Apologies to anyone who is still waiting to the conclusion to one of my recent stories. It’s taking longer than I hoped, while this one flowed better and had a deadline. I am still working on it and thanks to anyone who has written to ask.
Most of the place names in the story are fictional.
Some of the less sexual bits of the choreography for the dance are based on the Pina Bausch version with the Cleveland Orchestra available on YouTube.
1. The Approach
“Girrus a hand with this, luv,” said Verna Baldwin as she tried to navigate her suitcase down the stairs of the cottage. It wasn’t the weight of the case that was causing her difficulty, so much as the way the narrow staircase curved round and round on its way down. There were many twentieth-century luxuries which hadn’t been borne in mind when the cottage had been designed, like a WiFi signal that extended past one room, consistently hot-running water, or the ability of keeping any kind of heat in. It was the start of June and it was still brassic in here. Verna mentally added ‘going on holiday to Lanzarote’ to the list of things the cottage made darn near impossible.
Her assistant, Emily Earnshaw, put down what she was reading and got up to help her, though by the time she’d wormed her way through the tall stack of hardbacks yet be sorted and the rest of the luggage that had already been brought down, Verna had already managed to disentangle the case long enough to have managed to get it into the book store area of cottage.
She dumped the case with the others next to the big Wuthering Heights display. Technically the shop-cum-apartment was half-a-mile the wrong side of the sign that said ‘Welcome to Bronte Country’, but it was their perennial best-seller with tourists passing on their way up to the Yorkshire Moors. It was one of the few new books that the shop sold — as luxurious illustrated version rather than the cheap and cheerful Penguin Classics version. That was a regretful but necessary concession to staying in business. She’d custom ordered the life-sized character cut-outs when she’d first opened the shop thirty years ago. Like everyone since 1978, the artist had drawn distinct inspiration for the Cathy from Kate Bush. Quite why he’d decided to model Heathcliff on Freddie Mercury was more of a mystery, but she’d grown quite fond of her constant companions over the last few decades. She’d have to get new ones in eventually though; like herself, they’d both seen better days.
“Right, that’s the lot,” said Verna, looking over her assembled luggage with a definite sense of satisfaction “I called for a car. Be here in about fifteen. Time for one last brew before I head off.”
Emily moved in the direction of the tea-pot, which lived perched on a pile of the less popular Catherine Cooksons but Verna stopped her. “Y’alright pet, I’ll pour. You get back to yer book. Anything interesting?”
Emily held the dog-eared volume up for her boss’ inspection. “Book about witches. Elderly gentleman bought in a bunch of them while you were upstairs packing. I wasn’t sure where to stick them. I was having a flick through to get a feel.”
“Well, children’s fairytales’d be the place to start or is it more one of your high fantasy type of deals?”
“Nah, you know, actual, real, honest-to-goodness witchcraft. This book is by a guy called Gardner – set the whole thing off in the nineteen-fifties seems. See here, this page says witches are supposed to work their rituals to the Great Goddess outside in the nude. Clothes muck around with your natural connection to the Earth ‘parently.”
“Fancy that,” said Verna, less than impressed. “You won’t catch many capering around in the buff up here. You’d catch your death. Nah, that kind of things more for your soft Southern witches — y’know the Pimlico Coven and whatnot. Up north, they’ll be where any sensible old crone’d be – huddled round a cauldron for warmth and a good thing too. Still if the weathers as good as they say in Puerto del Carmen, I might have a go at it meself — I feel like getting in touch with my inner Goddess, though getting in touch with someone else’s outer God would be alright n’all.”
Verna laughed. Emily didn’t. If the girl had a funny bone, Verna had never been able to find it. It definitely wasn’t anywhere near her hips. It wouldn’t really be fair to call her young assistant simply ‘bookish’. Hell, she ran a second-hand bookstore herself – ‘Bookish’ was a tautology for them both. But while she used books as a means of escaping real life for a few hours or even a whole afternoon, Emily seemed to use them as a way of understanding it. Instead of, you know, actually living. And to top it all, she always seemed to have at hand exactly the wrong book with the wrong message.
“So, what should I do with the books, Mrs Baldwin?” she asked.
“Leave ’em out. I’ll sort ’em when I get back,” said Verna. Technically they should go under Religion, she supposed, but the only person who ever looked back there was old Mrs Birkbeck and she’d have kittens if she saw the ‘occult’ invading what she regarded as her own personal shelf full of heaven. Still, if they weren’t on sale, they’d be in Emily’s hands and that might be worse. She picked up a volume at random,Sex Magic in Modern Witchcraft, the mind boggled. “No, on second thoughts, stick ’em in the stock room. They’ll be a bugger to shift anyhow.”
Oh, the girl was nice enough. Pretty too, especially if you defined ‘pretty’ as beautiful except with no effort put in. She was punctual, tidy, good with numbers and had an almost inhuman ability to remember what they had in stock and what had sold — generally all the areas Verna herself was weak at. It’s just people found her, well, a littleoff in some not quite definable way. It wasn’t she was ill-mannered. It was that her grasp of basic social conventions was hazy at best.
For example, she tended to get rather overheated when discussing fiction with customers — which was great when she liked it, but not so great when she had ‘opinions’. She took her fantasy seriously, more so than her reality, maybe. Last week, one poor teenage customer had remarked that ‘You can never have too much Harry Potter’ and had been treated to a fifteen-minute lecture about exactly how much twee boarding school wizardry Emily believed was a sufficient. It turned out to be a lot less the J.K Rowling had written, although oddly not completely zero. He’d been about to buy the deluxe box set as well, more was the pity. He’d left with a battered and rather less expensive Ursula K. Le Guin that Verna wasn’t sure he was going to get as much from.
Similarly, anyone approaching the counter clutching a copy of Game of Thrones would invariably be guided back towards the shelf with a recommendation any number of different fantasy series that were clearly better simply by being finished. Verna had been terrified the first time a Twilight fan had visited the shop, but to her great relief, Emily had just stared at it blankly, tutted and rung the purchase up. She’d was absolutely banned, under pain of instant dismissal from giving her opinion on Wuthering Heights ever again — she’d quite enjoyed the bit with the ghost at the start, but had put the book down once it was clear that Heathcliff wasn’t going to turn out to be a werewolf.