A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  “Saint and I read that she was very improper, what with her sexy statues and inviting poets to come get drunk at her house and all.”

  Rebecca laughs a little. “She sounds like someone we would like.”

  “She does.” I stop at a junction and try to orient myself, but it’s hopeless. There are too many little dead ends and spurs, too many turns to keep track of our direction. Rebecca picks a path for us and we keep going. Neither of us knows the way, but with each corner, Rebecca seems to ease more and more, as if the very challenge of the maze is relaxing, as if the difficulty of it reassures her somehow. She leads us closer and closer to the center, choosing paths with startling ease.

  I remember Auden telling me that Rebecca is a genius.

  “I also read that this is very, very old,” I say, after several long minutes of us crunching over the crushed gravel. “Estamond renovated the maze and put in the statue at the center, but there was a Tudor maze here first. And before that, maybe a labyrinth.”

  Rebecca is walking slightly ahead of me now, peeking around a corner and then doubling back to take the last turn we saw. “Labyrinths are not the same as mazes,” she says as we walk along her new route.

  “I know!” I say, wounded that she would think I didn’t know that. “It was interesting is all. The possibility that there’s been something in this spot for over a thousand years, maybe even with the center in the same place—”

  Rebecca stops right in the middle of the path and I almost run into the back of her.

  “With the center in the same place,” she echoes, staring straight ahead, as if she’s seeing something I can’t. “Ah. Of course. A labyrinth. Like a turf maze, maybe, or paved.”

  “Well, the book didn’t say what the labyrinth looked like, just that there was one—oh.” Rebecca’s pulled her iPad out and she’s started making notes for herself. “Has that helped? Did I help?”

  She looks up at me with one eyebrow arched high. “Given that I still have the entirety of the design and planning to do, and given that I’m still the one who had the idea to begin with, I’d say the help was limited.”

  “Pleeease?” I wheedle.

  She sighs at me bouncing on the balls of my feet, but there’s a distinct smile pulling at the edges of her mouth. “Okay, fine. You helped.”

  I beam and she rolls her eyes and mutters something like subbie, although I can’t hear for sure. But I don’t mind, either being a sub or purring under her praise. Who doesn’t like praise? Surely even Dominants do. And she’s smiling anyway.

  She and I decide to make it to the center before we head back, and when we step into the silent, hedge-lined enclosure, I feel the same dazzling air of mystery I did as a child. There’s something about the statue, Adonis and Aphrodite, this mortal man clutching his goddess, something tragic, erotic, timeless.

  Something hiding even deeper secrets underneath.

  “I want to go there again,” I say, kneeling near the fountain to see—ah, yes, it’s still there, still like I remember. A narrow notch only two feet wide between the fountain’s base and the statue’s plinth, disguised from almost every angle by the crescent shape of the fountain’s basin, which nearly wraps completely around the plinth itself. In the slow-brightening light, I can barely make out the steep steps that lead downward.

  “I’ve been once since we were kids,” Rebecca says, joining me by the fountain. “Five years ago. I was staying the weekend with Auden, and we went out there together. Just to see it.”

  “And?” I ask, facing her. I want her to tell me that it was magical, alive, filled with fairies, and maybe there was a conveniently dropped letter from my mother explaining why she left her child and her husband and if she’d ever come back.

  “It was lovely,” Rebecca says, “but it was wild too. The grass was so tall you could barely see where you stepped, and it was so still that the air itself felt thick. Like you could suspend things in it, like you could grab hold of it.”

  And then Rebecca—confident, left-brained Rebecca—shivers, the few braids she’s left out of her low bun dropping in front her face as she does.

  “It felt like it wanted something,” she says quietly, tucking the braids back. “Like it was waiting.”

  “Waiting?”

  She gives a quick nod, looking away, but her expression as she looks away isn’t one of sheepish admission. It’s determined. Watchful.

  “It was waiting for me to do something. I didn’t know what—I still don’t know what. But I feel like I’m about to find out.”

