“Gregory Place was another surprise. Minnie had only just taken it over from her parents, who’d run it a bit to ground. She’d gotten the place back together with nothing more than her two hands, working all the time. Not a few folks would stop by to help out, but she wouldn’t let them, because she couldn’t pay them, she said. I thought she seemed to have a lot of pride, a lot of things to prove to her family, but this first impression of her wasn’t fair because her very existence, her embodiment of hard work, called my own existence to task. So I mostly avoided her except for meals. Her food was too heavenly to avoid.”
There were painful truths already beginning to be sketched out in Agatha’s story, but Edie would have to mull them over later. She hated this, which made her antsy for it to be over. “It’s getting late,” Cosima said, and the ice in her tone filled Edie with gratitude. They were Team Morag, the two of them.
They would settle up with Morag after they finished defending her.
“I had trouble sleeping, so I was going for walks late at night. One night, I noticed the red glow of a cigarette at the back of the inn. It was Minnie. I discovered this was her only break of the day—a late cigarette by the kitchen door. I bummed one from her. We started talking. It became my favorite part of the day.”
Sherlock put his head on Agatha’s knee.
Edie tried not to notice, but then she couldn’t keep herself from imagining what it would be like when she went back to Green Bay, trying to keep her mind occupied with work while she thought about Cosima in Barcelona with a love bite on her shoulder, putting her hair up to get into the pool. Cosima’s sad blue eyes when she read Agatha’s letter in the dead cat café. Cosima enraged after Edie scared her in the dark during the storm. Cosima looking down at her from the hill at Hermione’s Stile, her intimate appreciation making an expression Edie hadn’t seen yet.
How had Agatha stayed here in this cottage? How had she walked past someone smoking on the street, smelling the sharp burn, without bursting into tears? Why hadn’t she gone to Morag?
“We fell in love,” Agatha said. “It surprised both of us. Me, because I had thought I was beyond things like love and commitment, and Minnie because she had grown up in a restrictive and difficult family and hadn’t been given a margin to thinkabout anything more than work. I think she had come to a place where she didn’t believe there was anything but work. Her parents hadn’t had the gift of innkeeping like her grandparents did, and their marriage was troubled, besides. They had three boys when they were young, quite a bit older than Minnie, and lost them in the war. Then they lost themselves. Minnie and her sister, Maisie, were late-in-life babies. I can’t imagine they had real childhoods.”
“But Morag loved the inn?” Edie needed Morag to have had a chance to love something other than a woman who left her fifty years ago.
“Yes. She had the gift. Even in the beginning when she was still shoveling out from under the pile her parents had left, Gregory Place was a charming spot for young people and students. And of course she loves Lincolnshire. She’d shown me some of her favorite places. The church, the manor, the castles. After I’d gone, there was a time, a long time, when Gregory Place was one of those secret hideaways for the rich and famous.”
“My mother never forgot her visit,” Cosima said. “It changed her life, I think.”
“I have no doubt. It did mine.”
“But you just said you were never there to see it in its prime.” Edie was frustrated. “You’re rich and famous! Why would you stay away? Did Morag come here?”
The novelist shook her head.
“Agatha!” Edie stomped her foot, making Sherlock look at her balefully.
“We fought. I came to understand in Harlaxton, from how I was accepted there, from the friends I made and the little church community, that I should give my mother another chance. I couldn’t ever hide who I was. My mother had been made single by the war, and she despaired over me. It gotworse until I left and we didn’t speak. I decided to write her. I wrote her to tell her I missed her, because I did, and I hoped we could have another chance, and of course that I was in love, so I believed in it again. She called the inn. She wanted me home. She was dying.”
Edie turned toward the strangled noise Cosima made in her throat. She reached across and held out her hand, and Cosima took it, shaking her head. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry,” Agatha said, looking at their joined hands. “I talked to Minnie. I knew, of course, she was in a precarious place with the inn. Her parents were selling it to her, making her pay in installments directly to them. It’s not my story to tell beyond that, but this and other obligations meant her life was limited.”
“You fought, and that was it?”
Agatha looked away at the fire again. “We tried the best that we were able to at the time. We ran away for a few precious days. Her sister covered for her so we could go to Rouen. She wanted to see where Joan of Arc was burned and Richard the Lionheart left his heart. Barcelona, because I wanted to show her the basilica. We hired a car, both of us pretending we could find a way to make it work.”
Agatha was gazing toward their clasped hands, her eyes unfocused and bright with tears she was holding back.
“But after we’d returned, when I went to give her my address, how to write me, how to visit, she told me she didn’t want to know. She said she didn’t see a way for us to be together. It would hurt too much to pretend. Again, not my part of the story to tell. I couldn’t leave it like that, so I made the hunt. I put it in the guest book for her to find me. Every year, I wrote my letter for the nun in Barcelona to keep. I’ve settled for knowingI’m giving the woman I love what she wanted. I don’t really expect anyone to understand.”
Edie did understand, and she hated it. Hated it, hated it,hatedit. It made her want to burn everything to the ground, this story. It made her want to cry. It made her want to tear up the guest book into pieces and feed it to the restored Victorian fireplace in the lounge.
Fuck this story. This was not the story that belonged at the end of the map.
“She sent us on this hunt,” Cosima said. “Everyone in the village knows about it, too. That you left a treasure hunt, but everyone also believes it’s treasure. They think Morag’s been guarding it. But she sent us to find you. What do you think we’re supposed to do with that?”
Agatha shook her head again. “I can’t hope to know.”
“Well.” Edie got to her feet. Leapt to her feet, maybe, spilling over with too much energy. “Youwillknow. In deference to your great age, I won’t make us set off right now. I assume you have a room or can point us to the entrance to the land of the fae where you are king to sleep for the night. Then I’m driving us to Harlaxton first thing. Sherlock’s welcome to come.”
“I don’t leave Wales.” Agatha said it without much force.
“And before all of this, I had basically never left Wisconsin,” Edie said. “But it turns out it was never that hard. Pack snacks. I’m not stopping on the way unless we run out of petrol.”
“There’s a guest room at the end of the hall. Make the bed up yourself. Linens in the wardrobe.” Agatha sat up straight, and Edie thought that maybe she seemed a little excited. Maybe. “I’m taking Sherlock outside.”
