Page 85 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
After an hour or so of circulating, Poe finally sits down and has something to eat. She’s shoveling potato salad into her mouth when an older black woman sits down next to her, a beer bottle in one hand.
“Hello, Proserpina,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I had a chance to introduce myself before this was all over. Your mother was one of my favorite students a long time ago, and I was lucky enough to later count her among my colleagues.” She extends a hand. “Katy Davidson.”
Poe hurriedly swallows and sets down her food. “Dr. Davidson! Yes!”
Dr. Davidson smiles at her. “I take it you heard about me from your mother? If so, I promise I wasn’t as bad as she probably made me sound. Every student thinks their first excavation director is a dragon until they go on to supervise a site themselves.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Poe assures her. “But I read your book last month, the one about ancient British religion?”
Dr. Davidson gives her a kind look. “I hate to ask this, but which one? I have a few.”
“The Hunt and the Hearth: Perspectives on Ritual Practice in the British Isles from the Neolithic to the Saxon Age,” Poe recites promptly. And then seeing Dr. Davidson’s expression, she adds, “I’m a librarian. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. And yes, of course it would be that one you read. Adelina wrote the foreword.”
“She did.” Poe pauses, not sure exactly how to phrase her next question, not sure if it’s even appropriate. “In the foreword, she mentioned that her first dig was with you, in the Thorne Valley. When she was there—I know it was a long time ago—but do you remember if she seemed . . . overly interested in the valley? Preoccupied with it, maybe?”
Dr. Davidson raises an eyebrow. “You mean, did she seem like she’d want to come back there on her own, years later?”
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Poe should feel a little self-conscious for how quickly Dr. Davidson reads into her question, but she doesn’t. “Yes.”
“We were excavating kistvaens up by Kernstow Farm,” Dr. Davidson says. “Naturally she was interested in the house and the area around it, knowing her family came from there. I would have found it strange if she wasn’t.”
“And Thornchapel?” Poe presses. “Did she seem interested in Thornchapel then?”
Dr. Davidson pauses to think. “She did seem interested. Which I understand must seem ominous now, in light of where she died, but at the time, it was very unremarkable. I’m the only archaeologist who’s ever had permission to dig there, you know, just the once in the late eighties. The dig was years over by then, but I got permission from Ralph Guest to give the students a tour there one day, just so I could show them the standing stones. Adelina hardly stood out to me for wanting to know more about it. It didn’t hurt that Ralph Guest was also very handsome.” She tips the neck of her bottle toward the doorway to the sitting room, where Auden is leaning casually against a bookcase and charming the hell out of some old professor. “Just like his son. I think the students fell in love with Ralph as much as the chapel. He was married, of course, and couldn’t have been more scrupulous about it, so I don’t mean to imply any encouragement on his part. But still, he made an impression.”
She doesn’t know, Proserpina thinks. She doesn’t know that Ralph wasn’t scrupulous at all.
Her dad has been deliberately vague about Adelina’s death—telling family and friends only that she was murdered and the case is technically unsolved. It’s cleaner that way, given that the police weren’t able to officially name Ralph as the murderer due to lack of evidence, and given that it would only drag Auden’s name through the mud by association. And it also means that all of the amorous connections between Ralph and her mother could be buried along with her, protecting them from pointless whispers and lurid gossip.
Which means Poe keeps her voice as light and innocent as possible when she asks her next question. “And my mother? She seemed in love with him too?”
“Well, yes,” the archeologist replies. “But again, so did everyone else.”
“I see.” And Poe really does see. If she’d been her mother, young and excited and abroad, and she’d come to Thornchapel and met a man who looked like Auden . . .
Yes, she would have fallen in love with him too.
“Thornchapel has that effect on people,” Poe adds. “It makes everything seem like—like a secret. One that’s waiting just for you.”
“A secret,” Dr. Davidson says, nodding and then taking a drink. “Yes.”
“I only knew my mom as a child, but I do remember that about her. She loved secrets. She always said that’s why she chose her field—she could have her pick of secrets to find.”
Dr. Davidson looks at her thoughtfully. “You know, when Adelina came to my dig that year, she was in the same place a lot of students are toward the end of their undergrad. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to concentrate her studies, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to stay in academia afterward, or maybe move to commercial archeology and earn actual money. But I think she found something in the Thorne Valley that led her to the ancient Mediterranean. Can you guess what it was?”
Poe remembers her mother’s foreword. “Human sacrifice.” She makes a face, which the professor laughs at.
“You know what’s interesting, though,” Dr. Davidson says, nodding at the bookshelves across the room. “I see a Bible there. I see Homer, I see Livy. Abraham and Isaac, Iphigenia and the vestal virgins. In a time when almost all history was oral, when almost nothing was recorded, these stories persisted and survived. They reverberated through the memories of generations. And of course—” Dr. Davidson nods at the crucifix hanging on the wall “—I can think of one human sacrifice that created an entirely new religion.”
“Well, but that’s not—it’s not the same,” Poe says. Even though the more she thinks about it, the less she’s sure.
“Maybe not,” Dr. Davidson agrees with a shrug. “In the purest sense of history, Jesus would have been an executed criminal. But you have to agree that the theology of the crucifixion is a sacrificial theology. One where Jesus consented for his blood to be shed for humanity’s absolution, where his life was a price paid for the lives of others. That is human sacrifice—human self-sacrifice—and that brings me to the point I’m trying to make, which is that there is something more to ritual murder than horror. Can you guess what it is?”
Poe shakes her head. It’s hard to think of anything other than horror when it comes to killing another person.