  Chapter 15

  The others leave for London, they come back. I play in the library the whole time, happy and sleepy and sadly still horny—but the last can’t be helped, so I take the edge off when I can, and try not to think too much about Auden and Saint when I do.

  I mostly fail.

  At night I dream more dreams of fire and pain and sex.

  I dream about a door that doesn’t exist.

  On a Friday afternoon, just after Auden and Delphine and Rebecca arrive in their usual formation of good looks and Keats references, and just before the clouds begin emptying their bellies of snow, Saint touches my arm in the library.

  I nearly jolt out of my chair.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say, my hand to my heart and trying to remember how to breathe again. And then I glare up at him. “What the hell?”

  Saint’s lips tip at the corners. “I thought surely you’d hear me come in. You must have been completely absorbed.” He nods toward the book I was reading.

  I have a moment—a Rip Van Winkle moment I’m very familiar with as a narcoleptic and also as an avid reader—when I realize a lot of time has passed. I’d carried this book over to an armchair and started skimming so I could give the highlights to Delphine, because I knew she’d be interested, and somehow that skimming turned into two or three obsessive hours. It’s dark now, the only light coming from the single lamp I’d turned on before I sat down, and snow has started dancing down outside.

  “It’s, um, a book about Imbolc.” And then I add, because I am aware that not everyone has fallen down the Thornchapel rabbit holes I have, “it’s an old seasonal holiday, on the same day as—”

  “—St. Brigid’s Day, yeah,” Saint says. “She was a goddess before the Church turned her into a saint, you know. So Imbolc and St. Brigid’s Day are basically two sides of the same coin. Pagan and Catholic, old and new.”

  “New?” I ask, dipping my eyes to the dusty book in my hands.

  “Fine. ‘Less old.’ There’s really a whole book about this?”

  “Even better,” I reply, holding it up with my finger still on the page I was reading. “It’s about Imbolc in Thorncombe specifically. Imbolc and the other seasonal festivals; the residents here had their own particular ways of celebrating them, I guess.”

  “It’s not very long,” Saint observes, and he’s right, it’s actually a very slender volume, compiled by a local clergyman from a nearby parish with admirable directness and efficiency.

  “Yes, but get this—he wrote this in the 1860s. After a certain someone gave him use of her library . . .”

  Saint raises his eyebrows. “Estamond?”

  “Yes!” I say, getting excited all over again. “Apparently he’d petitioned Randolph Guest before, but Randolph couldn’t ever be bothered to answer his letters. But after Estamond became lady of the house, she allowed him use of the library and grounds to put together his history. Which is interesting, because it’s a bit scathing for all that. I get the sense that he probably would have disapproved of Estamond’s behavior, given how much he fusses about the ‘heathen practices’ and ‘licentious, immoral antics’ in Thorncombe.”

  Saint extends a hand, and I reluctantly pass him the book, after noting my page number, of course. He flips through it, casually at first, but with more and more interest as he goes on.

  “You’ll notice,” I say, getting to my knees on the seat of the chair so I can lean over the book too, �
��that for someone who’s very insistent that all of this is evil and pagan, the clergyman sure does spend a lot of time detailing and describing said pagan acts.”

  “He was probably fascinated despite himself,” Saint says as he turns a page and reads some more. “And then that fascination made him ashamed. People like that aren’t motivated out of holiness, but guilt.”

  “You think our clergyman felt guilty?”

  Saint checks the cover of the book before going back to the page he was reading. “Old Paris Dartham of Blackhope Parish? Oh yes. He wouldn’t rail so much about it and then spend paragraphs imagining every single detail.”

  Saint’s handing the book back to me when I hear footsteps and look up in time to see Auden stopping in the doorway of the library. He’s staring at Saint. And me.

  And I realize how intimate the scene looks: me up on my knees like an eager schoolgirl, my head bent close to Saint’s as we murmur back and forth.

  “St. Sebastian,” Auden says.

