If only.
“Your great loss,” she said. “Well, okay. You obviously have stacks of paperwork to catch up on.” The stacks in question, located behind the reception desk, were tall enough to be visible from where Edie sat. “I have had so many jobs. It’s true most of them were in the weeds of food service, but I can file. I can toil at the hot fires of a paper shredder.”
“Stay away from my papers.”
She sighed and looked at the ceiling. “I am a hard worker, Morag. I love to do things. Put me to work. Use my body and what many might consider my talent for divergent thinking.”
“I can plainly see you can’t sit still.” Morag raised an eyebrow at Edie. “You want the English experience? Take a walk. Complain the season’s coming too early or too late while you trudge through the same rainy weather we have in all seasons.”
“I could tidy the lounge.” Edie opened her biscuit packet, watching for Morag’s reaction to this salvo.
She scoffed. “Needs more than a tidy.”
“It needs a shovel and a pressure washer, but for today, I could dust and haul these ancient magazines and newspapers to recycling.” Edie popped a whole biscuit in her mouth.
“And what would be the point of that, lovey? Gregory Place isn’t in any guidebook. No one’s beating down thesedoors. It’s just you and me and—” Morag pointed above her head.
The other guest, she meant.
Edie hadn’t gotten a look at her. She didn’t come downstairs for Morag’s modified-vegan-for-Edie full English breakfasts, even though the mushroom bacon was extraordinary. Instead, Morag left a tray in front of the guest’s door for every meal, and the guest put the empty tray outside of it when she was done. She didn’t go for walks, or for excursions, and she hadn’t left her room to sit in the lounge or stroll over to the manor, even though it was genuinely massive and had been built by an English madman named Gregory Gregory.
Edie hadn’t been there, either. She was saving the madman’s manor house tour for a special occasion. The special occasion being free third Thursdays.
She had inspected the neat line of mysterious skin care products on the guest’s shelf in the bathroom. Their labels looked like they were made by a calligrapher working under a rainbow while angels sang, and they smelled so good when Edie guiltily twisted off their heavy lids that her eyes rolled into the back of her head.
“I’ve already taken too many walks in the rain,” she said. “I have a lot of energy, and I’m here for weeks yet. Let me organize something. Or clean it. I love vacuuming.”
Morag pointed a digestive biscuit at her. “Don’t touch my Hoover. It’s temperamental.”
“Please,” Edie begged. “You don’t have a television. I don’t have a computer, and my phone’s a brick. All of the books in the library are by Barbara Cartland.”
“A genius if there ever was one.”
“You won’t let me read the guest book.” Edie looked with longing toward the inn’s enormous, olive-green, leather-boundguest book where it sat closed on top of the reception desk. It looked as old as the building. She was starting to feel desperate to flip back the cover and see if the first entry had been written in the crabbed hand of an Elizabethan scribe, possibly in rhyming verse.
It had been rainingso muchsince she got here.
Morag set her mug down on the table at her elbow with a decisive thump. “You want something to do?”
“I do, Morag. I really, really do. It’s not a good idea for me to have any time to think at all.”
This was a spectacular understatement.
Morag smiled and started rocking in her chair. “Then go wake up the princess.”
Edie’s mug froze halfway to her lips. The entire time she had been here, Morag had emphasized how critical it was to stay quiet in the inn during the daytime so that “the princess” could rest. Edie had, of course, asked Morag nearly one hundred thousand times why she called the mysterious guest by the nickname—if it was because she knew this guest or something about her, or if it was a joke, a dig, an insult—but Morag wouldn’t say. Edie had gotten the impression that this woman was perhaps ill, or maybe not a paying guest but someone Morag was sheltering for an unknown, Gothic reason.
Edie had even wondered if the guestwasa princess.
This was England. They had them here.
Without hesitation, she stood, walked across the lounge, and put her mug and packet wrapper on the reception desk. Then she brushed her hands together. “I will do that. I will go wake up the princess.” Edie smiled at Morag’s surprised expression. “You didn’t think I would.”
“I don’t know what to think about you, to be quite honest.”
This response did not bother Edie. It was not an uncommon reaction to her existence. Her mom liked to say that if she hadn’t been at the birth, she wouldn’t know where Edie came from.Certainly not Wisconsin, she liked to add.
“I will walk up those stairs, knock on her door, and ask her if she wants to go to the lane off Church Street where it meets the Rectory Street loop and see a hedgehog, so put a pair of extra wellies by the door.”
