Chapter Nineteen
Twilight in the Welsh countryside wasn’t something that Edie would soon forget.
When Edie was a sophomore in high school, she had an English teacher who read them the Wordsworth poem about the abbey.
Edie remembered the stormy day her teacher had read it and how it sounded.
There was a single line that she’d collected like a crow sitting in the classroom.
It came to her every once in a while when she ran into a particularly pretty view driving around Wisconsin.
Connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky.
She hadn’t thought that someday she would be remembering that line in the place it had been written, far from home, and understand it deep inside her body.
Cosima’s phone navigation indicated that the turn for the lane that led to One Tree Cottage was a half mile away. Edie downshifted and slowed. There were no other cars around. Slowing down was enough to wake up Cosima, who sat up and stretched her arms along the top of the car.
“Hello.” She smiled at Edie, looking no worse for wear than she had this morning, except that the back of her hair where it had rubbed against plane seats and the car seat was having a party.
“Hi there.” Edie grabbed the phone and gave it to Cosima. “Tell me where to turn.”
She studied the navigation and the road until they came on the right-hand turn that would narrow into Agatha’s lane. Edie made it and then stopped and put the car in park. “What’s our plan?”
“Knock?”
“After that?”
“After that, we tell her who we are,” Cosima said.
Edie thumbed the gearshift, looking out at the darkening twilight.
Telling Agatha who they were sounded harder than an introduction.
In the same way the landscape was starting to look formless, there was a way Edie felt formless.
Who was she now? She wasn’t the same person who’d checked in with Morag the first day she arrived, wet, oversharing, and sad.
She was in love. She knew that Cosima was it for her, no matter what happened—and given that their future together was the definition of uncertain, this told her that the heartbreak of Fauxmage hadn’t broken her.
Maybe heartbreak could teach someone to risk more, not less, because of how much it was possible to learn about love every time a heart started to heal.
“Tell me who you are,” Edie said.
Cosima turned to the side, her long legs folded awkwardly in the small seat.
She was so beautiful in the blue-purple light.
“I forgot to ask myself who I was,” she said.
“I ran away. I shut myself up in my room at the inn and turned into primordial ooze. I slept, and when I woke up, I knew I was hungry. I ate, and then I knew I wanted to soak in the hot bath. I drank Morag’s juice and decided I’d like to read a book.
When you came to my door and asked me to take a walk with you, I did, because I discovered I wanted to. ”
“You only ever do what you want to do.”
“That started when I came here.” Cosima looked out the windshield at the cottage. “I needed to find her. Find me. It made sense to start from ooze and do only what I wanted, one thing at a time.”
“You were following the clues.”
Cosima turned back toward Edie in time to catch her smile and return it. “I was following the clues. I started with my body’s clues, then I followed my mother’s clues, and now we’re following our clues, which are Agatha’s clues.”
“Did you find her? Did you find Cosima?”
She clasped her hands in her lap and leaned closer, her eyebrows lifting into an elegant configuration that promised Edie, I’m going to tell you a secret.
“When you were pulling tacks out of the lounge, I was in the garden. I wanted to clear out a pile of leaves that were mounded over some marginal plants by the pond. I uncovered a glorious border of hostas—they’d died back over the winter, but I could see the potential.
I wanted to cut back last year’s leaves that had frozen and rotted to give the new shoots an easier time of it, and so I could get a better look, and that was when I discovered an enormous infestation of slugs. ”
“I hate that you said ‘enormous’ so close to the word ‘slugs.’ It makes my hindbrain shudder.”
Cosima gave her a broad grin. “I picked them off one by one, slime trails thick as mozzarella pulling from a slice of pizza. I was merciless, Edie. I gave those slugs no quarter, and as I was doing that, my fingers frozen and stinging, slime all over me, I thought, There you are, Cosima. There you are.”
“I love that your self-discovery story could double as a villain origin story. It’s hot in a way that’s just wrong enough.”
Cosima laughed. “I’m a gardener. And because I’m also Phoebe Frank’s daughter, this means I love everything about it, even the disgusting parts.
It means I want to make devastatingly ambitious gardens.
I want roses named after me and for people to be jealous.
I want to know everything and be someone who gets name-dropped.
