Cosima grabbed her wrist. “Let me see! You didn’t even look at it.”
Her fingers circled Edie’s wrist in a firm grip, and Edieresisted without thinking, palming the coin and dropping her arm so she could bury her fist against the softest part of her stomach. She hunched over it. “No! Don’t take it! Iwilllook, but not until you stop grabbing at me!”
“What are you doing? Why are you bent over like that? I’m not going totakeit from you!”
“I have two brothers, and they’re both taller than me.” Edie straightened, but she pushed her arm behind her to rest at the small of her back. “This is how short people protect their resources.”
Cosima’s ears had gone pink around the rims. She was breathing fast, closer than Edie had realized, with her fingers at Edie’s elbow.
“Promise you’re not planning to swipe it out of my hand the instant I let down my guard?” The question came out a little too husky. Edie took a step back, and then Cosima did, too. She still had her fingers curled around the coin, hot and sticky with gum.
Maybe she could chalk this up to jet lag. Could jet lag come for you eleven days later and make you embarrassed and horny at the same time?
“I would never,” Cosima said. “I thought we were in this together.”
“We are definitely in this together. Possibly, I might be dealing with a certain amount of trauma around protecting a prize.” Edie swallowed. “Please forgive me, and also completely forget that ever happened.”
“I will remember it until I die. I’m going to write about how unhinged your reaction was in my journal. But if we don’t look at that coin and confirm it’sonlya fifty-pence coin in the next literal moment, I will in fact knock you over and pin you to the ground. I went to an all-girls’ boarding school. I played rugby. Lacrosse. Field hockey. I could take both of your brothers.”
“That is absolutely hot. I’m tempted not to show you this coin, just to see what would happen, but I will submit.” Edie held her hand up, palm flat between them.
“There’s a lion on it.” The coin was silver, with an image of a woman beside the lion. It wasn’t circular. Edie counted seven sides while Cosima breathed onto the palm of her hand. “I assume that’s Brittania with the lion. Is this the current fifty-pence coin?”
“No clue. We should flip it to heads.” Edie moved the coin to sit on top of her thumbnail and then flipped it. “Ow! Motherfucker. British coins are heavy!” The coin spun on the aisle carpet, then settled flat.
They both crouched down, the tops of their heads nearly touching, and gasped.
“There’s an engraving!” Cosima breathed.
“You were right about the notecards. Good job! Your attention to detail is god-tier.”
Cosima looked up, grinning. Her real smile made wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and over the top of both cheeks. It was really, really good. “Your mom was right, too,” Edie said without thinking. “Don’t ever get fillers.” Cosima’s brows folded into a confused tangle that rippled the skin on her forehead. Edie felt a blush coming on, so she grabbed the coin from the floor and stood back up. “I’m going to read it, even though you’re the one who found it.” The coin had the type of engraving normally found on a locket or pocket watch. “It says,And Now for a Piece of Cake.”
“What?” Cosima squeaked. “What does that mean?”
Edie felt the swarm of excited bees low in her belly before she even had the answer fully formed, so excited was she to have the experiences of her life add up in such a perfect way. “She means an actual cake.” She permitted herself to take Cosima’selbow. “Greer said that the stone carvings in the interior of the church were done sometime between the eleven and fourteen hundreds, right?”
“That’s right.”
She led Cosima to the front of the church, where the stone carvings outlined the nave.
“I might not know history, but I do know cake. At that time, the cake everybody was baking on this side of the pond was a simnel cake.” Edie guided her to a carving she’d noticed on Greer’s tour.
“Simnel cake?”
“It’s a yeasted cake. If I made it for you now, you’d think it was more like bread. It was round, one layer, baked with a domed top because of how the yeast rose the dough out of the tin. It was studded with whatever the baker had on hand that was sweet—berries, dried fruit, nuts, chunks of apple or quince or handfuls of currants. Sometimes even cheese.”
Edie put her hand on the dome-topped carving, with its little stubs all over it. The round cake was carved to look like it rested on a linen.
“Oh! That’s a cake!”
“It’s a cake.” Edie ran her fingernail under the top of the carving. “And the other thing I noticed when I, of course, identified this as a carving of a cake, is that this isn’t just a carving. It’s a tabernacle. Thank you, casual Catholic upbringing.” With a soft grind of stone on stone, Edie carefully lifted off the top of the cake.
“A tabernacle?”
“Where the priest keeps the sacrament. The bread. The crackers. The wafers. Or, in this case”—Edie reached into the shallow stone tabernacle, and her hand found a thick envelopeand pulled it out, dust raining from it—“a treasure. Or the next clue to one.”
She handed the heavy cream envelope to Cosima. Her entire body had been overtaken by a shimmering, incredible feeling.
