Page 45 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I’m no stray, though. I belong.
When I stoop under the lintel to step inside, Sir James Frazer at my heels, I can see a cove in the far wall that could be a tumble-down fireplace, and a flat, moss-covered expanse that must have been a hearth-stone at the bottom. When I squat down to rub away some moss and confirm, my fingers encounter deeply etched grooves. Grooves like carvings, straight and curved and straight again, not the kind of accidental wear and tear one might expect from a fireplace used for centuries. Sir James—who I’ve been keeping during the week instead of Becket because it’s painful to be alone during the day—sniffs at the stone once, without much interest, and then walks away to snuffle at the other corners of the derelict structure.
Curious, I stay where I am and pick away at the moss, eventually finding a small stone nearby to scrape it as clean as possible. It’s impossible to make sense of first—a line with several other lines branching off and an arc below it—and it’s not lettering of any kind, it’s not even runes (and it wouldn’t be runes anyway, not in this corner of the country)—and my forehead is scrunched into tight furrows of puzzlement as I keep scraping. Distantly, I’m aware of a bubble of pleasure somewhere in my stomach, despite the occasional scrape of my knuckles on dirty stone and the damp chill that hovers in the ruined farmhouse like a ghost. It’s the pleasure of having something new to think about, something other than my mother, which is the same reason I’ve been working myself to the bone in the library these past two weeks.
It takes less than ten minutes to clear off as much of the hearth as I need, but I have to stand up and squint a little to make sense of it. It almost looks like an etching of a person, but a person unlike I’ve ever seen. A person with . . .
“Antlers,” I say to myself as soon as I see it. “Those are antlers.”
Sir James Frazer trots over to smell the newly exposed stone, deems it just as boring as the first time he smelled it, and wanders back outside the house looking for something to chase.
The person isn’t three-dimensional in any sense, is barely even humanoid in shape. Almost a stick figure, with its stick legs curled as if it’s sitting and both stick arms outstretched. Crude hands hold a spiral aloft on each side—the left hand holding a clockwise spiral and the right hand holding a counter-clockwise spiral. The lines of each spiral end in the figure’s hands, meaning that none of the spirals truly end and both are connected through the figure’s body. The antlers are the branching lines I saw earlier, and the arc is the uppermost part of a nearly featureless face. The entire thing is less a depiction, and more of a concept. A symbol.
But for what, Poe?
I think of my dream earlier, the one with Auden’s ancestor in the forest. The wild god. The Thorn King.
Is that what this is supposed to be?
I take a picture with my phone, certain that I’ll be able to find some answers in Thornchapel’s library, but I’m not ready to move away from it just yet. I’m not sure why—the antler-figure is unsettling, as unsettling as the dream I had—but I feel drawn to it nonetheless. Perhaps precisely because of the dream, or perhaps it’s the idea that my mother might have stood here too and looked on the very same thing. It was the kind of thing she would have liked. A secret right in the open. A mystery with ties to something alluringly ancient.
It’s the kind of thing I like too, but truth be told, I didn’t come here looking for secrets. I don’t even know why I came here, really, except that I saw the Kernstow Farm mentioned in a book I was scanning, and suddenly nothing seemed so important as to come here, nothing at all. I had to see the place with my mother’s name. I had to see where my family had come from—once upon a time, the place where Estamond Guest herself came from. So I hunted down my Dartmoor Ordnance Survey map, loaded Sir James Frazer into the car, and wended my way through the narrow valley roads to the smallish pull-off that marked the beginning of an ancient dirt lane, and together the dog and I hiked up here.
I don’t even know what I wanted or what I expected to find, but when I duck back outside and roam around the enclosure made by low, grass-topped stone walls, I can’t help but feel disappointed. Like I was going to come here and the ghost of Estamond was going to apparate and then explain everything to me. My mother’s death, why she came here, why the Kernstows were forbidden to marry the Guests, and what it was the Guests got up to in the chapel ruins anyway. Like I was going to come here and find my mother’s initials carved into the wall, along with a helpful note. Convivificat was my band name, nothing important or sinister at all, love you, xoxo — Mom.
A moody rain is setting in, the kind of rain that can’t decide if it’s fog or what, and it mists against my face as I call for Sir James. He lopes over to me, tongue hanging out and mud up to his thighs, and in that moment, I wish so keenly that his master was striding along behind him, coat flapping around his thighs and mist-damp hair falling into his face. Auden would stride over and pull me into his big chest, grumpy that I was letting myself get chilled in the rain, and then he’d scrape his teeth along my neck until I was all warm again. Auden would make everything okay, because when I’m with him, I feel that new feeling again, that feeling like I’ve been tilled. That the worst is over and something good is waiting just out of sight.
