Lennox was sitting on a bench outside the farmhouse in the nearly faded light. She didn’t quite catch what he was doing at first, and merely nodded at him. He grunted back in response. She focused closer. He appeared to be . . . She smiled, unable to help herself.
“He looks just like you,” she said.
Lennox looked up again from where he was feeding the tiny lamb with a baby’s bottle.
“Think dead lambs are funny, do you?” he grunted back.
Nina rolled her eyes. “You’re the one always telling me to wake up to the realities of farming,” she said. “What’s up with him, then?”
Lennox looked down, an uncharacteristically gentle look on his face. “His mam didn’t want him. Happens sometimes.”
“Why not? Did she have another lamb?”
“No, just him. They get rejected. Not all mothers want their bairns.”
“So you’ve adopted him?” she said.
Lennox shrugged. “Neh, just doing the night shift when the boys have gone home.”
“Work never ends as a farmer,” said Nina, genuinely impressed.
“Neh,” said Lennox. “It don’t. So you been off seeing someone?”
Nina allowed herself just for a moment to think about the long tinge of Marek’s eyelashes on his high cheekbones. “And no. Too early.”
Lennox put down the lamb, who scampered back into the kennel where he was obviously sleeping with Parsley.
“Not for me,” he said shortly. “Think I’ll turn in. Good night.”
And Nina carried on toward the barn, and barely woke even when Surinder came in, extremely late and rather inebriated, giggling loudly and telling someone to be quiet.
Chapter Nineteen
You’ve got your head in the clouds,” said Surinder.
Nina gave her a look. “Well, you’ve got your bum in the bed, so I have to look somewhere.”
Somewhere along the line, Surinder’s mini-break had turned into a massive leave of absence. The weather, completely unusually for Scotland—if the jackets people carried nervously everywhere were anything to go by—had turned unutterably beautiful: clear blue skies, with the occasional high white clouds scudding along like galloping lambs.
Nina had, true to her word, not done anything, hadn’t contacted Marek or asked him for any favors at all.
The books had arrived regardless.
Griffin had independently arranged with Marek to send up stock from the latest library to close, adding an invoice for the small fee and a slightly poignant note saying that if she was short of staff at any point to get in touch as the overgrown children he had to work with were all driving him absolutely crackers. He really wanted to be working with books again rather than trying to stop kids from getting around the library security system to access large amounts of pornography, which appeared to be something of a full-time job.
Marek had simply placed the books by the side of the railway line, Jim had alerted her by e-mail, and she’d picked them up in the morning.
“You’re a book-smuggling operation,” Surinder observed. “This isn’t right at all. If the police track him down . . . What about when the railway realizes he’s stopping all the time? If he loses his job? Will it all be fun and games then?”
Every single box had come with a little something from Marek on it: a joke, a poem, even a lovely drawing of a dog. And every day, when Nina had finished tending to the book hungry of Lanchish Down or Felbright Water or Louwithness or Cardenbie or Braefoot or Tewkes or Donibristle or Balwearie—where she would park the van and serve up the hottest romances, the grimmest crimefests or the latest, goriest Japanese serial-killer series (as always, going to the mildest-mannered-looking of people; in Nina’s experience, the more sensibly dressed the person, the more unutterably depraved they liked their fiction; no doubt there was a cosmic balance in it somewhere)—she would unpack some more.
She also sold a lot of copies of The Hamlet Cookbook, written by a woman who had moved to a tiny island in the Hebrides and who ate nothing except what she could digest of the local grasses. There was a lot of boiling involved. But you did get thin pretty fast. Surinder could tut all she liked, but she couldn’t deny that Nina was beginning to make a success of it.
Ainslee was looking as shy as ever as she unpacked the latest box, then gasped in delight.
“What?” said Nina, leaning over.
“It’s a whole box of Up on the Rooftops,” said Ainslee. “An entire box! It’s like gold!”
“Not the originals?”
“I haven’t . . . I mean, there was one in my old school, but I wasn’t allowed to touch it.”
“Oh goodness,” said Nina. “Oh goodness, they can’t have known what they had. Otherwise they could have sold them.”
“But you bought them,” said Ainslee.
“I bought a hundred boxes, sight unseen, library closure clearance,” said Nina. “You don’t really know what you’re going to get. But this . . . this is treasure.”
It was a clutch of hardback first editions of the famous book about three children who had to cross London without touching the ground; the books had inlaid binding, golden covers, and numerous exquisite line drawings.
“Oh my word,” said Nina, bending down. “Shall we just close the doors and sit down and read our favorite parts to each other all afternoon?”
“AINSLEE?” came a voice outside the van. They both looked around.
“Who’s that?”
“No one,” said Ainslee, scowling. “Can we shut the doors?”
“Not really,” said Nina, going forward.
“AINSLEE!”
“NOT NOW, BEN!” yelled back Ainslee suddenly, louder than Nina had expected. “I’M BUSY. GO AWAY.”
Nina hurried down the steps. Standing at the bottom was possibly the dirtiest little boy she had ever seen. His hair had obviously been cut with kitchen scissors. His cheeks were sticky, his fingernails black.
“Hello,” Nina said. The child, who looked to be around eight, scowled back at her.
“AINSLEE! I WANT BREAKFAST!”
Ainslee came out scowling. “I told you not to come here.”
“There’s no breakfast!”
“I left some custard creams in the side cupboard.”
“I ate them yesterday.”