Page 56 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
Of course, he’d reasoned to himself, he’d be fascinated here, in this lonely corner of the country still studded with fragments of Brythonic place names and scattered with dolmens and menhirs older than the Celts themselves. It was intellectual curiosity that sent him searching for books and rambling over the moors to see each and every standing stone or ruined church or hill fort for himself. That was all. Nothing more.
The lie had dissolved tonight. He could no longer pretend to himself that his fascination was intellectual. It was personal, deeply personal, rooted to his very soul somehow. And despite the dispassionate and worldly air he’d put on downstairs, he’s troubled by it. He’s troubled by the pull he feels toward this place. He’s troubled by the feeling that it needs him.
It’s not the unorthodoxy that troubles him, at least he doesn’t think so. He’s an unorthodox priest anyway, being openly bisexual—if celibate—and encouraging his parishioners to think critically and constructively about their faith. He is fond of other religions and their rituals, he enjoys learning about them, and he sees this Imbolc as more of a cultural exercise anyway.
Or at least he should.
Instead, he’s terrified that the zeal waits for him in the chapel ruins. And when he dreams—dreaming of the summer he came here in college, alone and with the zeal blazing so hot inside him that he couldn’t even think—he dreams of being in the thorn chapel. He dreams of standing in front of the altar and feeling like a pillar of fire because he was so consumed with a desire to know his god.
And when he wakes up, he wakes up with his skin burning against the air, like he’s aflame with righteous hunger once again.
The storm howls on through the morning, and Rebecca wakes at her usual early hour to find that it feels like day hasn’t broken at all. There’s a vague sort of brightening in the white maelstrom outside, like somewhere high above the world the sun does, in fact, still exist, but it’s dim enough that Rebecca has to turn on the light in the kitchen to make her tea while she hunts down an apple for breakfast. She decides to work in her favorite spot, which is a corner of the old hall, on a window bench overlooking the terrace and south gardens. Of course today she won’t be able to see much outside, but she’ll be cozy with her pile of blankets and the space heater she keeps over there.
Strictly speaking, she shouldn’t be working. It’s Saturday, and Rebecca has been trying to work less, to keep normal hours, to be the kind of woman who has enough free time to take up a hobby besides flogging strangers for fun. But she also can’t seem to rid herself of this suspicion that free time is wasted time, that she’s cheating herself out of her own future if she doesn’t pour everything she has into the present. A belief no doubt planted in her childhood, when those early tests revealed exactly how gifted she was, and a belief watered daily by her boss—who is also her father.
She supposes in an ideal world, there’d be something easier about working for one’s father, relaxed expectations maybe, or just a surfeit of understanding and compassion. But the truth is that her father is all the harder on her for their connection, demanding more of her than he does of any of his other architects. She knows he loves her . . . she knows that in a way, expecting so much from her is his way of showing his love. He wants her to succeed the same way he succeeded—against the odds and tirelessly.
And she understands, she knows, she’d felt her neck burn and her shoulders creep forward those days in sixth form when she’d walk in and realize she was the only black girl in the class. She’d felt helplessness and frustration dig inside her chest when she’d had to work doubly hard as the white men in her master’s classes just to have her projects graded the same. She knows tirelessness, she knows when the world wants her to bite down her words and her feelings, she knows that she’s not ever, ever allowed a moment’s rest, a moment’s weakness, a moment when she’s not the best and the most graceful and the most patient.
She just thinks it would be nice if her father didn’t demand all the same things too. If he could give her the space to breathe she doesn’t have anywhere else.
In any case, Rebecca has never been the type to linger over wishes and unmet hopes. Truth be told, it’s too late for her to be anything but a workaholic, and she’s found places where she doesn’t have to swallow her bitten-down words like she does in her father’s office—places where she can do the biting, the speaking, the winning. It’s the one thing she has that’s hers and only hers, and it’s the one thing that keeps her job and her father’s all-consuming expectations of her from swallowing her whole.
Rebecca thinks with some wistfulness about how it will be another few days until she’s in London again, until she can find someone to play with and until she can shuck off the exhaustion that comes from being entirely perfect all the fucking time.
And that’s a few days if the storm lets up . . .
Christ.
She’s just getting settled in her corner and pulling out her laptop when Delphine drifts down the stairs
, looking unfairly cute and sexy with her hair piled on top of her head and wearing one of Auden’s old Cambridge sweatshirts. Her curves strain at the material, they strain her unicorn-patterned sleep shorts even more, and her soft flesh makes a distinctive and inviting v between her legs. Rebecca looks away quickly, her heart beating faster.
“You’re up early,” Delphine yawns, trundling forward in Auden’s slippers, which are too big for her and so she has to shuffle to keep them on.
“I’m always up early,” Rebecca points out. “You can’t have failed to notice this about me over the last two months we’ve been living in the same house.”
Delphine just tilts her head, blinking sleepily at Rebecca. She’s shivering too, her legs covered in goosebumps, which for some reason irritates Rebecca rather a lot.
“Get under here,” Rebecca says, a bit gruffly, holding up the big, fuzzy blanket that’s currently over her lap. Apparently too sleepy to remember to argue, Delphine obeys; she crawls onto the window seat next to Rebecca, tangles their legs together, then drops her head onto Rebecca’s shoulder like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Are you going to help me plan the Imbolc thing today?” Delphine asks on another yawn.
Rebecca had nearly forgotten about all that, too wrapped up in her usual morning routine of tea and work. “I really should complete this proposal,” she says.
“And then you’ll help me,” Delphine decides, as if it’s that easy, as if all Delphine has to do is wish it and it’s so, like a storybook princess.
And the strangest thing is that Rebecca almost feels like indulging her. Right now with her pressed warm and lush against her side, with that mass of golden hair brushing against her cheek with faint whisper-scents of something expensive and floral, she wants to pet her and spoil her.
“Why aren’t you still in bed, Delphine?” she asks, trying to sound normal, trying to sound like she’s not committing the smell of her hair to memory.
“Sir James Frazer,” Delphine answers dozily. “He wants to be in the bed with Auden when it’s cold, and there’s just not enough room . . .”
“So you came down here, where there’s no bed at all?”
“Thought I’d—” a yawn “—come get—” another yawn “—some tea . . .”
With a sigh—she chooses not to examine how almost-content her own sigh is—Rebecca opens up her laptop and begins working, Delphine’s head on her shoulder the entire time. And within moments, Delphine is fast asleep.
