A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(4)

He dreamed of Proserpina the most often and the most vividly. They met at the altar in his dreams and they rambled around Thornchapel’s forests and broken stone circles and hidden dolmens. They kissed too, and they held hands, and as he got older, the dreams grew both darker and richer, the place where he could be every bleak and tender thing he wanted to be. Sometimes it was him and St. Sebastian, sometimes it was him and Proserpina, and sometimes it was all six of them, doing things that made him blush the next time he’d see Delphine and Rebecca in real life.

He dreamed and he burned.

Thornchapel waited.

And in a clearing in the woods, in a church ruined by thorns and time, something stirred.

Something called all six of them by name.





Chapter 1





Twelve years later


Everything is possible.

Thornchapel waits at the end of my journey, and everything is possible.

My cab wends west on an asphalt ribbon surrounded by stretches of snow-dusted moor. Granite tors frown down; the occasional clump of sheep gnaws on frostbitten grass. It’s all white and brown and dead and cold, and it’s so different from how I feel, from the things I normally crave—which are green and restless and alive—that I’m fascinated by it. I’m in love with it.

I already want more of it.

I look down at the paper I pulled from my coat pocket after the initial small talk with the driver faded away. The paper hasn’t changed since it arrived in my apartment’s mailbox last week—the day before I accepted a job offer I would’ve never been able to refuse—but I can’t stop staring at it. Like if only I look hard enough, it’ll make sense.

But nothing has made sense for the last twelve years of my life. The world cracked open the day I married two boys at Thornchapel’s altar . . . or maybe it cracked open before that, on the day my parents brought me to Thornchapel in the first place.

Certainly it was already cracked open by the time my mother disappeared from my life forever.

The envelope was postmarked December 21st—the date of my twenty-second birthday—and it was stamped by the Exeter Mail Centre, although the postcode was for Thornchapel, that ancient house tucked deep into a wooded Dartmoor valley. It had been gently battered from its trip over the sea, creased as the uncaring mailman shoved it in the narrow rectangle of my shared mailbox. Not that it mattered—the envelope only contained a single paper, and on that paper, a single word.

Convivificat.

It’s Latin, and I don’t speak Latin, but the benefit of being a librarian at a university is that I know many people who do. Within an hour of firing off an email, I had a translation.

It quickens.

It quickens.

I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t.

I mean, I know what the word quicken conveys in the dictionary sense; I whispered its synonyms as I went about my business that evening, as if that would help me understand.

It stirs, it awakens, it comes to life . . .

But what was stirring? What was coming to life?

And that isn’t even the real mystery of the note, that isn’t even the real reason I said yes when Auden Guest’s lawyer called the next day and offered me a job. No, the real reason I agreed to leave my career and friends and country was because of the composition of the note itself.

The handwriting—the sharp C, the narrow vs, the impatient but precise slice of every letter—it belongs to Adelina Kernstow Markham. A woman who’s been missing for twelve years.

My mother.





Down a steep wind of road, the village of Thorncombe opens into a disordered but still postcard-worthy cluster of thatched houses, pubs, and the stone St. Brigid’s-on-the-Moor with its massive bell tower at the front. There’s a small grocery store, a few restaurants, and a public library, and then at the edge of the village, a clutch of tired-looking houses all in various stages of molting their render and growing weeds in their driveways. Something about those houses tugs at a long-discarded memory, but I can’t dredge it up before we’re past them and piercing through ever-thickening woods, heading deeper into the valley toward our destination.

And then we are over the narrow stone bridge and on the long, tree-pressed drive that leads to the house. When I came here as a child, arriving in the full flush of July green, the house was hidden by the leafy crowns of the trees, an edifice you could only take in entirely once you were standing right in front of it—or if you were at the back of the house, where the gardens seemed to stretch into infinity.

But today, the bare winter trees do nothing to hide the house. Not the crenellated teeth of its fortified heart, nor the uncountable windows glittering from the Jacobean extension to the west. I can see the entire imposing sprawl of it as we approach—clustered chimneys and disordered gables, and the castle-worthy front doors and smaller side doors, and the vast spread of dead rose bushes clinging everywhere to the house itself, promising blooms and bees in the summer.

This is Auden’s house.

It’s the thought I haven’t let myself think, the dream I won’t let myself dream. The job and the money and all the arrangements were done through his lawyer; I haven’t spoken once to Auden himself. For all I know, I won’t see him here at all. Not ever.

Which is good, that’s a good thing. Because I don’t care what he does or where he is, and he’s not the reason I’m here.