The Bookbinder’s Immortal Client

13 min read · Vampire romance · Free, complete, 18+

Before he would open the box, the man asked Esme Garrod to pour him a glass of his own wine.

He had carried the bottle inside his coat against the rain, and he set it on the counter beside the box as though the two came as a pair: no label, the cork sealed in brown wax. “Would you?” he said. “It goes better from someone else’s hand.”

It was a quarter to six on a Thursday in October, the last hand bindery in Bath had been shut for fifteen minutes, and Esme did not, as a rule, open bottles for strangers. But the name he had given at the door was in the ledger. She had looked it up while he wiped his feet. Mr H. Daubeny. Her grandmother’s slanting hand in 1952, and again in 1967, 1983 and 1991; her mother’s square capitals in 2009. A herbal repaired. A slipcase. A spine rebacked. Paid in cash, collected in person, no address.

He did not look like seventy-four years of anybody’s customer. He looked forty, perhaps, with dark hair gone grey above the ears and a long, patient face, and he stood very still among the presses, as people do in small shops when they can see what things cost.

She found the corkscrew in the drawer with the bone folders and poured into the only glass in the shop: her grandmother’s sherry glass, which lived under the counter for handovers. Garrod’s had poured a glass for every finished commission since 1931. Nobody had ever poured one at the start.

The wine was the colour of old gold and smelled of walnuts. He did not swirl it. He drank half, slowly, watching her hands rather than her face, and put the glass down as if he had been lent something.

Then he opened the box.

It held the most overfed book she had ever seen. Boards gone, spine gone, the sewing broken in a dozen places, the text block held together with linen tape and habit. Vellum at the front, soft and brown as an old glove. After it, paper of every age the trade had made, laid and wove, rag and wood pulp, gatherings of different sizes sewn and tipped and pasted in, as though someone had been adding to it for a very long while and had never once thought of stopping.

Every page was written in iron gall ink. On the vellum it had aged to a sound dark brown. On the eighteenth-century paper it had done what iron gall always does to paper, given long enough: it had eaten what it was written on. The downstrokes had burned through, and whole words hung in the leaf like lace.

“It’s a cellar book,” he said. “Mine. The last man to bind it was a Florentine, in fifteen twenty-three. He told me it would see me out.”

“And it didn’t.”

“It’s been close.”

She turned a leaf with the tip of a folder. Each entry was a date, a place, a wine and a few lines in a small upright hand. Bordeaux, 1611. Jerez, 1702. Leith, 1784. She did not read the lines.

“It needs everything,” she said. “Taking down to single sections. Every burned leaf mended. New sewing, new boards, new cover. Months.”

“Then months.” He closed the lid with two fingers. “And leave room at the back. A good deal of room.”

“I’ll have to read the dates to put it in order.”

“Read the dates. You’ll see the rest. You needn’t read it.”

He paid a deposit in notes so old she would have to explain them at the bank, and went out into the rain without an umbrella. Esme stood at the counter with her grandmother’s glass, half full, and did not ask herself how a man came to be a customer for seventy-four years. Her grandmother had not asked either, she suspected. Garrod women did not ask. It was the family’s other trade.

---

The Cellar Book

He came every Thursday at a quarter to six, which in October was dusk and by November was full dark, and every Thursday he brought a bottle and asked her to pour.

She took the book down to its sections over the first fortnight, slitting the old thread stitch by stitch, and laid the gatherings out along the long bench in order. Then she began on the burns: Japanese tissue thin enough to read through, pasted over each eaten word with wheat-starch paste she cooked on a camping stove in the back. Iron gall, she told him, is the only ink that goes on working after you have stopped. It goes on the page grey and darkens for days as the iron meets the air, and then it keeps on darkening, slowly, for the life of the page, until one day it has darkened right through.

“I know,” he said. “I make it.”

“With what?”

“Oak galls. Copperas. Gum. And the last of whatever was in the bottle, instead of water.” He nodded at the lace on the bench. “Wine’s sour. It doesn’t help.”

On the third Thursday she put the corkscrew down without using it and said, “What are you?”

He gave the question its due. “A customer.”

“A customer who doesn’t get older and drinks half a glass of wine a week and nothing else I’ve seen.”

“I don’t drink what you’re thinking,” he said. “Not since Florence.”

“Then what’s in the glass?”

