Chapter Five #3
“You weren’t kidding about the pink. This is outrageous.” Edie crossed to where there was a big, darker pink square on the wall opposite the bed. “Looks like there was art up once.”
Cosima walked to the closet to retrieve the stack of framed pictures of her mother. She laid them out on the table with a flourish. “I wouldn’t call it art.”
Edie put her hand over her mouth again. “Morag decorated this room after your mother’s stay as a tribute to Phoebe Frank?”
“It seems she did. Well, not decorated, but the pictures, the plaque, the binder of Ship of the Cosmos trivia questions in the bedside dresser, and the decoupage roses around where Mother signed the wallpaper”—Cosima pointed to the spot—“do give the room a certain air of homage.”
“Grieving or not, I wouldn’t want to sleep in a room with that many pictures of my mom peering at me from the walls.
Why would she sign the wallpaper? Obviously, Morag embellished the signature with the roses, but is that because she discovered the signature afterward?
Or did she ask your mom to literally autograph the room? ”
Cosima looked more carefully, then leaned close and slid her nail under a long, thin cut in the pink paper. “I’m going to guess she signed it as a kind of ‘X marks the spot.’ I’m ripping it off.”
“That’s fine,” Edie said. “But, for accounting purposes, let the record show that you broke the shepherdess and ripped the wallpaper. I can’t afford surcharges.”
Smiling, Cosima carefully followed the cut with her fingernail, lifting and tearing off the paper until it revealed a corner of yellow stationery, which she pulled out. “Here we go. Oh, there’s a lot of writing on this one.” It slowed her heart down to see it. Her stomach clenched.
Edie must have sensed the shift in mood, because she eased away, putting space around Cosima to afford her greater privacy. “Take your time reading it. It will give me a chance to snoop.” She clasped her hands behind her back in a show of I won’t touch anything.
While Edie looked around the room, Cosima sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes instantly adjusted to her mother’s heavily slanted, dramatic script.
My love,
I don’t yet know who you are, but I do know that you will exist. I knew you would exist not three days from the moment I met your father, a man I haven’t even made love to yet.
I met him walking from Gregory Place to the manor when I was overcome by a small herd of sheep.
He was as much a tourist as I am, but he herded them away for me, laughing at how ineffectual he was at the task, and after walking together for only an hour, he changed his booking from a hotel in Grantham to Gregory Place.
Federico Russo is a man I would not have looked at twice in California, but such is the magic of this inn.
Here, there is the quiet necessary to listen.
I can eat real food. The weather makes my decisions for me—if I will go out or stay in.
If I will read or warm up with tea. It means I could hear your father’s dry wit instead of missing it in the fray.
I don’t feel as though I am losing time or money or the public’s interest if I do nothing but lie in his arms and stare at the clouds.
He’s a race car driver, of all things, absurdly Italian, who has shown me that a man’s eyes can genuinely sparkle.
He had no idea who Phoebe Frank was, but he came to know me in such a short time. Tonight, I told him I would marry him, very firm, and he put down the novel you found a clue in and said, “Of course. I will buy you an aquamarine to match your eyes.”
I also told him that when we had a child, I would never be romantic enough, not in Hollywood, not ever as Phoebe Frank, to tell them about how I fell in love for the first and only time, and he told me, “Tesoro, you can tell them. You can sing our love to them. You can write it in a book or act it in a play.”
It was important to me that you would know about this love.
He calls me Tesoro, “treasure,” and so I came up with this silly idea to create a treasure hunt for you.
One day I will bring you here, or ask you to go, when the time is right.
I’ll tell you to find my name in the guest book and see if you can take it from there.
I love you. Right now, you’re made only of stars and hopes I didn’t know I had, but I love you just the same, because it’s almost as if my love for your father means the two of us can’t contain it. We already need you to hold more.
Your mother (!!!)
Phoebe
Cosima put the letter down in her lap. Outside, weak morning light was beginning to gather under the dark clouds.
Her mother sounded different in the letter. She sounded young, and hopeful, and excited for the unknown future.
Cosima thought of Duncan’s kind gray eyes. The future this letter imagined didn’t include him.
She thought of the way the light looked in Phoebe’s office, slanting through a crystal highball glass and illuminating the amber color of the bourbon her mother liked to drink neat, chasing it with a razor-thin slice of lemon.
How she would claim, after the third or fourth drink, that she needed time by herself to think, and send Cosima away.
Phoebe Frank was good at everything she did. She was the best alcoholic Cosima had ever met.
How strange it was to be sitting in the same room where her mother wrote these words. Alive, when she wasn’t.
When everything and nothing had turned out as Phoebe Frank expected it to.
“What’s next?” Edie asked, sitting down on the other chair around the table.
“There isn’t a next.” Cosima laid her hand on the letter. “This is what I was supposed to find.”
“You, specifically? But you weren’t even—”
“Born. Or conceived. My mother had to make that clear.” Cosima’s throat closed, and before she could stop it, her face, her neck, were wet with tears that came as fast as the rain had fallen. “I’m not crying,” she said.
