Page 39 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Becket stands up and stretches. Against the Dartmoor sunset, he looks like a commercial for running clothes, a magazine cover for outdoor living. There’s no longer any trace of that unknowable thing lurking inside him, no trace of the Essene, the anchorite, the priest who trades in blood and flesh. He’s just a boy from Virginia who grew up tall and blond and moneyed.
He holds out his hand to me and I take it, letting him help me to my feet. Our shadows are long enough that I know it will be almost full dark by the time I’m across the river.
“Are you parked close?” I ask. There’s a B road only half a mile away, winding between tors, and Thorncombe is only about two miles from here. Honestly, there’s hardly anything dangerous on the moors—the occasional adder and maybe some grumpy cows, depending on where you are—but the weather can turn quickly, and the darkness of night is near total, meaning it’s very easy to sprain an ankle or twist a knee, and then find yourself drenched and shivering with no cell service.
“I’m on the road,” he says, pointing. “And I’ve got my flashlight if I need it. The path is good and well-marked.”
“I could always walk with you to the village and then drive you back to your car.”
Becket’s already leaping down off our rock, landing with the stable poise of a professional athlete. I follow, as easily as he does, if not as springily—more lynx than deer—and then he pulls me into a quick hug. Too quick for me to slouch out of it.
“It’s going to be okay,” he tells me. “And St. Petroc’s will be unlocked. Tonight and every other night. You know you’re always welcome.”
I nod, my throat tight, and he bounds down the hill, bending back toward the path that snakes along the bottom of the reaves. And then I take a deep breath and walk the other way, down Reavy Hill to the River Thorne and then on to Thornchapel.
The house is quiet when I let myself inside, the quiet of a tomb or museum, with a stillness that creeps along my skin.
You’re not him, I can imagine the house saying. You’re not him.
But the creeping silence is broken when Sir James Frazer hears the south door click closed, and he comes tearing into the mudroom, back legs scrabbling on the flags as he careens around the corner, howling balefully until he sees it’s just me.
Instantly, the howls change to whines as he nudges my hand and then prances near the wellies lined up against the wall. He nudges my hand again, with a meaningful sort of look, and then I ask him, “Outside?”
He answers me with another prance and a lick on my hand. I open the door again. He streaks off into the gloaming, barking at nothing and seeming like the happiest dog in the world. I prop open the door and go find Poe.
The library is barely lit when I get there—just a reading light on a table and the glow of her scanning equipment—like dusk has crept up on her without her noticing. And indeed she doesn’t even seem to notice me as I slip through the doors, her head down and earbuds in her ears as she hums happily to herself. At some point she’s pinned her hair up with some pens, but several strands have since fallen to hang around her face and neck, and she’s kicked off her shoes, wearing a pair of fuzzy socks instead. It makes her shorter than usual, more rumpled, and more adorable for all that. For a few minutes, I just lean in the doorway and watch her work. Watch the way the shadows catch on her dark eyelashes and around her hauntingly plump mouth. Watch as she competently pages through books older than the country she was born in, as she fingers colorful lithographs, quirky typefaces, rich end papers—the minutiae book lovers live for.
I drift closer, half dreading her seeing me, half unable to resist. She’s tweedy and pretty and lush, and I’m getting hard just by looking at her, but I don’t know if she’ll want me now, I don’t know if I’m allowed to touch her, taste her, feel her—
She finally turns all the way around, reaching for a pen that’s rolled to the edge of the table, and then she sees me, her eyes lighting up as she tears her earbuds free. “Saint! Thank God!” She’s over to me in a few skirt-bouncing steps, flinging her arms around my waist and burying her face into my chest. “I was so worried,” she mumbles into me, her fingers bunching in the thin fabric of my T-shirt. “I wanted to come find you, but Becket said that would stress you out more, so I’ve been trying to be understanding, but I was almost out of patience. I was considering walking down to your house and just banging on the door until you let me in.”
I slide my hands around her, exhaling a long, jagged breath. Her back is warm under my hands, and her hair smells like summer—like reading a book under the shade of a big tree. Paper and wildflowers and sunshine. I fill my lungs with her, with Proserpina; I breathe her in so she’ll be in my body, in my blood, bonded to my cells. I want my body to be made of her, built from her, layers and layers of Proserpina inside St. Sebastian.
I kiss her hair, and it’s so silky and soft that I kiss it again. “I wasn’t home,” I finally say. “I had to work and then I took a walk after to clear my head.”
“Saint,” she whispers, finally tilting her head up to me. Even in the dim light of the library, her eyes are greener than a cat’s. “Auden told me, and I—I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry that asshole was your father, and I’m so sorry that Auden hid it from you. I’ll kill him if you want, you know.”
Impossibly, I feel the corner of my mouth turn up.
“Just a little murder. Not a lot.” She smiles, but the smile doesn’t last long. “Are you okay? Are you doing okay?”
I nod, my throat going tight again. I’m not planning on saying anything else about it at all—because I don’t want to, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to feel about it—I just want to stand here and breathe in the girl I love and never have to think about this again.
But then Poe pulls harder on my shirt, as if I’m not close enough, and I breathe in another lungful of drowsy summer flowers and somehow I am talking, without planning to. Somehow the words are coming out, and I can’t stop them.
“I don’t know if I can forgive him,” I say. “I hate that he lied. I hate that it’s true. I hate that I was so happy, and I hate that I feel so foolish. Like it was transparently, pathologically stupid to have believed I could have . . . that. But the thing that makes me sadder—angrier even—is knowing Ralph could have told me at any time. He could have called, written, pulled me aside that summer or any summer after, and just fucking told me.”
St. Sebastian Perth Martinez, yes. I know who you are.
“And then Mamá—” The words have tied themselves into knots deep in my throat; I have to hide my face in Poe’s hair in order to force them out. “She lied to me too, you know? And maybe that’s worse? Because she lied my entire life—every single day—and then she left me, she went and died and now I can’t yell at her, I can’t scream at her, I can’t m
ake her fix it. I can’t even ask her for the whole story, I can’t even learn the entire truth. All the things you’re supposed to know about where you come from and about why you’re here—I don’t know any of that, and I never will. It’s just this question. This unknowable thing I’ll have to live with my entire life, and on top of everything—losing Auden, reckoning with the sins I’ve made with him, knowing everyone has lied—it’s somehow the not knowing that bothers me the most. There will always be a curtain between me and the entire truth. And every person who could possibly draw it back—Ralph, Richard, my mother—has died.”
I finish with a short suck of air, having run myself clean out of breath, and then every part of me flushes hot with embarrassment. This is why I hate talking about feelings. It’s like feeding stray cats—you do it once or twice, even just a few scraps of food, and then one day you have a back garden full of the little beasts licking their paws and mewling at you.
I’m about to apologize to Poe for all the emotional vomit when she looks up at me again. And there’s no aversion on her face, no pity. There’s a cute little line between her eyebrows as she studies my face like it’s one of the library’s leather tomes.
“There’s got to be someone who knows,” she says. “I know you said your mother didn’t have very many friends in the village other than those in the Historical Society—do you think she would have confided in them? Or perhaps—you’re not going to like this—but perhaps Augie knew? If he was close with your father—your real father, I mean, not your biological one—then he might know?”
