by Hazel Gaynor
OLIVIA WOKE THE next morning, groggy, as if she’d hardly slept at all. Stepping out of bed, she paused. On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow.
Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: “Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also said to be favored by fairy folk. Meanings associated with it include money, protection, sleep, prophetic dreams, and beloved daughter.” She placed the yellow bloom in the coffee cup vase with the others. Henry Blake must have been right. The cat must be bringing them in. There wasn’t any other rational explanation.
Unsettled by her dreams and the unusual flower, Olivia couldn’t get back to sleep. She made coffee and sat in the window seat, watching the sunrise and wishing more than ever that Pappy was beside her, reminding her that nothing had happened yet today, and that everything was possible.
Ten
Ireland. Present day.
It was five weeks since Pappy’s funeral, four since Olivia had watched his words fly away across the sea and had taken off her engagement ring in a moment of reckless defiance. Still her future, and that of the bookshop, hung in the balance, and still the weeks slipped away too quickly beneath unpredictable skies. Days of moody granite clouds made way for days with skies the perfect blue of every child’s imagination. The weather had always affected Olivia’s mood, and she found it hard not to let her emotions sway from sunny highs to colorless rain-lashed lows.
As time marched on, Olivia’s life in London, and the future she’d been planning there, felt increasingly distant. She was surprised at how easily she had detached herself emotionally from it all, like a page come free of its bindings—part of the story that didn’t belong there in the first place.
Jack insisted, with increasing irritation, that she come home now. He said it was becoming difficult to explain her continued absence. “People are starting to ask questions, Olivia. It doesn’t look good.” She wasn’t especially surprised that he was more concerned about the clients he had to impress and the reputation he had to uphold than he was about their relationship. An absent wife-to-be didn’t fit within Jack’s carefully orchestrated life. It was awkward. Not how things were supposed to be. “My secretary is finalizing dinner arrangements for the Willoughby contract next week, and she needs to know if you’ll be there. It will be rather embarrassing for me if you’re not.”
With every conversation she tried to tell him about the letter, about her “condition,” but the tone of the exchange was always wrong, and the words escaped her. Her secret remained in only two places: her heart, and the drawer of her nightstand.
Through the ever-shifting weather and emotional turbulence, Olivia stuck resolutely to her task, working hard to learn the business of selling rare books. She visited house clearances, where substantial private libraries often yielded rare ex libris treasures. She contacted auction houses and specialist librarians. She studied websites and catalogs of other booksellers and, all the while, she continued to work on uploading Pappy’s catalog to the new website. Something Old held such treasures. She just had to find a way of connecting the right book lover or collector with the right book.
Even in sleep, there was no escape from the overwhelming responsibility to save the shop. In her dreams the books came to life, flying up from their shelves like a flock of seagulls startled from the sand, their pages flapping wildly beneath cracked spines, carrying them up and out of the open door where they swooped across the dazzling lights of the city, intending to settle on deserving nightstands, gifts for sleepy book lovers when they woke in the morning. Except the books never made it. Something interrupted them and they forgot how to fly, falling from the sky like shot game as Olivia watched, helpless. They landed in graffiti-covered skate parks and litter-strewn rivers and empty housing estates, until they were lost and ruined, and it was all her fault.
The sense of guilt and helplessness nagged at her as she opened the shop each morning and saw Pappy’s carefully collected books. Unread. Unloved. Beautiful narratives and prose trapped among their closed pages. She ran her fingertips along their spines, like a child running a stick along a fence. There was something pleasing about the rhythmic undulation of the smooth leather against her skin. Silently she promised Pappy she would bring customers to them, promised she would breathe life back into the shop’s hollow lungs, even if she didn’t know how.
THANKS TO A continual stream of correspondence between Olivia and Iris, the fairy-themed shop window bloomed like a summer garden. Olivia added greeting cards she found in the gift shop with Arthur Rackham’s classic fairy illustrations. She added several editions of Cicely Mary Barker’s Victorian flower fairy books she’d found in a bag of donations, and inscribed favorite quotes from fairy tales onto chalkboards. She watched people stop to admire the display, willing them to come inside, but it was Ross who first noticed the most curious addition to the window.
Olivia was cataloging a shelf of Irish Poets when she saw him outside, arms folded, face scrunched up in confusion. Ross was one of life’s quiet observers, so it was no great surprise to see him standing still, pondering. Olivia liked the way he made time to think. She liked the way he listened to her properly when they had their chats over coffee. She liked that she could tease him about trying to be one of the cool kids with his gig T-shirts and man-bun and the beanie he wore even on the warmest days. She liked him . . .
Lost in her thoughts, Olivia didn’t realize he’d seen her until he started to wave his arms around, beckoning frantically for her to come outside. Embarrassed at being caught staring at him and at how much she’d been thinking about him lately, she ducked behind the shelf and pretended she hadn’t noticed.
The bell jangled as he pushed the door open. “I know you’re in there, Kavanagh. Stop checking me out and come here for a minute. I want to show you something.”
