The Little Shop of Found Things--A Novel

by Paula Brackston

  She retrieved her house keys from her hidden bag and moved quickly and quietly across the lawn. The key sounded loud in the lock of the back door. Inside, the smell of beeswax furniture polish, paint, wood glue, and the dust of ages made her feel instantly at home. It was hard not to nip upstairs to her mother’s room. Just to see her. Just to reassure herself that Flora was well. But she could not risk waking her. She opened the front door of the shop as carefully as she could, given that it needed quite a tug to get the old wood to free itself from the doorjamb. In her haste she had forgotten the bell, which clanged loud enough to wake the whole street. She grabbed hold of it. She waited, heart pounding, listening for sounds of Flora stirring. Nothing. Had she had to take extra painkillers or sleeping pills because her arthritis had flared up again? She felt the now familiar wrench at leaving her as she slipped out of the shop and down the cobbled street. The town was asleep, blurred beneath the dull glow of the streetlights. Everything was so unchanged, so normal, and yet she could never look at it in the same way again. The space at the end of the street was where the original blind house had once stood. Above The Feathers, a sign had once swung proclaiming it to be THE THREE QUILLS. At the top of the hill, hidden by another church now, was the little green surrounded by old brick town houses, one of them once the home of the Applebys. She squared her shoulders and quickened her pace. She could not let herself become disturbed by the enormity of her newfound ability to journey through time; there was something she had to do. She had brought her attention to bear on that, to the exclusion of everything else. She hurried down the narrow street, relieved to find Liam had left the gates to his yard open. The flat was in complete darkness, and his front door lacked a doorbell. She thought of hammering in the door but dismissed the idea. She didn’t want light—sleeping neighbors waking up and seeing a frantic woman, apparently in fancy dress, desperate to wake up a young single man in the middle of the night. She couldn’t risk someone recognizing her, or mentioning to her mother that she had been seen. The possible complications were too difficult and too time consuming to risk. Instead, she searched around for some small stones—not as easy to find in a street as one might think—and threw them up against Liam’s window. She was on her second handful when Liam appeared, bleary eyed. He opened the window and frowned down at her.

  “Xanthe?” was all he managed.

  “Sorry,” she began, the first of many times she was to say that to him over the next hour. “Can you let me in?”

  She must have looked more than a little deranged, dressed as she was and babbling at him. Liam, dressed in tracksuit trousers pulling on a T-shirt, refused to do anything until they had some tea. The idea of pausing for refreshment when she wished only to make progress with her urgent mission made her become even more incoherent, which only made Liam insist. She could see he was not prepared to agree to anything otherwise. Fighting her own growing sense of panic at time passing, she let him lead her up the narrow stairs into his little flat. Once they were sitting at his kitchen table sipping strong, sweet Assam and eating shortbread biscuits, he tried to make sense of what little information she had given him.

  “So, putting aside for the moment the fact that you’re dressed for some sort of Civil War reenactment…”

  “It’s complicated. It would take too long to explain,” she said, noticing then that the colors of her dress were strangely faded. It was only now, in the cheerfully lit kitchen, that she was able to see that the hues had definitely become more faint. Had it happened straight away, she wondered, or was it an ongoing process? Liam’s voice shook her from her confused thoughts.

  “Let’s just deal with the fact that you’re back from Milton Keynes, except that you never really went there, because the friend who lives there didn’t really need you in the first place, but someone else does, only you can’t tell me who. And your mother mustn’t know you’re here, and you can’t tell me why. OK, that’s all brilliantly clear so far.”

  “Sorry,” she said again, and meant it. She knew she was going to be asking a lot of Liam, and there was no reason he should just help her without question. “Really,” she said, “I know it all sounds ridiculously mysterious.”

  “Your words, not mine.”

  “But, well, there is stuff I can’t tell you. It’s too complicated.”

  “For my basic little brain?”

  “I didn’t mean that. It’s just … let’s say the secrets are not mine to tell. But someone is in deep trouble, and I may be the only hope she has.”

  He munched a biscuit and shrugged. “So what is it exactly, in simple words that I will be able to understand, that you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. That is, I just need to use your computer. I need the internet.”

  “Not working in Milton Keynes? Oh, wait, you haven’t been there!”

  “Liam, please?”

  He shrugged and held up his hands in surrender. “OK. Internet. Why not?” He fetched his laptop and set it up on the table for her. “Am I allowed to ask what it is you’re looking for?”

  “That,” Xanthe said, punching out broad searches on the worn keyboard, “is something I’m curious about myself.” She frowned, biting her bottom lip as she deleted one search and typed in another. Not for the first time she cursed the vastness of the web, the swathes of useless information that had to be plowed through before anything useful, or even relevant, could be found. It was difficult to know where to start. Searches about laws in the seventeenth century were far too vague. Questions about loopholes in the law regarding theft in the 1600s were too specific and sent two different search engines fizzing off at unhelpful tangents. Xanthe could feel low-level panic coloring everything she was doing. She couldn’t leave until she had found something that could work as a defense for Alice. But what?

