Unexpected Company

The library at the end of Birch Lane was Ottoline's, in the way that certain things become yours after enough time — not by ownership but by long habit and deep familiarity. She had run it for eleven years. She knew the location of every book in it. She knew which floorboards creaked and where the draught came in in February and which lamp made the best reading light. She had arranged it precisely to her liking, and she liked it quiet.

Most visitors stayed for thirty minutes and left. This suited her well.

She had not always preferred solitude. There had been a period, earlier in her life, when she had liked company very much and had a great deal of it. But things change. People leave, or drift, in the way that they do, and eventually Ottoline had found that the library was enough. Better, even. The books were consistent. They did not disappoint.

The storm arrived on a Tuesday afternoon without much warning.

At four o'clock, the rain was light. At four-fifteen, it was coming sideways. At four-thirty, it was doing things that weather is not supposed to do in a village of this size, and a young fox came in the door shaking water from her ears and looking at the floor with the expression of someone who is trying very hard not to drip on anything.

"Sorry," said the fox. "I'll just — I'll wait it out."

She was perhaps twelve or thirteen, with bright amber eyes and a canvas bag that appeared to be entirely soaked through. She found the furthest corner from the door, as far from Ottoline's desk as the room allowed, and sat on the floor against the shelves rather than taking a chair, which Ottoline noted was either very polite or very self-conscious. Possibly both.

She stayed quiet for twenty minutes.

Then, apparently forgetting herself, she pulled a book off the shelf beside her — Ottoline saw from the spine that it was Vera Blackwood's Collected Animal Tales, which was old and rarely touched — and began to read it under her breath, the way people do when they have always read aloud to themselves and only learned too late that this is considered unusual.

Ottoline listened.

The fox read well. She read with the unselfconscious expression of someone who had disappeared entirely into the text, one ear tilted slightly, her lips shaping the words. She smiled at something in the third story. She frowned, briefly, at something in the fourth.

Ottoline had read the Collected Animal Tales herself many years ago. She remembered the fourth story: a long one about a crane who navigates entirely by the position of the moon, and loses her way in cloudy weather, and must learn to navigate by other means. She had thought it was about grief, at the time. She still thought so.

The fox turned to the beginning of the fifth story and paused and looked up.

"Sorry," she said, noticing Ottoline for the first time in some minutes. "Am I bothering you?"

Ottoline considered.

"What do you think of the fourth?" she said.

The fox blinked. "The crane?" She thought about it seriously, in the way that young readers think about things when they believe the question is genuine. "I think it's about when someone you rely on is gone. And how you have to find out you can do without them, which is not the same as not missing them."

Ottoline looked at her for a moment.

"Yes," she said. "I think so too."

Outside, the storm went on. Inside, it was warm and dry and the lamp on the reading table made a good circle of light, and they were both quiet for a while — but it was a different quiet than the one Ottoline usually kept.

When the storm eased an hour later, the fox stood up and put the book back carefully in exactly the right place, which not everyone did.

"Thank you for the shelter," she said.

"Come back when it's dry," said Ottoline. "I have three more Blackwood collections that are rarely touched. Someone should touch them."

The fox looked at her — a quick, uncertain look, to check if this was a real invitation.

"Tuesday afternoons are quiet," said Ottoline. "There is a good lamp."

The fox nodded, and left.

Ottoline straightened the Collected Animal Tales and stood in the empty library for a moment in the good quiet. But she noticed, with some interest, that it felt different than it usually did. Not less — just different. As though it had more in it than it had had this morning.

She went back to her desk and opened her own book, and read until closing time.