From Auden, who’s normally the most skeptical of us, this is surprisingly heartening.
I beam at him. “I like you.”
He glances down at me, mouth tipped into an almost-smile. “Oh, do you?”
“Okay then,” Saint says. “I buy it. We make our own meaning and we do the stag-hunt our way. So what exactly is that going to be like again?”
“I’ll grab some paper so we can take notes,” volunteers Becket.
I’m already moving pictures around and Delphine’s stuck her head out the library door to call for Abby and Prosecco.
“The Record says we’re praying to Mary and not St. Brigid,” Rebecca says at the same time Becket says, “I’m still worried about the gendering of the Great Rite.”
“I have an idea about that!” I say excitedly. “The Great Rite, I mean, not St. Brigid.”
Delphine comes back. “Do you think we’ll need ring lights?”
“Ring lights?” Saint asks.
She sniffs at his ignorance. “For pictures, Saint. For pictures.”
“I’m comfortable praying to the Virgin Mary,” Rebecca continues, “but if there’s going to be sex, isn’t that strange? Why would they have a sex festival and pray to a virgin?”
“Is that a serious question?” I ask, and earn a Domme glare for it.
“My guess is that she represents an aspect of the goddess,” Becket interrupts in his favorite know-it-all tone. “May is the month Catholics celebrate Mary, and some of our devotions to her are very nature and spring driven—crowning her with flowers, et cetera. Additionally, the Mary-Jesus dyad makes a lot of sense in light of some of the more ancient beliefs, where the consort of the goddess is actually her son.”
“Her consort was her son . . . ?” Delphine asks, looking around at us to see if anyone else is confused. When she sees the scandalized looks on our faces, she catches on. “Oh. Ewwww.”
Becket ducks when she throws an archival glove at him. “It’s not like I traveled back in time and invented it!”
“But you did lob an incest bomb into the conversation,” Saint points out.
“Incest is a social construct!” Becket protests, and then more archival gloves are thrown in his direction.
Auden clears his throat, and just like that, our racket dies down. We turn to look at him, but he’s not looking at us. His eyes are on the pictures of the young men and their antler headdresses.
“I think,” he says quietly, “that I want to be the stag king.”
Chapter 27
St. Sebastian
Present Day
* * *
Originally Beltane was a festival of fire.
The fires called in sympathy to the sun; they burned bright against air grown too thin to hold back the other world. Couples jumped over the fires to pledge troths, people brought the flames back to their own houses to kindle their hearths, and the smoke was used to purify the animals before they were driven to summer pastures.
And in the darkness just outside the fire’s ring, the people fucked.
Beltane was primal and earthy, but it was also ecstatic, complex. A little dangerous even, as it was one of two feasts where the veil between worlds thinned and fluttered and sometimes drew aside. The fires weren’t only about animals, and the fucking wasn’t only about babies. It was about facing the dark with dancing light, facing the cold with the cradling warmth of summer. It was about facing death with all the most unruly and raucous parts of living—eating and singing, and sex for sex’s sake. It could marry pleasure to purpose or it could marry pleasure to pleasure; it could be used to celebrate or it could be used to plead for something worth celebrating. It was a promise and prayer that people made to themselves and each other: we survived the winter and we will survive it again.
Summer is here.
Life is good.
If only for one night of sparks and sex and sweetness, life was good.
O Mary! We crown thee with blossoms today.
Queen of the Angels!
Queen of the May!
The voices float up into the air, clear as the blue sky above us, soft as the breeze tugging gently at our clothes and hair. My own hair is just long enough that the ends catch on my eyelashes, and more than once Auden reaches over and brushes it away from my face. I give an obligatory grumble, but my heart rocks a little every time he does it, and I try to memorize the different looks on his face each time he touches me. Impatient, amused, autocratic. Sometimes a mixture of all three.
Becket’s congregation is larger than one might think, given the remoteness of Bellever. Having attended Masses here before he took over, I can say for certain he’s the reason the congregation has swelled. Partly it’s his unwavering ardor for God and all that, but also there’s no way that these people have missed that he’s handsome as hell. Added to the fact that he’s thoughtful and unfailingly compassionate to everyone he meets, and it’s no surprise he’s won over old and young alike.
And so even on a perfect Saturday morning and for a ceremony that’s not even a proper Mass, Becket drew a crowd. We all processed out of the church, with him and Auden carefully carrying out a statue of the Virgin in front of the congregation, and after they installed her safely at the entrance to the church, the children brought up flowers and boughs of white hawthorn to lay at the Virgin’s feet. It’s time for her May Crowning.
As we sing the hymn of crowning, one of the youngest girls—not yet four maybe—totters up, and with the help of Poe, settles a crown of pink and white roses on the Virgin’s bowed head. And even as suspicious as I am of the Church, even though I probably don’t believe in any part of this, with the day so beautiful and the hymn so sweet and Proserpina smiling down at the little girl as they carefully place the crown on Mary’s head . . . I think I could almost believe it all right now. That there is a God and that he had a mother and that his mother still watches over us and cries tears of love for us all.
