A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  It should be grim, this room, it should be forbidding. The stark white of the ceiling and the near-black of the dark, dark wood should make it somber and churchlike, the cool light pouring in from between the stark trees outside should make it lonesome and cold.

  But by some kind of magic, none of that is true. Maybe it’s the variegated strata of books, or maybe it’s that I feel at home in rooms like this anyway. Maybe it’s because it’s Thornchapel and I love Thornchapel, and when I think about it, the whole house is like this. Three stories of cold stone and glass should in no way feel as inviting and as enchanting as they do, and yet I feel utterly invited. Utterly enchanted.

  I give a very long, very happy sigh.

  “Do you like it?” Auden asks quietly.

  I realize I’ve been turning in wondering circles for the last God-knows-how-many minutes, and I feel like an idiot—until I see Auden’s face. He must have been watching me go all dreamy and hazy over his library, but he’s not looking at me like I’m an idiot at all.

  He’s looking at me like I’ve just told him a secret.

  “This is the best place in the world,” I declare, and he laughs.

  “We need to take you more places then,” he says, but he’s wrong. I wouldn’t be able to burrow into other places, I wouldn’t have the promise of spending days and days rifling through all this arcana, of touching each and every forgotten page. It’s the best place in the world because it will belong to me—not in a legal sense, of course, but in the caretaking sense, in the spiritual sense.

  “Did you remember it much?” he asks as I drift over to one of the glass cases to examine the curios. “From that summer?”

  “Barely,” I admit, running my fingers along the glass. It’s dusty, as if the room hasn’t been cleaned in a while, even though the fireplace area looks well used. I have a sudden image of Auden and the others camping in this house like children, eating out of cans and making tents out of blankets. “The adults always chased us off, remember?”

  My only memory had been of a cavernous space filled with books, of temptation incarnate for a girl like me—but it was a temptation I never satisfied. My parents—and Becket’s, Rebecca’s and Delphine’s—had all been kind and warm to us, herd of feral children that we were that summer, but Auden’s father terrified me. It had only taken one barked warning from him when he caught me running down the Long Gallery to know that I never wanted to be in trouble with him ever again.

  So I stayed far away from the library, even though it called to me. Even though I felt its presence in the house like a flickering lamp—beckoning me, brightening the shadows, promising secrets.

  “They were so ferocious about us being in here,” Auden agrees, coming over to join me at the case. “Do you . . . do you know what they were working on?”

  He sounds so hopeful, and it’s a hope I know well because it’s mirrored inside me. All these years I’ve asked my father, straining my memory for anything I could have heard or seen, all for nothing.

  “My father would never tell me. What about your parents? Did they ever say anything to you about it?”

  Auden shakes his head. “And same with everyone else. Whatever they were working on, they abandoned it that summer and decided to take it to the grave. Literally, in the cases of some of them.”

  Disappointment makes hatch marks over my good mood like frost on a window.

  “All I remember is that they needed the library,” he says. “And they had books and things spread out all over the tables. And one night they went out to the maze”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say. “When?”

  “August first. Lammas. I remember because our cook made us little bread people, do you remember?”

  I have a murky recollection of holding a bread person in my hands, of being sullen that Delphine’s little bread girl was prettier than mine, but that’s it.

  “I was eating mine in my room that night when I saw them go into the maze. I stayed up for hours waiting for them to come back, and they didn’t return until after dawn . . .”

  “And you don’t know what they were doing?”

  “No idea. Maybe they went to the thorn chapel to get married. Like us.” Another crooked smile and my heart flips over.

  He shifts closer, ducking over a verdigris-covered figurine of a man with antlers. There’s only a few inches between my shoulder and his arm, and this close, I can smell traces of his scent. Something with citrus and pepper and pine . . . and lavender? I want to press my face against his neck and suck it in. I want to smell it as he’s pinning me to the floor . . .

  Engaged, Poe. Engaged. And you’re not stupid.

  I’m stupider than I give myself credit for, apparently, because that pepper and lavender smell is all I can think about. “Blenheim Bouquet,” I say. Randomly. Like a random asshole.

  “Pardon?” Auden asks, startled.

  “Blenheim Bouquet. That’s what you’re wearing, right?” I say, trying to fill in this awkward conversation crater I’ve just made. “Delphine’s father wore it. I remember that day St. Sebastian found it in their room when we were looking for spare change to go to the shops, and he broke it on the floor.”

  “Oh God, I’d forgotten,” Auden says, pressing a hand to his hair. “We tried for hours to make that room smell right again. And it didn’t matter because they’d immediately known what we’d done.”

  “And you confessed,” I add, just now remembering that part. “You confessed so St. Sebastian wouldn’t get into trouble.”

  “Well, it’s not like Delphine’s father was going to yell at me,” Auden replies with a charming dimple.

  I don’t think he knows that I also remember the bruise he had on his cheek after his own father got done with him. I move away to another case, pretending to be absorbed in the shallow dishes and bone knives inside. Auden follows me.

  “Proserpina,” he says quietly, and the sound of my full name is so lovely in his voice, I have to look up. “Why did you come here? Why did you come to Thornchapel?”

