The Christmas Bookshop(11)
Carmen sniffed, and marched on up through the dark tunnel of something absurdly called ‘New College’ and found, to her surprise, that it popped her out at the top of the Royal Mile.
The ancient thoroughfare that ran between the castle and all the way down to Holyrood Palace was full of shops selling anything and everything that could get some tartany nonsense stamped on it, but it was early in the morning and the tourists were not yet abroad.
Anyway, Carmen didn’t notice the eye-level shops straightaway. As she emerged from the dark tunnel of the ancient steps, she could see only a three-sided courtyard and a towering structure with windows that seemed to funnel upwards.
How could they have built so high without lifts or modern technology? There was no car noise here, no trains, not even a bagpipe, just quiet footsteps passing by. And as she walked through the courtyard and stepped out onto the cobbles, polished beneath her feet, Carmen had the slightest sense of a spell, of a step in time. She wondered who else had stepped on them in their time: kings and queens, the poor and forgotten, uncounted for hundreds of years. She herself could be anyone: a dairy maid, a farmer’s girl, a grand lady, stepping out into an unchanging Edinburgh world.
A lonely shaft of sunlight appeared and lit up an old black and white building next door to the narrow passageway she had emerged from, and she watched it shine on the ancient panes of glass, so neatly and tidily divided, six on the bottom, six on the top.
Who lived here, she wondered, among this most ancient of roads, with stone watering troughs for horses still standing, and tiny narrow passageways and mysterious staircases disappearing hither and thither? And did you feel it every day, that it was magical?
Then a busker loudly set up with a drum and a penny whistle close by, and the spell was broken, and she realised the shop in the building was selling something called Ye Olde Tartan Fudge and she sighed. Work, after all, was still work, and she was running late.
She had one more set of steps to go, thankfully downwards, to take her onto Victoria Street.
As soon as she got there, she checked again: this was definitely the right place and she almost sent a message thanking Sofia. Because Victoria Street was about the most irritatingly pretty place she’d ever seen.
The street was a row of curved buildings underneath some kind of balcony arrangement – Edinburgh’s notion of sticking streets on top of each other was incredibly peculiar, like the area called the New Town being really, really super old – and curved down towards a large open space at the bottom called the Grassmarket. This must be, Carmen realised, what Sofia meant by an upper and a lower section.
There were little shops lining the length of the street, each painted a different, cheerful colour – pink, green, blue. There was a hardware shop, a French restaurant, a magic shop with a wide array of herbs and broomsticks, expensive-looking shops for hunting and fishing and tweed, chichi little restaurants – and a bookshop.
It was green with a beautiful display of bicycling frogs towing books wrapped in Christmas paper. It was adorable and perfect and for a second Carmen genuinely felt quite excited.
Then she saw it was the wrong number, and in fact a books and antiques shop, not what she was looking for at all. The McCredie shop, it turned out, was two doors down.
This shop was also green, but in this case, a pale olive colour. And in fact, it didn’t really look like a shop at all. The dusty window was crammed with maps, with folders and big old reference books but not in an enticing, imaginative way like the other bookshop. Instead they were simply piled up haphazardly against the glass, so it was impossible to read what they actually were.
The place looked less like a shop of any kind and more like a two-storey fire hazard. She checked her phone again. Yup. This was definitely the place. But what on earth could she do here? Who would ever even come here? She couldn’t imagine any customer ever being enticed through its doors.
She frowned. Maybe it was one of these scams and actually fronted a massive drug-running business. Sofia wouldn’t have put her up to that though. But otherwise how could anyone who ran a place like this afford to use Sofia’s services? That made the most sense so far.
There were dead flies in the window and thick dust over many of the objects. Carmen thought briefly back to Mrs Marsh and what a heart attack it would have given her.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door, which tinged with an ancient bell, flattened down her hair and walked in.
Inside, the shop did not seem any less of a disaster area – or any more of a place where any sane human would want to spend their time or their money.
The main room, painted green to match the front, was lined with shelving in which books – mostly old – were jammed so tightly you couldn’t pull any of them out.
The titles appeared to be filed willy-nilly. There was a large glass cabinet at the front on which sat an old-fashioned till, and on top of those were two or three old books displayed that clearly hadn’t been touched – and Carmen had never heard of them – for a very long time. The rest of the cabinet was covered in an unruly sprinkle of invoices, paper, receipts, advertising flyers, empty envelopes and general detritus.
‘Hello?’ said Carmen loudly, but there was no reply.
There was a floating set of steps to the higher shelves, but that too was piled high with what looked like atlases; not just atlases but atlases Carmen wagered were too old to have half of the new names of countries in them. There was a section of books about Edinburgh itself, which had obviously been fingered and read by tourists so often they were in a dreadful state, and couldn’t possibly be sold now. A spider’s web in the corner of the window was pretty, but Carmen rather thought it did not give an ideal impression.