Chapter Two
Edie sighed over her map in frustration until the innkeeper sighed back.
“If you’re set on seeing a hedgehog, I suppose there’s the road past Baroness Rachel’s manse.
She puts hedgehog houses in her garden, so you might look there.
” Morag Beveridge retied the strings of her apron.
She shoved a dripping collection of branches, leaves, flowers, and possibly mosses—lichen?
—into a large jar and then poked at it. Edie guessed it would end up being one of the innkeeper’s “arrangements” for the lobby.
Edie squinted at the map with renewed enthusiasm. The phone plan she’d bought before her trip here didn’t work, and she spent a lot of her time wishing she’d learned how to properly read maps in school. “The road past Baroness Rachel’s—is that Church Street?”
“Where it loops up the hill and runs into Rectory Street.” Morag stuck a fake bird on a stick into her arrangement.
At least, Edie hoped it was a fake bird and not a taxidermied bird.
Or what it actually looked like, which was an alive bird that had been rendered immobile by a spell but kept on a stick for a hundred years.
“Loops up the hill?”
Morag looked at Edie over her glasses. “We’re on Gregory Close.”
“Yes.”
“Go out the front door, turn—”
“Left!”
Morag blinked at the interruption. She was still getting used to Edie. “Yes, left. Walk all the way to the high street.”
“Then I turn right on High Street.” Edie put her finger on the map, trying to follow along. “Oh, I see. I can take that to Church and turn right and go to the top of the loop!” She put the map down. “But what is the road that Baroness Rachel’s manse is on?”
“A lane that spins off the loop where it meets Church Street.”
“Called?”
Morag gazed at one of the beams in the ceiling of the inn’s lounge. “Can’t recall.”
Edie laughed. “You’ve lived here your entire life!”
“Eighty-six years.” One of Morag’s long white braids slid over her shoulder when she nodded. She was a lively, active eighty-six, favoring a uniform of sturdy jeans and wool sweaters with her apron. “I think it’s had more than one name, and that’s why I can’t remember.”
Edie folded her map and collapsed back into the dusty mauve-and-cream striped upholstered armchair that she’d adopted as her own in the eight days since she arrived at Gregory Place.
She rolled her head to look out the wavy glass of the lounge windows.
“It’s raining again. Do hedgehogs come out of their garden houses in the rain? ”
“Why would I know that?” Morag pulled a tea bag out of a mug, added soy milk and sugar, and brought it around the reception desk to hand to Edie with a packet of what had become her favorite biscuit, bourbon creams. “Here you are, love.”
“Thank you.” Edie put the biscuit packet on the arm of the chair and pulled her legs up beneath her before wrapping her hands around the hot mug. She studied the room as she waited for her tea to cool enough to sip.
The lounge at Gregory Place had textured mauve-on-brown wallpaper and at least six mirrored occasional tables that Edie could not seem to keep fixed in her field of vision no matter how hard she tried.
The flesh around her knees had acquired a number of spectacular bruises.
The décor reminded Edie of her grandmother’s house in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, which had last been decorated when Edie’s mom graduated high school and moved out in the early nineties.
When Edie first got here, the contrast between this room and the inn’s spare stone exterior had kind of blown her mind.
The slate-roofed building promised fireplaces big enough to roast venison, or maybe a suit of armor gleaming in the hallway.
The plaque at the inn’s door said that Gregory Place dated to 1758—older than the Declaration of Independence!
A lot of England was like that, it turned out. Historic, but lived in by not-historic people in a completely ordinary and ever-so-slightly disappointing way.
Of course, she had only been to this one tiny corner of England, Harlaxton village, but she’d read a lot of tourist brochures in the lounge and gathered there were places she could visit that were even older and looked less disappointing.
She would if she had the money for one of those limitless train passes. She did not.
Edie’s room was clean and serviceable, but dust furred nearly every surface of the lounge.
Some of the stacks of magazines featured the wedding of Princess Diana, and they were not collectibles.
There was a spot where the mauve carpet crunched if you walked on it.
She doubted Morag could keep up with the details of the inn at this stage of her life.
The innkeeper didn’t have any employees, as far as Edie had been able to tell.
It was not lost on her that these were the same reasons she’d been able to afford such an extended stay at Gregory Place on her limited budget. Age. Infirmity. Lack of better options.