  Is he joking?

  “This is every librarian’s dream,” I answer quickly. This is the line I’ve been feeding everyone—my startled roommate, my former boss at the University of Kansas, my ex-girlfriend/Domme. It’s true, even if it’s not the entire truth about why I agreed to take the job. “You have an untouched library, and I could be the first person to learn its secrets. It’s like an untouched canvas to an artist, or a new dig for an archeologist. How could I resist?”

  He studies me, hazel eyes kaleidoscopic under those long, dark lashes. “But there must be something else,” he murmurs. “Something else to make you want to uproot your life and come all the way out here.”

  The trouble with being hopeful, with feeling like everything is possible, is that it can sometimes come at the cost of dignity, which is a trait I’m reluctant to sign away, even when I’m being forced to kneel with a gag in my mouth. The need for dignity is partly why I’m trying to resist the pull of Auden, not to mention the lure of the glossy group outside.

  If I tell him about the convivificat and all my secret hopes about my mother, does that make me less? Will Auden think I’m foolish or deluded? Will he look at me with pity?

  And does it even matter?

  He might know something about my mother or the note that can help. I’m here for her, or at least, I’m here about her, and even if I’d planned on waiting until longer than my first afternoon here to ask, there’s no point in being coy about it.

  I relent, and surrender my dignity, as hope so often demands.

  “Actually,” I say, reaching into my skirt pocket. “There was one other thing.”

  Chapter 4

  Auden takes the piece of paper from me and steps a little closer to the wall of windows, which sends light glowing over his hair and face, catching on his long lashes and along the sculpted cut of his jaw.

  “It . . . revives?” he asks, peering down at the paper. His brows pull together. “No, it w
akes.”

  I don’t bother asking how he can just whip out a random Latin translation, because everything about Auden screams boy who learned Latin in school. But I do register a tiny tick of disappointment at his genuine confusion; he’s never seen this before, which means he doesn’t have the answers I need.

  “It quickens,” I say, trying to sound like that’s a totally normal thing to be written on a piece of paper and mailed to me. “Or that’s what my friend in the Classics department told me at least.”

  Auden glances up at me, head tilted. “And you got this in the mail?”

  “Yes. It was mailed on my birthday.”

  “Happy belated birthday.”

  “Thank you. It was mailed from here.”

  His brows pull together even more, making a little crease between them that I’d like to lick. And then be punished for licking. “Mailed from Thornchapel? You’re not saying that one of us could have written this . . . ? I mean, I suppose we could have, in a technical sense, but why?”

  I’m already shaking my head. “It wasn’t one of you. At least, not one of you who wrote it. That’s my mother’s handwriting.”

  Auden’s lips come together and then part. “Poe.”

  “I know. I know.”

  He angles the paper in the weak sunlight, bending over it. “I can’t tell how old this paper is.”

  “It’s got a high cotton content. It wouldn’t show its age for at least another few decades.”

  He nods to himself, eyes still scanning the paper. “Meaning it could have been written the day it was sent or twenty years before.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You can tell it was underneath another paper she’d written on—there are indentations of other letters on here. S-e-c-r-a-t-i-o-n . . . ?”

  I’ve already been down this river of thought. “Either obsecration or desecration is my best guess.”

  “And then here’s an L and a C. Capitalized, it looks like. Underlined too.”

  “Short for limited liability company? Library of Congress? Lacuna Coil?”

  Auden’s lips twitch. “Lacuna Coil? Really?”

  “My point is that those letters could be anything. An abbreviation. A call number. A test to make sure her pen works.”

  Auden makes an mmm noise.

  “I have to ask, Auden. Does any of this seem familiar to you? Have you heard or seen anything about my mother recently?” I rush through it, hearing how desperate I sound. How naive.

  But when Auden looks up at me, there’s no pity in his eyes. If there were pity, I might have left. I might have cried.

  There’s only understanding. His own vulnerability shining through.

  “No,” he says softly. “I’m sorry.”

  My shoulders droop. “Maybe one of the others . . .” I trail off. I don’t really believe that. I’m not sure what I believe, what I hope right now, but it’s not that the others will know something.

  Auden hands the paper back to me, his eyes searching my face.

  “It’s what I expected,” I say hopelessly, feeling suddenly and painfully tired. I need to sleep again. “I didn’t expect to find her. Or for anyone to know anything. I just thought . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought that I’d come here and the note would suddenly make sense. Like I’d find a giant stone plinth engraved with this Latin word and she’d be buried there.”

  “Not knowing is the hardest,” Auden says.

  I remember his mother, and what she did to herself, and I think our losses are cousins to each other. Like me, he’ll never know what his mother thought while she bore down into the pit of her addiction, and there won’t be any answers or closure. Just a seeping wound that sometimes bleeds and sometimes doesn’t.

  I don’t know what to say, so I only nod and tuck the note back in my dress. To change the subject, I ask, “So you really don’t know how many books are in here?”

