The Pawnbroker's Christmas
(2026)(The first book in the Sybil Cook's Victorian Christmas series)
A novel by Sybil Cook
Susannah Hembury has stood behind the brass rail at Sillifant's pawnshop in Exeter since she was fifteen. She can name a family by the smell of its Sunday coat, test gold with a drop of acid, and add a column faster than any clerk in the city. She takes nobody's word for anything. It is the whole of what she is.
Then a stranger comes in by the side door with his father's watch.
Matthew Westaway is a bookkeeper with no character, no overcoat and a past he won't name. Somewhere in Bristol there is a ledger with a hole in it, and a letter that accuses him of nothing and has ruined him all the same. He can't prove he is an honest man, so he has stopped asking anyone to believe it.
Yet every Saturday night he climbs Bakers' Court to pay his sixpence, owed or not. And every Saturday night Susannah finds a reason to still be at the counter.
But the quarter's Christmas is lying in her master's safe: ninety families, tuppence a week, one black tin. And the figures Susannah has trusted all her life are starting to come out wrong.
As snow settles over the West Quarter and Christmas Eve draws closer, Susannah must decide what she believes, and whom. Because the one thing she has never done is take a man at his word...
A Christmas of pledges, pawns and second chances.
Genre: Sagas
Then a stranger comes in by the side door with his father's watch.
Matthew Westaway is a bookkeeper with no character, no overcoat and a past he won't name. Somewhere in Bristol there is a ledger with a hole in it, and a letter that accuses him of nothing and has ruined him all the same. He can't prove he is an honest man, so he has stopped asking anyone to believe it.
Yet every Saturday night he climbs Bakers' Court to pay his sixpence, owed or not. And every Saturday night Susannah finds a reason to still be at the counter.
But the quarter's Christmas is lying in her master's safe: ninety families, tuppence a week, one black tin. And the figures Susannah has trusted all her life are starting to come out wrong.
As snow settles over the West Quarter and Christmas Eve draws closer, Susannah must decide what she believes, and whom. Because the one thing she has never done is take a man at his word...
A Christmas of pledges, pawns and second chances.
Genre: Sagas
Used availability for Sybil Cook's The Pawnbroker's Christmas