Page 9 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
“But then,” he continues, “I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I don’t know why. I still don’t.”
He gives me a helpless kind of smile, as if I’d blame him for not destroying his ancient family home.
“I suppose you know I just finished my master’s in architecture?” he asks.
I make a vague nod, not wanting to admit exactly how Drunk Librarian I’d gone on him before I came here.
“Well, I’d just taken a job with a firm, and I had the idea—why not hire myself? Why not get my practical experience working on someplace that belongs to me? My boss agreed so long as I keep up my work on my other projects, and so now I’m here.” He waves a careless hand. “Playing architect to a place I might still hate.”
“Might?”
More helpless smiling. “I guess I’m hoping I’ll figure it out by the end.”
“And the others?” I ask.
“Will they figure it out—Oh! Why are they here, you mean. Well, Rebecca is a couple years older, I think you remember, and our resident genius. She’s already got a global reputation as a landscape architect.”
“You’re going to redesign the gardens,” I realize.
“Rebecca is going to redesign the gardens,” Auden clarifies, “and I don’t really care what she does to them. Whatever it is, it’ll be good because she’s good, and it will be different. It won’t be the same as it was when, well . . . you know.”
“As that summer?”
He nods.
I chew on my lip. The thought of the cloistered English gardens being demolished, with their tousled riots of flowers and statues of veiled women and hidden benches . . . the thought of the maze being demolished . . .
My head snaps back up. “You’re not going to do anything with the thorn chapel, are you?”
“It’s not scheduled or anything, so I could,” Auden says, with a strange note to his voice, like he himself has just realized he’s committing some kind of blasphemy. “But I don’t know yet. I don’t have any plans to at the moment.”
Relief seeps through me. “And then Delphine? Why is she here too?”
“Well, we’re engaged,” he murmurs. “So it just seemed natural she’d come live with me.”
The relief stops; all other feelings stop. I’m suddenly very, very still. And numb.
“Pardon?” I ask.
“We’re engaged to be married,” he repeats, slightly louder, as if he thinks I asked pardon because I didn’t hear him. “I proposed last year.”
“Oh,” I say. My voice sounds dull, and I try to brighten it. “I didn’t know.”
“We haven’t formally announced it; you know, in the papers or anything like that. My father didn’t approve, and then after he died, Delphine wanted to wait until it was more . . . seemly, I suppose. Only her parents and our close friends know; she hasn’t even posted about it online, I don’t think.”
I know she hasn’t posted about it online b
ecause she’d also been a victim of my Drunk Librarian research.
“Congratulations,” I say, with a fake-jolly expression that makes me wince, but Auden doesn’t see because he’s turned back to the trees.
“Yes,” he says to the glass.
Yes.
Not thank you, not any expression of excitement or endearments of his future bride. It’s strange, but I take less notice of it than I should because I’m still fighting against that awful numb feeling.
Auden and Delphine.
