 1800s, Nora. I think it was excellent, Agnes. It shook everyone up and Dad definitely enjoyed himself.” Paisley looked sideways at her sister and rolled her eyes at Agnes. Nora raised an eyebrow, obviously used to her sister’s flights of fancy.

  “Is the apartment to your liking?” Nora asked. “Have you found everything you need?”

  Agnes fought to keep from glancing at the blanket and pillow on the counter. All she was missing was a lock-pick for the Book Nook back door, but she didn’t think it was the right time to ask for one.

  “Yes, thank you.” She pulled out a chair for Nora. “Please sit. When are you due?”

  Judging by the stern eyeball she received from Nora it was not a welcome question. “Not soon enough,” she muttered, lowering herself to the chair with an awkward slide.

  “Do you have kids, Agnes?” Paisley asked.

  “Me? Oh no, I don’t have anything. I mean, I don’t have anyone,” she stuttered. “I’m single, in every way.”

  “Me too.” Paisley smiled. “Nora’s got a husband, but she mostly doesn’t want him.”

  “Oh.” Agnes tugged on the edge of her apron. This was too much information.

  “Thanks, Paisley, for once again airing my personal life to strangers,” Nora said dryly. “My husband is an asshole, Agnes. You wouldn’t want him either.”

  “But you’re—” Agnes gestured weakly at the mound of Nora’s belly.

  “I sure am,” she agreed. There was a pause as they all considered the evidence. Nora grunted, running her hands over her pregnant stomach. “We just wanted to check in and make sure you were settled. I already have your deposit, so you can pay your rent on Fridays from now until the end of December.”

  ‘Um, yeah, about that.” Agnes turned to Paisley, uncertain how to approach Nora’s no-nonsense severity. “Since I didn’t get the part in the play, I won’t need to stay. I know it’s an inconvenience to you, but I was thinking—”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t get the part?” Paisley asked. “Mrs. Crawley was rabid after you left. She wants you to be the Ghost of Christmas Past. She said something about your stage presence and ‘ethereal physicality’.”

  “Ethereal physicality?” Agnes repeated.

  “Ethereal physicality,” Paisley nodded, grinning like the Ghost of Christmas Every Single Day.

  “But I can’t,” Agnes said. Savannah’s bucket list swam before her eyes like a talisman. “I tried, and I couldn’t do it, and now I can move on.” She spoke more to herself than to the women in the kitchen. Or maybe she was speaking to Savannah.

  “Of course, you can.” Nora rose awkwardly to her feet and turned toward the door. “Anyone with ‘ethereal physicality’ like yours should jump at the chance. I’m helping with costumes, so I’ll make you look suitably celestial.”

  Agnes swallowed hard. The elation of an hour ago deflated rapidly.

  There was a knock at the door and all three women jumped.

  It was the pizza.

  Paisley looked at her quizzically as Agnes paid the delivery boy and closed the door behind him. She shoved the pizza box on the table.

  “You look like you’re ready to cook supper.” Paisley gestured at the apron. “And then go camping.”

  “Oh, no. I just. Have plans. Tonight. Um.” She tried to smile.

  Nora tugged on Paisley’s sleeve. “Let’s go. The smell of pizza makes me nauseous.”

  “I’m sure Mrs. Crawley will be in touch, Agnes. Don’t tell her I told you, she’ll have fits if she thinks anyone scooped her on the cast list.”

  “Did your father get a part?” Agnes asked, standing at the top of the stairs as the two sisters descended.

  “He’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, even though he definitely does not want to be.” Paisley grinned up at her. Agnes got the feeling that Paisley grinned at everything. “So you might get a chance to kiss him again, after all.”

  Agnes heard Nora grunt, and she was pretty certain it had nothing to do with the size of her belly.

  Four

  Oscar had hoped to slip into the Book Nook without having to speak to anyone first thing on Sunday morning. He was always up before the sun, walking his usual route around Heartswell before the bustle of the town intruded on the peaceful sound of waves and seabirds. Even in November, with a sharp breeze cutting off the water, he enjoyed his morning constitutional more than any other moment of his day.

