The student bounced up the stairs.
The library.
“Get out Agatha’s map.” Cosima could hear her own frustration. She hadn’t gotten to find out what happened after Edie asked her not to move away, and she’d really, really wanted to.
“Already on it.” Edie’s voice didn’t sound regular, either. She unfolded her jacket and pulled the envelope with the map out of it, then opened it carefully. “Okay, so you and Tam worked out that the starting point on the map was here.”
“The manor.” Cosima put her finger on the sketch of the manor at the bottom left corner. “Yes, because underneath it, Agatha wrote ‘The game’s afoot,’ which is the epigraph from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that she put at the beginning of her first book.”
“And these other sketches are probably hints to the places we have to go in each country, but we don’t know the order to visit them. Presumably, something here will tell us where to go next, or one of these small drawings we already decided were part of the clues.”
“It has to be something that was here when Agatha was here. I think the student had a good idea.”
Edie stared at the map for several moments, her hair curtaining her face. “Cosima.”
“Yes?”
“I think so, too. You know why?”
“Why? Don’t be coy, it’s rude.”
Edie’s quick smile made dimples appear in both cheeks. “I don’t even know what coy looks like. Look at the decoration she sketched in the border around the manor illustration.”
Cosima looked. “It’s a ladder? With wheels?”
“Yes!”
“Follow me.”
This time, Cosima managed to make her voice sound the way she wanted it to, which was, as Edie liked to say, imperious. She needed that little bit of distance between them again to survive. Just a small space without a bridge so she could breathe without thinking about lemons and cut grass and small red mice.
“Anywhere,” Edie told her.
I wish we could follow each other anywhere. Everywhere.
She grimaced back at the god on the ceiling.
Chapter Twelve
Edie yanked on the handle of yet another heavily decorated double wooden door that she very much hoped was the door to Gregory Gregory’s library.
It felt like they had walked through miles of hallways, ducking into one unbelievable, gilded, paneled, muraled, carved room after another, but there hadn’t been the usual number of wry comments and observations from the princess. Just like there hadn’t been the usual number of teasing remarks and non sequiturs from her.
A bit of heady, awkward silence was probably to be expected after you both almost went up in flames over a kiss on the cheek that was hotter than a lot of kisses Edie had experienced in dark rooms with her clothes off.
The double doors creaked open to reveal a room lined with books and dark furniture. “Library. Thank Moses.”
“I thought you’d been dying to tour this place.” Cosima trailed into the room behind her, her jacket over her arm, herbra tastefully visible through the creamy silk of her blouse tucked into the first pair of jeans Edie had ever seen her wear. They were a soft, pale, broken-in pair. The high yoked waist was cinched with a belt that buckled with gold double letters.
Edie had not, in all of her life, seen someone wear a silk blouse with expensively destroyed blue jeans and a designer belt. She had not borne witness to the inside of an English manor, with skies painted on the ceilings and truckloads of Italian marble carved to look like curtains. The library smelled like things she didn’tknowabout—expensive pastes and waxes that servants used to clean silver and wood, cinders in massive fireplaces, paper of vellum and ink made from gall. She’d read about rooms like this in romance novels the same way she read about the minutiae of queer history, not once believing any of it was real or applied to her.
But here she was. With Cosima Frank.
“Edie?”
When she looked up, Cosima was close again, her head tipped and her golden-flocked eyebrows furrowed. “Yeah?”
“I found it.”