But Auden is in London, and I masochistically rejected the impulse to call Saint and have him come with me. Maybe coming here was a roundabout way of flogging myself, of reinforcing the isolation creeping up around me for these last two weeks while everyone has been so busy.
With the milder weather, Saint’s uncle’s company has taken on another project, in addition to Thornchapel and another house outside Two Bridges, and so St. Sebastian has been spending every available minute with Augie, creating budgets and schedules and materials orders. Auden’s been consumed with this next phase of renovation, which will be the wing of the house we just vacated and the hall, and because so much restoration work is involved, he’s been lining up masons and glaziers and joiners and plasterers and the like. Rebecca has been busy with London work—the upcoming spring season meaning an increase in both construction on existing projects and more clients, and Delphine hasn’t been able to come back from London since the last time she was here—one weekend for a party her mother had planned, the other because she was being featured on some morning show. And Father Hess has been hosting Friday night fish dinners for Lent and teaching an extra Bible study on the mysteries of Jesus’s death and resurrection, so he’s been scarce as well.
It’s been lonely for a kinky party girl.
I take a final minute to survey the abandoned farm. In every way, it’s Thornchapel’s opposite. Where Thornchapel soars, this house squats; where Thornchapel is grand, the Kernstow Farm is rough and scrubby, and would have been humble long before Estamond’s brother abandoned it and the roof caved in. For Estamond, becoming the lady of the Thornchapel must have been like bec
oming a princess overnight. Surely she must have been happy to leave this place?
I try to see it through her eyes, through the eyes of someone who called it home. She would have known it when it was warm and snug, she would have known it when it was her family’s sheep bleating just over the hill. She would have known when the moors were misty and when they were warm, and she would have known the names for the small flowers that pushed up out of the mud in defiance of the wind and rain and sheep hooves. She would have known the shadow-and-glow play of firelight over the antlered figure on the hearth.
Maybe she was happy here. Maybe she was sad to go.
I decide to believe this. I think of my mother, always grinning and always sun-kissed, even in winter somehow, and how she saw as much magic in our backyard as in the grave of a Natufian shaman. Maybe happiness and magic are Kernstow traits, which is nearly cheering, until I think about how I’ll never watch my mother jump after fireflies in our backyard again, and then I’m suddenly very ready to say goodbye to this lonesome place after all.
Then with the rain susurrating around us, Sir James Frazer and I walk back to the car.
I thought I understood grief. My mother had been missing for twelve years, and even within the first few months, family members and my parish’s priest and the police officers involved—and even my own father—tried to prepare me for the grisly inevitability of a body. For the barren destiny, the grim cup the Markhams would have to drink from for the rest of our lives.
Adelina Markham was dead, and we would never know why, and that was our particular family fate.
You’d think that in twelve years of this, I’d have achieved some kind of motherless nirvana, an equanimity and balance with the world that saw fit to take my mother from me—but no. I thought I had, I thought all of my little hopes and what ifs were carefully potted, cloistered away from real hope, from actually imagining a happy ending.
Hope is a weed. Hope is a flood. It pervaded everything, and I didn’t even know I’d had any hope at all until it was snatched away the day after Imbolc.
I can’t seem to make for Thornchapel after visiting the farm, so I head for Bellever instead, thinking that I’ll drop in on Becket at the church. Bellever is a tiny hamlet sandwiched between a tor and a thick forest of spruce, and the story goes that the church there was built when Edward III gave the land to his son as part of the Duchy of Cornwall, but Becket’s told me that the church is younger than that, probably from the early Tudor period instead.
St. Petroc’s is strikingly beautiful and in remarkably good condition—it was abandoned for a time after the Glorious Revolution and then purchased by the Guest family and gifted to the Catholic Church in the 1830s to be restored and reopened as a Catholic parish. And today, with the mist settling in between the widely spaced trees of Bellever Forest and the shallow river rushing nearby, it’s deliciously melancholy, enough so that my mood is lifting before I even step foot inside the church. Although maybe that’s just the Becket Effect—I always feel lighter after seeing him, like I’ve been absolved and cleansed just by being in his presence.
Sir James’s paws have thankfully mostly dried on the drive here, and so there’s no muddy dog prints on the handsome flagstone floors as we walk in—just the heavy tread of my boots and the click of Sir James’s paws and then the matching steps of the priest as he ducks into the narthex from his adjoining office.
