Nancy & Uhtred

by A. K. Klemm

  Nancy & Uhtred

  a Bookshop Hotel story

  by

  A. K. Klemm

  For Bernard Cornwell,

  this is the only acceptable and appropriate way I could find to write you a love letter, and thank you for the most pleasurable reading hours ever;

  and

  For Marta from Good Books in the Woods,

  who always said The Bookshop Hotel as a series should follow Nancy’s book club.

  Monday

  “It’s one of the most romantic novels of all t—” Nancy tried to say, but was immediately cut off.

  “It was hard,” whined Sue’s daughter, Chloe.

  “What was hard about it?” Nancy asked.

  “All the goofy dialect at the beginning, that’s what,” Nancy’s daughter-in-law, Kat, piped in.

  “Didn’t you get past that, to the heart of the story?” Nancy’s voice was rising steadily. Sue, her best friend, nudged her.

  “I admit, I watched the movie instead,” Sue said.

  Nancy felt her jaw drop a little.

  “There was a movie?” Ann chimed in. “Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a movie?”

  “Because the rest of us Googled it,” Kat said. Her tone was sharp, and Nancy, usually amused by Kat’s blunt manner, found her irritatingly rude this evening.

  “Of course Ann didn’t Google it, Kat.” Nancy furrowed her brow.

  “I watched the miniseries,” Nancy’s granddaughter Fiona said quietly. She was the youngest and quietest of the bunch. “The library had it on DVD,” she added in an even smaller voice.

  That didn’t hurt Nancy’s feelings as much as Sue’s admission had. Sue was her friend and a reader, whereas Fiona was a busy student and hated to read. Nancy patted Fiona’s knee, and her grandchild smiled meekly.

  “There’s a miniseries?” Chloe’s daughter Charisse asked. “I watched a super old movie I found on VHS in Briar. Jane Seymore was in it..”

  “You have a VHS player?” Fiona asked.

  “A VCR, yeah. It’s fun.”

  Chloe tsked. “The Jane Seymour version is not that old.”

  “Older than you,” Charisse said.

  “Actually, no,” Chloe said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Ladies . . .” Nancy tried to regain order, but gave up. She took a deep breath while the entire argument continued to derail. They weren’t even bothering to argue the merits of the book. They had disliked Baroness Orcsky’s novel so thoroughly, they weren’t even discussing it anymore.

  The twinkle lights of the garden started to shine a bit more as the sun ducked down in the sky. Cicadas were chirping their good evening song, and a slight breeze drifted over the scarlet pimpernels—“red chickweed” to most of the ladies here. Nancy had weeded them out of her garden and brought them in little white pots to place in various parts of the Bookshop Hotel’s courtyard for the evening.

  The women, spanning in ages from fifteen to seventy-six, had been groaning about Ms. Orcsky’s masterpiece for so long, Nancy hadn’t even had the chance to point out that the title flower was running rampant through Lily Hollow this month. Ubiquitous, yet unnoticed. Hiding in plain sight.

  She’d prepared such riveting and informative discussion points, and they hadn’t gotten to a single one. The more she listened to the group’s disregard of the book, the straighter her back became.

  “I told you we should have read Colleen Hoover’s latest book,” Kat said. She checked her watch. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Me too,” piped in her friend, Kim, who had remained silent the whole time. “Do we know what we’re going to pretend to read next month?”

  Kat shot her friend a look, and Kim laughed. “I mean, actually read . . . right. Let’s read J.R. Ward, I’m into that.”

  Nancy sighed, exasperated by the little exchange.

  Chloe and Charisse began gathering their things as well.

  As the crowd thinned, Ann took her time rising from her chair, only to raise her eyebrows at Nancy and say, “Well, that went well.”

  If you can’t say something nice . . .! Nancy wanted to yell, but she kept her mouth shut as Ann waved a hand dismissively at Nancy and picked her copy of the book off the table only to toss it in the donate box that stayed on the atrium stoop.

