The Covent Garden Cafe: A Short Story

By Jessica Baverstock

On dreary autumn evenings Celeste Wang wanders the streets of London, always returning, as if magnetically drawn, to stare at the brightly lit cafe above Covent Garden.

Celeste imagines great minds like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and John Wyndham gather there to discuss deep and fascinating subjects long into the night.

When her friends and family cannot provide the solution to a major life question, Celeste searches out Wells, Verne, and Wyndham in the hope they hold the answer she seeks.

A science-fiction story twisted through the realities of famous authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Baverstock
• Release date: May 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463440858

Jessica Baverstock

Jessica Baverstock has been a storyteller since she learned how to talk, and dreamed of becoming a writer from the day she first saw a typewriter at age 3. She writes an eclectic mix of endearing stories, crossing from science-fiction to historical fiction and everything in between.She is an Australian author and blogger. In her early twenties she moved to China. Now she lives in the South West of Australia with her husband and a modest book collection. When she's not busy working on her next story or globetrotting across oceans, she's usually curled up watching a good movie.

Book preview

The Covent Garden Café

Copyright 2018 Jessica Baverstock

Published by Jessica Baverstock at Smashwords

Cover design © Jessica Baverstock

Cover art © TanaDobush/Shutterstock, tommyvideo/Pixabay, and BarbaraALane/Pixabay

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Table of Contents

The Covent Garden Cafe

About the Author

Other Books by Jessica Baverstock

The Covent Garden Cafe

ON DREARY AUTUMN evenings such as this, with drizzle falling like liquid misery from the sky, Celeste Wang wanders the streets of London, always returning, as if magnetically drawn, to the grey, paved square of Covent Garden.

The rain leaves a clean, slick sheen on the uneven rectangular pavers, each reflecting the soft yellow light emanating from the curtained windows of the surrounding buildings.

She shelters beneath the pure white of the marble colonnade that skirts the square, leaning up against one of the cold Roman columns, ignoring the passers-by whose faces seem as blank as the mannequins in the shop windows behind her. She does up the top button of her red wool coat and nestles her cold nose into the folds of her white cashmere scarf, the smell of mothballs still present.

Finally comfortable in mind and body, she gazes up at her dream.

Above the market in the centre of the square, supported by a dozen aged stone columns along each of its four sides, is a second storey. A high metal archway covered in glass dominates this level, to its left and right long glass conservatory-style buildings are lit up with warm, inviting light. In front of these buildings sit small café tables, each with four white cane chairs, every table presided over by a large, square umbrella, so white they appear sun-bleached. Between each umbrella is