A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(54)

“I want to show you something,” he says, pulling me away from the window. “In the south tower.”

I follow him, but I do tug my hand free, feeling strange about holding hands with him and not wanting Delphine to get the wrong idea as we go past the group by the fire. I needn’t have worried though; they’re so absorbed with the ledgers that they don’t notice us leaving the library at all.

Snow buffets the windows of the corridor leading back to the hall, gusting against the newly repaired windowpane and piling atop the sills. We take another corridor to the south wing, passing more windows looking onto a paved courtyard with a single bench and empty fountain, and then into the locus of the renovation mayhem, stepping over wood planks and spools of wire and random piles of tarp and scrap. We go up the stairs to the first floor, where the renovated bedrooms are mostly finished and awaiting final coats of paint, and then up another floor to the former servants’ quarters, where Auden’s studio will be.

And then the last flight takes us up into the tower, which is a squarish facsimile of a medieval tower, but with the telltale faux-Gothic trappings of an enthusiastic Victorian builder. There are windows overlooking every direction—the forest to the north, east, and west, the majestic stretch of lawn and river valley to the south, the snow-hummocked maze and walled garden to the southwest and southeast respectively. The middles of the windows are inset with stained-glass roses and thorns twining in curlicues from windowpane to windowpane, and the tops of the windows are capped with stone quatrefoils.

“It’s very fanciful,” I say politely.

Auden laughs a little. “It is. The view is amazing, but I don’t think anyone could ever accuse my Victorian ancestors of restraint.”

I step over to the north-facing windows, peering out against the snow. The lights on the front of the house illuminate the flakes from underneath, showing exactly how thick and fast they’re falling. I can’t even make out the orange glow of Thorncombe less than a mile off.

“Anyway, I didn’t bring you up here to make you look at the Gothic architecture,” Auden says. “I wanted to show you this.”

When I turn back, he’s kneeling in front of a trunk that’s been shoved against the wall—in fact, there’s rather a lot of stuff that’s been shoved against the wall here, like this tower room has been more like an attic than an observatory. There’s more than the one trunk, and a few battered cardboard boxes, and even a tricycle for a very small child. A small child in the 1950s, one would guess, given the amount of dust clinging to it.

Auden stands up, holding a framed painting in one hand while he turns on his phone flashlight with the other. The painting is only a foot square—nothing like the massive ones still hanging in the Long Gallery—and the frame is almost simple, just some polished, beveled wood. Nothing ornately gilt or carved. But what’s most remarkable about the painting is the image itself, of the young woman it depicts.

She stands alone in the middle of the chapel ruins, holding a lantern aloft while a white gown billows around her bare feet. Her long, dark hair is unbound and tangling over itself in the wind as she looks back over her shoulder to the painter. She’s nearly as pale as her gown, her cheekbones high and wide, her full mouth parted ever so slightly, as if she’s startled. Her eyes have been painted so green that they nearly glow from the canvas, like a cat’s.

The distinctive arc of the golden torc dangles from the hand not holding the lantern.

I should be focused on that, I should be consumed with that little detail because that torc seems to be everywhere—but I’m not, I’m back to staring at her face, struggling to believe what I’m seeing.

“Uncanny, isn’t it?” Auden asks softly, and I don’t have to look to know he’s gazing intently at my face, at the face that so closely resembles the painted one in his hands. “You could be sisters. Mother and daughter.”

“Who is she?” I whisper, only barely stopping myself from touching the canvas.

“This is Estamond, your Victorian party girl and amateur librarian. Her husband Randolph seems to have had a particular fondness for this painting—after her death, he kept it in the master bedroom. I heard my grandfather say once that Randolph even traveled with it, although that might just be family gossip.”

I can’t stop staring at her, this Victorian doppelg?nger of mine, Estamond Kernstow Guest.

Kernstow, I remember. Your mother was a Kernstow.

Can it be a coincidence? Can it really? How many things are going to happen around my mother and Thornchapel before I stop dismissing them as mere accidents of fate?

I wish my father would text me back about my mother’s family. My grandparents died long before I knew them, and unlike many other librarians, I never entered the cult of genealogy research. Partly because it held no charm for me, and partly because I couldn’t bear to fill out any family tree knowing that I’d have to put a question mark as my mother’s year of death.

I finally look at Auden. He’s staring back at me with a thoughtful but heated expression. His eyes dip to my mouth once, just briefly, just long enough that I know he’s thinking about our kiss. That he might even be thinking about spanking my bare ass while I writhe and cry in his lap.

“I noticed the resemblance right away,” he says with a small smile that doesn’t cool the heat in his eyes. “I used to come here often as a kid. My father hated it up here, and so it was my safe room of sorts. I used to pretend I was a prince with a wicked king for a father, and that when he died, I was going to be a merciful, strong ruler in his place. And Estamond would be my queen.” He rumples his hair in embarrassment. “A stupid, childish game.”