Page 43 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Except it wasn’t really stolen, was it? It was never mine, it was never meant to be, it was always a lie.
I just didn’t know it before.
But even with the lingering ghosts of the Life That Might Have Been, I’m still content to watch Poe move around, sleepy-eyed and sulky, fumbling for clothes and flinging socks and bras around like a teenager getting ready for school. When she goes in to use the bathroom and brush her teeth, I wander around the room, the dog at my heels.
Almost nothing has changed since the morning I found Auden’s journal, save for Poe moving in her things too. She has a book on the bedside table just like I would have, and librarian habit has me picking it up and flipping through it. It’s a book about ancient British religion, and after nosing through the front matter—it was published fourteen years ago through a university press—and scanning through the
chapter headings, I’m about to set it back down when I see Poe’s last name. Or more accurately, her mother’s last name.
Introduction by Dr. Adelina Markham
Curious, I page through to the introduction, reading about Dr. Markham’s background in Neolithic Mediterranean rituals and how she views the author’s work on ancient British religion. One section in particular catches my eye:
The nuances of when, where, and how humans were sacrificed are vagarious and so intrinsically complex that they defy easy explication, even in a book entirely devoted to the matter. It is frustrating to the historian, of course, because we crave categorization, we crave indexing, but above all, we crave understanding. We must never forget, however, that the bones, bogs, wicker men, sacred groves, and altars all belonged to people, and people are inherently inconsistent and illogical; they are given to fear, erratic behavior, and all manner of specious thinking.
They are also hopeful, imaginative, compassionate, and profoundly selfless.
We can surmise from archaeological evidence and contemporary accounts that many victims of human sacrifice consented to their own deaths and willingly allowed themselves to be slain, often in brutal and painful ways. Why they consented is a matter for conjecture, but it seems reasonable to suppose that ritual murder was an act that straddled both violence and abnegation, and that sacrifice was an act that was seen to benefit the community and the land the community needed to survive.
Complicating our search for meaning is the gradual ebbing of the practice before the pervasion of writing into the communities that performed ritual sacrifice. In fact, one may even go so far as to say that there is a strong inverse correlation between written history and human sacrifice—that the latter declined in the face of the former, but again, why that might be is beyond what the data can tell us.
In the face of this absence, we are left with mysteries, and our only recourse is to find more mysteries to add to the record, in the hopes that somehow all these unanswered questions will elucidate themselves. And to that end, the work of Dr. Katy Davidson has been invaluable, particularly in the excavations in the Thorne Valley, where I first met Dr. Davidson as a student many years ago, and where she has conclusively proven a span of human religious activity dating back to the Neolithic. Dr. Davidson uses the Thorne Valley ritual landscape as a synecdoche for the religious life of ancient Britain as a whole, showing the transmission of ideas from the Neolithic all the way to the Roman occupation and into Saxon rule—
“I see you found my mother’s introduction,” Poe says from behind me. “Cheerful stuff, right?”
“It’s interesting. Where did you find it?”
“I was looking for something about Estamond, actually, and I noticed this because it was so much younger than all the books around it. And then once I saw my mom’s name, I obviously had to read it. But there’s also a lot in there that’s on brand for us.” She says it in an oddly light voice, as if she’s trying to make a joke, but she’s too troubled to pull it off.
“I did notice your mother referenced the Thorne Valley. She was a student digging here?”
Poe lifts a shoulder. “That’s what the introduction says. My father never said anything about it, but it would explain why she came here when we were children, maybe? Maybe not? But here, look at this—”
She flips to a dog-eared page toward the end of the book and points. I read:
The standing stones on the Thornchapel estate are a well-guarded secret, as is the chapel situated to the west of them. The Guest family, who have officially owned the land since the Domesday Book, but very probably for much longer, have only allowed one excavation of the site, in the late 1980s. The stones have been in place there for at least four thousand years, while the chapel is of early Norman construction. The altar inside the chapel, however, is an interesting case, as it seems to predate the standing stones, but also bears testimony to the various faiths that have been practiced there. The excavation uncovered two Neolithic jet beads, a pair of bronze divination spoons, a mix of Roman and Saxon coinage, and a small lead cruet that could have possibly been used for sacramental wine after the Guests commissioned the family chapel. This speaks to an incredible continuity of worship centered on one site, especially one so remote, and indeed, it is hard not to conjecture why that might be. Even the Romans were curious; it is said that when they first encountered the Dumnonii living in the Thorne Valley, they asked the Britons why the altar in the woods was so deeply sacred to them.
We don't know what words the Dumnonii used to explain it, but we do know how the Romans translated what they said. Convivificat.
It stirs. It resurrects.
It is perhaps no wonder the Christians felt so at home there.
I look up at Poe, and she’s staring back at me with an I know, right??? face.
“Convivificat,” I say aloud, thinking of the words etched onto the altar. The lettering looked newer than Roman to me, just by the shape of the letters, but how much newer is hard to say. Long enough for the grass to grow over the altar, I suppose.
“I still don’t know why she wrote it,” Poe says, looking down at the book with distinct yearning. “But it’s nice to know the history of it, you know?”
“And the altar.”
“Isn't that part wild?” she asks. “The altar being older than everything else in that clearing?” And then she frowns to herself. “Well, other than the door, maybe.”
“The door?”
She looks away from me and the book, off to the window. As if she’s embarrassed. “It’s going to sound very, um, bizarre, but I’ve seen a door. Behind the altar. Mostly in my dreams, but also glimpses of it when I’m awake, and then Auden saw it too. After Beltane.”
“A door,” I repeat. “Like an actual door? A door that takes up space in the real world?”
