Page 49 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
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.”