Olivia grabbed a pile of books and stepped outside. “I was not checking you out. As if! I’m busy. What is it?”
“There.” He pointed at the bottom corner of the window. “Look at the fairy door.”
Olivia leaned forward to take a better look. A slender green shoot was entwined around the lintel of the little blue door. “That’s so weird. How did it get in there?”
Ross moved close beside her, their breaths misting up the window as they both stared at the fairy door. “Dunno. It’s pretty cool, though.” He tugged at Olivia’s sleeve. “There. Look at the window box.”
The plants in the window boxes had flourished beneath the mix of sunshine and rain in recent days. The one closest to them had sent out a shoot that had found its way through a tiny crack in the frame.
Olivia walked back inside and leaned into the window to take a closer look.
Ross followed. “Must be all your fairy juju working its magic. Here, take this before it goes cold.”
He passed Olivia the latte he habitually picked up for her now on his way to the shop, always with a different instruction written in black marker on the side: “Laugh.” “Dance.” “Fart.” Anything other than her name.
“And what do we have today?” she asked, smiling as she turned the cup ’round.
“Today, Ms. Kavanagh, I bring you a cup of ‘Hope’ with a capital H. Enjoy!”
As Ross went upstairs to the flat, Olivia sipped her coffee and listened to the scraping of chair legs and windows being opened and the cat being shooed out of the way. She smiled to herself as she glanced back at the shop’s front window. However it had gotten there, something about that little green shoot spoke to her of new beginnings, of hope.
Fairy juju or not, five new customers arrived that morning, and every one of them left with a book in their hands and a promise to come back soon.
>
OLIVIA WAS STILL thinking about the shop window when Henry Blake arrived later that morning, peering around the door to ask if it was a good time.
Olivia put down the pile of books she was rearranging. “It’s always a good time to see you, Henry. Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.”
They drank peppermint tea while Henry asked how she was and how business was going and whether there had been any offers on Bluebell Cottage.
“We’ve had a few viewings, but no offers yet. To be honest, part of me hopes it doesn’t sell.”
Henry looked surprised. “But surely you’re keen to release some cash?”
Olivia sighed, a big heart-heavy sigh of resignation. “I am, I suppose. It’s just that Nana and Pappy loved that little cottage so much. It’s been in the family for years. I hate the thought of someone else living there.” She rummaged in her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “I even bought a lottery ticket today. My first ever. Maybe if I win the lottery, I can keep the cottage and the bookshop.” Henry eyed Olivia studiously. She felt as if she had been scolded without him having said a word. “It’s a big if,” she conceded, returning the ticket to her pocket. “A very big if.”
Henry looked at her with compassion then. She sensed that he understood her reluctance to let go.
“Everything must move on, dear. Houses. Shops. Books. People.” He stood up and took his teacup for a walk as he paced up and down the shop. “Let someone else love the cottage as much as your nana and grandfather did. Let a new family make it their home. Sometimes we have to let go of the things we cherish the most. Sometimes it’s the only way we can move on.”
Henry talked such sense. Olivia often wished she had a notebook to write everything down. She imagined his wisdoms on fridge magnets and notecards. “Henryisms,” as she called them.
He put his cup down, took a book from the shelf beside him, and opened it to the front page. “Take all these books with their sentimental inscriptions. Here. Listen to this. ‘Christmas, 1915. To my darling Beatrice. Think of me as you read these glorious words. Yours always. Patrick.’ Young lovers separated by war, no doubt.” He opened another book. “And this. ‘August, 1933. Follow your dreams, wherever they may take you. Bertie.’ These words, these books, meant the world to someone not so long ago, and now here they are, giving joy to us as we romanticize about who these people were. When someone buys these books, those sentiments will become theirs to cherish.” He sat down again. “There’s a provenance to everything, Olivia. The only reason anything has a story is precisely because it moves on. Books, paintings, houses—they all hold a trace, an echo, of the people who once cherished them.” He took a sip of tea and added as an afterthought, “Not so dissimilar to people, I suppose. We are the sum of those who have touched our lives in one way or another.”
Olivia remembered how Pappy used to talk about the provenance of books. He found great romance in the notion of books acquiring new owners and a new history. Henry was right. She was being overly sentimental. She desperately needed the money and Bluebell Cottage was, after all, just bricks and mortar.
“Did you ever look into that old picture book you found in the drawer?” Henry asked. “Or the Conan Doyle book you found about the girls and the fairies?”
Olivia said she had and that they were both cataloged and on the website. “It’s all really interesting. I found an old manuscript in the desk drawer, as well. It was written by Frances, the younger of the two girls who took the fairy photographs, and what’s fascinating for me is that her schoolteacher, Ellen Hogan, was my great-grandmother.”
“That is fascinating.”
“Isn’t it? I’d love to take a trip over to Yorkshire. Nana Martha grew up in Cottingley, where the girls took their photographs, but she never talked about her life there, so I hadn’t made the connection. We didn’t talk about the past much. My mam died when I was young. I suppose it was too upsetting for everyone to look back. So we didn’t.”
