Free First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen by Charlie Lovett

man.”
    “You
are
a young man,” she said. “At least too young to be having this conversation.”
    “And you, my dear, are perhaps too young to understand the need for such a conversation. There’s something I’d like to tell you.”
    Sophie leaned forward in her chair and placed a hand gently on her uncle’s arm. “You’re not sick?”
    “No, no,” said Bertram, standing. “This is news for the distant future, I hope. But someday, when my time comes, I would like for you to have all this.” He waved his hand to indicate the room.
    “The books?” said Sophie, for an instant breathless with delight, until she considered that the gift was contingent on her uncle’s death.
    “Not just the books, but the flat as well. No one I know would be happier here.”
    “Oh, uncle!” cried Sophie, wrapping her arms around him. “But I hope to be a very old woman before I sit by this fire without you.”
    “I hope that as well,” said Uncle Bertram. “But I thought you should know. Now, since you will have to wait to get your hands on all these musty old volumes, and since Advent is nearly done, I think it’s time you picked out this year’s Christmas book.”
    —
    NOW SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS volumes could soon be returned to Uncle Bertram’s flat and reunited with the rest of his books. Only it wasn’t Uncle Bertram’s flat and they weren’t his books. It was all hers now. But while the books she had chosen over the years comforted her; the promise of owning
all
of her uncle’s library did not. To be in that cozy flat among those glorious books but without her uncle meant that something was deeply wrong with the world.
    “Sophie, it’s time.” Victoria stood in the library doorway, a silhouette in her black dress, holding out Sophie’s handbag for her. Five minutes later they were in the back of a black car, crunching down the drive.
    The funeral was a simple service in the local parish church. Uncle Bertram had been cremated, and his ashes were buried in the churchyard. It ought to have been a cold winter day, with clouds hanging low in the sky and a sharp wind whistling through the unmown grass of the graveyard; but it was lovely—a warm blue sky, immaculately trimmed green grass, and a gentle breeze to keep the heat from bearing down on the black-clad mourners.
    Back at Bayfield House, Sophie, feeling like the unacknowledged chief mourner, drifted through the visitors—distant cousins she had never met, business associates of her father, friends of her mother—without making any meaningful contact. Victoria and her mother were both in full hostess mode, and in the crowd Sophie felt more alone than she had all week. She was in the library peering through the metal grid at a shelf of travel narratives when she heard a voice beside her.
    “I was so sorry about your uncle, Miss Collingwood. He was such a wonderful man.” Sophie turned to see the short, round, and balding figure of Augustus Boxhill, one of London’s leading antiquarian booksellers. She had met Mr. Boxhill many times at his shop in Cecil Court when on the prowl for books with Uncle Bertram.
    “It was kind of you to come, Mr. Boxhill.”
    “I suspect,” said the bookseller, looking around the room, “that you and I may be the only people here who really knew your uncle.”
    “That looks like the first edition of
Voyage of the Beagle
,” she said, nodding at a row of four volumes at the end of a shelf. “I’m sure Father will be happy when he finds out what that will fetch at auction.”
    “Thanks to your uncle, you know more about books than most collectors twice your age,” said Mr. Boxhill.
    “And without my uncle,” said Sophie, “I’ll have no one to share all that with.”
    “Bertram was a good customer,” said Mr. Boxhill, “but more important, he was a good friend. I think he’d want me to tell you that there are a lot of us out there who share your passion. You’re not alone, Sophie.”
    “I know,” she said,