That’s who I am. I love the Castle’s garden, but it feels like it was my sandbox. ”
Edie rubbed her hand over her chest. Her heart felt overfull. “Do you want to know who I am?”
“More than anything.”
“Who I am, I think, is someone who’s not ready to give up on having a legacy.”
“I never thought you were, or ever would be.”
But then Cosima went quiet. Edie held her breath, because she could tell Cosima was thinking, and she wanted to know what she had to say.
“Okay. Here is what I want to tell you,” Cosima said. “Next time, you can’t do it by yourself. Phoebe surrounded herself with people. PFS has thousands of employees. But at the end of the day, she didn’t have anyone to give her legacy to but me. I think legacy has to be a group project.”
Edie nodded. She couldn’t say aloud what her heart wanted.
“Let’s drive to the end of this lane, Edie.”
She put the car in gear, and they drove down the narrowing lane until it turned to gravel and wound around an enormous oak not unlike the one in the field in Harlaxton.
As soon as they cleared the shadows of the oak tree, a low-roofed stone cottage came into view, sitting on its own with nothing but grass and scattered rocks around it.
There were lights on inside. “One Tree Cottage,” Edie said.
“Very apt. Whoever’s inside must know they have visitors. You should park.”
They hadn’t even gotten out of the car when the Dutch door to the cottage opened and a woman stepped out.
She was short, thin, but her posture was ramrod straight, and Edie could see her lean muscles where the sleeves of her chambray shirt were pushed up.
She wore a knitted vest and loose pants with wellies.
Her hair was cut in a short style reminiscent of an old movie star like Cary Grant.
She wore dark-framed glasses. An enormous dog sat at her feet, its huge, square head looking up at her, obviously waiting for her instructions regarding whether or not to eat them.
“Hello! Very sorry to bother you,” Cosima said. “We didn’t have a way to call ahead. I’m Cosima, and this is Edie. We’re here from Harlaxton. We’ve been staying at Gregory Place, and we followed your clues in the guest book.”
The woman stood at the door of her cottage for a long, long moment. “Is Minnie gone?”
The anguish in this question carried across the space between them. Her dog whined at her feet.
Edie swallowed over a throat sore with empathy. “Ms. Llewellyn, we don’t know. We were hoping you could help us.”
Agatha put her hand on her dog’s head. A freezing-cold blast of wind from the river made both Edie and Cosima wrap their arms around themselves in defense.
“Come in, then.” She disappeared inside with her dog.
Edie looked at Cosima. “You first,” she said.
“Me first?” Cosima lifted her chin. “Why me?”
“You were the one who wanted to race here from Barcelona. We could be in the lounge at Gregory Place, interrogating Morag so we didn’t walk into a situation with a masc fae and her massive hound in the middle of Wales, in the dark, yards away from a deep, cold river, but no.”
Frowning fiercely, Cosima started walking. Edie followed her a couple paces behind, her ragged breath making her feelings-sore throat worse.
They scuttled to the door, and Cosima disappeared inside the cottage.
Edie stepped over the stone threshold and toed off her Converse, leaving them on a rubber mat next to Cosima’s. Then she looked up and froze.
Mauve.
Mauve everywhere. Mauve-painted plaster walls. Mauve rugs. Pink or pink-and-white or pink-and-blush upholstery on every stick of furniture. The room glowed like the inside of a conch shell.
“Edie!” Cosima whispered. Agatha must have stepped into another room, or she was hovering against the ceiling above them, her spidery wings spread, poison dripping from her fangs.
“What?”
“The mantle.”
Edie looked. There were two porcelain shepherdesses. “What the fuck.”
“What the fuck, indeed.” Agatha stood at the entrance to the room with a tray.
“The clues were not meant for you, and you don’t seem to know Minnie, so what are you doing here?
Sit down. This is tea. There’s Hobnobs there, but I’m on my last packet, so don’t be greedy.
Plenty of cream and sugar.” Agatha smashed the tray down on an ottoman in the middle of the room.
Edie quickly filled a mug from the Brown Betty teapot and grabbed two Hobnobs, another variety of accidentally vegan English biscuit that she’d enjoyed. She planted herself in a pink chair. Cosima followed suit, if a little more elegantly, perching on the edge of a settee.
“Ms. Llewellyn,” Edie started.