  As the last of the group dispersed, Nancy slouched down in her chair. Strands of her graying mop escaped from the neat bun on her head. Book Club was becoming tedious, and as she saw what she thought was the last member exit the Bookshop Hotel, she let an even deeper sigh escape.

  “That was a rough one,” said Matthew, the assistant manager, as he tidied up after the evening’s crowd. “We thought it might be when we ordered the books.”

  “But it’s such a wonderful book!”

  “They’re tired of classics. They’re not a classics crowd anyway, and they did Little Women and Our Mutual Friend with you.”

  And a few more than that, Nancy knew they were both thinking.

  “They want romance novels, and the best I can do is a few popular contemporary fiction pieces. I chose The Scarlet Pimpernel because it’s romantic suspense at its finest. They want, they want…” She found herself inarticulate. “And I want…” She didn’t know what she wanted. Something else. Something more. “What are you reading?” she asked her young friend.

  He grinned at her. “Probably nothing you’d want.”

  “Try me.”

  He nodded and jerked his head toward the French doors, motioning for her to follow him. His arms were full of coffee mugs and saucers stuck with brown sugared coffee-cake crumbs. Inside the back doors, he veered right into the kitchen, dumped the dirty dishes in the sink, wiped his hands down his jeans, and darted to the fiction stacks.

  “You should wear an apron,” she said. He shrugged.

  It was so much brighter in there, under the giant 1920s chandelier. The glass shot tiny rainbows into the dark corners of the room.

  They were at the beginning of the alphabet, only on the last name Cornwell. Matthew ran his finger along the surprisingly not dusty tops until he read the spine he was apparently looking for: The Last Kingdom.

  She knew what he was thinking when he said “nothing you’d want.” She was prim, proper, curt, and old. She was a Bible-thumping southern Baptist and a small-town event coordinator. She’d worked for the mayor of Lily Hollow since she’d graduated from the high school’s secretarial program and married Richard. She lived for the annual pumpkin roll and Tuesday/Thursday Bingo. She was the sort who organized Republican election debates and tapped carefully manicured pink nails on countertops when service industry folks weren’t efficient enough. She couldn’t pass up a sale on well-tailored pant suits, especially if those suits were in solid colors. Matthew was probably thinking that she couldn’t handle this, whatever this was. Well, she’d show him!

  She held the book in her hand. The Holy Grail of the moment. It looked downright terrible, but in the best way possible: it was something she’d never select on her own. King Alfred who? Uhtred what? Vikings? Was there going to be blood?

  “Okay,” Nancy said.

  “Okay?” Matthew’s eyes grew wide.

  “Yes. I’ll buy it.”

  “Okay.”

  She made her purchase swiftly and slipped the book in her purse.

  “What did you find?” Sue said as she appeared from around a corner.

  Nancy nearly jumped out of her skin. “Nothing. Jesus, Sue, you startled me.”

  “Raunchy romance? Of the J.R. Ward variety?” Sue teased.

  “I honestly don’t know what you're talking about.”

  Nancy left the store to walk home.

  The night was stickier than expected, warmer on the pavement than it had been tucked un
der the Bookshop Hotel’s garden greenery. The right leg of her pant suit bunched at the back of her knee where she’d begun to sweat, but Lily Hollow was small and anyone who lived in the old downtown area walked. It was expected. The farm families were free to come and go in their minivans, and Pete—Sue’s nephew and the town’s most prominent landscaper—was allowed his truck, but most of the drivers in town were Lily Hollow High School students practicing the use of their new licenses.

  One such student blew past Nancy now, and she gave him the appropriate angry-old-lady scowl. She didn’t particularly care how fast they took the streets, but the mayor did, and she worked for the mayor.

  Turning onto her own street, she chided herself for not having left the porch light on. Getting the key in the door would be harder than necessary. While she lamented this, the heel of her pump slipped on a bit of gravel. She’d call the street sweepers from her office in the morning. The summer festival started Friday night, and she would not allow loose grit to hinder the curb appeal.

