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    The Bookbinder
    The Bookbinder
    The Bookbinder
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    The Bookbinder

    By Laura Finch

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    About this ebook

    The Bookbinder is a subtle romance, not untouched by the supernatural, which concentrates on a woman as she grows and changes under the influence of love and all its consequences. It is a happy story, but full of mysterious influences which guide her from the mountains of western North Carolina, where she lives and works, to beautiful Rome, where she meets the intriguing man who will become her lover and more.

    The novella is both charming and witty, and the reader is guaranteed to enjoy the characters and their verbal interplay. There is magic not only in them, but in the action and direction the book takes. Delightful reading for a day at the beach, a long evening at home, or a solo picnic in the mountains!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateAug 15, 2012
    ISBN9781466946415
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      Book preview

      The Bookbinder - Laura Finch

      © Copyright 2012 Laura Finch.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

      isbn: 978-1-4669-4642-2 (sc)

      isbn: 978-1-4669-4641-5 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913600

      Trafford rev. 07/25/2012

      7-Copyright-Trafford_Logo.ai

      www.trafford.com

      North America & international

      toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

      phone: 250 383 6864 ♦ fax: 812 355 4082

      Contents

      The Mountains

      Introduction

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Rome

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Afterword

      About the Author

      The Mountains

      Introduction

      To get there, you must first find Dillard, Georgia, where you will make a turn just at the big gas station, at an intersection you can’t miss, up into Ryl’s particular high region of the Great Smoky Mountains. You will be surprised at how quickly you climb. At first the road seems safe and fairly straight, until about the place where the heavy, leafy kudzu vines cover the cliffs created when the ribbon-like country highway was carved out of solid mountain rock. Still climbing, you will be on the outside of the road, where monster trucks delivering goods to the little towns higher up have been known to slide over the side during the winter, when roads are icy.

      But you will not be thinking of that as you pass into the dark woods near the Sky Valley Resort and come to the view over what the mountaineers call simply Blue Valley. Possibly you will pull over into the specially-made place to park, get out of your car, and stand. Looking straight down you will see a forest as dense and primeval as any in the land. Then, looking up and beyond, you will see layer after layer of blue mountains, getting lighter and lighter until they fade into the distance. By this time you will have passed back and forth between the borders of Georgia and North Carolina, as the winding, ever-climbing road takes you closer and closer to the small, unspoiled town of Highlands, North Carolina.

      Before Highlands, however, but when you are in North Carolina, you will probably pass a yellow dirt road which leads to Ryl Ambrose’s farm. There are two large rhododendron bushes flanking this road as it meets the highway you have ascended. Visible to the right along the dirt road is an old-fashioned split rail fence with a cornfield behind it. There is a cabbage field on the left-hand side, which is also fenced, and beyond that another cornfield. Barely visible beyond that is a log house, two-storied, with a porch in the front. If you stop there and look hard enough, you may make out a large wooden planter full of pansies on the porch, and perhaps even notice the top of a big old-fashioned red barn beyond the house. But you will probably not stop there. Certainly you would not turn in there unless your car breaks down and you have to call the gas station down the road in Dillard or up the road in Highlands, should you have those numbers. And since passers-by seldom turn in, Ryl lives and works in peace, loving the life she has made in the foggy green and blue hills.

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      Chapter One

      Ryl’s farm was not atypical of many small working farms in the South. There were, beside the log house and a weathered red barn, some small wooden outbuildings for machinery, and a kitchen garden where Ryl grew tomatoes, squash and other vegetables for herself and to give as gifts. There were only fifteen acres of actual farmland, tended by her neighbor Ed Hurley, a tall, grizzled, close-mouthed mountaineer, who took care of Ryl’s cabbages and corn as well as his much larger crop at his own farm, just up the road. On the other side of the house from the kitchen garden was a rose bed, which Ryl tended herself. Almost without trying, she could produce from the fertile mountain land huge pink and yellow Peace roses, which were wonderful in the house and in her mother’s bookshop on the road further up to Highlands. These made gifts as much appreciated as were her vegetables.

