A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel Book 1)

by Sierra Simone

  Auden stands up, holding a framed painting in one hand while he turns on his phone flashlight with the other. The painting is only a foot square—nothing like the massive ones still hanging in the Long Gallery—and the frame is almost simple, just some polished, beveled wood. Nothing ornately gilt or carved. But what’s most remarkable about the painting is the image itself, of the young woman it depicts.

  She stands alone in the middle of the chapel ruins, holding a lantern aloft while a white gown billows around her bare feet. Her long, dark hair is unbound and tangling over itself in the wind as she looks back over her shoulder to the painter. She’s nearly as pale as her gown, her cheekbones high and wide, her full mouth parted ever so slightly, as if she’s startled. Her eyes have been painted so green that they nearly glow from the canvas, like a cat’s.

  The distinctive arc of the golden torc dangles from the hand not holding the lantern.

  I should be focused on that, I should be consumed with that little detail because that torc seems to be everywhere—but I’m not, I’m back to staring at her face, struggling to believe what I’m seeing.

  “Uncanny, isn’t it?” Auden asks softly, and I don’t have to look to know he’s gazing intently at my face, at the face that so closely resembles the painted one in his hands. “You could be sisters. Mother and daughter.”

  “Who is she?” I whisper, only barely stopping myself from touching the canvas.

  “This is Estamond, your Victorian party girl and amateur librarian. Her husband Randolph seems to have had a particular fondness for this painting—after her death, he kept it in the master bedroom. I heard my grandfather say once that Randolph even traveled with it, although that might just be family gossip.”

  I can’t stop staring at her, this Victorian doppelgänger of mine, Estamond Kernstow Guest.

  Kernstow , I remember. Your mother was a Kernstow .

  Can it be a coincidence? Can it really? How many things are going to happen around my mother and Thornchapel before I stop dismissing them as mere accidents of fate?

  I wish my father would text me back about my mother’s family. My grandparents died long before I knew them, and unlike many other librarians, I never entered the cult of genealogy research. Partly because it held no charm for me, and partly because I couldn’t bear to fill out any family tree knowing that I’d have to put a question mark as my mother’s year of death.

  I finally look at Auden. He’s staring back at me with a thoughtful but heated expression. His eyes dip to my mouth once, just briefly, just long enough that I know he’s thinking about our kiss. That he might even be thinking about spanking my bare ass while I writhe and cry in his lap.

  “I noticed the resemblance right away,” he says with a small smile that doesn’t cool the heat in his eyes. “I used to come here often as a kid. My father hated it up here, and so it was my safe room of sorts. I used to pretend I was a prince with a wicked king for a father, and that when he died, I was going to be a merciful, strong ruler in his place. And Estamond would be my queen.” He rumples his hair in embarrassment. “A stupid, childish game.”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” I say quietly.

  “It was.” He’s bitter again. Bitter with himself, and with this tower and everything surrounding it. I can tell.

  “Maybe it was a little childish fantasizing about your ancestor,” I say to try to tease away some of the bitterness, and he looks up at me with surprise.

  “Oh, Estamond isn’t my ancestor,” he says. “All of her children and her grandchildren were dead by the time of the War. It was Randolph’s nephew—his brother’s son—who inherited Thornchapel. My great-great-grandfather.”

  I think of the entry Saint and I found, about her happy but too-short life. “That’s so sad. All of her children and grandchildren?”

  Auden nods. “Randolph let the place fall into ruin after her death. He would occasionally visit his children in London, but gradually, he fired most of the staff and became a recluse. He watched his own line die out.”

  I feel a pang for the old Randolph, alone in this empty manor with only his painting of Estamond for company. And a pang for Auden, the equally lonely boy, hiding up here from his father with his imaginary kingdom and an old tricycle.

  “I’m sorry again,” I say, squeezing his hand and thinking of that little boy. The tower is freezing, and so now both our hands are cold when we touch. “I shouldn’t have said—”

  “Maybe not to someone else, but I’m glad you said it to me,” he says, catching my gaze with his. His eyes are serious. “I have been blaming the house for him. And I’m letting him take up all this space in my thoughts like he’s still alive, like he can still hurt me, because if I stop letting him into my thoughts… If he’s really dead—then maybe it means I’m someone different now. Part of me must have died with him and I’m not sure what’s left. What can grow into the vacant places.”

  “They’ll be good things,” I tell him confidently. “Strong things. That’s what Imbolc is for, you know—new beginnings.”

  “At least according to the Reverend Paris Dartham,” Auden sighs. Then he gives me a real smile—half hopeful, half mischievous. “Are you really sure you want to act out a scenario laid down by an obsessive clergyman?”

  I’m still squeezing his hand, I realize, as I look down at the woman in the painting. “It looks more like we’re following Estamond than him.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “Well, that’s a comfort. I much prefer Estamond to old Dartham.”

  I let go of his hand and point at Estamond with her torc and her vivid eyes.

  “You’ll finally get to be with your queen,” I say, thinking of his boyhood games, but Auden gives me an odd look, as if unsettled by what I just said.

  “My queen,” he answers slowly. “Yes, I suppose I will.”