  Nancy climbed the stairs to her 1935 bungalow. Other than the color, it looked like most other houses in Lily Hollow. Every street seemed to feature two or three original Victorian houses, and peppered between them were tiny bungalows that had been added in later years. Most Lilyhollowans, as they liked to call themselves, had lived in their homes all their lives, just like Nancy. Few people in town weren’t multi-generational locals. Matthew, the assistant manager of the bookstore, was from elsewhere, but even the owner, AJ, was from two long-standing Lily Hollow families.

  The house was quiet when Nancy finally got the door open. Of course it was quiet; the only sources of noise were the stray cat in the garden and the goldfish on the coffee table in the living room. Richard had died years ago.

  “I’ve been a widow for longer than I was ever a wife,” she told her fish.

  Nancy reached her bedroom and removed her slacks. She gently rolled her pantyhose down her legs, unveiling the sprawling map of her vein system, varicose lines popping and shooting streaks of blue and purple. She promptly took the hose to her bathroom sink and washed them by hand, wringing them out before she hung them to dry over the shower rod. Back in the bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her dresser to reveal carefully organized undergarments. Panties on the right and rows and rows of L’eggs pantyhose eggs on the left. As she changed her panties, the golden eggs sparkled in the dim light of her bedroom, and, like a mother hen, she smiled at them and patted each one before selecting the pair she’d wear tomorrow.

  Her bedroom had a reading nook, a place she often took tea in the evenings, with a solid-pink wing-back chair and a glass table that doubled as a night stand. She placed tomorrow’s clothes over the chair and proceeded to get ready for bed.

  “’My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called Uhtred,’” she read.

  “Well, hello, Uhtred,” Nancy said aloud. She held her thumb between the pages and flipped to the back of the book to re-read what she had already read in the bookstore. Ruthless invaders, yes, history, yes. “Okay, perk up, Uhtred. Get ruthless and stop sounding like the begats of the Old Testament before I end you.”

  The house seemed to creak in response to Nancy’s chatter, and she looked up at the walls to say, “Okay, okay, I’m getting on with it.”

  And get on with it she did. It didn’t take long for her to get completely sucked in. Ragnar arrived and killed Uhtred’s father, and Nancy found herself, a Southern Baptist grandmother, smitten with the pagan Danes and their wild ways. Part One ended two hundred pages in, and she looked up at the clock to see it was well past midnight. She sighed and set the book down, took her reading glasses off and set them on the night stand, and switched off the lamp.

  She fluffed the pillow and laid down.

  She wriggled her toes under the sheet and counted to ten.

  To twenty.

  To thirty.

  She rolled over, flipping the pillow so the cool side was now on her cheek. Her back popped.

  The stray cat tapped her window with its paw, attacking a June bug. It mewed. The digital clock on her dresser glowed.

  She blinked.

  The cat jumped from the window ledge and into the garden, disappearing from view. The fish in the living room pushed pebbles around in the bowl for a few moments, chink chinking against the stillness of the night. Then all was silent again.

  Nancy had to be at the mayor’s office at 8:30 a.m. sharp. The coffee pot in the kitchen was set to brew at 7:45. She looked at the glowing clock. Normally, she would’ve been asleep two hours ago.

  She had time. She could always take a little nap when the office closed at five and still make it to Bingo.

  She sat up in bed, switched on the light, and smushed her glasses onto her face while opening the book with her other hand. It was the fastest she’d moved for anything in quite some time, and she knew that what she was about to do was foolish—but she had to know what was going to happen next. She couldn’t rest until she’d finished the book.

  Around four in the morning, she read, “’For I am Uhtred, Earl Uhtred, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and destiny is everything.’”

  “Well, holy cow!” was all she could muster before she closed the book and collapsed. She refused to look at the clock as she turned the lamp off, but her glasses were still half pressed against her face and the book was still clutched in her hand when she woke to her alarm clock at 7:30 after dreams of warlords and battle cries.

  Tuesday

  The coffee pot began brewing, the alarm clock was screaming. The cat scratched at the back door. Nancy rolled from the bed and lurched toward the kitchen. “No,” she told the cat through the screen. “Forever and always, no.”