  After half an hour of tense silence, save for the clicking of keys and the occasional exasperated sigh, Liam collected the mugs from the table.

  “More tea,” he said, and set about making it. “I’d be happy to help,” he called over his shoulder, “if I knew what it was I was helping with.”

  “If I thought there was any way you could help, but it’s…”

  “Complicated. I think you mentioned that.”

  “I’m not being deliberately cryptic.” Xanthe turned and caught the unconvinced expression on his face. “OK, I need to find out if there’s some way a person about to be tried and convicted for theft can be got off, I don’t know, on some sort of technicality. A loophole.”

  Liam looked serious for a moment. “Has your old boyfriend been in touch again?”

  “What? Oh, no. Nothing like that. This is … a friend is in trouble. She’s relying on me.”

  “Does she have a lawyer?”

  “Not as such.”

  “Good place to start, I’d have thought. Did this friend actually steal anything?”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “Hmm, tricky. Might be best to fess up and appeal to the judge’s better nature. Say sorry, promise not to do it again, that sort of thing.”

  “She certainly won’t get to do it again if they hang her.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth Xanthe regretted them.

  Liam plonked the freshly filled mugs of tea down on the table and stared at her hard.

  “What worries me most about that statement,” he said, “is that you don’t look like you’re joking.”

  “I’m sorry.” Xanthe began to rub her temples, closing her eyes against a burgeoning headache. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. I’m talking about the law as it was in the early sixteen hundreds.”

  “Of course you are.” He sat down opposite her.

  Xanthe opened her eyes and met his stare. “I don’t have time to convince you. Just humor me.” When he gave another why-not shrug, she went on. “There must be something we can argue in her favor.”

  “Mitigating circumstances, sort of thing?”

  “Maybe.” She scrolled through more pages of repetitive inform
ation.

  “Did someone else make her do it, d’you think? Would coercion be grounds for … something?”

  Xanthe shook her head. “There was no one else involved. Damn it, I’m getting further away from what I want. So much rubbish.”

  Liam chomped another biscuit thoughtfully for a moment and then suggested, “Try another angle. You know, come at the thing differently.”

  “Differently how?”

  “Well, when I’m struggling to diagnose a problem with a car, I stop looking at what I think the problem is and start thinking about what I think a solution might look like.”

  Xanthe looked up from the screen, about to say something dismissive, but then she stopped to consider what he had said. Perhaps looking at how to defend someone vulnerable and guilty was all wrong. There could be another way. She tried to think about how a powerful person would get out of a similar situation. “You might have a point,” she said, thinking aloud. “If a person with good connections needed a way out. Or someone with money, or influence … a high position in society, say, well, they’d have ways of getting away with things.”

  “Friends in high places and lots of money, yup, I reckon they’d find that loophole.”

  “OK”—Xanthe resumed her typing—“so who are those people. Or rather, who were they?”

  “Way back then? Aristocrats? Landowners? Who else had power?”

  “The church,” Xanthe said at once, thinking of how it was the particular manner of Alice’s faith that had got her and her family into so much danger. “The clergy.” She deleted her last search and tried again:

  How would a member of the clergy benefit from his position if charged with a crime?

  Possible answers pinged up on the screen.

  “Well?” asked Liam.

  “Bingo!”

  “Really?”

  “Listen to this: ‘When standing trial, a priest could claim Benefit of Clergy. This entitled him to be tried by a bishop, rather than a magistrate, who was empowered to choose his own sentence. As the Church protected their own, this was guaranteed to me far more lenient than anything the accused could expect from the secular law. In fact, where a first offense had been proven and the accused was likely to hang, the clerical church would usually impose a term of one year’s imprisonment instead.’”

  “Is your friend a vicar?”

  “No, but wait, it goes on: ‘Over time this law was extended so that people outside the Church could also use it, the test being that they be able to read a passage from the Bible.’ Alice can read!”

  “So it worked for women, too?”

  Xanthe scanned the document in front of her. “Well, there’s a record of it having been used by nuns, and it doesn’t say anywhere here that ordinary women aren’t allowed to claim it.”

  “If it’s that easy I should have thought everyone would be using it.”

  “Everyone who could read, maybe. Which was, believe me, a really small percentage of the population.” Xanthe thought about the Lovewells’ household, running through their names and faces in her mind. Most, she knew, would have been illiterate. But not Alice. Alice was born of a wealthy family. A family who knew their Bible. Even if it was, politically, the wrong one. “There is a risk,” she said, more to herself than Liam.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, this whole mess came about because of … let’s say because of what my friend’s family believed in. She has had to keep her faith secret. To use religion as her defense, well, it’s playing with fire.”

  “You reenactors take this stuff very seriously, don’t you?”

  Xanthe looked up from the computer and studied Liam’s face. She saw there that he didn’t really believe she was engaged in some sort of Civil War role-playing, but that he was prepared to go with it, to let it be, not to press her further, if it was easier for her. It was a measure of his character, of his ability to put someone else first. She liked him for that. She was truly grateful.

  “We do,” she said, turning her attention back to her search. “Have you got a piece of paper and a pen? No, hang on, make that a pencil? I need to write some of this down.”

