Page 54 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
Auden laughs a little. “It is. The view is amazing, but I don’t think anyone could ever accuse my Victorian ancestors of restraint.”
I step over to the north-facing windows, peering out against the snow. The lights on the front of the house illuminate the flakes from underneath, showing exactly how thick and fast they’re falling. I can’t even make out the orange glow of Thorncombe less than a mile off.
“Anyway, I didn’t bring you up here to make you look at the Gothic architecture,” Auden says. “I wanted to show you this.”
When I turn back, he’s kneeling in front of a trunk that’s been shoved against the wall—in fact, there’s rather a lot of stuff that’s been shoved against the wall here, like this tower room has been more like an attic than an observatory. There’s more than the one trunk, and a few battered cardboard boxes, and even a tricycle for a very small child. A small child in the 1950s, one would guess, given the amount of dust clinging to it.
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.”