  The cat mewed its protest and slinked away. Nancy opened the back door after it was gone and placed food and water on the porch. “Darn cat.”

  She poured her coffee and slumped into the chair, feeling as dejected as the cat. She looked up at the wall calendar, riddled with Post-It Notes and highlights, neatly organized and color-coded events and bills. When was the last time she’d used a sick day? Two years ago? Three? But what good was calling in if she didn’t have the next book? In her mind’s eye, she could see Matthew’s finger running along the top of all those Bernard Cornwell novels—surely some of them belonged to Uhtred’s tale.

  She was too old for this.

  Nancy drank her coffee, burned her tongue, plucked up a muffin, and went to her room to get dressed.

  Her hair was short enough that she didn’t feel like a ridiculous school girl, and just long enough to wrap in the tiniest of little tight buns, with effort. Today was not a day of effort. She quickly combed her hair and for once in probably twenty years let it go free: gray waves, random curly bits, and all.

  Sporting a three-quarter-length pencil skirt, hose, a blouse, a suit jacket, and a smear of lipstick, Nancy shot out the door in the opposite direction of the mayor’s office, toward Aspen Court.

  The Bookshop Hotel was open, literally, the large double doors propped outward with stones. The old Victorian-mansion-turned-bookstore never failed to be a refreshing sight, after the years it spent as a condemned hotel in disrepair. The owner, AJ Rhys, was feather-dusting a display table of all things Harper Lee-related when Nancy stormed the castle, so to speak. AJ fumbled the feather duster, but caught it just before it hit the ground.

  “Nancy, what brings you here?” AJ asked, gripping the duster a little bit tighter in her hand. She was a tiny little thing, but not easily startled, and Nancy briefly felt bad for being disruptive.

  “Where’s Matthew?” she whispered.

  “In the kitchen,” AJ whispered back. AJ’s smirk was inquisitive and playful, but Nancy didn’t have time to fill her in, nor did she want to.

  She charged the cafe on the left and went straight to the bar, where Matthew’s back was turned as he prepared a French press.

  Nancy tapped her nails on the counter and Matthew tur
ned.

  “Nancy?”

  “I need book two. There’s a book two, yes?” She could hear the crispness in her own voice.

  “Book two? Oh! You finished The Last Kingdom already?”

  “Yes, and I want what comes next.” This must be how addicts felt when trying to score dope. Did they call it dope anymore?

  Matthew smiled broadly, and Nancy followed him around to the patron’s side of the kitchen and the fiction stacks, passing AJ’s incredulous face as they did. Nancy held her head high and ignored AJ’s gaze.

  Matthew found The Pale Horseman and handed it over. Several regulars walked in the door at the very moment Nancy was about to head to the register. She stopped short, frozen.

  “Nancy,” Matthew said, “how about I give you the third one too, and we’ll start a tab?” His eyes shifted to the oncoming morning crowd.

  “Yes.”

  Nancy shoved both books into her purse and ducked out of the store on a speedy march to the mayor’s office.

  By the time she arrived, it was 8:31 a.m. and she’d broken into a hearty sweat. Her hair was beginning to frizz with the early morning humidity, and the mayor sent her a look of obvious concern.

  “Nancy?”

  “It’s only one minute, sir.”

  “It’s not that, but . . .”

  She’d already placed her purse on the coat rack and picked up the phone to call the street sweepers.

  “Everything is fine, sir,” she said as her hand cupped the receiver. More than fine, she thought.

  The day went by at a crawl. She poured coffee after coffee, and it helped a bit, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Uhtred. What would it be like to wield a sword? To be part of building a country from scratch by methods of war? To scream battle cries to the wind? To not sit behind a computer screen day in and day out, to orchestrate more than a book club or Bingo night? What would it be like to be part of something that mattered?

  The moment five o’clock hit, she was out the door, the mayor still pulling his tweed coat over his peach collared shirt. “Nancy,” he called after her, but she let the door suck itself shut by the air conditioner, and she hurried home.