Chapter Eight #2
“Nothing changes here,” Cosima said. “When we had the tour, I noticed a bulletin board where visitors and congregants can tack up notecards. They use it to write requests for prayers, or say something they particularly enjoyed about a church event.”
“Okay.”
“When they take the notes down, they keep them.” Cosima picked up a short stack of cards and flipped through them, then put three in front of Edie. Edie picked them up.
“So these are from—”
“—when Agatha was in Harlaxton. 1977. On a hunch, I found the box from the year she was here, thinking she might have left her own.”
There were two pastel pink cards and a yellow one. The cards were written in the same handwriting from the guest book, in soft-tipped pencil. Edie read the yellow card first.
Personal blessing for us with a lovely, knowing prayer. Very unexpected grace that would not have come from my own parish church. All our love, A. B. Llewellyn.
Edie held it up. “This is the kind of thing my mom would say in church. Something that sounds like a eulogy she wrote when she was drunk.”
Cosima gave her a small smile. “I was more interested in the other two.”
Edie read the first one.
The rat carving on the east-facing stone panel of the font is much more darling than I would’ve guessed given its accountability for the plague!
“It wasn’t the fault of the rats, really,” Edie said. “It was the fleas.”
“Yes. Read the other one.”
Edie pulled it forward.
You could drop a pocket watch into one of the nostrils of the green man poppyhead, and no one would discover it for a thousand years, if not longer.
“That is an exceedingly weird observation to pin to a bulletin board. Have you read her novels? Are they this weird?”
“Yes. Did you notice the green man poppyhead? Greer told us about how every medieval church had a green man, remember? She showed it to us.”
Edie had enjoyed that part of Greer’s lecture, actually. “Hmm. Did she? Was it green?”
“No. They aren’t green, or at least, they don’t have to be. They’re pagan symbols of the natural world, with foliage carved all around their faces and—” Cosima stopped. “You’re teasing me. You remember.”
“I do.”
“And you remember the poppyheads?” Cosima narrowed her eyes.
“The carvings on top of the skinny plinths at the beginning of each pew, yes. I paid attention. No quiz necessary.”
“So you know what Agatha’s talking about on that card.”
“The giant man-head with leaves sprouting from his face who has nostrils the size of shooter marbles? Again, yes, and I had a similar thought about how many things I would have tried to shove in his nose had I gone to this church.”
“When you were a child.”
“Obviously”—Edie smiled—“at any time in my life.”
Cosima took an imperious sip of her coffee. Edie was glad. Imperious Cosima with eyebrows that could hook a trout was a woman she could relax around. “I thought that perhaps we could check the font and the green man.”
“You want to pick the green man’s nose.” Edie nodded solemnly. “You should’ve just said.”
Cosima wrinkled her nose, then tidied up the cards and put them back in their box. “I’ll clean up after the coffee and meet you outside.”
Edie had been dismissed, but it was okay. The caffeine had dusted away the gloomy thoughts that had been working hard to keep her down. She was on vacation.
She was hunting treasure.
Outside the vicarage, she took a deep breath of the outside air, cooler than it had been at midday but holding clear.
From here, she could see a wide slice of this place.
The fields were the softest green, still mixed with the browns of late winter, and embroidered with huge trees and stone fences.
Everything felt like a storybook, a little unreal.
Edie took a deep breath, and Cosima appeared at her side. She’d buttoned up her jacket again and refastened her hair. “Let’s go see the green man.”
“After we fish around in his nose, do you think we should walk the mile to the Gregory Arms? Morag has probably given up on us for lunch. I’ve only gone to the pub one other time, but it’s nice.
They fry their chips in peanut oil and bring vinegar to the table.
It’s the vegan lunch of champions. Only two pounds forty pence, also. ”
Cosima pulled open the church door. “If you like.”
Her voice was nice and sharp. It released the last vestiges of panic from Edie’s chest.
They found the green man halfway down the aisle, the poppyhead slightly bigger than the others on its row of pews.
The head of the wooden carving was about the size of a grapefruit.
Its nostrils were worn smooth at the edges, suggesting that generations of children had been sticking their fingers in his nose.
“Do you want to do the honors?” Edie asked.
“Hmm.” Cosima reached a hand up, then crossed her arms, tucking her hands into her elbows. “Hmm.”
Edie laughed. “You don’t.”
“It seems unseemly.”
“I’ll do it!” Edie fished her finger into the green man’s left nostril, wiggling as she went. She twisted her finger around. Nothing but smooth, polished wood. “No gold.”
