“Fine,” she said. “I’ll look at the hedgehogs.” Her voice was low and sharp. Like a broadsword.
She didn’t slam the door, but she did close it very firmly.
Edie stared at the heavy wooden door for a moment. Then she bent down, grabbed the tray, and slowly walked downstairs with it, trying to form a thought.
She had been successful, yes. But also, she hadn’t thought she had beenconvincing. Yet the princess was getting ready to walk with her to Baroness Rachel’s garden.
“Had you already talked to her?”
Edie asked this question of Morag on her way past. She was headed for the stony cavern that was the kitchen to put the tray on the huge wooden prep table, which Edie was certain had been made sometime around the Norman Invasion.
“Is she going for a nice walk with you?” Morag sat knitting in her rocking chair. That was what she did in the margins of bustling about the inn. There was an overflowing bin by the back door of wool hats, scarves, and mittens for guests, all of them slightly misshapen and in odd colors. The conversation Edie had tried to have with Morag about how much one’s knitting should be expected to improve over forty years hadn’t gone well.
“She agreed in words if not in spirit.” Edie bustled into the kitchen and turned on the taps to do the dishes on the tray before Morag could tell her not to.
“Back off.” Morag appeared suddenly in the cased opening to the kitchen, making Edie jump. She elbowed Edie aside and took over the washing. “Go get your jacket and wellies on. I already put hers by the door.”
Edie could not believe she’d gotten herself into this. She’d promised hedgehogs to a tall, wild-haired stranger with terrifying eyebrows who’d disliked her on sight, and she stood only a meager chance of delivering them.
She had literally never seen a hedgehog.
But still,still, there was an unmistakable electric buzz at the base of her spine. It was similar to the feeling she’d had as a child standing with her toes curled around the edge of the high dive, and many times since, when she stood right on the cusp of doing something that would change her life and likely end in humiliating failure.
Probably it was just that she hadn’t talked to anyone butan eighty-six-year-old innkeeper for more than a week. She was getting an extrovert’s social engagement high from simply speaking to a stranger.
She stood by the back door, staring down at a pair of brand-new Hunter wellies in sleek black. Edie wore the scuffed green, inn-supplied ones that were a half-size too big and had gotten stuck in the mud, then come off more than once. She did have a rain jacket that she’d borrowed from her brother, also too big. Morag claimed its bright lime color “burned her eyes,” but it kept Edie dry.
The other woman’s wellies looked like they belonged in one of the fashion spreads in Morag’s crumbling magazines, on the feet of a model whose outfit was described in a caption that mentioned Harrods and quoted an improbably high price.
And then there she was. The princess.
She’d gathered her hair into a bun on top of her head that looked like an expensive, intentional mess. Her jeans were trim, her jacket a deep plum wool plaid with a series of plackets and collars that laid perfectly along her shoulders and front. Edie had never seen a jacket like that. She didn’t even know if it was called a jacket, or if it had some other sartorial name only known to people who spent two hundred dollars on rubber boots and had three kinds of face cream.
The woman bent over and slid her feet into the boots. The shafts snugged over her calves without a hitch. This improbable person looked at her, one of those eyebrows lifting. “Are we going?”
And then Edie made a mistake. She couldn’t have known it was a mistake, of course—that was how mistakes worked—but she would’ve appreciated a hint about this one.
It was just that she’d suddenly recognized why this woman’seyes looked familiar. She had seen those eyes for the first time when she was five years old, sitting next to her mom on their red sofa in the Jackson Street apartment watchingShip of the Cosmoson DVD, mesmerized by Captain Astra Saturnine, a girl hero.
But this woman was not Phoebe Frank, who played Captain Astra in four movies and two epilogues.
Which meant she must be the person occasionally photographedwithPhoebe Frank, usually in a magazine that had dressed them alike.
Edie had never been someone who followed pop culture closely. She was more likely to develop a single obsession with a show or music artist or movie every couple of years or so, such that she would learn everything about it to the exclusion of all other interests. And in the last few months, Edie had paid attention to virtually nothing but her own increasingly snowballing problems. However,PhoebeFrank and Captain Astra andShip of the Cosmoswere famous in the way the president was famous. Or the Princess of Wales.
Edie spoke without thinking, excited to have figured it out. “You’re Cosima Frank.” She pronounced the name the way she’d always said it to herself or heard her friends say it,Coe-SEE-ma—a pronunciation so wrong that it turned out Edie hadn’t even recognized therealname when she heard it.
Cosima. CosimaFrank.
Cosima Frank.She had promised hedgehogs toCosimafuckingFrank. Who was staying at Gregory Place? The inn that came up first upon typing “cheapest place to stay in England” in a Google search?
“Not to you,” Cosima Frank said and strode out into the rain, letting the heavy door bang shut behind her.
Edie winced. “Fuck.”
Morag appeared, holding out a hat for Edie that looked like a fistful of wet moss.
“You might have mentioned who she was,” Edie said. “Saved me looking like an ass.”
