Chapter Eleven
Cosima took a few steps back when Adina Bidderscombe crossed her arms over her baby-blue kitten sweatshirt.
Having now met Adina, Cosima did feel a certain amount of pressure not to put Morag in a bad position. Ridiculous, her increasing interest in the politics of this vanishingly small English village.
“Morag called up here and told me what you two were up to,” Adina said, “but I won’t have you disturbing the students.
Their British Studies presentations are next week.
I’ve been near scraping them off the ceiling, they’re so stressed.
” She delivered every word like she was snapping a sheet off a clothesline.
Cosima knew all of this courtesy of a lecture she’d received during her walk to the manor with Edie, who had absorbed a great deal from the brochures stuffed into dusty racks in Gregory Place’s reception area.
“We completely understand that the students’ needs come first.” Edie smiled at the housekeeper. “I promise we will keep to empty rooms as much as possible.”
Adina was not unmoved by Edie’s rosy cheeks and freckles.
This was fortunate, because she had neatly dismissed Cosima with a look that made it clear she was not impressed by American celebrity.
Cosima wondered if she’d directed the very same look at Phoebe decades ago.
Her mother may have made an enemy of this woman.
Phoebe’s general policy was that there could only be one queen, and Adina was not to be usurped.
Now, Adina’s lean hands clenched and unclenched, her wrists no more than knobs of bone exiting the voluminous sweatshirt’s cuffs. “You represent Morag. If there is a breath of trouble, I will go directly to her and hold her accountable.”
“Absolutely,” Edie said. “We’re so appreciative.”
Adina put her hand into the pocket of her dark green slacks and pulled out a gold pocket watch. She snapped it open. “Ninety minutes, no more. Two hours puts you too close to lunch, when the students will be headed to the commissary.”
“Starting?” Edie asked.
“Now. Go on. Don’t touch anything.”
Cosima turned from the foyer, with its multistory, almost gothic fireplace, and followed Edie to the big room beyond, on the threshold of which—despite having lived in a castle of her own—Cosima stopped short with a breathless gasp.
“Holy chevre,” whispered Edie.
Dozens of feet above them, the ceiling was gridded with dark polished wood beams framing squares of snow-white relief sculpture.
The tidy grid matched one made of multicolored marble on the floor.
Dark wood pillars ringed the room, topped by full-sized marble sculptures of the gods, their stone expressions frozen in grimaces as though burdened by the weight of the ceiling.
“This is the Grand Hall?” Cosima reached out and pulled Edie’s brochure from her jacket pocket. “I thought the solid mile of turrets guarded by stone lions on the way up the drive had prepared me, but apparently not.”
Edie shook her head, her green eyes wide.
The freckles glittered over her face caught in a sunbeam from a leaded glass window.
“This is going to be like finding a needle in a massive mansion where I am already lost. How did we get to this room? Was it through those mile-tall doors? Was there a portal?”
Cosima opened the brochure with a snap. “College students live here. We’re smarter than a bunch of twenty-year-olds.”
“I don’t know about that.” Edie’s smile made a previously unmapped dimple appear above the left corner of her mouth.
The sight of that secret dimple compelled Cosima to take a step closer before she could think about why she wanted to. She attempted to distract herself with the open brochure. “Let’s go to this famous cedar staircase, which is pretty central, and figure out the clue from the treasure map.”
Edie moved even closer to look. There was nothing to do but take in the shine of her soft hair and the smell of grass and lemon.
Cosima had not once imagined herself with a partner, kissing someone, yearning for someone.
She had touched herself and luxuriated in orgasms but never fantasized about getting help with them.
She had read enough about the ace spectrum to understand that she was somewhere on it but hadn’t explored further, so her connection to her queerness on that spectrum remained theoretical.
Until now. When she could suddenly think of nothing else but Edie’s bare skin against hers.
Gliding her mouth everywhere on Edie’s body she could find.
What Edie’s bottom lip would feel like against her tongue.
What the hollow of her inner thigh would taste like.
An erotic and desperate kaleidoscope of images filled in the answers to questions Cosima had never bothered with nor cared about.
She couldn’t help thinking about Edie’s body, her skin, her mouth, how much of her shiny hair she could get in her fist. And it wasn’t only that.
It was where all of those thoughts came from.
