Page 82 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
he’s not suggesting. He’s telling, and so I turn and together we walk into the heart of the magic and into the living air of the thorn chapel.
Chapter 24
Delphine is waiting for us by the altar, all faint flickering light and glimpses of long gold hair. And there is something very lordly about her as we approach the two menhirs that guard the entrance to the stone row. Even in her red wool coat and rain boots, she looks regal, and even though she’s been alone in this buzzing, magic night for at least fifteen minutes, she seems nothing short of confident and brave.
Sweet, bubbly Delphine is the lord of the manor for real right now, and somehow that makes perfect sense. Somehow it feels like it couldn’t have happened any other way.
One by one, we enter the stone row, Rebecca first, then Becket, then Saint. I follow them, dreaming on my feet, my skin and lips and breasts tingling with whatever is in the air tonight, nature or God or many gods or even just the manifested energy of enormous, thrilling potential.
And because I’m dreaming, I’m not ready for what I feel as I pass through the guard stones and begin my walk to the altar.
I feel drunk, even though I haven’t had anything to drink, and I’m sure I must be asleep, even though I’m more awake than I’ve ever been. I can sense the weight of this stone-lined path, the sheer gravity of it, as if it gathers everything to itself so that it can run like a river down to the altar at the end. With each step closer I get to the end, I hear impossible things. Music, voices, drums. Sounds from nowhere, sounds from another time.
And then I’m within the ruins of the chapel, and the drums recede ever so slightly, although they don’t entirely go away. They stay just within hearing, just within awareness. They match the pound and pulse of my heart; they match the fall of my feet on sacred ground.
I tell myself I’m dreaming.
I tell myself it can’t be what I think. I’m too fanciful, too ready to believe, too eager.
But even Rebecca—the least eager of us to believe—looks troubled as we meet Delphine at the altar. She keeps glancing around the ruins and into the trees, as if she’s trying to locate the source of a sound, and I notice Saint is too.
Auden has eyes only for the altar. Or rather, a point just beyond it, a point where a door could be if a door existed, which it doesn’t.
But before I can ask him what he sees, Becket starts the ceremony, having memorized the script as if it were one of his normal priestly duties. As if it being about St. Brigid just makes it another arcane Catholic rite, and nothing more.
“Lord, we bring you your bride, St. Brigid,” he says. “What will you have us do?”
I expected this to be awkward too, like when students are forced to read a play aloud in class, but maybe the long walk in the dark woods has pressed all the awkwardness right out of us or maybe those otherworldly drums are encouraging us or maybe it’s that Becket says his part so surely and so seriously it feels impossible not to be sure and serious along with him.
Or maybe it’s because this is all a dream, and in a dream, you can do anything you want without shame.
Delphine already has her paper in her hand and glances down at it once before answering. “Make a circle of light around us and then bring her to me.”
Rustling over the wet grass, we walk a circle around Delphine and set the items we brought down at the altar as we finish. Then we each find a place to set our lantern down, until they’re in a circle around the altar and us and a low wooden platform that must have been built this morning. I wonder who built it until I see Saint watching me examine it. I give him a tentative smile, still upset about what’s between us, but thanking him for his thoughtfulness. Tonight when I share my body with someone else for the very first time, I won’t have to do it in the cold mud and that’s because of him.
My smile seems to surprise a vulnerable near-smile of his own right out of him, but he clamps down on it quickly, returning to his usual closed-off expression.
Becket told us earlier that the circle is one of the most important parts of the ceremony, that it represents protection and the sacred, that it marks the space we’ll move in as holy. And so accordingly, four of us have arranged our lanterns to line up with the four cardinal directions, and as we all set them down, we each said a prayer to St. Brigid, asking her to protect us and protect our circle as we celebrate her feast.
And then we turn back to Delphine, all of us in a circle of faint light. The darkness pools in the corners of the chapel and in the center of our circle, but it’s not ominous, it’s not frightening. It feels like a shadowed library or a dark beach. Awake and inviting. Quiet, except for the low pulse of drums that can’t be seen and the snatches of whispers coming from the woods.
Rebecca keeps glaring around her with narrowed eyes, as if she expects to catch the source of the noise and scold it for not falling in order with the known universe.
I withdraw a long, white taper from my coat pocket and walk to the south lantern. I remember this part without looking at my paper, and I murmur, “St. Brigid, patron saint of cattle and newborn babes, wardeness of fire and sweet water, we light this flame thinking of you.”
I kneel and open the little glass door of the lantern, touching my taper to the big, sturdy candle inside. The flame hisses and jumps to life, and I close the lantern and stand, hardly able to see over the dancing brightness of the flame.
“Bring my bride to me,” Delphine says once my candle is lit, and it’s so unlike her, so unlike her usual girlish self. It’s commanding and almost arrogant and deeply, deeply sexy. My pulse starts thudding deep in my cunt when Becket takes my hand and leads me to her, my lord for the night.
And so I’m brought before the altar.
There’re so many differences from the times I’ve dreamed this. The rustle of my coat, the sound of sodden grass under my boots. The huff of my breath in the air and the twist in my stomach and the burn of the others watching my back as I walk. I’m not bearing a torc like in the pictures, and I’m not in a robe, but it doesn’t take away from how inevitable it feels to slowly make my way to the lord who will extract promises from me. How heady and how divine and how right. Like this one moment, this one night, is what I’ve been seeking my entire life without knowing it. Like every answer to every question about myself and my mother and her past and this house and the boys I hate myself for loving is waiting just beyond a veil I can’t see, and if I can reach through it, if I can part it with reverent fingertips and step in . . .
Reach for what and step where, I’m not sure. But I am sure that I can’t stop myself from trying. I am sure touching that veil might be the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s the closest to God I’ve ever felt, and I don’t know if that’s okay to feel, if that’s allowed, to have Catholic feelings inside an arguably pagan space, but I do. I do, and they’re all jumbled up together so thickly I almost can’t remember what they felt like separately, and then when I stop in front of Delphine and she cups her hands around my face, I think this must be what Becket feels every time he performs the Liturgy of the Eucharist and fuses the holy into the profane. Except right now, we are the wafers being transfigured, all six of us; we are being made into something other and better and sanctified as we stand in a circle and act out the ancient human ache for renewal and spring.
Becket, who turned out to be something of an expert in Celtic paganism, explained to us that there’s a difference between evoking someone like St. Brigid and invoking St. Brigid—meaning that we invited our saint to our ceremony, meaning that we asked her to protect us, but we didn’t ask to be her. So in theory, I’m only playing a role, I’m only echoing the words she would say if she were here.
But I feel a kick of dizziness when Delphine asks, “St. Brigid, we beg your blessing on us,” and I say, “You have it.”
