Page 1 of The Book of Lost Stories

PROLOGUE

Cleo Finch

The old-fashioned brass bell jangled as Ambrosial Books’ first customer of the day scurried out, clutching his purchase to his scrawny chest as if he thought I might leap over the counter and snatch it back.

Before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of a shaft of sunlight in the narrow street of the ancient Shambles in York, where the upper floors of the Tudor buildings overhung the lower, so that I often felt like some shy creature looking out of its burrow.

Even on a bright day, the lights needed to be on to illuminate the maze of crammed bookshelves.

The door to the storeroom behind me swung open. Uncle Ambrose had been unpacking his latest finds from a country house auction, and now he backed out, carrying a large and battered cardboard box.

As always, since his sartorial taste had been set in his youth, Unks’ long silver hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he was dressed in the waistcoat and trousers of one of his ancient velvet suits, this one a dark plum colour, rubbed somewhat shiny around the knees and seat, and teamed with a striped shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up.

The odd addition of a smooth fur scarf that hung limply around his neck was actually his elderly Siamese cat, Tilly, who usually spent her afternoons playing dead in the shop window, to the consternation of passing tourists.

‘I just sold the Alexander Pope from the glass case,’ I told him as he plonked the box down on the counter in front of me, where it exuded a familiar blend of old books and immemorial dust.

‘It’s the early bird who catches the first edition,’ he said, then gestured to the box, looking pleased with himself. ‘Happy birthday, Cleo.’

‘You remembered!’ I said, astonished, because he was usually forgetful about these things and he hadn’t mentioned my birthday at breakfast.

‘I only remembered it was today when I opened this box, because it’s something I spotted at the last sale that’s just up your street,’ he confessed.

‘Well, this is exciting,’ I said, opening the flaps to reveal one of those small wooden desks, the antique kind that could be carried about and put on top of tables. It was resting on a layer of old books.

‘Late eighteenth century or early nineteenth, I’m sure,’ said Uncle Ambrose. ‘It needs a good clean and waxing, but it is a nice piece.’

‘I love it,’ I said, lifting it out and opening the top, to reveal a slightly ink-stained interior. ‘I could imagine Jane Austen using something like this, and it’s around the right period.’

He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘It was a late addition to the auction, brought in with some other lots from elsewhere, so I haven’t examined all the books yet, although the top ones seem to be by Mrs Radcliffe and her ilk, so you may find some you haven’t already got.’

I collect early Gothic novels and, in fact, was just in the later stages of finally finishing my PhD thesis on the subject.

‘I’ll go through them, Unks, and if there are any I don’t want I’ll add them to the stock catalogue,’ I promised, dying now to excavate the lower layers of books. ‘I might find a treasure trove.’

‘You never know,’ he replied, then vanished back into the stockroom, where I could hear Tom, the long-suffering student who helped out at weekends and in the university holidays, having a coughing fit over the rest of Unks’ latest dusty finds.

Left to myself in the empty shop, I put the little desk carefully to one side and began to delve into the box …

*

‘How’s my little Birdie?’ Tris asked, when his face popped up on the screen later that day. ‘ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman coming along OK?’

I replied that my PhD thesis, Dark Reflections: the mirroring of the struggle for female emancipation in Gothic literature, needed a little rewriting but was almost there.

‘And how is Tristram Shandy and “ A Vindication of the Rights of Man to Appropriate the Genesis of the Horror Novel From Women” ? Still on hold?’ I asked, although personally I didn’t think Tris’s thesis, From Monk to Monster: How Matthew Lewis walked, so Mary Shelley could rampage, would be a great loss to the literary oeuvre if it was never completed.

These preliminaries over, we grinned at each other. We’d been best friends and verbal sparring partners ever since my parents were killed in a climbing accident when I was thirteen, and I came to live with my Uncle Ambrose over his shop in York.

Now Tris was living on the other side of the Atlantic and we were FaceTiming most days, it helped that he had always been nocturnal by preference. He’d been too busy yesterday to talk, but today I had something I was bursting to tell him.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said, before I had the chance. ‘Did Freddo send you a card?’

‘Yes, with a hoofprint on it,’ I said, for every year we sponsored a donkey at a nearby sanctuary for each other’s birthdays. Tris’s was called Martha. ‘What’s more amazing, though, is that Unks remembered it was my birthday too, and he bought me a present.’

