Page 72 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Auden thinks for a moment of the note Proserpina received from her mother, that strange Latin word sent twelve years after her death. “How?” he says, hoping he sounds very, very normal right now, and not like he’s being haunted by the tireless, grasping ghost of Ralph Guest. “How can this be?”
“He’d arranged a delayed delivery with a courier service last year, a couple months before his death. It would have been after the first heart attack, I believe, given the date on the package invoice.”
“It’s a package?”
“Yes, sir. A small one. We took the liberty of opening it—it was addressed to me—and inside there was a letter directing me to give you an envelope in the circumstance of his death or mental incapacity. I hope it goes without saying that I have not opened that envelope.”
Auden taps his fingers lightly on the keyboard, not typing, just trying to exorcise the sudden anxiety pricking at the inside of his chest. Ralph and his fucking mind games.
“Forward it to Thornchapel, Mr. Cremer. I’ll read it then.” Or throw it in the fire.
“Very well, sir. May I ask how the renovation is coming along?”
Auden sighs and stands up, deciding to finish the email to Isla on the car ride home. He thinks of Proserpina’s wide green eyes and St. Sebastian’s pierced pout. “It’s going well enough that leaving it feels like agony, Mr. Cremer.”
There are moments when Auden can almost remember the boy he was before the wedding in the chapel. They usually occur on the road to Thorncombe—passing by the service area outside Ilminster where his mother would get him Burger King if they were traveling without Ralph, for example. Or that stretch of B road just west of Bovey Tracey that gradually pulls itself out of woods and fields and hedgerows into staggering moorland vistas—vistas which a young Auden didn’t care about in the least, but those first clumps of heather and gorse meant his chances of seeing wild ponies increased greatly, and that was something young Auden cared about very much. And of course, St. Brigid’s-in-the-Moor, so medieval and evocative that Auden imagined somewhere inside there were ladies with steeple-shaped hennins and men in poulaines and all manner of romantic-looking people.
And then there is Thornchapel itself, the small, rattletrap bridge (now a giant fucking headache to get his contractor’s trucks and trailers over) that to a boyhood Auden was a moat bridge or sometimes a bridge into Faerie or sometimes a bridge over a dizzying crevasse. The merry Green Man door knocker, which always seemed on the verge of winking to Auden, and the library where he’d pretend he was at Hogwarts or Rivendell, or maybe, when he got older, the monastery in The Name of the Rose.
And sometimes when he sees these places—but not always, and not often enough for him to be armored against them—small darts of memory will pierce right through his chest, gone before he can grab hold of them and leaving only their wounds as proof they were there.
He doesn’t know what he feels about them, exactly, because he’s had more than a decade to leave the boy who made them behind, and because he’s overwritten them with new memories.
And because he knows what he knew as a boy was wildly wrong, all of it, every bit of it. The mother who bought him Burger King was already drinking then, and was keeping much deeper and darker secrets from Ralph Guest than feeding their son cheap food. He was never, no matter how hard he willed it, going to turn into a wild pony that could run as far and as free as it wanted, and any romantic thoughts he might have had about St. Brigid’s were complicated from their inception by his parents’ silent and bitter war over his religion—his mother being so C of E as to have a bishop in the family, and his father being a scion of one of the only recusant families in Devon.
And now he knows that maybe Thornchapel is a magic place, but it isn’t a safe place.
So what is it that bothers him so much about remembering that young boy? He doesn’t know, but he’s still grasping reflexively at those darts of memory as the car pulls onto the Thornchapel drive. As if remembering the boy who used to think the world was bigger than it was will help him be a man who knows for a fact it is.
He doesn’t wait for his driver to help him get his bag out of the trunk—he grabs it himself, thanks him, and gives him the time he’d like to be picked up early Tuesday. And then he makes for the house with long strides, feeling like he’s bleeding from the entry and exit wounds of remembering a time when he thought he was loved and Thornchapel was the best place in the world.