The ceremony concludes with a blessing for all those gathered and “for all those who need to feel the renewing love of the Queen of Heaven and her Son,” and then paper cups of lemonade and a platter of biscuits are produced. Auden, Poe, Delphine, and I drift off to the side and watch Becket laugh and joke with his parishioners.
“You think they have any idea what he’ll be doing tonight?” Poe asks.
Even the breeze—which is sending my hair into my eyes and keeps sticking Poe’s long hair to her lips—is caressing Becket with nothing but affection. It waves through his dark blond hair and presses his black shirt and trousers tight enough to his body that even the old ladies are admiring his fine, tall figure. The sun makes his gaze sparkle blue with zest, and more than one person blushes after having his full attention on them.
“No, but I bet if they did know, they’d be lining up to join,” I mutter.
Delphine leans her head on Poe’s shoulder. “He is very handsome. And he’s all ours, isn’t he, Auden?”
“Yes,” Auden says firmly. “He’s all ours.”
Despite Delphine’s wheedling, Rebecca didn’t come to the May Crowning, working instead to get a head start on gathering some of the items needed for this evening (and also to avoid going to church). She’s still not back inside the house when we get there, so Delphine decides to wait for her, which is less an act of friendship than a desire on Delphine’s part to take a nap, I think. And with Becket still at St. Petroc’s and our own Beltane revels not happening until afternoon, Auden, Poe, and I decide to walk up to the village and see some of the May Day festivities going on.
“I haven’t seen these since I was a little boy,” Auden says wistfully as the village green comes into view, bustling with people and lawn chairs and small tents serving food and beer. Young girls in flower crowns are running through the crowds giggling, and everything smells like gardens and sweet things. Later on, it will smell like smoke and beer as the more innocent festivities morph into the twilight party, but for now it’s all vestal and fresh and so very, very
Although . . .
“There are the antler-boys,” Poe says excitedly as we step through the low stones bounding the green. She points over past the maypole, where a herd of teenage boys are jostling and shoving at each other while they put on their headdresses. And as I watch them preening and showing off, and then look over to where this year’s May Queen is sitting underneath a tent and interestedly watching, I think despite the veneer of serene village respectability there’s still a dangerous edge of uncivility underneath it all. Something primitive. As if in some kind of collective, unconscious memory, the villagers remember that once all of this was real.
As we walk through the green to find a good spot to watch the stag hunt, people begin noticing us. Or rather, noticing Auden Guest and Proserpina Markham, daughter of a Kernstow. Whispers and murmurs ripple out from where we step, as if we’re stones dropped in a pond, and some of the festival-goers are staring outright now. Auden takes Poe’s hand to reassure her, and the gesture has a visible impact on the crowd. Like the earth itself has shifted as the people of Thorncombe see the lord of Thornchapel claiming a Kernstow for his own.
Just like Ralph would have wanted.
As we approach the tent, one of the older women in the village nudges the May Queen, and then the May Queen herself stands up and meets us in a flutter of white poplin and long red hair. I recognize Gemma Dawes, the daughter of the café owner, from all the times I’ve helped her in the library. Her expression is one of shy solemnity as she offers Proserpina a flower crown of her own.
“Oh thank you,” Poe says, flushing and beaming one of her big smiles that makes the very air around her warm like summer. She reaches for the crown, but the girl shakes her head.
“No, Miss Markham,” she says, and I can see Poe is surprised this girl knows her name. Being more familiar with the Thorncombe gossip network, I’m not. “I’ll help you.”
So Poe ducks a little and the village May Queen settles the crown onto Thornchapel’s May Queen, and for a moment, I can’t help but see the little girl crowning the Virgin outside Becket’s church, and the déjà vu is so tantalizingly powerful that I have to catch my breath. I hear Auden do the same.
The village queen smiles as Poe straightens up, and then she turns to Auden and me as well. “You could come watch from my tent if you’d like. We’ve got plenty of room and I’ll have to get up for the maypole dance soon anyway.”
That’s how the three of us end up watching the stag race from the tent, as if it’s a medieval pavilion and Auden and Poe are king and queen. We watch the boys kick off their shoes and hop around to warm up as the rules of the race are explained to the crowd. The runners can push, shove, and tackle, but no foul play—no hitting or kicking or bucking with their headdresses. The first boy to cross the finish line after nine loops around the green is the king stag and will have the honor of sitting with the May Queen for the rest of the day. The May Queen herself blushes after this part, and I notice her eyes straying to one boy in particular, a kid named Charlie who spends a lot of time reading sci-fi novels in my library (and whom, therefore, I like very much).
The boys line up, and I hear Auden snort with amusement at how they’re all trying to test the strength of their headdresses by tossing their heads. It makes them look like stags in truth, practically stamping at the ground to show off. A whistle blows, and they charge forward, heads down, legs and arms pumping.
It’s more dangerous than I would have thought. The antlers are a constant threat as they try to shove or tackle their competitors to the ground, and more than once a boy is nearly gored when two or three of them fall down together. The course is a good one—circling the green in a big enough loop to promise a few long straights for the sprinters, but with a couple of switchbacks and turns that give the more agile of the boys a shot to leap ahead. And some of them do literally leap—over other boys, over humps in the grass—and some of them leap together, until after three or four passes around the course, they begin to look like a herd for real, crashing through the forest and not the village green. Like they could be landing with hooves and not bare feet.
