Edie was not sure she had balanced the scales sufficiently. “You need to brace yourself for some changes around here,” she told the innkeeper. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll love my updates so much that you decide not to sell to a soulless real estate outfit!”
Morag made a chuffing sound that Edie couldn’t quite categorize. “Warn me the day you pull up the carpet in the lounge. I’m allergic to dust.” She removed herself from the kitchen.
Edie had definitely not managed to balance the power. In fact, the more she thought about it, walking up the stairs to her room, brushing her teeth to get ready for bed, the more she wondered if she might have been had.
But she couldn’t stop grinning into her pillow as she fell asleep.
Chapter Eleven
Cosima took a few steps back when Adina Bidderscombe crossed her arms over her baby-blue kitten sweatshirt.
Apparently, Morag had attended primary school with Adina, who was the housekeeper of the massive Harlaxton Manor. Before placing the phone call that ensured Cosima and Edie this jaundiced welcome at the manor, Morag had announced, darkly, that making this request would place her in Adina’s debt, which she had not been in since 1981.
Having now met Adina, Cosima did feel a certain amount of pressure not to put Morag in a bad position. Ridiculous, her increasing interest in the politics of this vanishingly small English village.
“Morag called up here and told me what you two were up to,” Adina said, “but I won’t have you disturbing the students. Their British Studies presentations are next week. I’ve been near scraping them off the ceiling, they’re so stressed.” She delivered every word like she was snapping a sheet off a clothesline.
The manor, built by Gregory Gregory in 1837, had been used by US colleges as the site of enchanting study abroad experiences since the 1960s. Prior to its current incarnation, the manor had served as a Royal Air Force base in World War II and a Jesuit residence after Gregory Gregory’s heirs petered out in the 1930s.
Cosima knew all of this courtesy of a lecture she’d received during her walk to the manor with Edie, who had absorbed a great deal from the brochures stuffed into dusty racks in Gregory Place’s reception area.
“We completely understand that the students’ needs come first.” Edie smiled at the housekeeper. “I promise we will keep to empty rooms as much as possible.”
Adina was not unmoved by Edie’s rosy cheeks and freckles. This was fortunate, because she had neatly dismissed Cosima with a look that made it clear she was not impressed by American celebrity. Cosima wondered if she’d directed the very same look at Phoebe decades ago. Her mother may have made an enemy of this woman. Phoebe’s general policy was that there could only be one queen, and Adina was not to be usurped.
Now, Adina’s lean hands clenched and unclenched, her wrists no more than knobs of bone exiting the voluminous sweatshirt’s cuffs. “You represent Morag. If there is a breath of trouble, I will go directly to her and hold her accountable.”
“Absolutely,” Edie said. “We’re so appreciative.”
Adina put her hand into the pocket of her dark green slacks and pulled out a gold pocket watch. She snapped it open. “Ninety minutes, no more. Two hours puts you too close to lunch, when the students will be headed to the commissary.”
“Starting?” Edie asked.
“Now. Go on. Don’t touch anything.”
Cosima turned from the foyer, with its multistory, almost gothic fireplace, and followed Edie to the big room beyond, on the threshold of which—despite having lived in a castle of her own—Cosima stopped short with a breathless gasp.
“Holy chevre,” whispered Edie.
Dozens of feet above them, the ceiling was gridded with dark polished wood beams framing squares of snow-white relief sculpture. The tidy grid matched one made of multicolored marble on the floor. Dark wood pillars ringed the room, topped by full-sized marble sculptures of the gods, their stone expressions frozen in grimaces as though burdened by the weight of the ceiling.
“Thisis the Grand Hall?” Cosima reached out and pulled Edie’s brochure from her jacket pocket. “I thought the solid mile of turrets guarded by stone lions on the way up the drive had prepared me, but apparently not.”
Edie shook her head, her green eyes wide. The freckles glittered over her face caught in a sunbeam from a leaded glass window. “This is going to be like finding a needle in a massive mansion where I am already lost. How did we get to this room? Was it through those mile-tall doors? Was there a portal?”
Cosima opened the brochure with a snap. “College students live here. We’re smarter than a bunch of twenty-year-olds.”
“I don’t know about that.” Edie’s smile made a previously unmapped dimple appear above the left corner of her mouth.
The sight of that secret dimple compelled Cosima to take a step closer before she could think about why she wanted to. She attempted to distract herself with the open brochure. “Let’s go to this famous cedar staircase, which is pretty central, and figure out the clue from the treasure map.”
Edie moved even closer to look. There was nothing to dobut take in the shine of her soft hair and the smell of grass and lemon. Cosima had not once imagined herself with a partner, kissing someone, yearning for someone. She had touched herself and luxuriated in orgasms but never fantasized about getting help with them. She had read enough about the ace spectrum to understand that she was somewhere on it but hadn’t explored further, so her connection to her queerness on that spectrum remained theoretical. Until now. When she could suddenly think of nothing else but Edie’s bare skin against hers.
Gliding her mouth everywhere on Edie’s body she could find.
What Edie’s bottom lip would feel like against her tongue.
What the hollow of her inner thigh would taste like.