  That’s all he says. That seems like all he can say, judging from the shock on his face.

  A muscle jumps in Saint’s jaw as he straightens up. “Auden.”

  “I’d ask what you’re doing here, but I see you’re visiting Poe,” Auden finally manages. “And I’m clearly interrupting. Forgive me, I’ll come back later.” He moves to leave and I scramble out of the chair to stop him.

  “Auden, wait.”

  He stops, shifts ever so slightly. He won’t look at us, and I’m suddenly unsure which one of us it is he can’t stand to see. I recall the torment in his face when he looked down at us pinned to the ground underneath him that first day, and I almost want to see it again. Convince myself that it was real, that I didn’t conjure it up in some dark, airless dream.

  “What did you want?” I ask softly. “When you came in here?”

  “I wanted to—” he breaks off and runs his fingers through his hair in that way he does when he’s upset. “It wasn’t important.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, or if I should say anything at all, or if I can say anything, because my heart has started beating very, very fast. God, I hope Saint can’t tell. This is awful, being strung between the two of them like this, and it’s even worse because one man is in love with someone else and the other man won’t have me.

  I’d be better off longing for the priest.

  Saint scuffs a foot against the floor. I know he’s about to go, I know he’s about to dodge away, and I hate it, I hate that we can’t be like we were as children—together. Despite our fights and scrapes and petty competitions, together was the default, it was the understood mechanism of how we were. We could fight and complain all we wanted, but at the beginning of each new day, we came together once again.

  There are lots of good reasons why adults don’t do that. Pain and boundaries and new lives, but God—just for us, just for this thorny little family of ours, I wish we could be more like the children we were.

  “Auden, Abby says dinner will be ready in half an hour, and Becket’s just called, he’s almost here and he says the roads are bad already so he might have to stay the night . . .” Rebecca comes around the corner and stops at our silent tableau. She assesses Auden, and then assesses Saint and me. “So Saint’s joining us for dinner then?”

  “No!” Saint and Auden blurt at the same time—and then glower at each other for having the audacity to say the same word aloud.

  Rebecca gives them both an impatient look. “He’s here. Dinner is soon. Roads are bad.” She relays all this like she’s writing an algebra formula on a board, the solution going unspoken because it’s just so obvious. “I’ll tell Abby that we’ll have another at the table, excuse me.” And she goes back out.

  And so it’s decided. Saint’s staying for dinner.

  There’s a bunch of London talk during the meal—Auden is working on a large project that involves renovating a school and its attached church, and Rebecca and Becket have lots of opinions. Delphine is mostly on her phone, and Saint is his usual wordless-around-Auden presence, although I notice he has more than his customary single drink with dinner, as if he’s not unaffected by what happened between all of us in the library earlier. I treat myself to an extra drink too, as a reward for surviving the barbed coil of tension circling the room.

  It’s a relief to move on to drinks in the library, and when we get there, I finally spill the good news to Delphine while the others continue talking architecture and Sir James Frazer gnaws loudly on a rubber toy near the fire.

  “I think I found an Imbolc ceremony for us to do,” I tell her.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Really? Really really?”

  “Really really.”

  “Oh God, tell me everything. Like everything right now.”

  I trot over to find the clergyman’s book, and we sit together on the sofa, the one facing the big windows so we can see the snow swirling and whirling against the glass. We hold the book between us, and Saint kneels behind the sofa with his arms crossed along the back so he can join in. His extra drink seems to have relaxed him somewhat, because he’s almost smiling when he joins us, and when his hand brushes my shoulder accidentally, he doesn’t jerk it back like he normally does. In fact, he leaves it there, warm and insistent, and I have to force myself to breathe normally, to think about ancient pagan ceremonies and not St. Sebastian’s hand.

  “So a Victorian clergyman came into the Thornchapel library,” I start, “and apparently found some old pamphlets, books, and journals that mention the different ceremonies they used to hold at the chapel. And while he rants about the ‘unfaithful flock’ occasionally, he does give a lot of the details he uncovered . . .”

