The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane: The feel-good read perfect for those long winter nights

‘Of course we can,’ Della replied. ‘What kind of thing would you like?’

He looked at her for a few moments longer than necessary – time actually seemed to stand still – and she was conscious of every beat of her heart. ‘Er, anything really,’ he blustered. ‘Whatever you can, um, throw together. Um, I don’t mean throw, I mean carefully arrange, I’m sure you’ll do a lovely job …’ Feeling as if she had regressed to being sixteen years old – she was twenty-nine at the time – she assured him that she would indeed do her best.

In fact, Della reflected now, she would have somehow managed to find him fifty blue tulips – which don’t even exist in the natural world – so eager was she to help out the flustered stranger who had left her with a fistful of tenners and her head in a spin.

She pulled up into the castle car park, telling herself it was natural for things to become rather humdrum after over two decades together. But occasionally she wondered what had happened to the eager young man who’d come back to Fresh and Wild the next day and asked her out. She supposed he’d just grown up.

Had she, though? As she climbed out of her car and the castle came into view, Della supposed she had. She went to work, she was a mother – at least, as much as Sophie would allow it these days – and cheerfully handled the hordes of schoolchildren who hurled themselves into the castle shop, so grateful were they to have reached the end of their history lesson and be allowed to buy stuff.Two stout stone towers flanked the castle’s main entrance. The imposing archway led to a courtyard, the entrance to the grand hall and the obligatory tearoom and gift shop. Della waved to Georgia, who was manning the ticket office, and to Harry, who was brushing up copper beech leaves in the stone-flagged courtyard.

‘How are you, love?’ Angie greeted Della with a hug as she entered the shop.

‘I’m fine, honestly.’ Della pulled off her jacket and hung it on a hook in the back room. ‘I miss her, of course,’ she added. ‘It’s like, I don’t know …’ She shrugged. ‘A big gap, I suppose. I mean, we spent so much time together towards the end.’ Della cleared her throat. ‘But I’m just glad it all went smoothly, and it was good to see everyone together – all the people I knew from growing up, I mean.’

Angie nodded. ‘You must be shattered, being left to organise the whole thing.’

‘It was simpler that way,’ Della said truthfully.

Angie squeezed her hand. ‘Your poor mum.’

‘I know. All her life, not a single thing wrong with her. She’d never been to a hospital, not even to give birth – she had the three of us at home.’

‘Stoical,’ Angie laughed.

‘Yes, I guess she was. But I suspect she also wanted to do things precisely her way.’ It was true, Della decided; at home, Kitty could manage her births, barking commands to William and even the beleaguered midwife on duty (‘Your mother was very forthright in her wishes,’ William had told Della, when she had asked about the circumstances of her own birth). Only now did she realise how hard it must have been for Kitty to succumb to the routines of the hospice.

As no visitors had arrived yet, Della started to unpack a box of bendy plastic shields that would be as much use as floppy tortilla wraps in even the most mild-mannered battle. It seemed wrong that, while Heathfield Castle had stood for over nine hundred years, most of the souvenirs would barely last the car journey home. ‘Authentic’ tunics – fashioned from something like potato sacking, dyed silver – disintegrated at the first hint of energetic play. (Della knew this, having sent Isaac and Noah one each several birthdays ago.) Generic notebooks, rubbers and chocolate bars were emblazoned with the castle’s logo: a rather shabby drawing of the North Tower. But at least business was brisk as visitors began to drift in, which helped to take Della’s mind off Mark’s ill humour and Sophie’s imminent departure and, of course, what the heck she was going to do with her mother’s books.

By late morning the shop was milling with parents and grandparents and boisterous children. Two little girls launched into a full-scale scrap by the colouring books, and a mournful-looking boy seemed bitterly disappointed when his mother wouldn’t buy him an amethyst the size of a human head. ‘You can have this instead,’ she said, radiating fatigue as she brandished a bouncy ball that was supposed to resemble an eyeball (nothing medieval about that, as far as Della could make out).

‘So I guess you’ll be clearing out your mum’s house,’ Angie ventured, as the shop quietened down towards the end of the afternoon. ‘That’s going to be hard for you, Dell.’

She nodded. ‘I’m going to pop over after work and try to get my head around what needs to be done. It was tricky, with Roxanne, Jeff and Tamsin there.’

Angie pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I hope there’s no wrangling over your mum’s stuff? It’s just awful when that happens.’

‘No, I don’t think there will be. My sister-in-law’s bagged most of the jewellery already.’

‘No, that’s terrible!’

‘It’s fine,’ Della said firmly. ‘To be honest, Mum didn’t wear it much – at least, not after Dad left because he’d given her most of it.’ She paused. ‘I have taken her cookbook collection though.’

‘Oh, you can never have too many of those,’ Angie remarked, breaking off as a rather dishevelled man in a rain-speckled jacket tumbled into the shop, clutching the hand of a grumpy-looking boy of around eight years old.

‘Eddie, please stop moaning,’ the man exclaimed, throwing Angie and Della a quick look.

‘I wanted to go in the castle,’ the boy muttered. ‘You said the dungeons are haunted. Why can’t we just have a quick look?’