Though it was a little surprising, now that she was here, that Gregory Place hadn’t successfully kept up with the times.
Harlaxton received a steady stream of tourists to visit the massive Harlaxton Manor, which had appeared in movies and beloved BBC series.
The village was so pretty, it sometimes made Edie’s eyes cross in pleasure, and it was lousy with the kind of plaque-bearing buildings and structures that dads on vacation liked to take pictures of.
But if you wanted to stay overnight at Gregory Place, you’d better enjoy bedsheets on the unpleasant verge of damp, a cranky innkeeper who might be scratching sigils into the dirt to keep people away, and the noise of what had to be a hundred foxes screaming in the overgrown garden at night—a sound that Edie had been certain, on her first night, was a bloody, stabbing murder happening right outside her window.
The food was fucking amazing, however. And Edie knew food.
“Maybe I could help you with something?” she suggested.
Morag, who now sat in a rocker by the windows opposite the lounge, took a noisy sip of her tea. “Like what?”
Edie tried to think of a diplomatic way to put it. The problem was that she was not a diplomatic person. “I do have an entire culinary arts certification from the finest vocational school in Green Bay, Wisconsin.”
“You’re not to step foot in my kitchen.” Morag said this mildly, but she had said it much less mildly several times prior when Edie had attempted to get a closer look at the space.
One would think, given that Edie had just lost the love of her life—her own place to feed people, which she’d made with her own two hands—that she would be wary of kitchens and all of their beautiful promises.
If only.
“Your great loss,” she said. “Well, okay. You obviously have stacks of paperwork to catch up on.” The stacks in question, located behind the reception desk, were tall enough to be visible from where Edie sat.
“I have had so many jobs. It’s true most of them were in the weeds of food service, but I can file.
I can toil at the hot fires of a paper shredder. ”
“Stay away from my papers.”
She sighed and looked at the ceiling. “I am a hard worker, Morag. I love to do things. Put me to work. Use my body and what many might consider my talent for divergent thinking.”
“I can plainly see you can’t sit still.” Morag raised an eyebrow at Edie. “You want the English experience? Take a walk. Complain the season’s coming too early or too late while you trudge through the same rainy weather we have in all seasons.”
“I could tidy the lounge.” Edie opened her biscuit packet, watching for Morag’s reaction to this salvo.
She scoffed. “Needs more than a tidy.”
“It needs a shovel and a pressure washer, but for today, I could dust and haul these ancient magazines and newspapers to recycling.” Edie popped a whole biscuit in her mouth.
“And what would be the point of that, lovey? Gregory Place isn’t in any guidebook. No one’s beating down these doors. It’s just you and me and—” Morag pointed above her head.
The other guest, she meant.
Edie hadn’t gotten a look at her. She didn’t come downstairs for Morag’s modified-vegan-for-Edie full English breakfasts, even though the mushroom bacon was extraordinary.
Instead, Morag left a tray in front of the guest’s door for every meal, and the guest put the empty tray outside of it when she was done.
She didn’t go for walks, or for excursions, and she hadn’t left her room to sit in the lounge or stroll over to the manor, even though it was genuinely massive and had been built by an English madman named Gregory Gregory.
Edie hadn’t been there, either. She was saving the madman’s manor house tour for a special occasion. The special occasion being free third Thursdays.
She had inspected the neat line of mysterious skin care products on the guest’s shelf in the bathroom.
Their labels looked like they were made by a calligrapher working under a rainbow while angels sang, and they smelled so good when Edie guiltily twisted off their heavy lids that her eyes rolled into the back of her head.
“I’ve already taken too many walks in the rain,” she said. “I have a lot of energy, and I’m here for weeks yet. Let me organize something. Or clean it. I love vacuuming.”
Morag pointed a digestive biscuit at her. “Don’t touch my Hoover. It’s temperamental.”
“Please,” Edie begged. “You don’t have a television. I don’t have a computer, and my phone’s a brick. All of the books in the library are by Barbara Cartland.”
“A genius if there ever was one.”
“You won’t let me read the guest book.” Edie looked with longing toward the inn’s enormous, olive-green, leather-bound guest book where it sat closed on top of the reception desk.
It looked as old as the building. She was starting to feel desperate to flip back the cover and see if the first entry had been written in the crabbed hand of an Elizabethan scribe, possibly in rhyming verse.