  Delphine takes the book from me, her eyes bright and her lush mouth open like it gets when she’s excited. She’s got these slightly-too-big front teeth and an upper lip that naturally curves up in a plump arch, meaning its only when she’s thinking about it that she can keep her mouth closed, and times like now, when she’s utterly wrapped up in something else, her lips are enticingly parted.

  It’s the kind of mouth that teenage boys and horny librarians dream about, and between that and Saint’s hand still casually against my shoulder, I think I might go up in flames.

  I turn the pages for her until we get to the section on Imbolc, trying to focus. “Here he says that after the villagers blessed the well of St. Brigid, they went by lanterns and torches to the chapel ruins. That’s where the lord and lady of Thornchapel waited—or sometimes just the lord? Sometimes Dartham says ‘lords’ or ‘ladies’ plural, so I don’t know. It sounds like the main thing was that there was some kind of representation from the manor, whether it was more than one person or not.”

  Delphine nibbles on her lip as she traces her fingers along the page, reading as I talk. “This sounds familiar from the other books. What happened next?”

  I tuck my legs underneath me as I keep going, and the movement means St. Sebastian has to drop his hand—until I get settled again and he puts it back.

  On purpose.

  I’m trying to be annoyed, I really am, because he’s the one who won’t have me, who won’t kiss me again, and yet it’s impossible to be annoyed with him touching me like this. Maybe it’s supposed to be friendly, brotherly even, to cup my shoulder as he bends his head close to mine and reads, but it doesn’t feel brotherly in the least. It feels probing, possessive, like he can’t stop himself from doing it—and oh, that shouldn’t be so sexy, but it is. Like I’m watching his good intentions crumble to dust and they’re crumbling because of me.

  “The villagers picked a maiden every year to be St. Brigid,” I manage to say over the bratty, needy pulse deep in my clit. “She was the one who actually blessed the well, and she was the one who led the procession to the ruins. When she got there, she would promise to keep the fires burning and the waters clean. She would bring the lambs and the new shoots out of the earth. She would—” I find the passage again so I don’t misquote it “—‘ble
ss the village and be its blessing in turn. And then the maiden would light the fire, and there at the altar be made a bride by thorns.’”

  “How romantic,” Delphine sighs happily.

  “How cold,” Saint says pragmatically. His thumb makes the slightest brush against my shoulder, a tiny arcing rub that sparks across my skin, even through my thick sweater. “February? At night? Outdoors?”

  Delphine scowls at him. “That’s what the fire is for. You don’t have any imagination, do you?”

  “I think I have too much,” he mutters, and she waves him away, bored with his practicality. I’m not bored with anything because the only thing that matters is Saint’s thumb doing the thing again, which it does. One slow arc, as if daring me to stop him.

  “Is there anything else?” she asks.

  Fuck, I don’t know, I want to say. Can’t you see this fucking thumb doing a fucking thing on my shoulder?!

  Oh my God, I have to get it together. I’ve been clamped and flogged in front of hordes of people and I’m losing it over a goddamn thumb? From a boy who’s made it clear we can’t be anything together?

  I try to ignore his touch, don’t succeed, and then force myself to answer anyway. I scan the page really fast to make sure I’ve covered everything. “Just that after she’s ‘made a bride by thorns,’ whatever that means, she’s given cakes and wine, and then the entire village can share them. Oh, and the same maiden is also the May Queen on May Day.”

  Delphine claps her hands together. “Oh! We should do a May Day party too!”

  Her enthusiasm has caught the attention of the rest of the room, and as always, my gaze goes first to Auden, who’s staring at Saint’s thumb on my shoulder like he wants to bite it off.

  “What should we do on May Day?” Becket asks, curious and seemingly oblivious to the drama playing out on my shoulder. The drama between Saint’s mixed signals and my growing need to pounce on him and kiss the sullen brood right off his mouth.