And, for once, Cosima was right at the center of it.
She moved her stool closer and put her hand at Edie’s hip. This one was hers. And, if Cosima could make it happen, so was the two-acre garden of Gregory Place that deserved Grade I registration after a jaw-dropping restoration.
“Your phone may not work, but I can do research,” Morag said. “Fauxmage was good. But I’m not convinced this Wisconsin is the right place for you. Don’t you have dual citizenship? Because of your worthless father?”
“Yes,” Edie said. Her voice was almost a whisper.
“Maybe you don’t want it,” Morag told her. “But you understand this place, and you’ve learned the lessons I never did.”
“I have negative money,” Edie said. “I don’t know anything about running an English inn. I have a job already. I went tothe factory and had a meeting with HR to fill out all my paperwork.”
Morag stood up. “This is the part I mentioned that I don’t plan to be here for.” She set her mug down on the drainboard and looked at Cosima. “Be a duck and let Tam know I’m on my way. I don’t know what the state of Bronwyn’s heart might be, but I’d hate to be the reason it stopped in shock.”
“There are still some Lenten roses in the garden,” Cosima said. “If you’d like to take her flowers.”
“No, I would not.” Morag took her coat. “Can you imagine giving that woman flowers? I’ll give her a new silk necktie if she doesn’t turn around and run back to Wales when she sees me.”
And then she was gone.
“Edie.” Cosima shifted over to Morag’s stool to be closer. “How are you doing?”
“What is that woman’s long game, Cosima? Is this the first temptation in a gauntlet of torture? Or, more likely, I take her devil’s bargain, and then I’m doomed to run this inn for eternity, my skin bursting into flames if I walk more than ten yards from the threshold.”
“I think she just wants you to have the inn,” Cosima said, as gently as she could. She knew Edie was making jokes because her fear and overthinking were taking over. “I don’t think there’s anything behind her offer but her belief that you’re the right person to carry on a legacy. And she’s right. Edie, look around! This inn isalreadya legacy. You can be the next person in an unbroken line of people, some of whom were very damaged, who have taken care of it. Someday, you’ll pass it on, probably in better shape than you received it. This building, I am absolutely certain, will be here a hundred years after you’re gone. That’s the goddamned dream, isn’t it?”
Edie closed her eyes, her cheeks flushed, and when sheopened them, they were tide pools. Forest ponds. “But where will you be?”
“Come with me.” Cosima slid off her stool and waited.
When Edie rose, she led her out the back door and along the path to the garden gate. It didn’t squeak when she opened it, because Cosima had repaired and oiled it. She’d had to watch six YouTube videos, but she’d managed it. Then she stepped aside, hoping Edie could see not what she’d done, but what it would become.
“Oh, shit,” Edie said. “It doesn’t look like a place the cops should bring ground-penetrating radar to and look for bodies anymore.”
Cosima laughed. It was the earliest part of the spring in England, but she could see where the roses would come in and make a path to the step-over apple trees she had just started to retrain. Beyond that, there was the pond to clean out and replant, more marginal plants to edge it with. There were the box hedges that needed to be looked at for blight. She’d found the remains of a sunny dry garden, and the greenhouse was a disaster, but it would be gorgeous when it was repaired.
It was a kingdom, and she had laid claim to it as its queen. And king, if she were being honest about her ambition.
“This is where you want to begin your takeover of the world of gardening? Here?”
Edie’s face was still too pale. Cosima could see that the brokenhearted part of her hadn’t caught up to the part that was already running the inn. Kissing Cosima every day. Making everybody in town her new best friend.
“This is a two-acre garden, the oldest parts of which date to the beginning of the eighteenth century, even before the inn. It’s older than the gardens at Gregory Gregory’s manor. There are important artifacts of pre-Victorian pleasure gardeningaround every corner, some of which would be the first of their kind to be restored. There is stained glass in the greenhouse by an English artist whose pieces are in the British Museum. So yes. Here.”
Edie wrapped her arms around herself, scanning the muddy garden. “I suppose no other garden in the world has me—mighthave me—if you’re cataloging its features.”
Cosima bit her lip to keep from scaring Edie off with her excitement. “Nope. No other one.”
“Do you think we could charge twelve pounds to tour it?”
“Let’s say eighteen. It would be Cosima Frank’s, after all.”
Edie stepped farther into the garden, looking at a table where Cosima had been keeping tools organized and the pile where she was putting good pots where she found them, when Cosima’s phone buzzed in her back pocket.
It was Duncan.
She held up a finger to Edie and walked away, taking the call to a private space by the garden wall.
“I’m glad I got you right away.”
