Late May of the year 1800, Hatchard’s Bookshop, some time in the afternoon. Open to all.
Spending time in Hatchard’s was, in a word, dangerous for Catherine Lockhart. Not dangerous in the traditional sense, of course; there were no dark and suspicious alleyways lurking in the bookshop, and the potential for scandal was minimal at best. No, it was dangerous for Kate because something curious seemed to happen to time when she walked through the doors of the bookshop. It seemed like every time she stepped inside, she took a step out of London and into another world, a world where she could lose herself within the endless pages of novels. And lose herself she often did –– the last time she was here, Kate was convinced she had only spent an hour after lunch glancing at the titles and taking down this book or that one to examine the first few pages, only to look up at one point and realize that the sun was setting outside the shop windows. Needless to say: dangerous.
Still, the little wild spark in Kate that had originally belonged to her sister Amelia and the love of stories that had always been shared equally between the four Lockhart sisters had latched onto Hatchard’s, and she could not quite help herself today. There was only so many times she could re-read the well loved copies of Gulliver’s Travels or The Castle of Otranto, and her soul felt like it was starving for something new and captivating.
Presently, she was thumbing through a copy of The Castle of Wolfenbach, brows pulled together and head tilted slightly to the side as she read brief sentences here and there. Normally, Kate would have retreated to one of the settees near the front of the shop, rather than crowding one of the narrow aisles of bookcases, but she had (as per usual) lost track of time. At the sudden sound of someone snapping a book shut an aisle over, she jumped, shutting her own book guiltily, and pressed the novel to her chest, glancing at the shelves again. Ah! There! Near the topmost shelf, a few copies of The Necromancer, translated from German into English. Her heart sank when she realized that even if she were to locate a stool, the book was too far out of her reach; while most of her peers had shot up even slightly in height during their early teenage years, Kate still stood barely above one and a half meters, much to her own personal consternation.
At the sound of footfalls coming from one end of the aisle, Kate’s head shot up and the air left her chest in a sudden sigh of relief. “Pardon me!” She called, her voice pitched just barely above her normal speaking tone, The Castle of Wolfenbach still pressed to her chest like a dearest possession and a hopeful smile gracing her features. “Terribly sorry to bother you, it’s just –– could you perhaps help me retrieve a book?”