Page 97 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
If there had been any earlier doubt that he’d remain unmoved during the ceremony, if there had been lingering mental distance between him and these old rituals—well, it’s all obliterated now. He feels different, unwoven or unmade, like God has unknotted the bindings of his soul and let it sprawl everywhere like a mess of roots and branches and vines. He’s felt this loose and grasping before, but never this much, never this wildly, and the zeal has never consumed him this deeply for so many hours at a time.
All he wants is to kneel in front of the chapel’s altar and cry. With gratitude and wonder and sheer awe at the hand of God in his life—a hand that can reach him even through fire and sex and cakes and ale.
But when they get to the thorn chapel and Auden begins hunting down their things by the light of his phone, Becket doesn’t go in front of the altar. Instead he walks behind it to examine the tree.
It has fallen some ways—the stump was a good ten feet outside the chapel wall, and is now a broken, splintered mess from where the trunk has cracked away and fallen—and the force of the fall was enough to drive it deep into the grass hump that served as their altar.
He tells his parishioners not to assign meaning to events like this, not to confuse coincidences with omens, but he can’t take his own advice. This feels like an omen to him.
He’s just not sure if it’s good or bad.
I know what you did.
Troubling memories stir to the surface of his mind, and Becket takes a step away from the altar and the tree. He looks away, he tries to think of earlier tonight, of Delphine and Poe gilded into holy figures by the light of the fire, he tries to think of St. Brigid and candles and cookies and the dog and Auden moving through the ruins like a methodical ghost doomed to pick up wet blankets—he tries, he tries, he tries.
I know what you did.
It was his own voice that had said that. Not now, but six years ago.
Here in this very place.
I know what you did.
He closes his eyes, but it only brings the memory closer to the fore, only shows him the ruins as they were that summer—lush and green and rippling with magic. He’d come to them on his own, rented a car and driven away from his grandmother’s house in Cornwall, where he’d been staying for the summer.
He’d parked in the village and picked his way over the public footpaths ringing the valley until he’d managed to sight the house, and using the house and the river as reference points, had tramped his way through the wilderness to the thorn chapel.
For a long few hours, he’d been alone with God, his thoughts and feelings bent wholly on the contemplation of the divine and what it wanted from him.
And then he was no longer alone. He’d known it from the prickle along the backs of his arms and his neck, he’d known it from the way the breeze changed, as if it was trying to tell Becket the truth about the intruder.
Bad.
Wrong.
The intruder had been none o
ther than Ralph Guest, Auden’s father. He’d stridden into the clearing with his head down and expensive flowers clutched in his fist, and so he hadn’t seen Becket until they were inside the walls together.
“You’re not allowed here,” Ralph said once he noticed Becket, glaring at him with that haughty, dangerous cool that only a Guest could muster.
“You don’t recognize me?” Becket asked. It had been six years, after all, since he’d been here last, so he shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did confuse him a little. How could he not be indelibly burned into the memories of everyone here when they were all burned into his?
Ralph’s mouth had screwed up into an angry, little sneer. “Of course I recognize you.”
Bad, the thorn chapel seemed to whisper around Becket. Wrong.
“Why do you have flowers?” Becket asked him then, but he already knew why.
He already knew where Ralph would lay them down too.
Ralph’s eyes had narrowed then. “Don’t. Test. Me,” he’d hissed. “I could still call the police. It’s only for the sake of your father that I won’t.”
The hand clutching the flowers had been shaking though.
Ralph Guest was afraid. And Becket knew why.
“I know what you did,” he told the older man. “I know what you did here.”
