Page 46 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Jennifer said Clare never loved Thornchapel, not the way Ralph did. She didn’t want the rituals to happen at all, and maybe she thought if she refused to participate, then Ralph wouldn’t do them at all. Which was foolish. That man did whatever he wanted.”
“I saw a picture of Ralph and some other adults here at Thornchapel,” I say. “It seemed—well, I think they might have been doing the same thing Ralph did with my mother, keeping the old ways and all that. Clare was there with them.”
“Maybe she changed her mind? Maybe she realized that Ralph would never stop? I don’t know. But I do know the year your mother was his May Queen was the year she conceived you, and after Jennifer found out she was pregnant, she stayed away from the estate and everything associated with it. She didn’t see Ralph for a very long time. Years, in fact. She refused to see him until well after Richard died.”
I look up at the picture of my father sitting on her desk, resting atop a stack of old receipts. Richard Davey, eyes crinkling and mouth wide in a happy smile, a splotch of white paint on his neck. “Do you think Ralph knew she was pregnant?”
“No,” Ana María admits. “I’d almost like it better if he had so that I could hate him for that too, but he didn’t know until you were twelve, and the minute he found out, he started helping. With money, I mean. He wanted to meet you, but Jennifer said he couldn’t unless he was ready to claim you and actually be involved in your life. The way she saw it, you were better off thinking Richard was your father and not knowing Ralph at all if all Ralph was going to do was refuse to acknowledge you.”
I’m still looking at the picture. The happy face of the man who reared me even though I wasn’t biologically his. “Why did Richard do it?” I ask. “Why did he fall in love with a pregnant woman? Claim me as his own? Raise me?”
Ana María
sniffs. “Women don’t just cease to exist as people once we’re pregnant. Your mother was beautiful and smart and bright like sunshine. She and Richard fell in love, and it was never a question to him that he would raise you.”
“She was done with Ralph though, after that first year? They never . . . you know . . .”
A couple long drags on the cigarette.
Finally: “I told you earlier, St. Sebastian. Love is often wrong. And it is never, ever simple.”
And with a feeling like hot needles pricking the inside of my body, I recall what my mother said to me when I left England after the attack in the graveyard.
I have to stay. I won’t leave the man I love.
I thought she meant Richard Davey then. I thought she meant his grave and all the memories she’d made with Richard in the too-short years they had together. But no.
She meant Ralph.
“How?” I ask. “And for how long?” I search my memories, but I can’t remember anything that would have ever made me think she was sneaking off to fuck Ralph Guest. She took the occasional research trip, maybe, and she left sometimes for historical society meetings, but . . .
I can practically hear Ana María shrug. “Jennifer hinted something awful happened to him—something he couldn’t bring himself to tell her about. Something in the thorn chapel. I think it changed him. He was still a monster, but he was a broken one when he came back to your mother. And anyway, I think she couldn’t help but love him still. To her, he’d always be her May King. Her lord of the manor.”
I lean my head back against the bookshelves and stare up at the ceiling. I suddenly feel very foolishly and obviously like my mother, making the same mistakes, falling for the same breed of broken Guests. Except my mother’s sin was loving a married man, and mine is a sin of much greater magnitude.
Jesus. No wonder she was so scared and angry when Auden and I started seeing each other. No wonder she wanted me back in Texas, far, far away from Auden’s floppy hair and cool, arrogant drawl.
Too far away for him to draw on my skin or bite my lip.
Too far away for us to fall into reckless, terrible love.
Which we did anyway.
“She should have told me,” I say, vehemence staining my words with anger. “She was a fucking coward.”
This earns me a blistering scolding. “Do you think it was easy for her?” Ana María snaps. “Do you think it was easy raising a son on her own? Do you think she wanted to have a son with a married man who would never claim her or him? If she didn’t tell you, it was because she wanted to keep you safe from all of it. She wanted to keep you away from the darkness Ralph had made.”
“She was afraid of what I’d think,” I say angrily. “She was afraid I’d judge her.”
“Can you blame her?” Ana María demands. “Look at how you’re reacting now!”
“She lied to me my entire life! And because of her lies, I didn’t know any better, and I—”
Fell in love with Auden Guest is what I was about to say, but I manage to choke the words back before they pass my lips. Because here’s something as terrible as it is true:
No one can ever, ever know.
No one can know that I fell in love with my brother, that I made vows to him beside the river. That he chased me and caught me and mounted me and that I liked it. That he, Proserpina, and I were going to live together, that he was going to be our Dominant, that we were going to be our king’s priest and priestess, and we were going to be very fucking happy.