  “Belinda, what a surprise,” he said to the bundled form of a woman as she approached him on the boardwalk. “It’s a breezy morning for you to be out.”

  Belinda squinted at him from behind thick glasses, her grey curls poking out in a halo from under a woolly toque. “Couldn’t sleep last night, Oscar.” She spoke quickly, her words fogging in the air between them. “Simply could not find rest. Gave up about an hour ago and decided that fresh air was the best remedy.”

  “It often is.” He agreed, moving past her with a nod and every intention of continuing with his day. It was not to be. Belinda turned around and trotted behind him, chattering in short bursts as she panted to keep up with him.

  “I’m simply stirred up, as I said.” She puffed at his elbow and he sighed as he forced himself to slow to her pace. He looked down, smiling at the pompom bouncing merrily on the top of her toque. “It’s my cousin, Oscar. My cousin is a wonderful woman, as you know, and I must force myself to remember that. Force myself, I say.”

  Belinda and Irenia Crawley were cousins, rivals, best friends and often the bane of his existence. It was too early in the day to contemplate the wonderfulness of Mrs. Crawley, if such a thing were even possible.

  “What’s she done now, Belinda?” he asked, giving up his hope of solitude. The best thing now was just to weather the storm of the older woman’s tempest. Hopefully he could deliver her safely to her door and continue with his quiet contemplations. Quiet contemplations were his forte. Counselling geriatric family matters was not.

  “I don’t want to burden you.” She grasped his elbow to slow him down further. “She’s simply—overstepping, if I may.”

  “Overstepping like a freight train, no doubt.” He tucked her hand into his elbow to shield her from the sharpest of the gusts of wind.

  “I see you have met my cousin.” Belinda blinked up at him, a girlish grin lighting her face.

  “She has run me over on several occasions, yes.”

  Belinda tittered, hugging his arm. “Mr. Lake,” she said in mock consternation. “We mustn’t speak poorly of our very own Irenia. She is a champion of Heartswell, and a doer of good.”

  “In spite of the overstepping?”

  “It’s the play!” Belinda squealed, veering directly back to her original pique. “I drew up the cast list. I am the producer, after all. And she changed it. Changed it, I say. Without regard for my input whatsoever.”

  Oscar directed them across the road in front of the Book Nook. He looked longingly at the darkened windows, knowing how peaceful and calming it would be to light a fire in the shop’s little hearth and simply sit and read for the morning.

  “Is that not the Director’s prerogative, Belinda?”

  Belinda made a snorting sound that caused a billow of frosted breath to rise like the bellows of a dragon.

  “This is not Broadway, Oscar. As I did not hesitate to inform Irenia when she began to go off about theatrical movability and such nonsense.”

  “Belinda, would you like to have a cup of tea in the shop?” He released her arm and dug in his pocket for the key. “I will happily indulge you if you promise me a half hour of uninterrupted reading by the fire.”

  “As the producer, I simply feel that I should have a voice.”

  He put the key in the lock, pausing to lean down closer to her. Her eyes were bright little berries in the kind of face that delighted children and old men. Oscar decided he was an old man, because in spite of his yearning for solitude on this grey November morning, he
was delighted with her.

  “Uninterrupted, Ms. Crawley,” he repeated. “Do we understand each other?”

  Belinda sniffed, then smiled, the corners of her mouth appearing above the scarf she had wrapped around her neck. “You always were a quiet man, Mr. Lake,” she said. “Irenia could take lessons from you. I would love a tea and a read, thank you kindly.”

  He nodded and unlocked the shop door, the tinkle of the bell jingling merrily in the crisp morning air as held the door open for her.

  “Oh lovely.” Belinda sighed as she unwound her scarf and pulled off her toque, her grey curls snapping with static like an annoyed dandelion. “You’ve already been and lit the fire.”

