Pam Rosenthal by The Bookseller's Daughter Read Free Book Online Page A

with an X.
    Goodbye and good riddance, she’d told herself. He was nothing but a drain on her emotions, a useless distraction from her perfectly acceptable life.
    Which continued, busy and bookish, innocent and safe. The holidays came and went; when Augustin kissed her under the mistletoe at the Rigauds’ extravagant New Year’s fete, she flashed a sidelong look at his dreadful cousin—the one who’d been flirting with him all evening—and smiled modestly.
    Papa ceased his coughing, though Gilles had given her a sober assessment of his condition. But he seemed well enough; she enjoyed their days together as winter became spring.
    The Societé typographique de Neuchâtel sent replacement copies of the short-shipped books, with their apologies. The squint-eyed, bandy-legged porter who brought them had been most polite and respectful.
    She even caught up on the sewing she hated; it was something to do with her hands when Augustin came to call in the evenings. She smiled at him over the sheets and towels she hemmed and embroidered—for the future.
    And then Papa died and she became ill. And suddenly she had no future.
     
     
    In the end, it hadn’t been her father’s weak heart that killed him. It was typhus, doubtless contracted at a ratty inn during the spring book fair in Lyon. She and Glues nursed him for two weeks, bathing him with alcohol, feeding him broths when he could take them, trying not to squabble with each other. Papa rarely was conscious, though she once heard him muttering a few cryptic phrases to Gilles: “Rigaud” and “taken care of” were all she could make out.
    Her own illness waited politely until after the funeral. She collapsed and lost consciousness, awakening drenched and exhausted a week later to see a pale, relieved Gilles at her side. She’d passed the crisis, he told her in a shaky voice.
    Only to encounter the real crisis.
    For when Augustin came to her bedside and at long last proposed a formal engagement, she didn’t murmur the expected “yes” but stammered a tearful “no.”
    She was as surprised as everyone else. What more could she possibly want, Gilles and the Rigauds demanded. But what she wanted— who she wanted—was too preposterous to be admitted, even to herself. So she simply wept and shook her head, looking dimwitted and disagreeable, until they explained her financial situation to her and left her to contemplate it.
    The house and books were mortgaged to Rigaud. It had been foolish of her, she thought, not to realize where Gilles’s school fees had come from. Gilles owned the furniture, such as it was; the sale of it would support him through his last year of medical training. But except for sentimental knickknacks (she’d insisted on keeping Papa’s spectacles as a remembrance), Papa had left nothing to Marie-Laure. Well, there was nothing to leave; there hadn’t had to be. The Rigauds had wanted her even without a dowry, Augustin because he loved her and Monsieur Rigaud because she’d be an asset to his business.
    You could say that Papa had mortgaged his daughter to pay for his son’s education. But that would have been putting too calculating a face on it. Papa had thought she’d be happy with Augustin and the paradise of books he’d someday inherit. Marie-Laure knew he’d intended the best.
    Whatever face you wanted to put on it, though, the fact was that she was destitute. She’d have to live with Gilles after he set up a practice and married Sylvie next year. But in the meantime?
    The job in the scullery was the best solution, even if it proved how far she’d come down in the world. Still, she thought, at least she’d gotten to see something of the world outside the city walls of Montpellier.
    Of course she missed her family. Gilles’s regular letters weren’t very satisfying; he’d never grasped that writing might be more than a vehicle for the communication of facts.
    But what she missed even more was life among the crowded bookshelves.