And when the crowds went home and the tents came down, it was still this small, once-walled medieval town that sold cattle feed and local honey between the second-hand books.
‘But now something’s slipping away?’ Betty said.
‘Like everyplace. Greedy bankers, idiots in government, the Internet collapsing high streets. Then the King’s health breaks down and he doesn’t get to spend as much time here. The castle goes on the market, and now it’s in the hands of a trust which may or may not pull it together. And the ideas that took the town on to a new level are just… running down.’
‘So it needs… us?’
Oh God. Robin was viewing his possible encounter with the King as a sign of converging destinies.
‘Needs people with commitment to more than their own bank accounts. Needs reconnecting to its energy-source.’
This was Robin, seeing everything in mystical terms. Betty thought it would have been so much easier if they’d come here a few years ago, before they’d bought a farmhouse with a ruined church on it and Robin’s body had been smashed by falling masonry.
‘We should go back,’ Robin said. ‘Gotta be some other place for rent.’
‘Let’s wait awhile, see what happens.’
‘That’s what you had from the tarot?’
Betty said nothing. Although the tarot was just points of reference, a way of seeing what, deep down, you already knew, it still scared Robin.
‘Could be like old times,’ he said. ‘Like the first apartment.’
The first apartment was when he’d followed her home to the UK after they’d met at a Wiccan international moot in Salem, Mass. Robin attending as an exhibitor of artwork for pulp fantasy novels, Betty as… well, as a witch. A sublime witch, Robin used to say, with hair like a cornfield in the warm days before the harvest, telling her how he’d felt his whole being drawn into a vortex of obsessive love… and something more, something epic and mythological that he could evoke in gouache and coloured inks but would never understand.
The way Betty saw it, him following her home to England, embracing paganism, had been like going to live in his own artwork. Which was fine, until the lucrative Lord Madoc series had suddenly been terminated and the other cover-artwork it had brought in began to tail off in the wake of a betrayal that made you realize that no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.
‘Of course, we were young, then,’ Betty said.
‘We’re still young.’
‘What’s left of us.’
‘OK,’ Robin said angrily, ‘we’ll stay here. You can aspire to three days a week on the checkout and I can sit on my sorry ass trying to paint over the sound of lawnmowers and… and life grinds on.’
It was a matter of supreme irony to Robin that he now had an actual sorry ass.
‘OK, we’ll go tomorrow,’ Betty said.
The entry to Back Fold was facing them next morning as they came out of the parking lot, but they ignored it, heading up an adjacent short track that led around the castle and accessed stone steps leading down through its grounds to the marketplace.
At the bottom of the castle hill, there were unattended open-air bookshelves full of cheap books they relied on visitors’ honesty to pay for. Used to be books all over the castle itself, Robin told Betty – at least the parts you were allowed into without a hard hat. And down in the town even the shops that weren’t bookstores – the antique shops, the jeweller’s – all sold a few books as well.
Books had become the town’s circulation system. Carrying the energy, the mojo.
‘You take out books,’ Robin said, ‘you’re weakening the system. You’re inviting, like, entropy. So whatever they do to this castle, books need to be part of it. Crucial.’
Betty looked up at the castle. They were under the heavy medieval tower, with massive oak doors in the portcullis opening. Doors so huge and damaged they could even be original. A shudder took Betty by surprise; a voice from the square stopped her thinking about it.
‘Mr and Mrs Thorogood.’
A very dry, very Home Counties voice. Betty turned slowly.
‘Mr Oliver.’
‘So you’re back.’ He was in an Edwardian-length jacket, a suede hat with a turned down brim. ‘Still looking for a shop? I confess I didn’t think you were particularly serious about acquiring a lease on mine.’
‘I tend not to do things for laughs.’ Robin leaned on his stick. ‘Any more.’
‘Then I apologize. As you can imagine, there are passing tourists who just get it into their heads that they’d like to be booksellers.’