Page 96 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I suddenly miss my mother with such a cruel ache that I close my eyes as we walk through the entrance, just so that I don’t have to see the empty plinth where Demeter should be.
Inside the maze, there are only the paint marks and the vacant statue niches to speak to its imminent destruction. All else is shadowed and hushed as it has been since Estamond rebuilt it a century and a half ago, the hedges still tall and impenetrable.
Auden steps alongside me, but he doesn’t respond to my remark about the statues, and I know it’s because he’s waiting for me to answer his first question.
I sigh. “Are you asking because you want to know how you can do Beltane without believing in it?”
We turn deeper into the maze, and despite the warmth of the day, the interior paths are cool and damp.
“No, Saint,” he says. “Quite the opposite. I’m asking because I do believe.”
I stop and turn to face him. “You don’t,” I say, a bit unsteadily. “You think all of this is nonsense. You think it doesn’t matter. I heard you when we planned this, I heard you on the night before the equinox. You’ve always acted like this is something we had to drag you into.”
“As I recall,” Auden says, eyebrow arching, “you’ve been protesting just as much, and you had all the same doubts at the beginning. Do you not believe in what we’re doing?”
That’s a much more complicated question than how I feel about God in general, and I can’t find an answer, at least not right away. Which is just as well, because Auden keeps going.
“I didn’t believe in any of this at first, but I did believe in Thornchapel. I believed in Thornchapel enough to be terrified of it.” Without any kind of cue or signal, we both start walking again, and he goes on. “It’s got this force. A pull. On my family especially, but on everyone else around it too. You see the people in the village, how they revere this place.”
“They revere your family.”
“No, they think they revere my family. But what they actually honor, what they really respect, is the house itself—or rather, the land the house represents.” Auden lets out a low breath. “I know the power of this place. It corrupted my father and tortured my mother. Killed Proserpina’s mother. And now Becket says that people used to use the altar to—” He breaks off, stabbing fingers through his hair. “It doesn’t matter what we’ve learned now, because even before we learned it, I knew Thornchapel was a different place from any other place in the world. I used to hate it for that, you know. I used to hate it for how it grew inside people and claimed them. I found it sinister.”
“I’d always assumed that you loved it.”
“Of course,” Auden says bitterly. “Why wouldn’t I love it? Who wouldn’t love to be a Guest?”
“Auden . . .”
He shakes his head. “No, it’s fair. It’s more than fair, actually. I’ve had every privilege in the world, and this house is one of them. And anyway, I feel differently now. I have since Poe came, and you—” he breaks off again, but this time it’s with a small, shy smile. “You’re here too,” he says after a minute. “How can I hate any place where the two of you are?”
That shy smile might as well have been a kick to the stomach. I can’t breathe, can’t look at him, can’t anything for a minute.
“My point is,” Auden says, as we turn into the final leg of the maze, “I always knew Thornchapel was different. I didn’t like it, but I knew it. And then you and Poe came, we were all here together again, and the Thornchapel I thought I knew, the Thornchapel I hated . . . I didn’t hate it so much anymore. Then we had our Imbolc night, and for the first time since I kissed you and Poe in the ruins, I felt like things made sense. Or like I made sense. Who I was, who I could be, how I fit together. Imbolc changed me.”
“It changed all of us,” I say heavily. “But now you’re a believer? In what—goddesses and horned gods? Magic?”
“Do you not find all of this curious?” Auden asks, as we step into the center of the maze. “Is there not a part of you that wonders if it could be real? That there’s a forgotten way to look at the world?”
“Yes,” I admit.
When I’m there, in the thorn chapel and in the woods around it, it’s almost more work not to believe. But I don’t tell Auden that. Not yet.
“But Becket would say that it’s probably the psychological effect of the ritual,” I add. “Becket would say that a ritual is supposed to reinforce identity, reinforce belief.”
“Becket also believes in God,” Auden points out. “So believing that a ritual has a practical way of producing the effects it does is not antithetical to also believing the ritual is a real way to touch the divine.”
We stop in front of a crescent-shaped basin, full of water reflecting empty sky. Adonis and Aphrodite are gone, also taken away before the maze demolition, and their embracing shadow no longer falls over the secret steps down to the tunnel.
“You didn’t answer me,” I say. “Do you believe in this? These same traditions that your own church tried to crush out—and when they couldn’t crush them out, they stole them for their own?”
Sir James starts lapping at the water in the fountain, and Auden looks at me.
“Yes,” he says. “I think I do. I think I do because I’m Catholic, if that makes any sense, because when you’re Catholic and you grow up venerating the Virgin and there’s a saint for nearly every spring or wood or hill—well, it doesn’t sound all that mad, does it? That there’s a goddess, that there are actually many gods and goddesses. Why can’t this be one expression of the ineffable along with all the others?”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t hmm at me. And you still haven’t answered my question. Why do you go to Mass? Why do you pray when you don’t believe in prayer?”
