The carriage drew closer to Booksellers' Row, and Beatrice Clayborn drew in a hopeful breath before she cast her spell. Head high, spine straight, she hid her hands in her pockets and curled her fingers into mystic signs as the fiacre jostled over green cobblestones. She had been in Bendleton three days, and while its elegant buildings and clean streets were the prettiest trap anyone could step into, Beatrice would have given anything to be somewhere else—anywhere but here, at the beginning of bargaining season.
She breathed out the seeking tendrils of her spell, touching each of the shop fronts. If a miracle rushed over her skin and prickled at her ears—
But there was nothing. Not a glimmer; not even an itch. They passed The Rook's Tower Books, P. T. Williams and Sons, and the celebrated House of Verdeu, which filled a full third of a block with all its volumes.
Beatrice let out a sigh. No miracle. No freedom. No hope. But when they rounded the corner from Booksellers' Row to a narrow gray lane with no name, Beatrice's spell bloomed in response. There. A grimoire! There was no way to know what it contained, but she smiled up at the sky as she pulled on the bell next to her seat.
"Driver, stop." She slid forward on the fiacre's padded seat, ready to jump into the street by herself. "Clara, can you complete the fitting for me?"
"Miss Beatrice, you mustn't." Clara clutched at Beatrice's wrist. "It should be you."
"You're exactly my size. It won't matter," Beatrice said. "Besides, you're better at the color and trimmings and such. I'll just be a few minutes, I promise."
Her maid-companion shook her head. "You mustn't miss your appointment at the chapterhouse. I cannot stand in for you when you meet Danton Maisonette the way I can at the dressmakers."
Beatrice was not going to let that book slip out of her grasp. She patted Clara's hand and wriggled loose. "I'll be there in time, Clara. I promise I won't miss it. I just need to buy a book."
Clara tilted her head. “Why this place?”
“I wrote to them,” Beatrice lied. “Finding it is a stroke of luck. I won’t be ten minutes.”
Clara sighed and loosed her grip on Beatrice’s wrist. “Very well.”
The driver moved to assist, but Beatrice vaulted to the street, tight-laced stays and all, and waved them off. “Thank you. Go!”
She pivoted on one delicate pillar-heeled shoe and regarded the storefront. Harriman’s was precisely the kind of bookstore Beatrice sought every time she was in a new town: the ones run by people who couldn’t bear to throw books away no matter what was inside the covers, so long as they could be stacked and shelved and housed. Beatrice peered through the windows, reveling at the pang within her senses that set her ears alert and tingling, her spell signaling that a grimoire awaited amid the clutter. She hadn’t found a new one in months.
The doorbell jingled as Beatrice crossed into the bookkeeper’s domain. Harriman’s! O dust and ink and leather binding, O map-scrolls and star-prints and poetry chapbooks—and the grimoire, somewhere within! She directed her smile at the clerk in shirtsleeves and weskit waiting at the front counter.