‘We will next time, okay?’ The man exhaled and raked back his light brown hair. Everything about him – the Toy Heaven carrier bag, the sadness in his soft grey eyes that suggested that today wasn’t turning out as he had hoped – said weekend dad.

‘You promised,’ the boy said crossly.

Della stepped towards them. ‘I’m sorry, the castle closes in five minutes.’

‘Yes, I realise that now,’ the man said with a rueful smile. ‘I’ve messed up my timings today.’

Della fixed Eddie with a bright smile. ‘The dungeon’s great, but you really need plenty of time to enjoy it properly. There are tours, you know. They turn the lights off and it’s really creepy.’

With his grumpiness subsiding, Eddie rubbed at his eyes. ‘Cool,’ he murmured.

‘So you should come back when there’s a tour on. That way, you’ll have a better chance of seeing a ghost.’

He regarded her intently. ‘Are there really ghosts here?’

Della paused. ‘Well, no one knows for sure. But there are plenty of stories about them.’

‘Who were they? The ghosts, I mean?’

‘Eddie, we really should be going,’ the man said, resting a hand on his shoulder. ‘These ladies will be closing the shop.’

‘We’ve got a few minutes,’ Angie called over from the till.

‘Who are the ghosts?’ Eddie repeated, eyes gleaming with rapt interest.

‘Um, well, some people think they’re prisoners who died in the dungeons hundreds of years ago.’

‘Why did they die?’ he asked eagerly.

Della glanced at Eddie’s father, wondering whether this line of questioning was okay. As a young child, Sophie had enjoyed the more gruesome aspects of history: floggings and hangings and witches being burned. She had devoured Horrible Histories books and, during one particularly fervent period, had insisted on visiting the castle’s dungeons every weekend for months on end. ‘They weren’t well looked after,’ Della explained, ‘so I think they probably died of starvation.’

Eddie seemed pretty thrilled by this as he turned to his dad. ‘Can we come back tomorrow?’

Della saw the man’s face relax for the first time since they had blundered in. ‘That might be tricky. It’s Milo’s party, remember?’

‘Can we come next weekend then? Please?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ The man smiled at Della. ‘Thank you,’ he added.

‘You’re welcome,’ she said, although she wasn’t quite sure what he was thanking her for. What she did know, though, as the man and boy left, was that she felt different: lighter somehow, as if the weight of her mother’s funeral, and Mark’s grumblings about the cookbooks, had simply floated away. Even more startling was the fact that, when she climbed into her car and glimpsed her reflection in the rear-view mirror, she saw that her red lipstick – Impassioned – was still perfectly in place.

Chapter Six (#ulink_16dceb1d-6b68-5de8-b06c-6c377e3cbea6)

Without the cookbooks lining the walls, Rosemary Cottage seemed different too. It was as if a vital part of its fabric had been stripped away, leaving empty shelves stretching from floor to ceiling in every room of the house. The place looked ransacked, but then, what else could Della have done? Anyway, soon the whole place would be empty and someone else – perhaps a young couple keen to move from town to country – would look around and think, Hmm, well, it needs renovating, of course, and that antiquated kitchen and bathroom need to come out. But it has lots of potential …

Della ran a finger along an empty bookshelf. It came away fuzzy with dust. Striding from room to room – the cottage already felt rather chilly and stale – she assessed what needed to be done. It wasn’t that she relished the thought of sending the polished mahogany dining table or Kitty’s glass-topped dressing table to the auction house; more that, the sooner it was all dealt with, the sooner she could move on from all of this.

In the rickety utility room she found a wicker basket into which she packed hand-printed silk scarves, elegant handbags and a slim box containing a set of mother-of-pearl-handled butter knives. These, plus Kitty’s handmade wooden sewing box, were just the obvious things to take home for safe-keeping: clearly, Della would be making numerous trips back to the house. She continued to flit through the rooms, gathering up small mementoes along the way. Photograph albums were packed into a faded tartan suitcase, along with reams of paperwork to be sorted through later. Perhaps it was for the best that her siblings weren’t exactly clamouring to help. Without Jeff, Roxanne and Tamsin sticking their oars in, Della felt clear-headed and purposeful.

As she investigated the contents of Kitty’s dressing table, thoughts of that man and his son who’d wanted to see ghosts filtered into her mind. With a smile, she realised now what she’d done: overly sympathised, just because he was a dad in charge of his own child. How many mothers had she seen trying to control screaming toddlers and cheer up sullen kids over the years? And how much notice had she paid, really? That was the thing with fathers, Della decided: they didn’t have to do very much to be hailed as superheroes by starry-eyed women. ‘Some woman came up to me in the park,’ Mark announced, when Sophie was a baby, ‘and said I deserved a medal.’ A medal, for taking his own daughter out in her pram for fifteen minutes! It hadn’t even been raining. Della had dragged the buggy through the park in all weathers – driving hail, four inches of snow – and she couldn’t recall ever being festooned with praise. The woman had probably just wanted an excuse to talk to him, Della had decided, aware of how the presence of a small child – like a puppy – heightened a man’s allure.