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 up the mountain to work at her mother's bookstore. Nella and her friend Rose Bryant ran a little roadside shop, called The High Country Reader, and Ryl helped them out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and the very busy summer Saturdays, when house owners, as the mountaineers called them, came up from Atlanta and other surrounding cities and towns to enjoy a weekend or summer vacation at their second homes. Her other working days were spent in the garden or the barn, busy with her bookbinding presses and tools, choosing from and working with the fine leathers, papers, and cloths carefully laid out, hanging, or put away in large shallow drawers in a big stall done over and dedicated to them.

But on this particular morning Ryl, her long straight black hair tied back for comfort, stood looking at a neat pile of crates which contained her share of the furnishings of the English Cloyne family, from which she was indirectly descended. There were four of the big wooden trunk-shaped boxes, and they were filled solid, had made no jostling sounds when the two men who had arrived with them earlier had unloaded them from a large white moving van. The van had not had a name on it, but Ryl knew that one had been engaged by an attorney in New York to distribute across the United States some remnants of the Cloyne belongings which had been left after the sale of the Welsh estate. Its arrival that morning was not unexpected.

The Cloynes had been a family of solid English yeomen until the seventeenth century, when Robert Cloyne, later Sir Robert, had made a success of a textile and dyeing business, then married a wealthy woman from York. With that money he had invested well in London rental properties of the best quality, and had added farms and manor houses at more remote spots around England and Wales. Later heads of the expanding family had served as good stewards of the property until the late nineteenth century, when young Sir Joshua Cloyne, who inherited the lot when he was in his early twenties, had gambled away property after property, manor after manor. In the end there was nothing left but a large rambling house in Wales, which was supported only by the farm around it and a cattle business which Sir Joshua's oldest son had managed to save. Now there were few Cloynes left, most of them cousins, most of them out of touch with the last head of the family, Sir John Cloyne, and quite unreachable.

But now, Ryl had recently been informed by letter that Sir John, a shaggy-headed, bearded, half-demented old landholder, had passed away, speechless after a stroke. As he had died without issue, American and Irish relatives were all that were left. No one was willing to go back to Wales and pick up family responsibilities for what was essentially a cattle farm in a remote dale, so the house, cattle and money left were settled on the last remaining nephew, Ian Williams, an Anglo-Irishman. Ian then sold the estate and parceled out many of the contents to whatever cousins he could locate, mainly from memory and word of mouth.

Ryl had met Ian eight years before on a trip to Ireland. She had written him beforehand at his address outside Dublin before she left Connecticut to attend a rare book sale in Dublin. He had given her a pleasant afternoon tea at his large, comfortable house in a cleft of the boggy Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. Ian worked in the city as a higher-up in an investment bank, at the same time managing land and funds left to him by his wealthy Cloyne mother, who had married into the Anglo-Irish gentry.

Ian was tall in the Cloyne way, as lean and long-legged as Ryl was, but with light brown hair and blue eyes which looked keenly out at the world over the long Roman nose which was another trait of the once-wealthy English family. He dressed well in Harris tweeds and solid, hand-made shoes which he ordered from a very special shop in London. During Ryl's visit they had served him well in the moist grass of his garden, around which he had shown Ryl, looking down at her appreciatively as they inspected his rock and rose gardens, one of which was dedicated to fine succulents, the other of which contained rows of great multi-colored blooms on old stock. They had spent well over an hour in the garden, Ian extolling the virtues of rock gardening and Ryl admiring the roses.

"I have no place to plant flowers like these," Ryl had said as they stood by the roses. "I have only a balcony off my apartment, and I use that for herbs and a few marigolds for color."

"That is too bad," replied Ian, smiling. "I would be glad to send you some cuttings, but I fear they would not do well on a balcony."

"No, unfortunately they wouldn't," Ryl replied, smiling, as they turned back toward the house. "But some day I shall have a house and garden, and I will write and remind you of those cuttings then, perhaps."

In the house they settled into comfortable chairs before a small fireplace in Ian's morning room, a small inlaid tea table placed between them. The burning log under the elegant mantelpiece was a comfort after the cool damp of the garden, even though it was September, only the beginning of the fall in Ireland.

"If you are a book-dealer, you really should go and visit the old place," he had told Ryl over a cup of steaming jasmine tea. "It's not really so bad, and the library has been left there, as far as I know. I can't say much for the company of my uncle, but you needn't stay."

"If I can't stay and look seriously at the books, I'm not going," said Ryl, laughing. "I've heard my share of stories."

Indeed, family legend had it that Sir John, the old owner, was more than a little mad, as witness his appearance and his custom of living in the stables with the cattle and a rudimentary kitchen. It had been years since anyone had kept up the house, and it was said that the key had been long lost and Sir John had never bothered to have a locksmith come from the nearby village and make another. And it was true, because years later, when the Welsh solicitor had informed Ian that his uncle had died, and Ian had traveled over, the two of them had had to have one made up to get into the manor house.

