Chapter Five
“Wait, did it say the one with the crook or the shepherdess?” Cosima sat on the piano bench in the lounge, holding a dusty Royal Doulton bone china figurine in each hand so that she could compare them more closely.
One had a wide-brimmed hat and held a big shepherd’s crook, and the other sported a bonnet and cradled a lamb in her arms.
“It doesn’t say. It just says, ‘Gregory’s blushing shepherdess keeps a secret.’” Edie was reading off the Notes app on Cosima’s phone, where Cosima had translated the message they found in the guest book.
Her mother’s message.
It had been easy enough to find the record of Phoebe’s visit. The guest book entries were in chronological order, and even if they hadn’t been, at some point Morag had protected Phoebe’s signature with a long strip of clear tape over the top of it.
In the two lines for guest messages, her mother had written a message in the code she’d taught Cosima when she was a girl so they could leave notes to each other without the staff leaking their whereabouts or plans.
She called it “Phoebe language,” but Cosima had later learned that it was a simple Caesar cipher, with each letter of the alphabet substituted by the one that came six letters before it.
Because my name has six letters, she’d told Cosima. And so does yours.
Edie had pointed out that the existence of this code, and particularly the reason for its existence, gave Cosima a solid point in their game.
Cosima had laughed and told her that she and her mother and Duncan all enjoyed codes.
Duncan’s mother had been a codebreaker in the Second World War, and he’d taught her and Phoebe quite a few of the tricks he’d learned as a child.
Cosima only realized after she’d finished speaking that this was a personal detail she’d never told a stranger before.
Edie came up closer to her, blocking the light with her body in a way that rendered Cosima’s attempt at inspection pointless. “So I guess either one of these figurines could be the shepherdess?”
A little irritated, she shoved the two porcelains back onto the piano top. “Both of these have red cheeks. Both have the accessories of a shepherd. You’ve wandered around this inn much more than I have, so you tell me, is there anything else that could be a shepherdess? A painting? A statue?”
The blunt ends of Edie’s dark hair brushed her bare waist where her miniscule EAST DANCE TEAM tee didn’t meet the waistband of her sweatpants.
“I’ve been everywhere except Morag’s kitchen and your room,” Edie said. “As far as I know, you’re holding the only sheep-related items in the place. Which one has a secret? No idea.”
Cosima shook them one at a time near her ear. Nothing.
“So the secret isn’t that your mom filled one of them with diamonds.”
“She thought diamonds were tacky. Her style was more about aggressively buying controlling shares in unwitting companies.” Cosima inspected the statues for any cracks or hidden openings. “And real estate. So much real estate.”
Edie sat down next to Cosima on the piano bench, holding out her hand to take one of the figurines.
In the last hour that they’d spent decoding Phoebe’s entry, Cosima had grown more accustomed to Edie’s physical closeness.
It wasn’t what she was used to. At the Castle, everyone maintained a bubble of personal space.
There were air-kisses. Side-by-side strolls with her mother in the gardens—some of their best times together—or planting out a perennial bed with Duncan while they knelt in the dirt in happy silence, several feet apart.
Cosima couldn’t remember the last time she’d had casual human contact with anyone. In LA, everything was so vast, the margins wide, the rooms and boardrooms capacious and minimally furnished. They were places to breeze in and out of.
There were people who’d made it plain that Cosima could have all the human contact she wanted from them, but the prospect had never appealed.
She didn’t want the person who met her eyes at a restaurant to touch her.
She couldn’t imagine any of the people who’d pursued her wrapping their arms around her, or putting their mouth on hers in a kiss, or pulling her into bed, skin to skin.
Her friends were not people who held hands or piled into cars and brunch booths.
They didn’t try on each other’s clothes or braid each other’s hair.
It wasn’t that Cosima didn’t want. She did. But hers was a nonspecific yearning that pulled at her chest and sometimes throbbed between her legs. It felt personal. Quiet. And it had never been called up by her connection to any other person.
But Gregory Place was emphatically not the Castle. This inn was an intimate warren of furniture and tight hallways. Every chair and mattress swallowed a person up in cushioning and featherdown.
Here, there wasn’t anywhere for Edie to be but close.
At first, the incidental brushes of Edie’s shoulder against hers as they bent their heads over the guest book hit as bright as the lightning, briefly fuzzing Cosima’s senses with too much input at once—but then the sensual static broke up into clear impressions.