  As soon as she had made her notes Xanthe got up to leave. As she did so she noticed tiny fibers falling from her clothes, and that the colors had faded even more. It seemed anything she brought back with her was at best unstable. How long before the garments disintegrated altogether, she wondered. She folded the paper and tucked it into her deepest pocket.

  “You’re going?” Liam asked. “Can I drive you somewhere?”

  “No, I’ll be fine.” Xanthe found herself wishing she could confide in him. She stepped forward and gave him a peck on the cheek. “I would have been stuck without you, Liam. Thank you.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “Will you tell me what this is really all about, one day when you’re not in such a tearing hurry?”

  She nodded. “One day,” she promised, not knowing if she would ever be able to keep her word.

  After convincing Liam she didn’t need him to go with her anywhere, Xanthe hurried back through the deserted streets of Marlborough and crept back through her house. All was still quiet and dark, and she reached the blind house without bumping into anyone. On the threshold she hesitated, looking longingly up at the little bedroom windows. It was hard to leave without seeing her mother, without checking on her. In that moment of hesitation she felt the heavy presence of Margaret Merton growing stronger. There was no time to dwell on anything, no time to waiver, no time to be afraid.

  “I’m going, OK?” she said to the deeper shadow in the blackness within the blind house. “I’m keeping my side of the bargain. Just make sure you keep yours and stay away from my mother.”

  21

  Xanthe had not dared think about where she would appear when she arrived in the seventeenth century again. As far as she could work out, each time she had traveled, she ended up near something significant, or at least looking at something that mattered to Alice, something that was connected to the story of the chatelaine. She could think of no way to control where she emerged, and it was too scary to stop and consider the consequences of turning up somewhere dangerous. On this occasion, to her immense relief, she found herself in Samuel’s workshop. She knelt on the dusty floor, allowing her breath to return to normal and the giddiness to fade. The space was unlit but not in darkness, and mercifully empty, so that there was no one to see her materialize. She got to her feet, brushing down her skirts and moving to the window. As the light fell upon her clothes she realized that they had regained their original colors, and that there were no more fibers falling from them. It was as if, by returning to their own time, they had been restored.

  Xanthe peered through the thick glass into the small courtyard. The weather was still wet and unsettled, with a brisk breeze rustling the few remaining brittle leaves of the ornamental trees that sheltered the herb beds. It was difficult to know what time it was. She tried to do the math that would tell her how many hours had passed while she was away. She calculated that she had spent little more than an hour in her own time, which should mean something like a day in the 1600s. She had left in the early evening. It was too cloudy to see where the sun sat in the sky, but the day did feel as if it were drawing in somehow. As she stepped outside she heard very few birds, confirming that this was not the pale light of dawn but the softness of twilight. She felt chilled rather than cold, as if her hasty dash to her own time and back again had disturbed her equilibrium, leaving her slightly weakened, almost feverish. She needed to marshal her thoughts. She would have to explain her sudden disappearance.

  “Mistress Westlake!” Samuel’s voice made her start. She turned to find him emerging from the door of the house. She tried to read his expression as he strode toward her. “We have been concerned, mistress. You left without word, without explanation.” She felt the sting of him addressing her so formally. She could not afford to lose his trust, not now.

  “Forgive me, Samuel, there was someth
ing I needed to do. I … sought the help of a friend. Someone who might be able to help Alice.”

  “A friend? But, you are not from Marlborough. I understood you knew no one in this area save the Lovewells.”

  “No one who lives here permanently,” she answered quickly, hating herself once again for the lies that she was forced to tell. “My friend is a fellow player with the troupe I once worked with, a musician in fact. I knew him to be visiting the town again briefly.”

  “Him?” An unmistakable flash of jealousy passed across Samuel’s face.

  “An elderly man, a grandfatherly figure to us all. Someone I have known for many years and whose advice I have sought before.”

  “And you did not think to inform me that you were to be absent? I had no way of knowing where you were, what you intended … whether or not you would return.”

  “I feared he would leave before I could speak with him. There was not time.”

  “And this musician is also an expert in matters of law?”

  Xanthe could see he was far from convinced.

  “Samuel, I—”

  She got no further, as at that moment Philpott came from the house. He gave a stiff bow in her direction and then addressed Samuel.

  “Master Appleby sent me to inform you, sir, the guests have arrived. He requests that you join him at once.”

  Samuel frowned, evidently torn between doing his father’s bidding and pressing Xanthe further on the matter of her curious friend. She could see that he was hurt by what he might see as a slight, or perhaps a lack of trust. What had he imagined, she wondered, when he discovered her gone? Had he really thought he would never see her again? And did it matter to him? It seemed it did.

  “Samuel!” Joshua came bounding from the direction of the stables, the wind ruffling his already unruly hair. He smiled at the sight of Xanthe. “Ah! The songbird has returned to us. We shall have entertainment this night after all. Excellent! Come, let us join father, for he frets if left to play host to men of business by himself, you know that, brother. Mistress Westlake…” He made an elaborate bow to let her go before him.