This is real magic, I think, entranced. Taking something mundane—ridiculous even—and rendering it mysterious all over again. I know every one of these boys, I know their parents, I know this green as well as I know my own garden. And yet I believe right now that they are not just boys, but part of the forest. I believe that if they didn’t run, something irrevocable would be lost.
But, as all magic moments do eventually, this moment burns itself away. Soon only three boys are really in the running, then only two, and by the time Charlie crosses the finish line, panting and staggering to the side, they are just adolescent boys again, gangly and hoping to impress pretty, red-haired Gemma.
Auden turns to me as Gemma goes to award the antlered Charlie his victor’s bouquet.
“Well, St. Sebastian?” he asks, and he doesn’t have to ask anything more. I know what he wants.
I nod, and then after the maypole dance begins, the three of us make a discreet exit and go back to the house.
Chapter 28
St. Sebastian
Present Day
* * *
“Nervous?” Auden asks me quietly as he closes the door behind us. Poe’s gone ahead to the thorn chapel, along with Delphine and Becket, and so we’re the last ones to leave the house.
I look down at the antler headdress in my hand. “Yes,” I say. “You?”
Sir James prances impatiently around his master’s feet, and Auden gives him an absent thump on the shoulder. “Yes. I’m nervous too.”
We walk down the shallow steps leading to the lawn, but instead of veering to the right for the hidden path, Auden walks for the maze. “I thought we’d go the old way today,” he says to me as Sir James trots happily ahead. “It seems fitting.”
“Because of Beltane?”
He doesn’t answer right away, but it seems like a thinking silence and not a stony, “shut up, St. Sebastian” silence, so I don’t poke at him. I simply match his pace and wait for him to speak when he’s ready.
We’re almost to the maze itself when he does finally answer, although it’s not an answer at all, but another question. “Why do you pray when you don’t believe in God?”
My boots scuff at the gravel path as I nearly trip in my surprise. “What?”
Auden glances over at me as we approach the temporary metal fencing Rebecca’s team has put around the maze. “You go to Mass, you murmur along with the words. I know from Becket that sometimes you go into the empty nave and sit alone.”
Goddammit, Becket.
“Most people who don’t believe in God wouldn’t still give God so much of their time and attention,” Auden says. “I’m just curious as to why.”
While I try to think of an answer to this, we step through a gap in the fence and continue on the path to the maze entrance—Sir James darting around and sniffing every spade, spray paint mark, and boot print the demolition crew has left behind.
“Demeter and Persephone are gone,” I say. It makes sense that the statues would be removed for safekeeping before backhoes and diggers got involved, but there was something about those two statues—the mother reaching for her daughter with such desperation and yet such certainty, as if she knows her love is powerful enough to break the world if that’s what it takes—that reminded me of my own mother. Like Demeter, she would have stopped at nothing to keep me safe.
I suddenly miss my mother with such a cruel ache that I close my eyes as we walk through the entrance, just so that I don’t have to see the empty plinth where Demeter should be.
Inside the maze, there are only the paint marks and the vacant statue niches to speak to its imminent destruction. All else is shadowed and hushed as it has been since Estamond rebuilt it a century and a half ago, the hedges still tall and impenetrable.
Auden steps alongside me, but he doesn’t respond to my remark about the statues, and I know it’s because he’s waiting for me to answer his first question.
I sigh. “Are you asking because you want to know how you can do Beltane without believing in it?”
We turn deeper into the maze, and despite the warmth of the day, the interior paths are cool and damp.
“No, Saint,” he says. “Quite the opposite. I’m asking because I do believe.”
I stop and turn to face him. “You don’t,” I say, a bit unsteadily. “You think all of this is nonsense. You think it doesn’t matter. I heard you when we planned this, I heard you on the night before the equinox. You’ve always acted like this is something we had to drag you into.”
“As I recall,” Auden says, eyebrow arching, “you’ve been protesting just as much, and you had all the same doubts at the beginning. Do you not believe in what we’re doing?”
That’s a much more complicated question than how I feel about God in general, and I can’t find an answer, at least not right away. Which is just as well, because Auden keeps going.
“I didn’t believe in any of this at first, but I did believe in Thornchapel. I believed in Thornchapel enough to be terrified of it.” Without any kind of cue or signal, we both start walking again, and he goes on. “It’s got this force. A pull. On my family especially, but on everyone else around it too. You see the people in the village, how they revere this place.”
“They revere your family.”
“No, they think they revere my family. But what they actually honor, what they really respect, is the house itself—or rather, the land the house represents.” Auden lets out a low breath. “I know the power of this place. It corrupted my father and tortured my mother. Killed Proserpina’s mother. And now Becket says that people used to use the altar to—” He breaks off, stabbing fingers through his hair. “It doesn’t matter what we’ve learned now, because even before we learned it, I knew Thornchapel was a different place from any other place in the world. I used to hate it for that, you know. I used to hate it for how it grew inside people and claimed them. I found it sinister.”
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