“Okay.”
“When they take the notes down, they keep them.” Cosima picked up a short stack of cards and flipped through them, then put three in front of Edie. Edie picked them up.
“So these are from—”
“—when Agatha was in Harlaxton. 1977. On a hunch, I found the box from the year she was here, thinking she might have left her own.”
There were two pastel pink cards and a yellow one. The cards were written in the same handwriting from the guest book, in soft-tipped pencil. Edie read the yellow card first.
Personal blessing for us with a lovely, knowing prayer. Very unexpected grace that would not have come from my own parish church. All our love, A. B. Llewellyn.
Edie held it up. “This is the kind of thing my mom would say in church. Something that sounds like a eulogy she wrote when she was drunk.”
Cosima gave her a small smile. “I was more interested in the other two.”
Edie read the first one.
The rat carving on the east-facing stone panel of the font is much more darling than I would’ve guessed given its accountability for the plague!
“It wasn’t the fault of the rats, really,” Edie said. “It was the fleas.”
“Yes. Read the other one.”
Edie pulled it forward.
You could drop a pocket watch into one of the nostrils of the green man poppyhead, and no one would discover it for a thousand years, if not longer.
“That is an exceedingly weird observation to pin to a bulletin board. Have you read her novels? Are they this weird?”
“Yes. Did you notice the green man poppyhead? Greer told us about how every medieval church had a green man, remember? She showed it to us.”
Edie had enjoyed that part of Greer’s lecture, actually. “Hmm. Did she? Was it green?”
“No. They aren’t green, or at least, they don’t have to be. They’re pagan symbols of the natural world, with foliage carved all around their faces and—” Cosima stopped. “You’re teasing me. You remember.”
“I do.”
“And you remember the poppyheads?” Cosima narrowed her eyes.
“The carvings on top of the skinny plinths at the beginning of each pew, yes. I paid attention. No quiz necessary.”
“So you know what Agatha’s talking about on that card.”
“The giant man-head with leaves sprouting from his face who has nostrils the size of shooter marbles? Again, yes, and I had a similar thought about how many things I would have tried to shove in his nose had I gone to this church.”
“When you were a child.”
“Obviously”—Edie smiled—“at any time in my life.”
Cosima took an imperious sip of her coffee. Edie was glad. Imperious Cosima with eyebrows that could hook a trout was a woman she could relax around. “I thought that perhaps we could check the font and the green man.”
“You want to pick the green man’s nose.” Edie nodded solemnly. “You should’ve just said.”
Cosima wrinkledhernose, then tidied up the cards and put them back in their box. “I’ll clean up after the coffee and meet you outside.”
Edie had been dismissed, but it was okay. The caffeine had dusted away the gloomy thoughts that had been working hard to keep her down. She was onvacation.
She was huntingtreasure.
