A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(14)

It should be grim, this room, it should be forbidding. The stark white of the ceiling and the near-black of the dark, dark wood should make it somber and churchlike, the cool light pouring in from between the stark trees outside should make it lonesome and cold.

But by some kind of magic, none of that is true. Maybe it’s the variegated strata of books, or maybe it’s that I feel at home in rooms like this anyway. Maybe it’s because it’s Thornchapel and I love Thornchapel, and when I think about it, the whole house is like this. Three stories of cold stone and glass should in no way feel as inviting and as enchanting as they do, and yet I feel utterly invited. Utterly enchanted.

I give a very long, very happy sigh.

“Do you like it?” Auden asks quietly.

I realize I’ve been turning in wondering circles for the last God-knows-how-many minutes, and I feel like an idiot—until I see Auden’s face. He must have been watching me go all dreamy and hazy over his library, but he’s not looking at me like I’m an idiot at all.

He’s looking at me like I’ve just told him a secret.

“This is the best place in the world,” I declare, and he laughs.

“We need to take you more places then,” he says, but he’s wrong. I wouldn’t be able to burrow into other places, I wouldn’t have the promise of spending days and days rifling through all this arcana, of touching each and every forgotten page. It’s the best place in the world because it will belong to me—not in a legal sense, of course, but in the caretaking sense, in the spiritual sense.

“Did you remember it much?” he asks as I drift over to one of the glass cases to examine the curios. “From that summer?”

“Barely,” I admit, running my fingers along the glass. It’s dusty, as if the room hasn’t been cleaned in a while, even though the fireplace area looks well used. I have a sudden image of Auden and the others camping in this house like children, eating out of cans and making tents out of blankets. “The adults always chased us off, remember?”

My only memory had been of a cavernous space filled with books, of temptation incarnate for a girl like me—but it was a temptation I never satisfied. My parents—and Becket’s, Rebecca’s and Delphine’s—had all been kind and warm to us, herd of feral children that we were that summer, but Auden’s father terrified me. It had only taken one barked warning from him when he caught me running down the Long Gallery to know that I never wanted to be in trouble with him ever again.

So I stayed far away from the library, even though it called to me. Even though I felt its presence in the house like a flickering lamp—beckoning me, brightening the shadows, promising secrets.

“They were so ferocious about us being in here,” Auden agrees, coming over to join me at the case. “Do you . . . do you know what they were working on?”

He sounds so hopeful, and it’s a hope I know well because it’s mirrored inside me. All these years I’ve asked my father, straining my memory for anything I could have heard or seen, all for nothing.

“My father would never tell me. What about your parents? Did they ever say anything to you about it?”

Auden shakes his head. “And same with everyone else. Whatever they were working on, they abandoned it that summer and decided to take it to the grave. Literally, in the cases of some of them.”

Disappointment makes hatch marks over my good mood like frost on a window.

“All I remember is that they needed the library,” he says. “And they had books and things spread out all over the tables. And one night they went out to the maze”

“I didn’t know that,” I say. “When?”

“August first. Lammas. I remember because our cook made us little bread people, do you remember?”

I have a murky recollection of holding a bread person in my hands, of being sullen that Delphine’s little bread girl was prettier than mine, but that’s it.

“I was eating mine in my room that night when I saw them go into the maze. I stayed up for hours waiting for them to come back, and they didn’t return until after dawn . . .”

“And you don’t know what they were doing?”

“No idea. Maybe they went to the thorn chapel to get married. Like us.” Another crooked smile and my heart flips over.

He shifts closer, ducking over a verdigris-covered figurine of a man with antlers. There’s only a few inches between my shoulder and his arm, and this close, I can smell traces of his scent. Something with citrus and pepper and pine . . . and lavender? I want to press my face against his neck and suck it in. I want to smell it as he’s pinning me to the floor . . .

Engaged, Poe. Engaged. And you’re not stupid.

I’m stupider than I give myself credit for, apparently, because that pepper and lavender smell is all I can think about. “Blenheim Bouquet,” I say. Randomly. Like a random asshole.

“Pardon?” Auden asks, startled.

“Blenheim Bouquet. That’s what you’re wearing, right?” I say, trying to fill in this awkward conversation crater I’ve just made. “Delphine’s father wore it. I remember that day St. Sebastian found it in their room when we were looking for spare change to go to the shops, and he broke it on the floor.”

“Oh God, I’d forgotten,” Auden says, pressing a hand to his hair. “We tried for hours to make that room smell right again. And it didn’t matter because they’d immediately known what we’d done.”