When he was nine, Gregoire fell deeply and permanently in love.

It happened on the day Tillie and Maude, the Finnegan’s housekeeper and maid, were off at a revival meeting on the other side of the island. Mrs. Finnegan wanted Gregoire to help “set a room to rights.” She led him down a dark corridor and opened the broad doors.

He had never, in his life, seen so many books. The walls seemed built from them. It was a large, dark room, lit just by sunlight coming in through tall windows framed by thick red curtains, and when Madame Finnegan pushed him forward his feet touched a carpet the color of red wine, decorated with gold flowers. Madame Finnegan pointed at that carpet, and now he could see there were books scattered across it.

“You need,” she said, “to put any books you find not on the shelf back on the shelf. And not just any old way, do you hear?”

He nodded. Shelves. They were shelves, not walls, or rather, they were walls made of shelves. He’d never seen the like outside of Glaspell’s.

“Red goes with red, blue with blue, and so on,” she said. “Be careful handling them. Don’t open them up and don’t tear any pages, you hear? If a shelf is too high, use that.” – she pointed to a ladder on wheels. He nodded.

She turned around and walked out, closing the door behind her.

Gregoire stepped forward. You started with one, that was all there was to it. He bent to pick up the broad, fat book with a dark green cover lying on the carpet.

It was heavier than he’d thought it would be. Greg tucked the book under one arm and looked at the shelf in front of him. Seeing colors in this dark room was hard.

Were those greenish book, or goldish books? And they looked mixed up by color. There was a chunk of dark brown books, but then there were blue and red books.

“I did that,” said a voice. He’d wondered when the girl on the sofa was going to say something. She probably thought he couldn’t see her, but he’d known she was there even before Madame Finnegan had opened the door.

“Blue with blue, red with red,” said the girl. “Does that make sense to you? It’s crazy. Just crazy. You can’t find anything in here. But Mama and ‘Sha, they won’t have it any other way. They say their way looks better. Does that make sense to you? Do you think books are for looks? Ha! I’m a poet, I don’t know it! That’s Longfellow.”

Felda, Felicia Finnegan’s big sister. He knew Felicia slightly because she was about his age, a pretty, very grown-up acting little girl who always seemed to be dressed for a party. Her sister was different. He’d only seen her from a distance before, always dressed in bright colors, especially red.

People said Felda Finnegan was a gawk and she talked too much and her mother despaired of her. He was thinking about this as he looked at her when he realized she was looking back at him the way people did when they told a joke. Now it was too late to laugh, and he felt a little sorry.

Instead of looking angry or hurt, she sighed and rolled her eyes behind her glasses. “Come here,” she said. He stepped a few feet closer.

She pointed at the book he was holding. “What does it say on the cover?”

He turned the book to look at the cover. “It says, ‘Kidnapped, being the Memoirs of David Balfour…'”

“Now, where do you think that book belongs?”

He shrugged.

“Haven’t you read it?’

“No, Mam’selle.”

“What? You haven’t read Kidnapped? But you’ve got to read Kidnapped! It’s the most wonderful book ever written! Come here.”

It took him a minute to realize she was patting the cushion beside her and inviting him to sit down. He hesitated. It was a very beautiful couch and its cloth looked very fancy, but she was frowning now, and smacking the cushion hard.

“Sit down,” she commanded.

Very gingerly, he sat down beside her.

“Now,” she said, and she opened the book now resting in his lap. “Read. No, no, not that part! That’s boring.” She flipped through a few pages and came to one that had a picture of a man in old-fashioned clothes leaving a cottage along a remote country road. Beneath it were the words “Chapter 1.”

He took a breath, and read “I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of Grace 1751…”

“Not out loud,” she said irritably. “Unless you want to.”

He read silently. At first he planned to read to the bottom of the page and stop. Then he decided he would wait until she told him to stop. Then he forgot about her and the room and was inside the book, fascinated, walking with David Balfour, a poor man’s orphaned son, off to meet high born relatives he’d only just learned about. There were words he didn’t understand — “mickle,” “kenned,” “soople,” but they didn’t get in the way of the story.

Gregoire had read other things. His schoolbooks, of course, and sometimes instructions on bottles, road and store signs. It had never occurred to him to read a book he didn’t have to read. It had never occurred to him he could read an actual, thick book, a novel, and yet here he was, reading more and more quickly, suddenly aware of a door opening, of possibilities he’d never considered.

He’d just gotten to David Balfour arriving at the dreary House of Shaws, and being confronted by Ebenezer Shaw with a blunderbuss when Felda Finnegan put her hand on the book. “All right, that’s enough,” she said, and took it out of his lap, closed it, and set it on the end table at her elbow. “Now, where do you think that book should go?”

He looked at the book. He looked around the room until he saw a shelf with dark green books. He pointed at it. “There,” he said.

“No, no no! Think for a moment. What is the book about?”

He thought. “It’s about an orphan going on a long journey.”