Ryl, who did indeed deal in antique books of the British Isles, imagined for a moment what the condition of the contents of the old library must be. The books and manuscripts, if there were any such, must be a disgrace: neglected, ill-shelved, grimy with smoke and mold, torn, fallen-apart.

"Of course, it is rather a temptation, anyhow, because I bind books as a hobby and for the occasional profit. I might find some long-lost treasure there worth working on."

Ian had laughed. "I doubt it, although I'm sure I can't say. My mother would never take me back to visit as a child, since she loathed her brother, and I never had a family of my own to let explore its roots. I only visited the old man once, in my twenties, and found him as unpleasant as she had said, and more drunken than she had ever let on, if she knew it. Then she died, soon after my father, and since then I confine my travels, if not to Ireland, to Switzerland. I do enjoy climbing, and have pretty well covered these mountains and the Swiss Alps. Not that you can compare the two." But he had looked out with contentment at the wilderness beyond his beautiful tree and rose-filled garden, where only the steep sides of the cleft and a few distant irregularities on the high horizon broke up the brown and gold landscape of misty peat bog and furze.

Ian had stretched out his legs and gazed again at Ryl over the high, thin Cloyne nose which she had seen in family portraits. She, too, had both the legs and the nose, and she pointed this out to him, laughing over her delicate porcelain teacup.

"Oh, when Anderson brought you in I would have known you for a relative any time," he had laughed back. "Almost every member of the family I have met has been well marked, except for Uncle John and our cousin Dr. David Trevor, who gave you my address. He's a charming fellow, by the way."

Ryl had smiled, thinking of David. "He is. We're very close, you know. He only lives in Pennsylvania, and we see each other several times a year, often for holidays. Sometimes we go traveling and book-hunting together."

"I liked him immensely, as I always do my American cousins, I find."

Ryl smiled again. "Thank you, Ian. I like you, too."

"And tell me, is your name actually the old family appellation `Amaryllis'?" Ian questioned laughingly.

"Absolutely not, although it was my paternal grandmother's name, if you must know. My parents mercifully shortened it to Ryl for me, for which I love them."

They had both laughed, and then there was a pause while they finished their tea. Ryl put down her cup and stood up, smiling at Ian, who gave her a cousinly hug as he walked her to the door. There he stopped a moment, looking down at her and smiling. "Perhaps you and David will travel back here some day soon and visit me again, only stay here next time. There is plenty of room. Or I will surprise you both and visit you in America."

And he had surprised her after all these years, if not by visiting, at least by arriving by proxy. She had watched each crate as it was unloaded, and noticed that the forwarding labels, "To: Miss Ryl Ambrose," and then her address, were in the same handwriting that had been on the note from him which he had written in reply to her thank-you note so many years ago. It was also like that on the occasional letters he had sent in reply to hers, which had informed him of her father's early death and her mother's and her move to North Carolina. Ian must have packed the crates himself, or stood by while each was being done, probably carefully choosing the contents. And now here they were on the floor of her barn.

Ryl walked over to one of her worktables and picked up the claw hammer which she would need to open the crates. If she had not been accustomed to opening crates, packing them and nailing them shut, and going through the occasional strain involved in bookbinding, she could have called Ed Hurley, who was working in the cornfield just beyond her rose bed, which was, indeed, full of bushes from Ian's cuttings. But she attacked the first of the crates herself, prying the nails loose enough to fit the claws of the hammer beneath, pulling back on the lid as the nails loosened.

Books! Books and some manuscripts. At least one package of letters, bound with a faded lavender velvet ribbon. All old, all in good or fair shape, to her great surprise. She burrowed a bit deeper in the box, and found some large books with no covers, the stitching torn; obviously Ian had remembered her craft and included a few challenges. Here was another packet of letters in a more masculine hand, these tied with slightly stained yellow satin, looking even older than the others. She could see on the top one, through the frayed and often-read paper, the outlines of a pen drawing. And at the bottom, each one wrapped in tissue paper which Ryl carefully unwrapped, a complete edition of Dickens bound in red leather, in excellent condition, which must be valuable.

She turned her attention to the other crates, opening them all without going through the contents before moving onto the next one. Inside these she found books of general interest, noting as she went through some Kipling, some Browning, a collection of Romantic poetry and a Blake, which looked like an original edition and therefore would be quite valuable. There were also novels of love and war, adventures in India and the far East, and a few biographies, one of Florence Nightingale.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Bookbinderby LAURA FINCH Copyright © 2012 by Laura Finch. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The Bookbinder

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Chapter One

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