She recognized the almost lemony, cut-grass smell of Edie’s skin from the amber bars of Pears soap that the inn provided for free.
Even with her middle exposed, that skin was warm where her arm pressed against the heavy silk of Cosima’s robe sleeve and along her thigh.
Some bit of Edie was always moving, shifting, or fidgeting. Cosima liked it. It gave her plenty of ongoing information about where Edie’s body ended and began, and if she was likely to talk or be quiet or take a sip of her boiling-hot, sugar-sweet green tea.
Edie turned the figurine around in her hands. “It has a hole in the bottom where it came out of the mold.” She skimmed the pad of her finger around it, then held up the figurine, closing one eye, and tried to look inside. “I can’t tell if there’s anything in here.”
“If there were, you’d think it would have fallen out. Or that you could hear it rattle.” Cosima lifted her own shepherdess to look in the hole made by the slipcast funnel, but it made her feel faintly ridiculous, closing one eye and squinting as Edie had.
“Use your phone flashlight.”
Cosima turned it on and aimed it into the hollow space of the figurine, Edie leaning against her to look, too. “I don’t see anything.”
“I think there’s a spider. Do you see her? Or it could be a bit of dirt.”
Cosima handed the phone to Edie. “Look inside yours.”
Edie pointed the light as the thunder found a bass-note rumble that gave Cosima goose bumps all over.
“Holy smokes,” Edie whispered.
“What?” She leaned over to look and spotted the edge of what looked like canary-yellow paper. The hairs on the back of Cosima’s neck stood on end. “Oh! That’s the color of my mother’s stationery.”
Edie’s smile was so wide that Cosima could see a tiny divot on her otherwise smooth incisor where there must have been a bracket for braces. It was perfectly kitty-corner to a deep brown freckle on her lip line. Probably Edie had hundreds of constellations like this, all over her body.
“Can you get it out?” Cosima asked.
Edie angled the tip of her finger into the hole, but it only rustled the paper. Then she turned back to Cosima, reached up, and slid out one of the hairpins that kept the shorter curls near Cosima’s face from falling out of her braid. “I’m going to borrow this.”
Cosima touched the place where the hairpin had been. She watched Edie slide the pin onto the edge of the paper, tugging it closer to the hole. She tried to use her finger again to ease it out.
Knocked loose by Edie’s fingertip, the hairpin pinged onto the floor, and the paper curled away.
“Fuck.” Edie bent over and grabbed the pin. She held it up with a laugh. “Despite what it looks like, I’m not trying to pick you up.”
Cosima’s brain glitched. “Pardon?”
“You know. I dropped a hairpin.” Edie’s cheeks had gone pink.
“I don’t understand the relevance.”
“It’s an old-fashioned signal. You see a girl you fancy, and you drop one of your hairpins. If she picks it up, then she’s—” Edie wrinkled her nose and brows like Cosima had suddenly gone out of focus.
“Gay?” Cosima guessed. She’d never heard of this.
“Yep. I like to learn about that kind of thing. Queer life in history. I love looking at antique pictures of sapphic couples that everyone thought were roommates.” Edie pushed the hairpin inside the statue again, clearly distracted now.
“I have this book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, by a lesbian photographer who called herself JEB. She published it in 1979, and it’s probably my favorite book.
” She darted a quick, unguarded glance at Cosima.
“I love all of the layers of meaning and code and elaborate Easter eggs that queer women and girls got up to. How they figured out to do that so they could make lives for themselves that felt bigger than what the world was willing to let them have. I think about how amazing it would’ve felt to receive an acrostic ring from a girl you were desperately crushing on, you know, spelling out A-D-O-R-E with an amethyst, diamond, opal, ruby, and emerald, and then wearing it to your history lecture so she would see it.
I’m glad no one will put me in an asylum for being a lesbian anymore, probably, but I do wish there was something with a little more depth and meaning than swiping right on a phone screen. ”
Cosima blinked. Her eyes stung, which was absurd.
Who was this woman who made gourmet vegan food and dreamed about romantic history while wearing what were obviously her brother’s castoff pants for pajamas?
How had someone so singular and imaginative not found a place better than a foam-hat cheesehead town that made fun of her for not being the same as everyone else?