Chapter Seven #2
Linda stood up and gave herself a shake as if Cosima’s words meant the same to her as to her mistress. Bert beamed. “Watch your feet heading down the hill. It’s slippery from the rain. I will see you two by and by.”
Bert whistled at Linda, and they took off in the direction they’d come from, Bert in long strides and Linda only visible as she parted the grass in front of her. “By and by,” Cosima said. “Good lord.”
“Wasn’t that the best thing that has ever happened to anyone on earth?
” Edie’s eyes were wide when she turned to Cosima.
The sun had brought color up in her cheeks and the blunt tip of her nose.
The breeze was picking up her hair and sending it in piecey bits, like she had walked out of a Ralph Lauren ad.
“Obviously, if having a nice conversation in a pasture with a boomer and her dog is the best thing that has ever happened to me, I’m still winning at our game, but I can pretend it’s magical. ”
Cosima couldn’t help it—she snorted and started walking toward the tree.
“You’re not winning. Not by a long shot.
My life has been so repressed, for example, that it never occurred to me I could text Duncan about something trivial, like the cipher.
I felt I couldn’t, not without giving him a reasonable explanation for why I’ve abandoned my post and am developing a dust allergy in England. ”
“Hmm.” Edie reached down and picked a long strand of grass to twirl. “You definitely get points for that. Though, get ready for my next observation.”
“Which is?” Cosima couldn’t be sure if she was ready, but everything she wasn’t ready for was another turn of the key, winding everything up, pushing her forward. Was that good or bad? Did she want to be awake?
“I didn’t know it was so nice to have clothes that fit.” Edie ran her hand over the sleeve of her jacket. “I’ve never done anything but make do when it comes to clothes. I feel like an entirely different person wearing this jacket.”
Oh, she certainly had not been ready, and now Cosima wasn’t sure what to do with her hot cheeks. “Who do you feel like?”
Edie gave her a one-sided, crooked, self-effacing smile that pinched Cosima’s heart. “Myself, I think. Who knows? Turns out I’ve hardly met her.”
“Yes.” Cosima turned away from that smile, which was beginning to feel emotionally lethal. “You do get game points for reaching the ripe age of twenty-eight before owning a properly fitted garment.”
“Do I get extra points if the reason I own it is because you’re the first person who’s paid attention?” Edie knocked Cosima with her shoulder, soft against her arm. It made her want to close her eyes and see if it would happen again.
The first person who’d paid attention. What world had ignored Edie Whitelock? Her appeals were so conspicuous. The jacket simply made Edie more Edie.
Edie in her green jacket was, to Cosima, as correct as the perennial beds at the Castle, shape-shifting through the high season from one glorious bloom to the next.
She supposed it was how her mother felt, making movies.
It was a feeling Cosima wanted more of for herself.
They reached the tree, which was dripping with rain under its branches. Edie held her hands up to the water. “Do you know what this is called? Fog drip. This tree is so huge, it’s nearly storming under here.”
And this woman had called her a nerd. “The hill is steep.” Cosima walked around the trunk of the oak, brushing rainwater from her arms and hair while looking dubiously down the rain-flattened grass of the hillside. “Maybe we should find a way to walk around.”
“Let me see.” Edie came up beside her. “Cosima! Look! There’s the stile! It’s just—”
And that was when Edie fell down the hill. On her ass. Like it was a slide at the carnival.
“For fuck’s sake!” Cosima looked around for a different approach, but there was nothing for it. She sighed heavily, sat down on the grass, and gave herself a shove.
It was terrible. The ground was saturated and surprisingly cold. The uncontrollable speed of her slide meant she would never be able to wear these trousers again. Edie had started laughing so hard she was tipped over, slipping down the hill curled up like an armadillo. Or a hedgehog.
Cosima came to a stop beside her, hip deep in a puddle, Edie still choking on laughter, every part of her wet. “Didn’t you hear me when I said we should find a way around?”
“I—I diiid,” Edie coughed out, holding her sides. “I totally did, but then I was ass over fucking teakettle.” She unfolded herself and starfished on the ground, looking up at the sky racing with fat, bright white clouds. “I lost my boot halfway down.”
“Naturally.” She injected the word with skepticism, but in truth, Cosima wanted to laugh.