‘Let me guess – it’s a book.’

‘It’s a whole box of books – Gothic novels he got from the last auction he went to – and a sweet little wooden desk, the sort without legs that just sits on a table.’

‘I know the kind of thing,’ Tris said. ‘Any of the novels interesting? Ones you haven’t got copies of?’

He looked at me quizzically, raising one eyebrow. He has a mischievous sort of face, but his eyes are a clear smoky-quartz grey and hard to look away from, even on a screen. ‘You look excited about something: come clean! What is it, some rare first edition?’

‘Well, there were some first-edition Orlando Browne books in the box, plus a couple of small non-fiction works by the same author that I’d no idea existed, among the later editions of Mrs Radcliffe and what Unks calls “her ilk”.

It wasn’t those that were the most exciting find, but a sort of journal mixed in with them, a really old one with board covers. ’

‘The plot thickens,’ Tris said, sounding amused, and his quizzical eyebrow now practically vanishing into his tangled mop of chestnut curls.

‘The journal certainly explains why there were first editions of all Orlando Browne’s works in the box, because even though I’ve only managed to make out the first few pages – the handwriting is minute and fills every bit of each page – it makes it clear that it’s written by him.’

‘Really?’ He sat up a little straighter. ‘That is quite a find. And it solves one argument, doesn’t it? Your contention that Orlando Browne was the pen name of a female author.’

He looked pleased with himself, but my next words wiped the smirk off his face.

‘No, actually, Tris, it doesn’t, because, as I knew from reading the novels, the author was a woman – Alys Weston.’

‘I suppose the journal is authentic?’ he said, fighting on into the last ditch.

‘Unks says everything about it rings true to him. He can’t get excited about any book or author before the nineteenth century, but the journal was begun in 1808, so he’s delighted his birthday present turned out to be so fascinating to me.’

‘It’s pretty fascinating to me, too,’ Tris admitted, accepting Ambrose’s expert opinion. ‘Tell me more.’

‘No, I want to hug it to myself for a bit longer. Also, I’ve just started to type it into my laptop, which is slow going since it’s so hard to read.’

‘OK, tantalize me a bit longer,’ he said, grinning. ‘But this means you’ll have to tweak your thesis a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, but my contention in it that Orlando Browne was a woman has now been proved, so I can add a footnote and make the necessary changes to the rest. And if you ever get on and finish your thesis, you’ll have to do a little tweaking, too.’

‘Funnily enough, finishing my PhD is one of the things I’ve decided I want to do in the near future,’ he said to my surprise.

Something about the room behind him, which I’d been too excited to take in until now, suddenly struck me, as did a life-size hair-covered cardboard figure that chose that moment to topple over on to him.

‘Is that Chewbacca? Where on earth are you?’

He fended it off. ‘In my friend Jason’s spare room. He’s a massive Star Wars fan and stores all his memorabilia in here.’

I assumed Tris was away from home. He now has friends all over the States, not to mention that his parents had retired to Florida a couple of years back.

‘I’ll arrange about finishing my PhD when I’m over,’ he added. Chewbacca had set off a sort of chain reaction and he was now rebuffing Princess Leia’s advances.

‘For a holiday? Is Marcy coming with you?’

I liked Marcy, even if she had taken my best friend so far away.

‘No, I’m coming alone – and for good. Marcy and I have decided to split up.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said sincerely, because I’d always felt that calm, organized, sensible Marcy provided my mercurial friend with a bit of ballast.

‘It was her idea, although actually I was getting a bit tired of being sweetly reasoned with when what I really needed was a good fiery argument, like the ones we have. Anyway, there’s nothing to keep me here now and I want to come back to York.

I’m really looking forward to seeing you again in three dimensions. ’

‘Unlike Chewbacca,’ I said. ‘And I suspect what you really want to see is that journal.’

‘That too, if you’ve stopped being dog-in-the-mangerish about it by then,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll have to be here for a few more weeks yet, so I don’t suppose you’d like to email me the typescript of the journal when you’ve finished it?’

‘No, you’ll have to wait until you are back,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m sure Unks won’t mind you staying in the spare room till you get yourself organized – when are you coming back?’

‘Around the end of the month, I should think. I’ve got some work to finish off first.’

‘Ah, yes, the great work of taking really good novels and turning them into TV and film scripts that bear no relation to the original.’