      Leading from the dirt road by which Ryl reached her house was a flagstone walkway, along which she had planted box hedges on either side. She had put them in five years before, when she had moved from Connecticut to the North Carolina farm. The slow-growing box was still sparse, only about ten inches high, but Ryl had considered her good genes when she was planning her garden and thought that the hedge might reach over her head by the time they carried her out feet first. Beyond the box, up the warm stone steps and on the edge of the wooden porch so that they could receive sunlight in the afternoon was the large, round tub of pansies which Ryl kept watered and fertilized so that they bloomed from spring to fall. She preferred the longer-stemmed, lighter varieties of pansy to the large, more common purple and gold ones, and certainly they seemed to last longer than the big ones. Her mother, Nella Ambrose, had told Ryl that it was entirely her imagination, that she herself had equally good luck with the big pansies she grew in her flower garden by her own house further down the road. But Ryl went to the nursery each year and looked for the same delicate white and lavender flowers she found so endearing.

      Since the house belonged to a farm which had been worked for generations, it was not surprising to find an old-fashioned screen door, then a heavy plank door, painted forest green, leading into the house. On either side of these doors were long, low windows, with shutters painted the same green as the doors. Inside, however, the house had been much modernized, especially the kitchen, which one could glimpse at the far end of the dining room to the right of the foyer. To the left was a small living room with a grey rock fireplace and mantel and comfortable furniture upholstered in a deep red, which suited the Persian carpets on the varnished wood floor and went well with the pine walls. Beyond this was a morning room where Ryl liked to sit reading on days too cold or rainy to go out; this room was all done in bright yellows and white. Her Peace roses looked particularly fine there, she thought, grouped together in a very special crystal vase on a white wicker table.

      In the dining room the theme of red upholstery and natural wood had been carried out, the table and chairs being of a fine cherry with red damask cushions. There was also a breakfront, but instead of containing Ryl’s china and crystal, which were stored in the much-remodeled kitchen, it contained her small but significant collection of the most ancient of books. There were Assyrian and Babylonian clay cylinders and tablets with cuneiform characters formed with wooden styluses, their subjects being exchanges of land, wills, historical events, even stories. There were Roman clay tablets and papyrus rolls, then a small collection of codices of the medieval Christian era, the earliest of the books bound in a way that would be familiar to the modern reader.

      Ryl had inherited some of her collection from her father, Dr. Arthur Ambrose, a professor of classics at Princeton University until his death of throat cancer at sixty-seven, the result of a lifelong attachment to his pipe. Other items she had dickered for by mail, on the internet, or at rare book conventions and sales. She frequently attended such events in the United States and Europe in order to build up her own business of trading in rare books and her craft of bookbinding, which she pursued in the old red barn not far from the back door.

      To reach this one passed through a gleaming modern kitchen, its counters topped with a green granite, down a few wooden steps, to a stone walkway which led to the front of the barn in which Ryl did most of her work. Since the farm had for most of its existence been a fully working one, meant to support a family, there had been pigs and dairy cattle whose stalls Ryl had converted with wooden flooring, shelves, and tables and desks where needed. Her computer, over which much of her business was done, was located in a particularly large stall which must have been used for birthing, and the upper floor of the barn, which of course had been used for hay and feed for the animals, was used for Ryl’s scant storage purposes. Ryl was tall, nearly six feet, a lean and fit 35 years old, and so had built shelves up to the high ceilings of the stalls on the first floor with little consideration of what she could easily reach. Should she require something set too high, there was a stepladder in the barn.

      Today, which was a Tuesday during the busy summer tourist season in the mountains, Ryl had dressed comfortably in a well-worn blue chambray shirt and jeans for work at home, instead of the dressier skirts and blouses she wore when she went

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