  Auden cups the back of his neck with a hand, looking like he wants to say more about mothers and Latin, but he’s too well-bred to push, I suppose. “Yes, that’s right. There was a Victorian lady of the house, Estamond Guest, who undertook a partial survey when she married into the family, but she didn’t get very far. Cremer says he heard a family legend that she found some kind of heretical tract and it shocked her pious sensibilities, but I think it’s more likely that she was too busy having piles and piles of Guest babies to catalog old books.”

  I wander over to one of the shelves opposite the fireplace and run my fingers along the spines. “Do you still have it? Estamond’s survey?”

  “Oh yes, no one ever throws anything away at Thornchapel. It’s actually at the top of that shelf there, the one right in front of you. Do you see?”

  I look up, and just as Auden said, there are two large books on the highest shelf—propped on top of the normal row of books. A big no-no, and I let out a disappointed huff at whoever did it. I slide that bookshelf’s ladder over to the middle and mount the first rung, flinching at the ominous wooden creak under my foot.

  Auden, ever the gentleman, sweeps over to steady the base of the ladder as I climb—and presumably to catch my fall if the old ladder collapses. “Is it really necessary for you to get them right now?” he asks pleasantly.

  “Yes.” I could explain about the additional weight and potential trapped damp of keeping the ledgers like this, or I could confess that I can’t even wait for the equipment to get delivered before I start assessing the library, but I’ve already got a hold of the ledgers and it’s taking all my concentration to lever them free and tuck them to my chest. They are mercifully dry, and my worries about damp are allayed.

  They’re bound in a cloth that’s faded to the color of dried blood, and when I crack open the top book, I see a flowery, scribbled signature.

  Estamond Guest. The m has an extra hump in it, like Estamond had dashed it out too fast to keep the letters neat.

  Feeling victorious for no real reason, I turn to smile down at the gentleman holding my ladder and find that his eyes are not on my face but on my ass, which at this angle is surely visible from under my skirt. Conflicting reactions blaze through me—embarrassment, anger, lust—and when he drags his eyes away from my bottom to meet my gaze, I realize that he has only one look on his face.

  Anguish.

  Utter, violent anguish.

  His beautiful mouth is tight at the corners but parted ever so slightly in the middle, and he’s breathing hard, hard enough that I can see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. His hands are gripping the ladder so hard that they’re blanched around the knuckles, and his eyes—

  I think I might be burning alive from those eyes. Burning alive like a saint tied to a stake.

  For a long minute, we do nothing but stare, and my body flames with awareness of him, with the want of him, but the moment collapses faster than I want it to and he pushes himself away from the ladder with much more force than necessary.

  “I trust—” he clears his throat, not looking at me. “I trust you’ll be able to make it down on your own. I need to step out for a moment. Excuse me.”

  And he’s moving to the door before I can say anything in response. Before I can even sputter a protest.

  Do I want to sputter a protest?

  No, no, of course not. Of course he should leave. He’s engaged and I’m not stupid, and there’s no world where he should have been looking at me like that regardless of those two things.

  The others push through the door just as Auden’s trying to leave, and Delphine gives him a playful smack on the arm.

  “The tea’s been ready forever! What was taking you so long?”

  To Auden’s credit, the question doesn’t fluster him. He merely drops a quick kiss on Delphine’s cheek and murmurs an excuse as he slides out of sight. Becket watches him go, holding the tea tray and frowning.

  “Everything all right?” Rebecca asks, looking between me on the ladder and the door.

  “Totally all right,” I lie. But it shouldn’t be a lie.
Or should it?

  I want to hit myself in the face with Estamond’s ledgers. This is exactly what I’d wanted to avoid when I came to Thornchapel. This exact situation.

  Becket sets down the tea things in the middle of the room, presumably to help me, but Rebecca is already on her way over. “Do you want to hand those to me?”

  “Yes, please,” I say gratefully, twisting enough to pass them down, and then I hear her suck in a breath. I crane my neck to see what she’s reacting to, but it’s not necessary. At that same instant, I feel her finger trace a line over the marks on my thigh.

  Oh, holy fuck. The marks.

  Rebecca’s face is thoughtful. “This looks like a cane.”

  I don’t answer. I can’t. I hadn’t planned on ever revealing this part of myself here, and while I’m not ashamed, I have no rehearsed lines and clear explanations to pull out of my brain. My brain is blank.

  “And a paddle too.”

  She pokes a bruise, and I gasp, nearly dropping the books.

  “Give those to me before you fall.”

  Disoriented and not a little panicked, I obey immediately, and this sends a small smirk curling at her mouth. “Well, well, well,” she says, taking the books. “Proserpina Markham is a little sub girl. Who would have guessed?”

  “I don’t—” I look over at Becket, who’s turned back to the tea and is currently pouring Delphine a cup. They can’t hear us. “I can’t—”

  “You don’t have to justify anything. Not to me,” she says. There’s a world of understanding in her deep umber gaze.

  “You too?” I whisper.

  “I’m the one who gives little submissive girls what they’re looking for. Stay there one moment.” She sets the books carefully on the closest table, and then angles her body so I can climb down the ladder without exposing my marks any further. Which is only half a relief because she still knows they’re there.