Page 71 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
“I remember,” he says tiredly. “I just didn’t want to tell you.”
“Don’t I have a right to know?”
“Don’t I have a right to keep you safe?”
I kick off my blankets and stand up, grumpy. “Dad.”
Somewhere on the other end, there’s the sound of a bottle clinking into a glass. “I know, I know. But talking about your mom’s family meant talking about your mom—”
He breaks off, and my heart twists. I can’t forget that he’s been hurt too, that his life ended the same day mine did.
He takes an audible drink, and I pace up and down the length of my bed twice. Then he says, “You’re right. Your mother was a Kernstow.”
“From here?”
“From the far side of the Thorne Valley. North of Thorncombe.” When he speaks again, his voice is less wobbly, more certain, as if relaying the bare facts makes speaking easier. “Can you guess which Kernstow alienated her family and beloved twin brother in the 1860s by marrying the wrong man?”
I have a guess. “Estamond?”
“Estamond.” A hiccup. “She married a Guest.”
I stop pacing, thinking about Estamond and her happy, fruitful marriage. About Ralph Guest and how much he wanted me to marry Auden. Kernstows and Guests, now and then.
“Was that a problem?”
“The Kernstows were forbidden to marry the Guests from time out of mind,” Dad says. “That was the story your mother found. So when Estamond married into the Guest family, it caused a major rift, and led to her twin brother selling the Kernstow farmstead and moving to America with his son after their parents died. He never saw his sister again, or so the legend goes.”
“I see,” I say, going over to the window again. The sky has grayed over, silvering the air with rain.
“It should be a boring story,” he says. There’s a tired sort of irritation to his voice now. “There should be nothing to it. My ancestors left Yorkshire in 1901 and came to America, and there’s no mythos around it. It shouldn’t have mattered that your mother’s family came from near Thornchapel, it
shouldn’t have made a difference to anyone or anything.”
“But it did?” I ask breathlessly, sensing I’m finally about to learn something about my mother, anything; even the tiniest ancestral morsel that might help me understand why she came here. Why she came back.
“It made a difference to Ralph,” Dad says. “He would have married her if she would have consented. Well, and if I would have given her up, which never would have happened.”
“I don’t understand,” I say slowly, trying to fit the pieces together. “He was in love with her? Did she love him back?”
Dad exhales. “I keep forgetting that there’s so much you don’t know.”
But that’s your fault! I want to say, but I hold my tongue. I want answers more than I want to punish my father for not giving them to me sooner.
“I think Ralph did love her,” Dad says after a minute. “Or at least he thought he did. He was certainly obsessed with her, and obsession can often feel like love, especially when pain is involved. Or power.”
“Are you saying they had an affair?” I ask, knowing it’s a tactless question, but barely caring. If she and Ralph were having an affair, then the explanation for why she went back is obvious, and I can begin to let go of her disappearance. I can stop attributing to Thornchapel all the sinister and beautiful qualities that I’d attribute to a temple or a god-garden or a cemetery. I can stop believing it’s suffused with high, holy magic, and I can stop imagining that the high, holy magic chooses people for itself and pulls them inexorably back into its rustling, sun-dappled heart.
“They didn’t have an affair in the sense that you’re thinking of it,” Dad answers vaguely.
“Then they did have an affair in some other sense?”
“I can’t talk about this with you.”
I make a frustrated noise. “Why not? She’s gone, Ralph’s dead, what difference does it make now?”
“Exactly. And what difference can it make now?”
“It makes a difference to me,” I tell him. “I want to know why she came back here. And I deserve to know. And I deserve any pieces of her that are left, because she took herself away from me, because she left me nothing but doubt, and I’m scared of living with that doubt inside me for the rest of my life. I’m scared it will spread to everything, that it will cover over my heart like mold, and then that mold will spread and spread and spread, and everything that’s fresh and bloody and alive in me will wither and decay until there’s nothing left. No pieces of her or me. Nothing.”