“People.” He took the bottle from her and turned it so the lamp came through. “The woman who cut the grapes. The boy who trod them, where anybody still treads. Whoever topped up the barrel, and what sort of year they were having. It’s all in there, a long way off. Blood is one person, all at once, and it doesn’t stop at the glass.” He put the bottle back in front of her. “This stops at the glass.”

“And whoever pours it?”

He was quiet a moment. “The last hand is always the clearest.”

She should have asked then. She knew it afterwards, the way she knew a bad join: by the place where her thumb kept catching. But he had taken his coat off that night for the first time, and the stove was lit, and he was asking how a sewing frame worked, so she showed him. The cords stretched upright from bed to crossbar. The needle in at the fold, round the cord, out again. The kettle stitch at each end, locking every section to the one before. She put his hand on the cords so he could feel the tension. His fingers were cold, and then less cold. He did not move them, and neither did she, and they stood over the empty frame for rather longer than the lesson needed. When he left that night he told her his name was Hugh, as if he had not said it aloud in some years.

After that she poured without being asked.

He talked, when she wanted him to, about the wines. A grower in the Jura who sang to his barrels. A widow in Jerez in 1702 who sold sherry to the English fleet and loathed every man aboard it. He was dry and exact and very funny about the eighteenth century. He never talked about himself, and she found she did not mind, because she had no wish to talk about herself either, and it was restful to sit with someone who would not make her.

On the second Monday in November, collating the last gathering, she found her own name.

It was the newest leaf, and the ink on it was still grey. Bath, 8 October 2026. Arbois, 1990, poured by Esme Garrod, thirty-eight. Walnut, salt, a grower who sang. And her: beeswax, cold fingers, a laugh she keeps behind her teeth. Proud of living alone, and less proud of it than she lets on. Wanted me to stay for the second half of the glass, and was cross about it.

She sat with that for some time. Then she did the thing Garrod women did not do. She went back through the sections, looking for the shop.

Bath, 14 March 1952. The shop sherry, poured by Constance Garrod, twenty-four. Lemon peel, a cut thumb, a temper she is fond of. A man in Frome she will not marry.

Her grandmother had told that story every Christmas for fifty years: the man from Frome, the ring handed back on the station platform. Esme laughed out loud in the empty shop.

Bath, 2 May 1991. The shop sherry, poured by Constance Garrod. Lavender. Her hands hurt in the cold now. She knows what I am and has decided it is none of her business.

That was the first leaf of a fold. On its other half, at the back of the same section, eighteen years later:

Bath, 19 March 2009. The shop sherry, poured by Pauline Garrod. Cold tea, bookcloth, the radio. She found it a fortnight ago. She has told no one, least of all the girl, who has her finals in June.

Esme’s finals had been in June 2009. Her mother had told her in the July, at this bench, with the radio on, and had said she had only just found out. She had died two Aprils later. Esme had believed only just for seventeen years. A man had known it in a glass of sherry before she did, and written it down, and gone home.

She put the leaf back in its place, exactly, because that was the job. Then she sat down on the floor of the bindery with her back against the plan chest and stayed there until the stove went out.

---

Without Leave

On Thursday he saw the sheet lying open on the bench before he had his coat off, and stopped where he was.

“You read my mother,” she said.

“I drank what she poured.”

“It’s the same thing. You knew before I did. You knew four months before she told me, and you wrote it in your book and went home.”

“Yes.” He came no nearer. “She never asked what I was. Your grandmother guessed, and chose not to mind. You—”

“I didn’t know there was anything to guess. I’ve poured for you every Thursday since October.” Her voice went at the end and she hated it for going. “Why didn’t you tell me? That first night, before I opened the bottle.”

He could have said a great many things. She watched him decide against all of them.

“Because you would have said no,” he said. “And I was hungry.”

It was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in that shop since her mother, and it did not help in the least.

“Don’t come on Thursdays,” she said. “I’ll finish it. I’ll write when it’s ready.”

He nodded once, laid a card on the counter with an address in Clifton and nothing else, and went. The bell over the door rang behind him and stopped.

She worked through November alone. She sewed the book on five cords at the frame where she had put his hand, section by section, kettle stitch by kettle stitch, and because the job was the job she read every date as it went under her needle. Some eleven hundred entries. A cooper in Bordeaux. A nun in Cádiz who watered the altar wine. Every hand that had ever poured for him was in the ground except hers, and hers was in it now, in grey ink turning brown. She would go on turning. In forty years, give or take, she would be a page he turned on his way to somebody else’s Tuesday.

