Only Cosima and Duncan weren’t shocked.
But there had been surprises even between the two of them. Cosima had seen tears in Duncan’s eyes before—at the end of her ballet recitals, at her graduations, when she held her parakeet George in her hands as she rested him on a bed of coneflowers in a grave Duncan had dug—but she’d never seen him weep. She’d never heard his heart break like crystal. Not until her mother died, defying everyone. Taking life’s deal like anyone else, without negotiation.
Cosima had not cried. Her mother had told her not to.
But here, in this no-place far away from shock or broken hearts, confronted with one small woman’s simple shock and watery eyes, Cosima felt for a moment like a daughter, a girl, a very tired woman, who’d always thought Phoebe was in charge of the world, and who was angry that her mother had left her.
“God, Cosima.” Edie had both hands plastered to her cheeks. “I am so, so, so sorry.”
“You didn’t know her.” She shook her head, seized with a vicious impulse to yell,I ran away! From everything! All of it!“You don’t know me.”
Edie frowned, gathering her hair from her shoulders and twisting it like the tar-covered rope of a tall ship over her shoulder. “I don’t. I didn’t. But even if it’s complicated, it’s not anything you want to happen to anyone.”
“It’s notcomplicated.” Cosima bit the inside of her cheek until it hurt the same amount as her stomach. “It’s private.”
But even as she chose the word,private, the lie gave a twisting pinch to her lungs.
It wasn’t complicated, and it wasn’t private. Secrets weren’t the same as privacy.
Edie’s enormous green eyes contemplated her expression. Cosima let her look. She lifted an eyebrow and imagined a sledgehammer smashing apart the hot lump of grief in her throat.
“Okay, then.” Edie shoved her hand into one of the kangaroo pockets of her gargantuan green raincoat and pulled out a crumpled pink and yellow bag. “Rhubarb custard?” She unfolded the top of the bag. “I’ll be honest, they’re not what I expected when I bought them from a shop at Heathrow. Morag calls them ‘boiled sweets’ like she’s in a three-hundred-year-old playaboutBritish people instead of a British person of this century, though I suppose she straddles the centuries. I think you need sugar.” Edie shook the bag and held it out to Cosima.
“I know what rhubarb custards are.” Cosima took one. The rough and sour surface of the candy—the way it flooded her mouth with sweetness when she rolled it between her teeth—chased away the sharpness in her throat and made one more survivable moment. Like her hot baths, how they stung, then surrounded her. Like the first bite of Morag’s butter-soaked toast after a night of bad dreams.
They stood in the lane, sucking on candy. For as much as Edie talked, she seemed to know when to be quiet. An occasional breeze rattled rain from the leaves of the trees overhead. Everything smelled muddy and green, spiked with the wet mineral scent of weak sun hitting the graveled lane.
Cosima didn’t know how long they had been standing still and silent when she noticed a movement and soft, rustling noises coming from the beautiful garden behind a fence that faced the lane. She looked toward the movement. Water shook off a big, floppy bergenia leaf.
A hedgehog ambled into view.
“Holy shit,” Edie said. “That’s one of Baroness Rachel’s hedgehogs. Morag was not kidding.”
The hedgehog paused in the lane, pointing its sniffing nose into the breeze, no doubt smelling their candy breath.
“My mother said the inn was magic.” The hedgehog’s back leg rose, and it furiously and comically scratched behind its ear.
“Phoebe Frank said that, for real?”
“You can’t say her whole name every time you talk about her. ‘Phoebe’ is fine.” Cosima crunched the candy. “It was in the eighties. She met my dad here.”
“You came here to be close to her?”
Cosima blinked at the unexpected question. Had she?
“What I’m doing here remains to be seen,” she said.
“Same, girl, same.” Edie shifted in her boots, somehow not startling the hedgehog, who only looked at her and adorably yawned, showing off rows of pointy little teeth.
They watched it sniff the ground, then amble away, disappearing behind a fence.
After it had gone, they started to walk back from where they came, saying nothing all down High Street. They were nearlyto the inn when Cosima broke the silence, surprising herself. “Have you seen the garden? At Gregory Place?”
“I’veheardthe garden. The foxes are hard to ignore. But I haven’t looked at it yet. I do want to. I want to see where Morag is getting her weird hex bouquets.”
“I can see into it from my windows. It’s a mess.”
“I’m guessing it’s hard for Morag to do that kind of work anymore. She tells me she’s eighty-six, but I think that’s just her human glamour’s age. She dates back to the druids at least.”