He finds his solace the minute he steps through the propped-open door and into the hall—touching the Green Man knocker as he always does when he walks past it, like paying a toll—and sees Proserpina Markham walking through the middle of the hall with her arms so piled high with books that her chin is the only thing holding them in place. Her hair is in some kind of braided bun thing, which he likes because it exposes the long lines of her neck and shoulders, the sweet place between her shoulder blades—and because he can fantasize about being the one to take all that hair down, to unpin it and unwind it, to lightly scratch at her scalp until she’s purring with pleasure. And the dress she’s wearing—a low growl builds in his chest when he notices it. It’s short, so short that the hem swishes around mid-thigh, and the demure Peter Pan collar does nothing to offset how it’s tailored to hug the tempting swell of her tits and the oh-so-palmable curve of her bottom. He wants to grab her and carry her up to his room right now, books be hanged, just have them tumbling straight to the floor as he hauls her off and has her all to himself for as long as he damn well pleases.
It’s getting harder and harder to remember why he doesn’t do just that. Why he hasn’t taken what he wants, especially when that what is as sweet and lush and ready to be marked and bitten as Proserpina is.
If only that wedding in the ruins were real, he thinks and not for the first time. Then Proserpina would be his, then he could have her for his own and kiss her plump little lips until she panted for more. He could take her to his bed and do every dark and filthy thing he’d ever wanted, he could sketch pain and pleasure across her skin, he could fuck her until they were both too spent to move, and then she could crawl inside his arms and live there forever and he’d keep her safe from everything, every sad and cruel thing that came for her.
“Little bride,” he says as she notices him.
Her eyes brighten—so green that Auden can imagine that God painted the world using the green of her eyes—and then nearly does exactly as he imagines and drops her books to run to him. Well, she doesn’t truly drop them, she’s too much a librarian for that, but she does set them on the metal folding chair that seemed to appear from nowhere when the renovation started, and then she scampers over like a good little kitten, and Auden has her exactly where she belongs: in his arms.
“I missed you,” she breathes into his neck. Auden buries his face in her hair and just inhales her—the smell of leather and paper and something else not quite identifiable but that reminds him of wildflowers and grass waving under a hot sun.
“I missed you too,” he says, hauling her up against him so that her legs are around his waist and his hands are full of her arse, covered in those thick tights he both loves and hates. His fingers flex and grab; he lowers his mouth to nip at her collarbone. “Have you been good while I’ve been away?”
He started asking her this after that night Saint fucked her in the library. (Every time but once she’s answered yes. The one time she answered no was the time she told him about Becket giving her an orgasm in the church, and Auden had been so simultaneously jealous and aroused after she described it to him that he’d had to clench his fists to keep from grabbing her and taking her right there and then.)
“Yes, I’ve been good,” she whispers. “But you could punish me anyway.”
God, he wants to. He wants to turn her over his lap and redden her flesh with his palm, he wants to see her shivering and sightless with need from being flogged. Some days, it’s all he thinks about.
Twice in the last four weeks, Rebecca has facilitated scenes between them. Nothing elaborate, but she showed him how to wrap rope in more complicated and useful ways and how to use a riding crop and a paddle. He’s enjoyed the aftercare as much as the scenes themselves, the feeling of Proserpina all warm and limp and sniffly, curled up against his chest, and those were the only nights where he allowed himself the luxury of having her in his bed. Not for sex—although he was sorely tempted and always had a swollen erection throughout—but to cuddle her and stroke her hair and murmur praise until she fell trustingly asleep in his arms.
But he’s worried that he’s tested the limits of his self-control, that he’s pushed himself too far and now all the bonds keeping him to his word are cracked and strained, and if he so much as spanks Proserpina tonight, he’ll turn into an animal. He’ll give in, and he’ll fuck her until she admits that she’s his, that she’s as much his as he is hers.
Stop.
You promised you wouldn’t.
