Touch Nothing Marked in Red

"Don't go," said my grandmother, not looking up from her crossword. "Every girl who walks into that shop after dark comes home in love, and never with anyone sensible."

Nobody takes Granny Bridie seriously. She also believes the toaster listens to her and that you should never trust a man who owns more than one scarf. So when my best friend Aoife slid two black tickets across the kitchen table, THE BOOKBINDER'S BRIDE: an immersive dark romance. One night only. Come alone, or not at all. I laughed.

"It's theatre, Gran. Actors. In a bookshop."

"That's how it starts," she said, and wrote DOOMED into seven across in her crossword. It did not fit. She wrote it anyway.

Aoife cancelled forty minutes before curtain with a text that said food poisoning / possibly a man / will explain, which is how I ended up alone at the end of a crooked Galway lane, rain coming at me sideways like it had a personal warning.

The Hollow Page bookshop looked like it had been folded out of an old map. Its windows glowed amber. A woman in a Victorian mourning dress opened the door before I could knock, pressed a black velvet mask into my hand, and gave me a card.

You are a guest at the reading of Lord Cassian Vale's will. Trust no one. Touch nothing marked in red.

"Lovely," I said. "Is there a toilet?"

She stared at me with the dead eyes of a professional trained not to break character. Then she pointed. Very dramatically.

Inside, the bookshop had been rearranged into a labyrinth. Shelves formed narrow corridors that turned in on themselves. Candles flickered in jam jars. Somewhere a cello was playing something that sounded like a heart being slowly disappointed. Masked guests drifted between the stacks, following actors like moths following lamps.

I followed nobody, because I have the sense of direction of a shopping trolley. I turned left three times, found myself back at the poetry section, and sneezed so violently I knocked an entire tower of Yeats onto the floor.

"Careful," said a voice behind me. "He bruises."

I turned. He was tall, in a long black coat with ink stains up to the wrists, dark hair falling into eyes that were, I'm sorry, there's no other word for it, smouldering. A leather satchel of old books hung at his hip. He looked like a man who had personally ruined a Brontë sister.

"You're the Bookbinder," I said.

"And you," he said, stepping closer, voice dropping low, "are trespassing in my library."

"I'm really not. I've a ticket. It's the fifty-euro one."

Something twitched at the corner of his mouth. He crushed it immediately, like a man stamping out a small fire.

"Come," he said, and took my hand.

Here is what I learned, as he led me through hidden doors and down a staircase I'd swear wasn't there last Tuesday when I bought a Maeve Binchy:

Lord Cassian Vale had loved a woman named Eléanor. She had died, and in his grief he had bound her soul into a book, one of thousands on these shelves. Every night he searched for her. Every night he failed. And every night, the story went, he chose one guest to help him look and if she found the right book, she would take Eléanor's place forever.

"Forever seems a bit much," I said.

"Love is always a bit much," he said. "That is rather the point."

We stopped in a tiny room, lined floor to ceiling with books and lit by one candle. It was so small our knees nearly touched. Somewhere above us, other guests were screaming at a murder in the travel section.

"Choose," he whispered. "The book that frightens you most."

I scanned the shelves. Ghost stories. Tragic poems. A leather volume that seemed to be breathing. My hand closed around something and I pulled it free.

It was How to Eat by Nigella Lawson.

The Bookbinder looked at the cookbook. He looked at me. His shoulders began, very slightly, to shake.

"Why," he said, in a voice that was absolutely not in the script, "does that frighten you?"

"Have you seen how much butter she uses?"

He laughed. A real laugh, surprised and helpless, the kind that folds a person in half. The candle guttered. For a moment he wasn't a cursed nobleman at all but just a man with ink on his hands and a dimple I'd bet money wasn't in the character notes.

Then he straightened, cleared his throat, and became dangerous again.

"You have chosen wrongly," he murmured, leaning close. "Which means you may leave. But know this: once you have read my name, you can never truly go."

"I haven't read your name."

He pressed a small card into my palm, closed my fingers over it, and was gone through a door in the shelves before I could argue.

The finale happened in the attic. There was dust and a violin and a woman in white climbing out of a giant book (Eléanor, it turned out, had been in Irish Local History the whole time). The Bookbinder wept. Everyone clapped. The lights came up. The magic evaporated into the smell of wet coats and people asking each other where they'd parked.

I found him outside, under the awning, coat off, drinking tea from a flask. Without the candlelight, he looked younger. Softer.

"Rory," he said, holding out a hand. "I'm not really a Lord."

"Shocking. I'm not really a guest at a will-reading."

"You're the first person in forty-two performances to pick Nigella."

"I'm the first person in forty-two performances to win, you mean."

He grinned. "Did you read the card?"

I hadn't. I unfolded it under the streetlamp. His name, a phone number, and one line, written in red ink:

Touch nothing marked in red.

"Well," I said, "now I have to, don't I?"

I got home at two in the morning. Granny Bridie was still at the kitchen table, as if she'd never moved.

"Well?" she said.

"Nothing happened," I said, and smiled at my phone.

She didn't look up. She just filled in seven down with FOOL, and it fit perfectly.

Eight months later, my cousin Siobhán waved a black ticket at me across the dinner table.

"Don't go," I told her, with Rory's hand warm in mine under the tablecloth. "Every girl who walks into that shop after dark comes home in love."

She laughed. "Says the woman who came home engaged to a cursed Lord."

"He's not cursed. He just has a lot of scarves."

Rory coughed into his potato. 

"Touch nothing marked in red," I whispered to Siobhán as she got ready to go.

She rolled her eyes. I knew somewhere in the labyrinth, a cello would begin to play, and a young man with ink on his wrists would step out of the poetry section, straight into her path.

I didn't warn her again.

Nobody ever listens anyway.