A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(45)

“Good night, Delphine.”

It doesn’t take me long to get ready for bed, and it’s not nearly long enough for my mind to settle around everything that happened tonight. The spanking and the kisses—Auden’s and Rebecca’s and St. Sebastian’s—and the reason why the people in Thorncombe look at me like they’ve been waiting for me to get here.

Some kind of chosen bride for the lord of the manor . . .

Lord of the manor . . . “the lord of Thornchapel,” as those old books so grandiosely put it. I think of the illustration in the book with the women and the lanterns, and the man at the altar with the torc around his neck. I think about my mother holding the same torc, trying to give it to Ralph Guest.

It stirs, was what that strange note said. It quickens.

Or as Auden translated it—it revives. It reawakens. As if from sleep, as if from death. I fall asleep thinking of that one word.

Convivificat.





Chapter 14





The nights go like this: I fall asleep in a fit of keening loneliness and tumble straight into the same vivid, grasping dreams of the thorn chapel. I wake up, ready to scream or ready to come or both, never able to remember much about why the dream made me that way. Only that there were thorns and hands on my body and Auden silhouetted in shadow in front of a door I’ve only ever seen in my mind.

The days go like this: I catalog, I scan, I scan some more, and then I find Saint or Becket to help me pass the time. When they’re in from London, Auden and Rebecca are busy with the ongoing construction and destruction of the house and grounds, and I use my lunch hour to take restless, dream-filled naps in my room, so aside from the occasional glimpse of Auden’s shoulders bent over his office desk when I walk past, we don’t see each other until the evening hours.

On Sunday mornings, we go to Mass at Becket’s church—all of us except for Rebecca, who stays at the house and works instead. Once, we saw St. Sebastian scowling and pouting in the very back pew, but only once. Becket tells me Saint usually only comes to the church at night, alone, to continue his ongoing argument with God, and hardly ever comes to Mass. I save a spot next to me in our pew anyway.

Just in case.

While I catalog, Delphine wanders into the library at intervals to chatter or just to sit on one of the tables while she works on her phone, and gradually I begin to see the amount of time it takes for her to keep up her job as an influencer. There’s not only her content to produce and plan out, but emails and phone calls and an unceasing rain of comments and DMs that she answers to boost engagement.

When we do talk, it’s usually more questions about kink or speculating about Thornchapel’s old rituals.

Becket joins us often. Saint stays away when the others are in.

None of us talk about the kissing, there’s no more chosen bride talk from St. Sebastian, and if Auden and I have trouble making eye contact or being alone together in the same room, no one seems to notice, which is for the best. No more kisses for me, unless they come from Rebecca, but she seems preoccupied after the game, working at every spare moment, even when we’re all curled up with drinks by the fire, so I don’t ask her for a repeat session.

“Auden’s asked her to build a new maze,” Becket explains to me one day after they’ve gone back to London. “And I think it’s not coming easily.”

“I wish they’d leave it alone,” I sigh, looking out the large windows at the south end of the hall. I can only just make out the leading edge of the maze before it recedes into the mist.

Becket makes a noise of agreement. “Me too.”

But we both know that Auden’s drive to reshape Thornchapel is driven by forces deeper than our shared nostalgia, and he’s determined beyond measure to carve it up beyond recognition, as if by carving it up, he can excise his childhood from the landscape. The very fact that we all have memories of the maze would be more proof to him that it needs to be peeled off the face of the earth.

“I don’t know what it would take to convince him to keep it,” I say. “You’d think he’d direct more of this animosity toward the house itself, because surely that’s where he remembers his father the most?”

Becket follows my stare to the mist-veiled maze, and we just stare at it for a few minutes. “He just has to see how it matters,” Becket says finally. “He has to understand it. Thornchapel, I mean.”

I look at Becket now, questioning. “You think he doesn’t understand his own house?”

“No,” the priest says, returning my look with a sad smile. “I don’t think he does.”





“You have to stop doing that,” I scold St. Sebastian as he sets another armload of books down on the long table. “You need to relax.”

Saint gives me a very small, very reluctant tip of his lips—which I’ve learned is the closest thing to a real smile I can coax out of him. “I actually like doing this,” he says, sitting down and opening up the first book. With a piece of paper and a pencil, he starts scratching down some of the easy-to-find information I’ll need to build the title’s metadata entry. “There’s something satisfying about it. Also it feels weird to sit here and watch you work.”

“Sorry,” I say, my attention back on the computer I use as a cataloging workstation. “I’m trying to do at least a shelf a day. There are so many books.”