  Oscar turned from the door with a frown. He moved several steps into the warmth of the shop where he could see the small hearth in a tiny alcove beyond the children’s section. The fire was indeed lit and crackling with a merry warmth, casting a rosy glow on the armchairs that framed the hearth.

  “Oh my.” Belinda gasped, grabbing his arm. “What on earth is that?”

  She pointed toward one of the armchairs that seemed to be draped in a mountain of blankets that shifted ominously as they approached, as if a bear were hibernating beneath them. Oscar pulled Belinda behind him with one hand, still holding the keys in the other. He had never had a break-in before.

  He’d also never heard of a break-in where the perpetrator lit the fire and snuggled like a sleeping beast in an armchair, waiting to be captured.

  He cleared his throat loudly.

  The mountain of blankets shifted again, and a tousled head began to emerge.

  “Oh,” the head said, rising higher to reveal wide green eyes and full lips and a tangled tumble of hair that shone like ebony in the firelight. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice rough from sleep.

  Oscar paused. Memories of a warm mouth and a soft body leaning into his arms flooded his senses and he had to take a moment to indeed ask himself what he was doing there, in his own shop, at the crack of dawn with an intruder who he wanted very badly to kiss.

  “My shop,” he managed to say. Belinda poked him in the back as if to wake him from a dream. He cleared his throat. “You must excuse me— Agnes, is it not? But I believe I should be the one asking questions at this point.”

  ∞∞∞

  This was awkward. Agnes pulled the blanket up to her chin, her legs curled under her in the big armchair by the fire where she had slept well past the hour she’d intended. It was too late now to scuttle back upstairs without anyone ever knowing she had broken in to a bookshop in the middle of the night, having shoved open a narrow window at the back of the building and shimmied her way in.

  She had sore ribs and a tear in her yoga pants as proof.

  She didn’t think the tall bearded man in front of her would be impressed with her gymnastic talents.

  She had tried to pick the lock, but it turned out that her training as a librarian was an education lacking in burglary techniques. All she managed to accomplish was to knock over a pile of books in the storeroom, losing her lock-picking needle in the process. She’d tried her credit card, sliding it up and down the crack in the door like they do in the movies, until she shoved it too far and it disappeared on the other side of the locked door.

  That had sent her into hysterics, realizing she had just left incontrovertible proof that she had stormed the castle. What kind of burglar leaves their credit card behind? She wasn’t sure when she had crossed over, in her mind, from mere trespasser to burglar but she managed to convince herself that the punishment for either was most likely life in prison.

  She had left her pizza box and pile of blankets outside the locked door and scooted out into the back alley behind the Book Nook, looking for other means of ingress. It was freezing out, almost midnight and the howling wind off the water cut through her black ninja clothes straight to her cold, cold heart.

  Criminals were famous for their cold hearts.

  She had read Crime and Punishment. She knew.

  The window was above a small ledge, and the screen was ripped and flapping in the wind. She had hauled herself onto the ledge, using an old bench as a stepping ladder. The shingles on the small section of roof were damp and bits of gravel dug fiercely into her knees and palms as she crawled toward the window. She tugged on the broken screen. She found a sliver of wood lying on the roof, and she used it as a lever under the edge of the ancient window pane.

  She made a mental note to mention the state of the windowpane rot to Nora in the morning. They really should know, to prevent future break-ins.

  She didn’t, at that moment, think about how she would explain her knowledge that the back window of the Book Nook, eight feet off the ground and reachable only by alpine exertions, was soggy enough that she was able to shimmy the window until it popped open on rusted hinges. She was just relieved that it opened without breaking the glass.

  Without wondering what she would find on the other side of the window, and without actually considering the best manner of entry, Agnes Evans, librarian and newly minted cat-burglar, climbed head-first into the beckoning portal, shivering wildly from the chill November breeze that practically blew her into the back room of the Book Nook.

  She broke her fall with both hands, hurting her wrist and scraping her ribs on the windowpane on the way down. She landed, grunted, rolled onto her back and smiled up at the dark and brooding shelves of books surrounding her.

