Page 50 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
“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.’”