“Ew.”
“I meant gold-gold, not boogers. Lord. California girls are prissy. I’m going into the right.
” Edie slid her finger into the other, slightly larger nostril, again wiggling her finger around like a wormy scope.
She was just about to give up when the edge of her fingernail caught something hard that wasn’t wood. “Oh.”
“What?” Cosima stepped closer. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t quite get it.” Edie switched to her middle finger.
“Aarrgh.” Cosima looked away, toward the altar.
“Really?” Edie stood in the aisle, her middle finger up to her knuckle in the carving’s nose. “It was my using my middle finger that tipped this over into indignity for you? It’s longer, Cosima.”
“I know! I just. I can’t. I can’t look at it.”
Edie gazed at the soaring ceilings and fished around again, directing her fingertip to where she’d felt the anomaly. “It’s a coin.”
“Can you get it out?”
“It’s hard to get my fingertip to grip it.
Hold on.” Edie pulled her finger out and shoved her hand down the front pocket of her jeans.
“Trident.” She unwrapped the gum and stuck it in her mouth.
“I remembered I put the last piece from a pack I bought at the airport in my jeans this morning. Give me a minute.”
Cosima watched Edie chew her gum. “What if the gum gets stuck in there?”
“It might.” Edie blew a bubble. “I’m actually surprised there wasn’t more gum down there. Do you think there’s a volunteer whose job it is to clean gum out of the nose of the green man?”
Cosima’s nose wrinkled again.
“Did anyone ever tell you your face is going to freeze like that?”
“All the time.” Cosima sighed. “Followed by a lecture on why I should never get filler, because they don’t rigorously test injectables.”
Edie blew another bubble, then popped it with her middle finger, leaving the skin of gum over her fingertip. “Here I go.”
She carefully dipped her finger into the nose, not wanting to stick the gum anywhere but to the coin, then pressed her finger on the edge of it. “Okay. I stuck it to my finger. I’m going to pull out.”
Cosima’s choking laugh echoed through the empty church. “Maybe I am prissy.”
Edie was smiling as she slowly slid the coin out, watching it emerge until she had it grasped between two fingers. She held it triumphantly in the air. “It’s fifty pence! Twenty percent off my chips!”
Cosima grabbed her wrist. “Let me see! You didn’t even look at it.”
Her fingers circled Edie’s wrist in a firm grip, and Edie resisted without thinking, palming the coin and dropping her arm so she could bury her fist against the softest part of her stomach. She hunched over it. “No! Don’t take it! I will look, but not until you stop grabbing at me!”
“What are you doing? Why are you bent over like that? I’m not going to take it from you!”
“I have two brothers, and they’re both taller than me.” Edie straightened, but she pushed her arm behind her to rest at the small of her back. “This is how short people protect their resources.”
Cosima’s ears had gone pink around the rims. She was breathing fast, closer than Edie had realized, with her fingers at Edie’s elbow.
“Promise you’re not planning to swipe it out of my hand the instant I let down my guard?” The question came out a little too husky. Edie took a step back, and then Cosima did, too. She still had her fingers curled around the coin, hot and sticky with gum.
Maybe she could chalk this up to jet lag. Could jet lag come for you eleven days later and make you embarrassed and horny at the same time?
“I would never,” Cosima said. “I thought we were in this together.”
“We are definitely in this together. Possibly, I might be dealing with a certain amount of trauma around protecting a prize.” Edie swallowed. “Please forgive me, and also completely forget that ever happened.”
“I will remember it until I die. I’m going to write about how unhinged your reaction was in my journal.
But if we don’t look at that coin and confirm it’s only a fifty-pence coin in the next literal moment, I will in fact knock you over and pin you to the ground.
I went to an all-girls’ boarding school.
I played rugby. Lacrosse. Field hockey. I could take both of your brothers. ”
“That is absolutely hot. I’m tempted not to show you this coin, just to see what would happen, but I will submit.” Edie held her hand up, palm flat between them.
“There’s a lion on it.” The coin was silver, with an image of a woman beside the lion. It wasn’t circular. Edie counted seven sides while Cosima breathed onto the palm of her hand. “I assume that’s Brittania with the lion. Is this the current fifty-pence coin?”
“No clue. We should flip it to heads.” Edie moved the coin to sit on top of her thumbnail and then flipped it. “Ow! Motherfucker. British coins are heavy!” The coin spun on the aisle carpet, then settled flat.