Chapter Nineteen #2
“Agatha. I use she and her. This is Sherlock. He uses he and him, though I imagine he’s actually beyond the binary.
” She put her hand on the dog’s cement-block-like head, and his mouth dropped into a panting smile.
He was some kind of pit bull mix, but Edie was beginning to suspect he must be all for looks, given his wagging tail and constant side-eyes at Agatha asking for permission to slobber on her guests.
“You’re Phoebe Frank’s daughter,” she said to Cosima.
“I recognize you. Didn’t want to act like I don’t. I hate it when people do that.”
“Me, too,” Cosima said.
“My condolences for your mother. Her studio produced The Clock Stopped at Midnight years ago. Very nicely done. I still receive residuals. Didn’t get to meet her, though. She didn’t come to Wales, and I don’t leave.”
Agatha had taken command of the room. Though Edie knew from her biography she was north of eighty, she seemed much younger. Her hair was a smooth blend of gold, blond, and white. Her navy eyes were large and sharp.
But Sherlock had moved closer to her, and when she put her hand on his neck, stroking him softly, it trembled. She was nervous. Upset.
Edie felt a thought like a sharp needle stabbing her in the back of the neck—a thought she couldn’t quite form.
There was the business of the mauve-explosion decorating.
The similarities between this room and the Gregory Place lounge, including the shepherdesses, were too strong to be coincidences, but when Agatha had been at Gregory Place, it was 1977.
The inn had been newly decorated in all of its mauvy glory years later.
So the mauve here could not be a result of Agatha, heartbroken, redecorating in memory of Minnie.
“You never leave Wales, but you went to Harlaxton in 1977,” Edie said.
Agatha’s eyes narrowed. “And you are?”
“Edie Whitelock. Of Green Bay, Wisconsin. My mother never produced any of your books into movies, but she did have a copy of The Bones of Kildeer when I was growing up that I read in middle school. It gave me nightmares for weeks, so well done.”
“Edie, yes. I was in Harlaxton in 1977.”
“No other time.”
“I was not.” Agatha seemed composed, but her hand had drifted again to the smooth spot on top of Sherlock’s square head.
“Do you get a lot of visitors here?”
“One Tree Cottage is my sanctuary. The only invitation I ever issued was through the guest book. Officially, Agatha Llewellyn doesn’t have an address. In the village, I’m called Bronwyn. Does that answer your question?”
Edie’s brain was racing, trying to find the source of her neck prickle. “Agatha’s your middle name.”
“Yes, but—”
The prickle became a stab as the pieces finally fit together and she remembered the photograph of Morag in the guest book, a striking young woman with dark braids and a cigarette. Morag Tourmaline Beveridge.
Tourmaline.
Minnie?
“Oh my god, that witch, how dare she?” Edie asked.
“What?” Cosima put down her tea mug. “What is it?”
“She used us as her minions. Her familiars. We’re nothing more than girls who she’s ensorceled and turned into bats to fly over the countryside and do her bidding.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Agatha demanded.
Edie frowned at Agatha, riding the wave of her anger so she didn’t have to feel any of the sorrow beneath it.
For heaven’s sake. “Your one and only is perfectly healthy, I can tell you that much. Your Minnie, aka Tourmaline, aka Morag, who until recently had Miss Havisham’ed herself into a pink travesty of an inn, moping around, waiting for what?
Maybe you can tell me. And nothing funny.
I’ve had enough of getting pushed around by octogenarians who can’t get their shit together.
As a twenty-genarian, I am perfectly capable of not getting my own shit together without assistance.
‘Are you girls going to find the treasure?’ she asks.
‘Oh, I’ll be waiting for you forever,’ you say, in a letter you have to know Cistercian numbers to find. ”
“Oh! The Cistercian monks were the ones who built Tintern Abbey, where we are,” Cosima interjected. “So that makes sense.”
Edie turned to Cosima. “You”—she pointed at her—“have to be on my side.”
“Noted. It’s just that if this is going where I think it’s going, I thought it was quite interesting to mention.”