  * * *

  We end up bringing the painting down to show the others, who are predictably excited and fascinated with it, and we all have another round of drinks while Delphine makes me pose like Estamond in the picture to gauge the resemblance for herself.

  It’s decided—by Delphine and Rebecca, in a rare show of solidarity—that Becket and Saint should spend the night in the old wing’s remaining spare room, and that the planning for Imbolc would resume tomorrow. Saint makes a faint noise of protest at this, but there’s no arguing the blizzard outside, no denying the snow falling so thick and fast that even the forest can’t be seen from the windows.

  So after dousing the fire, we stumble in a boozy haze up to our rooms, and after a general hubbub of brushing teeth and hunting for extra blankets and making sure Becket and Saint found everything they needed and also would both fit on the spare room’s bed, we close our doors and prepare to sleep while winter screams outside.

  It takes me almost no time at all to fall into the dreams.

  And when I do, there are thorns biting into my wrist and there’s a fire hot on my back and when I look down, I’m clasping St. Sebastian’s hand. Auden’s hand covers both of ours, and all of it is wrapped in thorny vines, stiff enough to make a cage, but tight enough to make all three of us bleed. We’re handfasted.

  “A bride by thorns,” dream-Auden says.

  Except then it’s not him, it’s Delphine and me, bound together with blood and thorns and she’s shivering against the pain, but with delight—and then it’s all of us standing in a circle, thorns between our palms and clasping hands tight so that we’ll each be pricked.

  “Are you ready to lie down, Proserpina?” dream-Auden asks gently, and I am, I am finally ready to lie down.

  There’s a door behind the altar.

  I stare at it as I slowly spread my legs and am made a bride.

  Chapter 17

  Our Life, Our Sweetness, and Our Hope

  The bed is almost too small for Becket and Saint together, but the priest is conscientious and Saint is exhausted. He came to Thornchapel to drop off a public library book for Proserpina, a fantasy title he knew sh
e wanted to read and that he’d checked out under his account so she could take her time with it without worrying about late fees . . . but even at the time he knew it was a pretense. She hadn’t asked for the book and he hadn’t offered it—there was no reason for him to come to Thornchapel other than that he was crawling out of his skin from not having seen her that day. And if there was the danger that Auden would be there, the danger that he might see the same look of mingled hunger and anguish on Auden’s handsome face as Saint saw that night when he hurt Proserpina’s bare bottom for everyone to see . . .

  It had been a danger that didn’t feel like a danger at all.

  And then when Auden said six of us . Not five. Not them minus Saint, but them plus Saint . . .

  He didn’t even know what he felt then, except that it was almost like panic but sweeter. Honeyed like bourbon and the lies he tells himself at night with his hand on his cock and his mind full of Auden.

  Saint rolls onto his side and stares at the window, even though there’s nothing to see but snow and darkness. He doesn’t need to see to know the window looks out over the south gardens, over the maze. He knows exactly which stand of trees conceals the tunnel exit from the maze’s center, and which almost indiscernible path leads to the chapel ruins.

  He knows because he goes there often. Like a poacher in the woods, treading soundlessly through the back paths and hidden inlets onto the Thornchapel grounds, he’s learned to come and go without being seen. Unlike a poacher, he’s not hunting, he’s not looking to take anything that isn’t his—all he does is search out the ruins and sit, as if the wildflowers and dead stones have answers for him.

  His mother’s family was a family of devout Catholics, and his mother had grown up with faith as inescapable and natural as breathing. She lit her saint’s candles, she prayed her devotions, and she went to Mass faithfully, every week. At his birth, she named her only child after the patron saint of saintly deaths.

  And for all that—for his mother’s fierce faith and his own name—Saint had never found any faith of his own. It all felt hollow, and after watching his mother die, it now feels worse than hollow—it feels pointless.

  Except there are these times . . . these strange, ephemeral times when he almost feels . . . something . He doesn’t know what to call it, how to think of it, and he doesn’t even know if he likes it, because whenever that something brushes up against his mind, it’s so dizzying and potent that he feels like he could lose himself in it without a second thought. And for a man who’s clawed for every scrap of identity he has, the thought of losing anything is terrifying.

  What he does know is this: any time he’s ever felt whatever it is, magic or God or the collective energy of the universe, it’s been in the thorn chapel.

  It should feel ridiculous, what he’s agreed to do with the others. In fact, he half expects they’ll all wake up and remember their drunken declarations with shame, and the idea will be quietly and gratefully forgotten.

  But for St. Sebastian, nothing could be further from ridiculous. Nothing could feel more necessary right now. He may not believe in anything, but if he could , it would be there in that place and it would be with them, and it seems right somehow to try. Like doing anything else might actually tear him apart.

  * * *

  Father Becket is at peace until he dreams. And then the zeal opens its pitiless mouth and chews him with eager, champing teeth.

  He’s told himself precious few lies over the course of his life; he prizes honesty as the king of virtues. And while he learned compassionate silence with others so that he could comfort them without prevarication, he forbade himself the same comfort. He would always tell himself the truth—the zeal demanded it—and so any lies he told himself were lies he sincerely believed. A lie, for instance, that his interest in Celtic mythology was merely an academic response to his surroundings.