Edie scooted her chair over until her knees touched Cosima’s.
“Of course you’re not crying.” She made a pffft noise.
“Who would ever even cry if they found a letter their late mother left them years before they were conceived on the off chance an elderly innkeeper would never redecorate, just to say—and I’m spitballing, here—‘I love you’?
Absurd. Crying is for kitten videos and when you’re tempering chocolate and it breaks.
These are tears more like having your period in front of Harry Styles. Completely involuntary.”
Cosima felt her throat choke her again, and she shocked herself with a laugh. “My period.”
“Perfectly natural. However, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need a hug? Only to soothe the discomfort of this period your brain is having. Not because you’re sad.”
Cosima wiped her face with her hands. “Maybe.” At the corner of Edie’s eye, the curve of her eyelashes made a question mark with a freckle for the dot. “Yes. I will take a hug.”
Edie wrapped her arms around Cosima’s shoulders.
She put her palms flat against her back.
Her hot cheek and sleek hair brushed against Cosima’s cheek.
Slowly, awkwardly, Cosima put her arms around Edie’s middle.
She could feel the other woman’s ribs rise and fall with breath.
She was surrounded by the smell of Pears soap and green tea, and her eyes burned, but there weren’t any more tears.
After a while, she realized Edie wasn’t going to let go first, and that made her think of Edie on her knees, sweeping up every shard of china around Cosima’s bare feet.
About Edie knocking on her door and asking her to look for hedgehogs.
They’d found one, too. She supposed hedgehogs would forever remind her of Edie now.
When Cosima pulled away, Edie let her go immediately. “We need to get the guest book back before Morag wakes up,” Cosima said.
Edie’s eyes went wide. “Fuck me, yeah we do. For a few days, I tried to beat her to being awake, but I found her creeping around the kitchen at ten past five in the morning and gave it up.”
They raced quietly down the stairs, the rooms dark, and went to the guest book, still open on the dining table with the battery-operated candle flickering away. Edie closed it and picked it up to head to the reception desk, but then a long red ribbon slipped out and fluttered to the floor.
“I’ve got it,” Cosima whispered. “Where did it come from? It looks like it was part of the binding.”
Edie set the book down on the table again. “This page. I had my fingers between the pages, and that ribbon slipped past them.” She opened the book. There was a bit of crusty glue at the top of the binding where the ribbon had been attached for a bookmark.
Cosima smoothed it into place, then stopped. “Look at this.” She pointed to a guest’s signature and message from 1977.
Edie craned to see it over Cosima’s shoulder. “Are those little symbols on the message line?”
She reached around Cosima’s body and pinched the bottom of the page between her fingers.
Only when Edie had nearly finished folding the page did Cosima see the crease.
It went right through the middle of the page.
It had been there already. The bottom of the page neatly met the top, and then Cosima could make out where there were tiny holes cut out, framing the symbols perfectly, with more symbols written on a blank signature line on the folded-up page.
Edie moved it back and forth. “For serious, Cosima, I think this is a code!”
“A cipher. That’s what you’d call it. Not a code.” Cosima sat down. She wished she had a pen and paper.
Edie flopped bonelessly into the chair beside her. “No wonder Morag wouldn’t let us look inside. This book is filled with sinister English secrets.”
“So are you two ladies going to hunt for the treasure?”
Cosima and Edie screamed as Morag appeared in the dining room. She wore an ankle-length white linen nightgown. Her loose hair streamed nearly to her waist in silver ripples, and she held a collection of dripping hellebore in one hand. Lenten rose, Cosima thought automatically.
“Swear to god, Morag,” Edie panted. “I’m going to make you wear a bell.”
“What treasure?” Cosima asked.
“Agatha Llewellyn’s treasure.”
“The novelist?”
Morag ignored this question. “She put the first clue there in the book. I’ve never let anyone see it because the treasure’s meant for someone else. No guest of mine.”
Edie made a noise like a muffled squeak.
“So why would we hunt for it?” Cosima narrowed her eyes at Morag. There was something more complicated going on here than the modest legacy left by her mother. Agatha Llewellyn was a well-known Welsh author. Why didn’t she have a plaque of her own?
The old woman walked to the reception desk and placed the burgundy Lenten roses in a very fine blue-glazed Qing vase that Duncan would have coveted desperately.
“I’ve never had guests here who did nothing but hang about,” she said darkly.
“The place needs an airing out from all the poverty and melancholy.” Her smile was just as dark.
“And I have reasons of my own to think this would be a good way for the two of you to spend your time.”
Edie looked over, her face so nakedly pleading, Cosima nearly laughed.
“We’ll talk about it after breakfast,” she said diplomatically.
But she thought about Tesoro, and the Castle, and Duncan’s careful reply to her text.
Her stomach hadn’t hurt, not for more than a minute, since Edie came into the lounge.
Maybe a treasure hunt was exactly the kind of rest a princess needed.