Chapter Twenty
“Morag Tourmaline Beveridge!”
Cosima scrambled to stay with Edie as she burst through the back door of the inn and shouted into the kitchen. They found Morag at the prep table, putting a tea towel over a bowl of dough to proof.
They had left Agatha with Tam at the Gregory Arms. He and Killian would drive her up when they got the all clear. Edie was determined this would be the only grace they extended to Morag.
Cosima didn’t think it was going to be so cut-and-dried.
“You’re back from Spain already?” Morag wiped her hands on her apron and started cleaning the table.
“Correction.” Edie pointed at her. “We’re back from Wales.”
Morag stopped cleaning. She didn’t look at them. “I see.”
“Otherwise known as the end of the trail. ‘X’ marks the spot. But you probably already knew that.” Edie hung her coat up on the hook, rounded the table, sat down on a stool, and folded her arms, glaring at Morag. Cosima sat next to her, with much less theater.
“The Whippledurn finished with the plastering,” Morag said slowly.
“I brought in the paint from the shed and ordered another two cans. Turns out Slate and Thatch roofing isn’t in business anymore, but I was directed to an outfit called LeLand’s, and they’ve taken a look at the roof.
That will be next week. Jenny from the manor came, Cosima. ”
“Oh.” She blinked. Jenny was the head gardener at the manor, and Cosima had asked her to come over for a garden consult days ago. “I didn’t know she’d be here when I was gone.”
“No trouble. She left you notes. I have them at the reception desk.” Morag folded the rag she had been cleaning with.
“What was your plan, Morag?” Edie leaned forward.
“You sent us on this journey, knowing what was on the other end, aware of my preference to get over-involved, and here we are, not a velvet bag of rubies or golden chalice between us. But you knew we wouldn’t find that kind of treasure, didn’t you?
Don’t worry, though. We brought the spoils back.
We’ve got her stashed at the Gregory Arms, with Tam keeping guard.
We’ll figure out how to carve off your seventeen and a half percent. ”
“Bronwyn’s here?” Morag didn’t say this to Edie or to Cosima. It looked like she said it to the rising bread dough, but Cosima suspected she was saying it to herself.
A little bit of the bluster seemed to escape from Edie. “She’s here, Morag. She gave us her part of the story, but what’s yours?”
Morag reached for the kettle, banging it against the stovetop in an uncoordinated lurch.
After she’d filled it and placed it on the hob, she pulled down the tea tin and mugs.
Cosima waited patiently. The inability of British people to talk about anything difficult without first making a cup of tea did not surprise or bother her.
It seemed, however, that the act of making tea was itself soothing enough to allow Morag to speak.
“I was sleeping on my feet to make this place go,” she said.
“My goal was to make enough to hire my sister, Maisie. She was still at home with our parents, and it was a right nightmare, I’ll say that.
When Bronwyn came, I was almost there. The advance payment she sent meant I could make Maisie’s room ready. Then Maisie told me she was pregnant.”
“Fuck,” Edie whispered.
Morag shook her head. “She was grown. It was 1977! Not the Dark Ages, believe it or not. I begged her to come anyway. I knew she didn’t have good memories about growing up in the inn.
I didn’t either, but I was trying to make it over into something different.
But she said our parents would take the place from me if she came.
Long story short, I found out she was right.
” Morag put tea bags into the mugs. “Because the universe has a good sense of humor, this was also the first time in my life I fell in love.”
Sitting on the kitchen stool, her feet on the rungs, Cosima had a sense memory of being on the plane to England, feeling as though the floor of the plane had dropped out and she was hung over the clouds, rushing past at six hundred miles per hour.
Her mother was gone, Cosima tapped with the immaculate maintenance of her legacy, needing more from Duncan than they had learned to give each other, and then, yes, she fell in love.
It amazed her, amazed her, that everything that had driven her here in a breathless, stomach-twisting compulsion to escape was still true. It amazed her because all of those things felt smaller. Loving Edie hadn’t distracted her. Loving Edie had made her more capable of tackling these problems.
They were problems. They would take time. She would be surprised by low moments. She might need help. But she couldn’t believe there was a bad time to fall in love with someone who only wanted the best for you.
“Why did loving her make things harder?” Cosima asked.