Edie sighed. “Out with it, Bronwyn. This instant. Have you been stalking Morag in this ridiculous and invisible way for fifty years? Who has the broken heart? Are you seriously the treasure? Would Morag even think so?”
“Only her mother called her Morag,” Agatha said.
“Everyone calls her Morag!” Edie shouted, discovering to her dismay that there was a vein of fierce protective feeling beneath her incandescent anger.
Damn it all to hell, she loved Morag. Lose one vegan cheese shop and apparently a vacuum opened in the center of your heart.
“Every single person! Morag. Of Gregory Place. Probably since before I was born.”
Agatha nodded. Then she put down her tea mug and leaned back in her chair. For the first time, she looked her age.
She stared into the fireplace, which had a flickering gas insert. After a long moment, she spoke.
“I was so full of myself then. I had just written my fourth bestseller. I was traveling the world, calling it research for my books, but really doing a lot of sunbathing and drinking and chasing pretty women. I finished a signing at Foyles in Charing Cross, and my new American literary agent was there. I had a trunk full of clothes tailored for me in Mayfair—you know, the Savile Row places. Annie Hall had made my look popular that year, and I was riding it into every bedroom in Great Britain.”
“All right. I get it, Dream Butch.” Edie didn’t want to know where this was going. She wasn’t interested in crying over a love story. Morag’s doomed love story, especially.
Agatha laughed. “I deserve that. I had decided I wanted to write a murder mystery set at a small Lincolnshire or Herefordshire vicarage. I went to the library, and the Harlaxton church was on the registry of historic places. I wrote the vicar at the time. A woman, which was still new. She advised me to take a room at Gregory Place. Convenient, she said, and it came with meals. I rang up Gregory Place and reserved my room for three months. I had my things shipped ahead. I anticipated a rural idyll, rusticating with locals to infuse my book with flavor.”
Edie crossed her arms. “Harlaxton is not a bouquet garni.”
“No, it’s not. I figured this out almost right away.
First of all, the services at the church were …
more than research. They were beautiful.
The people were charming, for the most part, but mainly they were hardworking and honest, with themselves and with me.
I figured out that my parties and traveling and women had been a way to avoid a lot of things. A lot of hurt.”
Edie wanted to lash out at Agatha again, but she understood what she was describing. There was something about Harlaxton. Maybe magic. Maybe just who Edie had been there.
Who Agatha had been, it sounded like.
“Gregory Place was another surprise. Minnie had only just taken it over from her parents, who’d run it a bit to ground.
She’d gotten the place back together with nothing more than her two hands, working all the time.
Not a few folks would stop by to help out, but she wouldn’t let them, because she couldn’t pay them, she said.
I thought she seemed to have a lot of pride, a lot of things to prove to her family, but this first impression of her wasn’t fair because her very existence, her embodiment of hard work, called my own existence to task.
So I mostly avoided her except for meals. Her food was too heavenly to avoid.”
There were painful truths already beginning to be sketched out in Agatha’s story, but Edie would have to mull them over later.
She hated this, which made her antsy for it to be over.
“It’s getting late,” Cosima said, and the ice in her tone filled Edie with gratitude. They were Team Morag, the two of them.
They would settle up with Morag after they finished defending her.
“I had trouble sleeping, so I was going for walks late at night. One night, I noticed the red glow of a cigarette at the back of the inn. It was Minnie. I discovered this was her only break of the day—a late cigarette by the kitchen door. I bummed one from her. We started talking. It became my favorite part of the day.”
Sherlock put his head on Agatha’s knee.
Edie tried not to notice, but then she couldn’t keep herself from imagining what it would be like when she went back to Green Bay, trying to keep her mind occupied with work while she thought about Cosima in Barcelona with a love bite on her shoulder, putting her hair up to get into the pool.
Cosima’s sad blue eyes when she read Agatha’s letter in the dead cat café.
Cosima enraged after Edie scared her in the dark during the storm.
Cosima looking down at her from the hill at Hermione’s Stile, her intimate appreciation making an expression Edie hadn’t seen yet.
How had Agatha stayed here in this cottage? How had she walked past someone smoking on the street, smelling the sharp burn, without bursting into tears? Why hadn’t she gone to Morag?