Henry put down his cup and touched Olivia’s hand. “I’m so sorry, dear.”
His words carried such meaning that they moved Olivia to tears. She’d heard “I’m sorry” so many times but had rarely believed anyone truly meant it. Henry’s compassion was so honest and heartfelt. It wrapped around her like the little green shoots entwined around the fairy door.
Sniveling into a tissue, Olivia thanked him for his kindness. “With Pappy gone and with Nana as she is, I feel like I’m losing touch with my family’s past. I’d like to go back to the start of their story. See the village where Nana grew up. Maybe the cottage is still there. I don’t know. I’ve done a bit of research online and found out there’s a collection of materials relating to the Cottingley fairy photographs in the library at Leeds University. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but I feel that I need to go.”
“Then do. I’d be very happy to look after the shop for you. I find the days interminably long. It would be nice to fill them here.”
“Would you really?”
“It would be my pleasure. I made a solemn promise to your grandfather, and I will do whatever I can to help you, Olivia, for as long as I can. If that includes sending you off on a fairy trail to Yorkshire, then so be it.”
He winked, and Olivia felt a crack heal in her heart. She hadn’t seriously thought she would go to Yorkshire, but now that Henry had made it possible, why not?
“But what about Nana? I can’t just abandon her.”
“Then don’t. I’ll visit her while you’re away.”
They had known each other, after all, although Olivia doubted Nana would remember Henry after so many years.
Henry placed his hand on Olivia’s. “It would be my pleasure.”
SINCE ROSS HAD started working in the flat, Olivia found a quiet solace in the shop after he’d gone home. She loved the click of the lock on the shop door, loved to kick off her shoes, pour a glass of wine, and take half an hour to read or just to think. She knew that wedding tasks were piling up and people were waiting for her to get back to them, but in those quiet moments alone, she could pretend nobody was waiting for an answer from her and nothing mattered, other than the sound of the sea beyond the window, echoing the sound of her breathing: in and out, in and out.
Such was her reluctance to acknowledge the life she’d left on pause in London that it was with a mixture of joy and regret that she opened a parcel from her manager at the National Art Library, sent with a note to say she hoped Olivia would be back soon and that she might find a use for these in the meantime.
She was delighted to see her bookbinding tools: her bone folder and awl, her French pointe knife and brushes, even her cutting mat. Her manager had thrown in a “few extras,” as she put it, which included book cloth, Somerset text pages with deckle edges, and a selection of flyleaves and silk headbands.
Olivia inhaled the lush vanilla scent of the paper, her hands itching to get to work. She’d always found great comfort in bookbinding, finding something calming about the diligence and care required. As she scanned the shop for inspiration, her eyes settled on the photograph in the silver frame, and then on the manuscript on the desk beside her. Frances’s story. She knew exactly what she would do. While the pages of her own story were unraveling, she would stitch Frances’s story together the only way she knew how: with thread and glue and beautiful gilded leather.
After opening the windows to enjoy the balmy evening, she switched on the radio. Her heart quickened as she heard what was playing—an old Beatrice Lillie recording, and she was singing Mammy’s song. “There are fairies at the bottom of our garden! / It’s not so very, very far away; / You pass the gardener’s shed and you just keep straight ahead— / I do so hope they’ve really come to stay. / There’s a little wood, with moss in it and beetles, / And a little stream that quietly runs through; / You wouldn’t think they’d dare to come merrymaking there— / Well, they do.” Olivia sang along to the end. It was a sign, she was sure of it. A new pebble for her bucket.
Befo
re she switched off the lights downstairs, she checked the fairy door in the window, remembering how Iris had said if you leave a gift for the fairies they might leave something in return. Olivia looked around the shop but couldn’t see anything small enough for fairies other than paper clips and staples, and she doubted whether fairies would have much use for either. Then her gaze fell on the coffee cup. She took out two of the flowers and set them in front of the little door. “There you are, fairies. A thank-you. From me.”
Feeling more positive than she had for a long while, she settled into bed with Frances’s words, happy to let a young girl’s memories transport her back over the years, to a place where fairies really did exist at the bottom of the garden and anything was possible, if you believed . . .
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. Winter 1917.
Time passed quickly among the familiar routine of school, piano lessons, Monday wash day, Thursday baking day, church on Sunday, and all the things that now formed my life at 31 Main Street. I watched the last months of the year race away over the distant hills along with the swallows and the starlings, taking autumn’s russets and golds with them and leaving the muted tones of winter behind: bare branches, gray skies, barren moorland, empty hedgerows. Winter was coming. It was time for nature, and little girls and fairies, to hide away.
Although my heart was still drawn to the beck, I mostly found it too cold to play there. Even on rare days when the winter sun hung low in the sky, tempting me outside and lighting the way toward the bottom of the garden, it wasn’t the same. Like the leaves and petals that had fallen from the trees and flowers along the riverbank, the magic I’d felt at the beck that summer had drifted away downstream, taking the long journey west along the River Aire.