  After closing the window, retrieving her credit card and the pizza, she’d dragged her blankets into the Book Nook, delighted by the smell of books, leather and old memories that were her favorite aromas in the world.

  The shelves of books stood sentinel in the shadowed darkness of the shop. She ran her fingers along their spines, breathing in a delicious sense of mischief she had never felt before.

  She had broken into a book shop.

  Alone.

  Without Savannah’s help or guidance, even if the impetus had been Savannah’s bucket list. Agnes had acted, Agnes had swallowed her fear and Agnes felt like a hardened criminal mastermind.

  She chewed on a piece of pizza as she strolled the shelves, swaggering a little in her success. It was cold, though. Really quite cold. She tried to snuggle under the blankets in the children’s section on the big bean bags lining the wall, but the chill she had brought in from the cold November night was in her bones and no amount of shivering and burrowing would rid it. She dragged her bedding around the shop until she found the fireplace, tucked in the back with two enormous armchairs on either side.

  Do intruders light cosy fires with the neatly chopped wood readily provided beside the hearth?

  They do now.

  With the small fire crackling merrily—she was quite pleased to use the pizza box to start the blaze, feeling that leaving any refuse behind would be a bit much—she’d bundled into her big blankets, suddenly weary from her exertions, and she fell asleep.

  She had intended to wake up well before dawn.

  But here was dawn, and here, in front of her with his beard and his questioning eyes and his ridiculously long arms was the man she had kissed the day before.

  The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

  Five

  “My first question,” Oscar said, when Agnes did not immediately explain her presence in his armchair, by his fire, in his place of business. “Is… would you care for a cup of tea?”

  Belinda chirped from behind him and he remembered that he had brought her in with him, toque and all, and now he was faced with a bewildered burglar and an extremely curious member of the Heartswell Association of Women who Care when all he had wanted at this ridiculously early hour of the morning was to read, uninterrupted, until at least noon.

  In the face of adversity, there was always tea.

  “I think you should probably call the police, Oscar, don’t you?” Belinda peered around his elbow, squinting at Agnes as if she expected her to try to make a break for it. “This is highly unusual, d
on’t you think? She could have burnt the place down, for goodness sake.”

  “Oh, I’m a Girl Guide.” Agnes sat up in her blankets, looking like she’d just woken up from a slumber party.

  “Are you?” Oscar gently removed Belinda’s hand from clutching his elbow and steered her toward the other armchair where she perched, eyeing Agnes suspiciously as if looking for badges and a sash.

  “Well, I used to be, I mean, I’m a grown up now of course, but a good Girl Guide never forgets how to build a fire or how to make a bivouac.” She gestured at her blankets proudly. A half-eaten slice of pizza slid from the folds of the blankets onto the floor.

  “Miss—” Belinda began, leaning forward with her hands clenched on her knees. “What is your name? I recognize you from the auditions and certainly I remember you from the unfortunate display of passionate excess you enacted upon our poor Mr. Lake here.” She nodded at Oscar who tried very hard not to blush. He wasn’t used to blushing or passionate excess. It was all very distracting. “But I do not recall your name, or where you are from, or what your purpose is here in our small hamlet of Heartswell, although I begin to fear you have questionable intentions if this is how you present yourself to polite company.”

  Oscar sighed.

  “I’m sure that Miss… um… Agnes, has a perfectly reasonable explanation—”

  “It’s Evans. Agnes Evans. I can explain.” She interrupted him, looking like she might be on the verge of tears. If there was anything Oscar wanted to avoid more than conversation on a Sunday morning, it was tears from a beautiful woman. “I’m renting the Airbnb upstairs, and my sister died recently, and I’m trying to—it was cancer and—”

  He took a step forward as she paused to compose herself. He stopped himself from scooping her into his arms, opting instead to pick up the lonely piece of pizza and tossing it into the fire.

  He straightened and looked down at the dark-haired Girl Guide sniffling in his favorite Sunday morning reading chair. He glanced at Belinda who had her fingers to her lips, also looking like she might burst into tears at any moment.