Not between her legs, even if that part of her now beat with the same rhythm as her heart.
They had come from Edie. In some particular way, they were hers.
Everything clicked into place so utterly and so neatly, like the hushed snaps of jigsaw pieces.
This was what it felt like—for her, for Cosima Frank—to fall in love.
It felt like opening the door to her room at the inn and finding the first person she thought was interesting in years.
It felt like not knowing if she should avoid her or figure out how to be around her all the time.
It felt like feeling her body relax when Edie restlessly changed position, fidgeted, and stimmed beside her.
Falling in love was a sleeper cell of interconnected feelings in her heart and brain and sexual self, and Edie had activated it by simply being Edie.
“Cosima?” Edie’s voice sounded far away.
Demisexuality was the part of the aro and ace spectrum that Cosima had learned and wondered about but decided she wouldn’t be able to completely know, for herself, until and if she got there.
She had gotten here.
Here she was.
She had gotten here utterly, and getting here validated everything she had learned about herself, showed her even more, and instantly created a personal disaster the likes of which would more than likely lead to heartbreak.
“Cosima, are you okay?”
She cleared her throat. “Yes.”
“Where’d you go?” Edie took the brochure from Cosima’s hands. She had been clutching it, crumpling its edges.
“I’m here.” Cosima desperately wanted to cover her eyes with both hands, drop to the floor, and sink into the center of the earth, where her feelings would be concealed from everyone, including herself.
“Lots to look at, and I got distracted by you … what I mean is, by your idea to head to the staircase.”
“That was your idea.” Edie had a tiny wrinkle between her eyebrows, a wrinkle that was trying to understand why Cosima had suddenly exploded into three hundred pieces of herself. “You sure you’re okay?”
Oh, I know I’m not okay. With this thought, Cosima closed her eyes, but it only made the questions louder and the mental images more vivid. What if she rubbed her bottom lip against Edie’s forehead wrinkle? Would it smooth out? Would Edie rise up on her tiptoes and pull Cosima down to her lips?
She forced herself to take a steadying breath. “Let’s head to the staircase,” she rasped. “What direction?”
“This way.” Edie led the way across the marble floor, unbuttoning her jacket as she walked to reveal the first item of clothing Cosima had seen from her wardrobe that looked like Edie.
It was a navy cotton blouse with clever darts for her bustline that kept the row of red buttons from gaping.
The collar was round but not twee, and Cosima had watched Edie roll up the long, fitted sleeves at Morag’s breakfast table, rapt as she secured and buttoned them at the elbow with sleeve tabs.
Close up, instead of a staid Swiss dot or diamond woven into the cloth, there were small red mice.
Cosima felt feral about this blouse of Edie’s. She had a lot of sudden, feral feelings about Edie, competing with the terrifying domesticated ones involving Cosima bringing Edie tea and curling up by her feet.
Fucked. She was fucked. Transformed, enlightened, reborn, and doomed.
“Oh my god,” Edie said with a laugh when the staircase came into view.
“Gregory Gregory is something else. The landing is bigger than my mom’s entire house.
” She looked up the massive, carved wooden staircase, each tread longer than two park benches together, covered in miles of fine woolen runner.
“It literally leads to heaven.” She pointed.
Indeed, the ceiling at the top of the staircase, at least a hundred feet above them, had been painted as though the skies opened up above the highest floor, framed in carved marble life-sized drapery. “Gregory Gregory seems to have had a very specific sort of taste.”
“What he had is a lot of taste,” Edie said, sitting down on one of the lower stairs. “Did he have good taste? Bad taste? I’m from Green Bay, so I have no idea, but this man did have a large amount of taste.”
Cosima sat next to her, carefully in case bending a body so full of sudden want would break it in half.
Edie put the brochure down on her lap, frowning again. “For real, what is wrong with you?”
I found an unexplored realm, a whole secret garden of my sexuality overgrown with roses that smell like Pears soap.
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Edie tipped her head. “I feel like I’m losing you.”
Don’t say that, don’t say that, even if it’s true.
“I shouldn’t have convinced Morag to get out her coffee maker. I’ve had a lot of coffee.”
Cosima looked away from Edie to the ceiling, desperate to pull herself together, but it was difficult to find an anchor to reality with Gregory Gregory’s fantastical heaven soaring above them. “You know what it is?” she asked.