I am going to be a page, she thought, and found that the anger had gone somewhere while she sewed, and what was left was worse, because it was only fear.

She sewed in the room he had asked for: eight sections of blank rag paper, enough for another century or two of other people. She lined the spine, laced oak boards on to the cords and covered the whole in dark goatskin, pared so thin at the joints that the lamp showed through it. She tooled nothing on the spine. There was no title she had the right to give it.

In the evenings, from the offcuts, she made a second, smaller book, and did not let herself ask what it was for.

On the first of December she posted a card to Clifton. Ready. Thursday. It was the shortest thing she had ever written, and it took her an hour.

---

With Leave

He came at a quarter to six with no bottle and stood just inside the door, like a man unsure of his welcome, which he had every reason to be.

She put the book in his hands. He held it as he had held the first glass, as if it were lent. He opened it, tried the hinge, turned the blank sections at the back one by one, and said nothing for so long that she began to fear the work was wrong.

“Have you a knife?” he said.

She gave him the paring knife, handle first, and only then understood, because he had opened the book at the fold where her grandmother’s old age and her mother’s secret faced each other across eighteen years.

“No,” she said. “That’s one sheet. They’re conjugate. You can’t take one without the other.”

“I know.”

“You’ll lose them both.” Her whole trade was the business of not losing things. “You told me. You don’t keep people. The book does.”

“I can’t keep that many people. No one could. I read an entry and they come back for as long as I’m reading.” He turned the blade to the lamp. “Show me where to cut. I’ll not spoil your sewing.”

She could have done it herself, and cleaner. She saw that he did not want her to: the point was that it should be his hand. So she laid the steel rule along the fold, a quarter of an inch out from the thread, and said, “Leave a stub, or the section goes slack.” He cut once, slowly, and the rule did not move.

He gave her the sheet. Her grandmother’s lavender. Her mother’s radio. The ink had gone through to the other side at every downstroke.

“What did my mother taste of?” Esme said.

He looked at her, and she watched him reach for it the way you reach for a stair in the dark, and find no stair.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She put the sheet in the drawer with the ledger, where it belonged. Then she took her grandmother’s glass from under the counter, and the shop sherry, which was what Garrod’s poured at a handover and always had.

“Esme—”

“I know what you are now.” She poured. Her hand was not quite steady, and she let him see it. “So this is with leave. Read it. All of it. Tell me what’s there, out loud, and if you get any of it wrong, I’ll know.”

She drank first, one mouthful and no more, and held the glass out to him with the print of her mouth on the rim. He turned it so that his went in the same place.

He drank with his eyes shut. When he opened them she saw what he had been doing all those Thursdays with his gaze on her hands. Not watching. Listening.

“Beeswax,” he said. “Paste. Goatskin. You cried at the frame on Tuesday and were angry about it on Wednesday. You’ve made something from the offcuts you haven’t shown me.” He set the glass down. “You’re afraid of being a page.”

“And?”

“And you want me to stay tonight, and you haven’t decided whether to be cross about it.”

She took the small book out of the drawer and put it on the bench between them. Goatskin from the same skin, linen thread, ninety-six leaves of good rag paper, nothing on the spine.

“That one’s built for forty years,” she said. “Thereabouts. After that it will want rebinding, and I won’t be here to do it.”

He looked at the small book. Then he picked up the paring knife, wiped the blade on his cuff and gave it back to her, handle first. He took off his coat and hung it on the press.

“Then you’ll have to teach me,” he said. “All of it. From the paste.”

She kissed him across the bench, with the forty-year book between them and the knife still in her hand, and had to put the knife down, which made him laugh against her mouth, low, a sound she had not heard from him before. His hands were cold on her face, and then less cold. She took one of them and laid it at her throat, over the pulse, so that he would know she knew, and felt him go entirely still.

“Ask me, Hugh,” she said.

“May I stay tonight?”

“Yes.”

Before she put out the lamp he took a pen and a small dark bottle from the coat on the press and wrote on the first leaf of the little book, while she watched over his arm: Bath, 3 December 2026. The shop sherry, poured by Esme Garrod, with leave.

It went on grey. Iron gall takes its time. She left the book open on the bench, so that it could.