Morag grimaced. “It didn’t. It made things beautiful. It gave me ways to stand up to my parents that I hadn’t had before. I nearly had Maisie convinced we could do it, and I could keep the inn. Bronwyn gave me so much. She even reached out to her mother, did she tell you that?”
“Yes,” Edie said. “She did.”
“It was a problem we could have solved.” There was a trace of Morag’s usual edge in her tone.
“I might not have been able to grow the inn as quickly. My family difficulties and Maisie’s pregnancy would only have been made worse by my openly being with Bronwyn, but I didn’t care about that.
I was scared, you understand. I’d been scared my whole life. ”
“Me, too,” Edie said to Morag. “But Cosima said something that made me think in the car ride here, and you know what I figured out? I could’ve saved Fauxmage.
I thought that if I couldn’t do it all by myself, I couldn’t do it.
I tried to take on the ocean without a crew.
Exactly how long, Morag, have you been running this inn without help? ”
Morag sighed and took the whistling kettle off the hob. She poured water over the tea bags into the mugs. “Always, I’d say.”
“And what happened?” Edie gestured generally toward the lounge. “I did not find this inn in the UK special edition of Condé Nast Traveler.”
“At some point, the denial set in.”
“The pink,” Cosima said. “That happened some years after Agatha left.”
Morag smiled. “That’s because your mother happened.”
“Phoebe Frank?” Edie dumped sugar and soy creamer into her tea.
“She fell in love while she was here. Not unlike I had, years before. We got on. I told her about Bronwyn, and she said I needed to set the scene. I needed to be able to visualize exactly what I wanted and what magic I required to make it happen. She helped me paper her room while she was still here.”
“That does sound like my mother.”
“I wasn’t brave enough to get into the clues Bronwyn had left behind, but I had piles of money by then, and so I hired a designer and told her that Bronwyn’s favorite color was pink.
She’d always complained about how cold the wood floors were.
It was the eighties, and the designer was delighted.
Bronwyn had bought those shepherdesses in town.
She thought they were funny. I’d kept them in the room she used, but I brought them down here. ”
“Then what happened?” Edie raised her eyebrows. “Because I am here to tell you that there is a much better-maintained twin to the former mauvetastic lounge in Tintern, Wales, right down to the shepherdesses, and you can imagine my shock.”
Cosima didn’t expect Morag to cry, and Edie obviously didn’t, either, because she looked horrified when it started.
Morag waved her hand at them and blew her nose in her napkin.
“Bah. I wasn’t expecting to know that, was I?
After so many years, you can imagine why I would think that she never thought of me again.
It’s why I chickened out after the lounge was done. ”
Edie clucked her tongue, but not unkindly.
“The final clue, in Barcelona, required her to write a letter to a nun every year. We met this woman. Sister Ona. She might have been a ghost. It was hard to tell. She had a desk drawer full of mash notes from your ex-girlfriend, which she wanted me to take, but I made Cosima give her two hundred euros as a donation and to cover whatever it’s going to cost to post them to you instead.
” Edie handed Morag her untouched napkin.
“Agatha spent three hours this morning in a very small car with the two of us and her dog, who I think needs to reevaluate his diet based on the ratio of gas to clean air, and I have heard more heartwarming stories about you than I ever would have thought possible considering that you once literally slapped my hand away when I tried to look in your recipe box. Slapped. It stung.”
“She hasn’t seen me in fifty years.” Morag reached up and touched one of her long white braids in a show of vanity that made Cosima suddenly appreciate how fond she had become of this woman. Morag had given her a place to collapse, to rebuild and recover, and then she’d sent Edie to her.
“She knows you’re not immortal,” Edie said. “I’d say you’re holding up.”
Morag rolled her eyes, but Cosima could see that she was pleased.
“Should I give Tam a call?” Cosima asked. “Invite Agatha to the inn?”
“No.” Morag untied her apron. “I’ll go down to the Arms myself. I think I’d feel better if we started on neutral ground. Also, I need to give Edie a chance to carry on without my having to bear witness to dramatics after I leave her with one last thing.”
“What’s that?” Edie said this around a bite of bourbon cream. “Are you going to give me your carrot raisin quick bread recipe and let me try it out in your Aga for the last week I’m here?”
“You can use the Aga and more,” Morag said. “I’m giving you Gregory Place.”