Page 21 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Estamond hates the name in Randolph’s mouth. She hates thinking of what that name means while the sun is shining on her silver-templed bear, a bear still too shy to reach for the freely offered honey beneath her skirt. Suddenly, she’s had enough.
“John Barleycorn is a memory, that’s all,” she says abruptly. “He is nothing to us.” And to keep Randolph from asking anything more—or wondering at her sharp tone of voice—she takes his hand and leads it up her skirts until she hears another bearlike grunt, and then there’s no more talk of John Barleycorn.
By the time I force myself out of bed, it’s late morning and the hedge removal in the maze is well underway. I peer out the bedroom window to see digging machines and backhoes and a veritable swarm of people in bright vests tearing the maze apart bite by bite. Chewing through one hundred and fifty years of beauty like it had no right to be there in the first place.
Carrion birds, ripping the flesh from Thornchapel’s bones.
The memory of my mother’s bones flashes through my mind, and I close my eyes, thinking of the white arch of her eye socket, of the dark mud St. Sebastian had scraped away from it. I think of him desperately murmuring a prayer in my ear, I think of Becket’s confession about that Samhain and what he saw. It should feel cathartic, maybe, to see something so quintessentially Thornchapel torn up beneath those machines, to see the land punished for the crime of hiding my mother from me, but it’s not cathartic in the least. It’s miserable, and I wish Auden would have stayed its sentence and let it be for another hundred and fifty years. Undoing the maze won’t undo Ralph’s sins no more than it will bring my mother back to life.
I’m full of contradictory thoughts and feelings by the time I’m down in the library with a cup of coffee and Sir James curled by the scanning station in an easy position for the idle foot-pets I like to give him while I’m working.
How can I love this place when it’s the place that killed my mother?
How can I feel so protective of it when I’m basically a stranger to it, and its own golden scion seems intent on scrubbing it down to the bedrock?
Estamond was protective of it too, I remember, and then look at the stack of books I’m supposed to be working on. They’re “scientific” agricultural treatises from the late eighteenth century, and I decide I’ll get back to the ruminations on the best soil conditions for barley in Devonshire in a minute. I set my coffee
down, and much to the disgruntlement of the German shepherd already rolled onto his side for tummy rubs, I start hunting through the stacks, climbing up one of the steep wooden staircases to access a far upper corner of the second level that I know holds some Guest family history. I want to see if I can find more about Estamond, or even just the time period when the Guests moved in and took the land from the Kernstows.
The day is one of intermittent drizzle and clouds, and so I’m listening to the rain patter softly at the glass and to the slide of leather and cloth as I tug at books to look at the covers when I hear footsteps. Expecting a lost construction worker or maybe Delphine wandering in from wherever she’s been curled up with her phone, I step over to the wooden railing that rings the upper story of the library and then beam when I see it’s my favorite priest.
“Proserpina,” he calls up, and before I can come down the stairs, he’s climbing up them, taking the steep risers two at a time with his long legs until he’s up here with me, pulling me into his arms for a solid embrace. I catch the woody, spicy notes of incense; I breathe them in, reminded of that day in his church when he trapped me against a wall and fucked me with a hand shoved down my panties.
As if knowing where my thoughts have gone, Becket asks in a low voice, “Can I kiss you?”
“Yes,” I say eagerly—then remember Beltane night and the promises Auden, Saint, and I made to each other. I’m a claimed submissive now, and I belong to someone. “Wait—I should ask Auden,” I whisper into Becket’s shirt. “I’m his now.”
“Oh, I know,” Becket says, and I’m not sure if I’m correctly reading the tone of his voice, so I lift my face to look up at him. He’s smiling in that priestly way of his—like happiness is the serious business of God—but there was something in his voice that seemed more serious still. Before I can ask him about it, he’s pulled his phone from his pocket and is showing me the screen. “Which is why I’ve already asked him.”
I glance down, and then I laugh a little. Leave it to the boys who’ve grown up with Latin lessons and horses to turn something like this into a mannerly, gracious exchange.
May I kiss Poe?
You may do whatever you like with her, Auden had replied. Provided she agrees and she’s returned to me happy.
“Well, then,” I say, still laughing when Becket’s mouth captures mine. His phone clatters to the floor as he grabs for my waist to haul me close.
You may do whatever you like with her.
I shouldn’t be so turned on by that, right? But hell. Every stroke of Becket’s tongue, every squeeze of his warm hands—it’s at Auden’s pleasure, it’s at Auden’s will. Auden is letting this happen, and so even though it’s Becket’s mouth against mine and even though it’s Becket’s long body crowding me up against the bookshelves, it’s like Auden himself is kissing me. It’s like Auden himself is slowly lighting my body on fire.
“You like this,” Becket whispers between kisses. “You like him loaning you out.”
Even the word loan makes my toes curl, and I’m searching for something to rock my hips against until Becket pushes a hard thigh between my legs as graciously and calmly as he would offer his shoulder for a parishioner to cry on. The pressure is so good, it makes me wild, and I paw shamelessly at the hard shoulders underneath Becket’s tab-collar shirt. A loaned toy already whining for more.
My voice is breathless when I finally answer. “I do like it. So much.”
“Auden knows you very well.” Becket’s hands move to my hips, helping me move against his thigh, as he kisses me again. “Even after such a short time.”
It has been a short time—it’s been less than six months since I returned to Thornchapel. And yet, it feels like so much longer, and I’m not sure why. I’m not sure if it’s because we knew each other as children, or if doing sacred things together out in the woods means you know someone much more intimately than normal, but whatever it is, it makes me feel like I’ve been bound together with Auden and Saint for much longer than a few months.
I wish Auden were here right now, so much. And St. Sebastian too.
“You taste so sweet,” Becket says, bending down to kiss my neck. “You taste like everything good.”
My wandering fingers find the collar of Becket’s shirt and run along the edges. He’s taken his priest collar off, and so the notch in the shirt reveals the base of his throat: strong and warm and vulnerable. I trace circles there as he tastes my mouth. “Is this okay?” I ask him as we break apart for a breath. “Are you sure?”
His eyes glow down at me, a deep blue made even bluer by the pale light pouring in from the north-facing windows. He gives me another serious kind of smile. “I am more sure about you than I am about anything else apart from God himself,” he murmurs, and then he brushes his lips against my forehead—a kiss that could be priestly if not for the thigh pressing so perfectly against my cunt.