  Of course, he’d reasoned to himself, he’d be fascinated here, in this lonely corner of the country still studded with fragments of Brythonic place names and scattered with dolmens and menhirs older than the Celts themselves. It was intellectual curiosity that sent him searching for books and rambling over the moors to see each and every standing stone or ruined church or hill fort for himself. That was all. Nothing more.

  The lie had dissolved tonight. He could no longer pretend to himself that his fascination was intellectual. It was personal, deeply personal, rooted to his very soul somehow. And despite the dispassionate and worldly air he’d put on downstairs, he’s troubled by it. He’s troubled by the pull he feels toward this place. He’s troubled by the feeling that it needs him.

  It’s not the unorthodoxy that troubles him, at least he doesn’t think so. He’s an unorthodox priest anyway, being openly bisexual—if celibate—and encouraging his parishioners to think critically and constructively about their faith. He is fond of other religions and their rituals, he enjoys learning about them, and he sees this Imbolc as more of a cultural exercise anyway.

  Or at least he should.

  Instead, he’s terrified that the zeal waits for him in the chapel ruins. And when he dreams—dreaming of the summer he came here in college, alone and with the zeal blazing so hot inside him that he couldn’t even think—he dreams of being in the thorn chapel. He dreams of standing in front of the altar and feeling like a pillar of fire because he was so consumed with a desire to know his god.

  And when he wakes up, he wakes up with his skin burning against the air, like he’s aflame with righteous hunger once again.

  * * *

  The storm howls on through the morning, and Rebecca wakes at her usual early hour to find that it feels like day hasn’t broken at all. There’s a vague sort of brightening in the white maelstrom outside, like somewhere high above the world the sun does, in fact, still exist, but it’s dim enough that Rebecca has to turn on the light in the kitchen to make her tea while she hunts down an apple for breakfast. She decides to work in her favorite spot, which is a corner of the old hall, on a window bench overlooking the terrace and south gardens. Of course today she won’t be able to see much outside, but she’ll be cozy with her pile of blankets and the space heater she keeps over there.

  Strictly speaking, she shouldn’t be working. It’s Saturday, and Rebecca has been trying to work less, to keep normal hours, to be the kind of woman who has enough free time to take up a hobby besides flogging strangers for fun. But she also can’t seem to rid herself of this suspicion that free time is wasted time, that she’s cheating herself out of her own future if she doesn’t pour everything she has into the present. A belief no doubt planted in her childhood, when those early tests revealed exactly how gifted she was, and a belief watered daily by her boss—who is also her father.

  She supposes in an ideal world, there’d be something easier about working for one’s father, relaxed expectations maybe, or just a surfeit of understanding and compassion. But the truth is that her father is all the harder on her for their connection, demanding more of her than he does of any of his other architects. She knows he loves her . . . she knows that in a way, expecting so much from her is his way of showing his love. He wants her to succeed the same way he succeeded—against the odds and tirelessly.

  And she understands, she knows , she’d felt her neck burn and her shoulders creep forward those days in sixth form when she’d walk in and realize she was the only black girl in the class. She’d felt helplessness and frustration dig inside her chest when she’d had to work doubly hard as the white men in her master’s classes just to have her projects graded the same. She knows tirelessness, she knows when the world wants her to bite down her words and her feelings, she knows that she’s not ever, ever allowed a moment’s rest, a moment’s weakness, a moment when she’s not the best and the most graceful and the most patient.

  She just thinks it would be nice if her father didn’t demand all the same things too. If he could give her the space to breathe she doesn’t have anywhere else.

  In any case, Rebecc
a has never been the type to linger over wishes and unmet hopes. Truth be told, it’s too late for her to be anything but a workaholic, and she’s found places where she doesn’t have to swallow her bitten-down words like she does in her father’s office—places where she can do the biting, the speaking, the winning. It’s the one thing she has that’s hers and only hers, and it’s the one thing that keeps her job and her father’s all-consuming expectations of her from swallowing her whole.

  Rebecca thinks with some wistfulness about how it will be another few days until she’s in London again, until she can find someone to play with and until she can shuck off the exhaustion that comes from being entirely perfect all the fucking time.

  And that’s a few days if the storm lets up . . .

  Christ.

  She’s just getting settled in her corner and pulling out her laptop when Delphine drifts down the stairs, looking unfairly cute and sexy with her hair piled on top of her head and wearing one of Auden’s old Cambridge sweatshirts. Her curves strain at the material, they strain her unicorn-patterned sleep shorts even more, and her soft flesh makes a distinctive and inviting v between her legs. Rebecca looks away quickly, her heart beating faster.

  “You’re up early,” Delphine yawns, trundling forward in Auden’s slippers, which are too big for her and so she has to shuffle to keep them on.

  “I’m always up early,” Rebecca points out. “You can’t have failed to notice this about me over the last two months we’ve been living in the same house.”

  Delphine just tilts her head, blinking sleepily at Rebecca. She’s shivering too, her legs covered in goosebumps, which for some reason irritates Rebecca rather a lot.