“But so much more happens than that! The old man he meets, that’s his wicked Uncle Ebenezer, who’s a miser who wants to keep David from his rightful inheritance! He sends David upstairs, to the top of a tower, to fetch some papers, but he won’t give him a light, and David climbs up and up and up the dark, winding stairs, and there’s a flash of lightning and David sees just in time the stairs were gone at the top and one more step would have sent him tumbling into the abyss! His uncle was trying to kill him! Then, since that didn’t work, Uncle Ebenezer has David kidnapped, carried off to sea! So….” She looked expectantly at him.

“It’s about kidnapping,” he said.

“So where should it go?”

“With books about kidnapping?”

“Exactly right!” She nodded, her glasses flashing in the light from the windows. “Now, if you go to the library, they’ll put it with other books by the man who wrote it, Robert Louis Stevenson. But I think it would make more sense to put it on a shelf with books about evil uncles, or orphans, or inheritances. That way, you can find a book that matches the mood you’re in at the moment. If I say to myself, ‘I’m feeling murderous today,’ I can go to a shelf with The Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Woman in White, or Oliver Twist.”

Gregoire looked around the room at the scattered books, some on the floor, some piled on tables. He wanted to open every one of them and look inside to see if he could read them all. It was as though he were for the first time noticing hundreds of doors to hundreds of worlds.

“So that’s how this happened,” she said, gesturing at the room. “I tried to organize the library. And I was doing really well until Momma caught me.” She looked at Gregoire. “What kind of book would you like to read?”

He barely hesitated. “Pirates!” he said.

She nodded and pointed to a table across the room. “Treasure Island, The Pirate, The Shipwreck, and A General History of the Notorious Pirates. Right over there.” She sighed. “But one’s red, one’s tan, one’s blue and one is black, so they’re going to end up scattered all over the place. And there’s no place at all for magazines, like Beeton’s. I tried to add it, and Momma wouldn’t hear of it. Said it looked awful.”

Gregoire stared at the pirate books and wondered if Madame Finnegan would be able to tell if he opened just one and looked into it.

Felda was looking at him now as if concerned. “You read the last Beeton’s, didn’t you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Oh but you must! It’s got the best story ever written, A Study in Scarlet, about a consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes. Do you know what a consulting detective is? People come to him with questions about murders and he answers them for him because he can tell everything about you just by looking at you. He looks at a man and says, ‘I see you have been in Afghanistan,’ and he’s right, he has, and do you know how Sherlock Holmes knew this?”

“Magic?”

“No! The power of his brain! Sherlock Holmes has a very, very powerful brain! He looks at the man and sees that he’s tanned by the sun, and he stands very straight like a soldier, (the man, I mean, not Sherlock Holmes) and he has an injury in his shoulder, and Sherlock Holmes thinks to himself, ‘Hmmmm, a military man who’s gotten lots of sun and has an injury, he must have been in the wars in Afghanistan!’ And the police come to him, and they want him to help with a murder, a man found dead in a room, with the word ‘Rache’ written in blood on the wall over the body…”

Greg was watching her talk and thinking she looked a lot like her sister. Why did people talk about her as if she were ugly? She wasn’t. She was very pretty. And she didn’t talk to him like older girls usually did, sounding either annoyed or cuddly. He couldn’t imagine her pinching his cheek. He hated it when older girls did that, and he would hate it even more if this older girl did. Somehow, he knew she wouldn’t.

“…and the night before the trial, Jefferson Hope was found dead in his cell, with a smile on his face! He died happy that he had avenged his love! So you see, you have to read it!” She looked at him as if waiting for him to respond.

He was struggling to think of something to say other than, “You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met,” when he felt a stab of anxiety.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Your mother is coming down the hall.”

“She is?” Felda listened, cocking her head. “I don’t hear her.”

He relaxed. “She went into the little room where she sews.”

“Now how do you know that?”

“I just know.” He stood up. “I need to put some books away,” he said. Now he felt anxious again. “You… you won’t be angry with me if I do what she says, will you? Because if it makes you angry…” Resolution filled him, and he stood up straighter. “If you’re going to be mad at me, Mam’selle, I won’t do it the way she wants. I’ll put the books away just like you want.”

He had resolved at that moment to face the wrath, not only of Madame Finnegan, but his mother when he came home unpaid. Maman would box his ears, and he would fall dead from an aneurisym, just like Jefferson Hope and everyone would be sorry, but he would die with a smile on his lips. Felda would cry very hard at his funeral and would cherish his memory forever, and never marry anyone, ever.

“Naw. I don’t want you to get in trouble. But you’ve got to promise me you’ll read Beeton’s.”

“If I can find it, I promise.”

Without a word, she rose, walked over to one of the shelves, and reached behind the books, pulling out a limp, brightly colored book with a paper cover. “There. Now you’ve found it,” she said. “You take it home after you’re done and read it and then we can talk about Sherlock Holmes.”

If he hadn’t been holding the magazine, he might have thrown his arms around her. “Merci,” he said. “Merci, I mean, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” It was better than saying, “You are beautiful. Please let me kiss you.”

“Well,” she sighed, looking around the room. “Let’s get started.”

Everything had changed. Everything.