She got up and looked behind her, scanning the hillside for it.
Once she spotted the boot, she looked around on the ground until she located a good stone.
She closed one eye and got the boot lined up and then sharply flung the fist-shaped stone at the boot, knocking over its shaft and sending it skittering down toward them.
“Holy fuck, Cosima.” Edie hauled herself up as the boot came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. “I’m positive I’ve never seen anything sexier in all of my life than you hauling off with that giant goddamned rock.”
“I did shot put.” Cosima brushed her hands off and handed Edie the boot, locking down any thoughts that wanted to make themselves known along the lines of If you knew how to be sexy for Edie Whitelock, you wouldn’t stop. “At boarding school,” she said, needlessly.
“Of course you fucking did.” Edie yanked on her boot, her smile guileless. She batted her eyelashes. “Be in my zombie shelter?”
Cosima snorted, appallingly flattered. “Let’s look at this stile.”
They walked up to the crumbling wall of huge, blond stones. There were narrow stone steps built into it, allowing someone to climb up and over the barrier easily. Judging from the graffiti carved into it, the wall had long been a destination for local kids.
“Oh, look! There’s one of those interpretative signs.” Edie stood by a small wooden post with a green sign, and Cosima joined her to look at it. “That is a truly enormous dong.” Edie pointed at the Sharpie vandalism over the prim lettering HERMIONE’S STILE.
“You needn’t have mentioned it. Ghastly thing.”
Edie snorted. “Seriously, though, I’m glad the English are so good at their signage.
I love that wherever you go, everything is labeled with a little contextual information.
‘Hermione’s Stile was constructed of local sandstone at or around 1688.
’ 1688!” She knocked her shoulder into Cosima again, and Cosima tried not to be pleased.
“Unreal. How do they even know? ‘Its name most likely refers to Hermione Blackwood, notable for running the local livestock market, though she was a single woman.’—though she was a single woman? Now I wish I had a Sharpie.” Edie flicked the sign with her fingertip.
“There are corrections to be made here.”
“What do you think we’re looking for?” Cosima studied the fifteen feet of crumbling wall with the slender double staircase, up one side and down the other.
“There’s not much wall left here, but enough that it could take ages to find a clue if it’s small.
Add to that the graffiti, and I wouldn’t know where to begin. ”
Edie had approached the wall and hunkered down to examine the penknife-carved defacements.
“This one’s from 1803. V plus M. With a heart.
” She traced the heart with her finger. Always hands-on, this woman.
Tactile. Kinetic. “It reminds me of this time that Mike took us to Ohio. His sister lived there, in the Hocking Hills. It was so pretty. There’s a cave there called Old Man’s Cave with a waterfall, and there’s graffiti like this on the walls.
I thought it was so amazing to think about how all these people from history were just regular people, you know?
” Edie stood up and leaned against the wall.
“In Pompeii, there’s graffiti on what would’ve been the wall of a bar between two men fighting over a woman named Iris. It ends with something like ‘and you’re just jealous and also suck.’ One third of Neanderthal graffiti boils down to, basically, ‘I fucked your mom.’”
“Cosima!” Edie screeched.
“What? Have you seen a Roman vase? They drew phalluses on everything. There’s thirty-five-hundred-year-old graffiti from a Chinese teenager in Egypt complaining about his vacation to the pyramids.
Most of the graffiti in medieval pubs in England is some variation on ‘the Pope puts stuff in his butt.’”
Edie clapped her hands, grinning madly. She did a little bounce from her tiptoes to her heels. “I could really listen to you talk about this all day.”
“People are just people,” Cosima said. “You’re completely right about that. A good reason not to listen to your brothers.”
“Ah.” Edie’s smile dimmed. “You’ve turned a discussion of dirty graffiti into a small lecture.”
Cosima mentally winced. She’d been thinking for days about the things Edie had said about how she grew up. “It’s only that it’s bothered me what you’ve said about … well, what they say.”
Edie adjusted her body against the wall with an unconscious fluidity that Cosima recognized as a sign she was thinking. She waited, looking around at the dips and rises of the landscape, irregular fields bordered by old stands of trees.
Lincolnshire really was beautiful.