“It looks like it was cared for once.”
One night, before Edie arrived, Cosima hadn’t been able to sleep. She finally gave up around five in the morning. She’d pulled on clothes and tiptoed down the stairs, leaving out the back door. It felt like a dream. She followed a path to a gate set into a stone wall. It took a great heave on the handle to budge the creaking iron.
She made her way around the perimeter first. In some places, she could walk along a path. In others, overgrowth blocked her way. She estimated the fenced area was two acres.
The lot the Castle sat on was considered parklike at eight-tenths of an acre, about thirty-five thousand square feet, but the first-floor footprint of the Castle took up ten thousand square feet of that. After the pool, cabana, tennis court, and garage were accounted for, the gardens Cosima and Duncan had cultivated weren’t even fifteen thousand square feet.
Two acres was almostninety thousandsquare feet of rough and neglected stone walls, follies, ponds, beds, greenhouse, orchard, and copses. At one time, this was a garden that would have offered tours. It would have bred new varieties of roses and narcissi in its greenhouse. Its gardener would have had a display at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Cosima spent the last few hours of that moonlit nightroaming around, mentally cataloging what she found, digging emerging perennials from fallen leaves, and guessing at the slope and where the garden was dry, where it was wet. She came across a hedgehog then, too, in a den under a stone bench, blinking at her while it gobbled a grub.
It was clear no one had gardened at Gregory Place since at least as long ago as the interior of the inn was kept up, but perennials carried on even without tending. Someday, a gardener would know Gregory Place again. Cosima’s envy of this unknown, imagined, faceless gardener was breathtakingly sharp and unexpected.
When she had finally gone inside, Morag had made her breakfast tray. Cosima took it from her wordlessly and floated back into her room, where she ate her breakfast and was finally able to sleep. She’d had her first good dream since she came here, of herself and Duncan, planning a new flower bed. Her mother was there, cutting flowers in a big hat. Phoebe told them to plant a garden in the shape of an elephant, and then Duncan tried to come up with a list of plants that would look gray or silver in the California sun.
“If someonewastaking care of that garden,” Edie broke into her musing, “they weren’t doing it by themselves. Same with the inn. The way Morag is running it, she couldn’t handle much more than the two of us. For the inn to make real money, it would need a staff around the clock. It would have to exist on the map, and that takes people.”
They returned to the inn in silence that should have been more awkward. Cosima climbed the stairs. She took a shower, not a bath—progress—but then got back into her bed, a pile of crisps and candy bars at her elbow and a stack of gardening magazines she’d grabbed off an end table in the lounge.
She wondered who had won their game.
Mentally, she awarded the point to Edie. What Edie had lost was something she had made herself, from her own dreams.
Cosima told herself it was ridiculous to feel sad about the inn’s dark and moldering garden. She had plenty else to feel sad about if that was what she wanted.
Was that what she wanted?
Chapter Four
Edie sat straight up in bed, clutching the duvet to her chest, her heart pounding.
Where was she?She looked into the shadows of the room, fitting them together until her brain relaxed marginally.
England. Harlaxton. Gregory Place. The noise of the storm had yanked her out of a restless sleep.
The rain started up again after dinner, and it had been pummeling Harlaxton village ever since. Thunder periodically rattled the windows in their stone sills. Lightning strikes lit the interior of the inn in startling strobes that followed the booms.
The slow leak from between the beams in Edie’s room added to the cacophony. Under the drip was a copper stockpot big enough to cook down an ox. It looked like it was older than Morag, who had heaved it up the stairs at bedtime. Theping!of water drops in that pot had made their way into Edie’s nightmares.
Edie eased back down against the pillows, and then the thunder clapped again, followed by a wicked streak of lightning.
“Fuck this.” She threw off the duvet and slid to the edge of the bed, her feet searching for and then finding her slippers. Surely this was an emergency that would override the ban on entering Morag’s kitchen. Edie wouldn’t be put out into the storm for making herself some tea and searching for a package of bourbon creams.
She crept down the stairs, their usual creaking obscured by the roar of rain against the old glass windows and a roll of thunder. Of course, it was only in this moment—the first in all of her time in this primordial inn—that Edie remembered ghosts.
She took another step down, coaching herself to breathe normally. Ghosts were not real. Probably. Yes, this inn had been built in 1758, and that was an older-than-the-United States number of years for people to have been dying inside its walls. Some of them would have died badly, or with unfinished business, or maybe even brutally at the hands of a psychopath.
She made it to the bottom of the stairs, scanning the dark lounge for any signs of danger, supernatural or otherwise, when a flash of lightning lit the room all at once, revealing afigurein one of the wing chairs.
Edie screamed.
The figure screamed back, and so Edie put her hands over her eyes—she didn’t want to see herself get ax murdered—and then one of the lounge lamps clicked on, and someone was extremely angry.
“Fuck me, Edie! Why are you creeping down the stairs like that?”
Edie dropped her hands to see Cosima wrapped in a different robe, her curly hair in a loose braid, her hands on her hips and shiny purple gel patches under her eyes. “Why are you sitting down here in the dark?” Edie whisper-yelled at Cosima. “You have never sat down here before!”
“The storm woke me up!” Cosima hissed back.
