A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(97)

“Chipper. Wide awake and talking a mile a minute. So I also thought I’d check on the ruins.”

Auden laughs a little and bends to pull on his rain boots, and Becket does the same. Sir James Frazer, who can hear boots being put on from two villages away, bounds into the makeshift boot room and wags his tail at Auden.

Auden’s mouth slants in what seems to be a regretful contemplation of how much mud Sir James Frazer will bring back in with him, but he ends up opening the door with a sigh. “Oh, all right,” he tells the dog, who gives his master a happy look and then trots out into the rainy night.

Both men pull on coats, and Auden flips open the top of a bench to extract umbrellas and an old flashlight. He hands it to Becket along with an umbrella, and then wordlessly they follow the dog outside.

It must be near two in the morning, and the darkness, if anything, is even thicker than before. The old flashlight’s beam, while a pleasantly nostalgic yellow, is not much stronger than Becket’s lantern from earlier, and by now, the rain has so slicked the world over with mud that the path is downright treacherous. Not that any of that slows down Sir James, who tears off into the woods at random intervals and then tears back, reappearing with even muddier paws and a few extra wet leaves clinging to his fur.

Still though, despite the unwelcome addition of another person, Becket’s frustration eases. Auden is quiet as they walk, as if caught up in his own thoughts, and Sir James is always good company, and anyway, Becket is doing what he needs to do, what the zeal demands of him. He’s going back to the chapel.

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 other 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.