Page 88 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“—but we did have to leave the next day for our conference. When we got home afterward, Ralph called, and invited us to stay the summer. He was already hosting the Danseys and the Hesses, and we’d be welcome to bring you since all the kids would be there. We’d get to stay in a beautiful house, free of charge, give Poe a summer abroad, and have complete access to the Thornchapel library—which obviously was a dream come true. There’re books there that you can’t find anywhere else—local religion for me, local history for your mother—and we’d be able to use the grounds too. There was the maze, the garden, the thorn chapel . . . ”
“And all the sex you wanted to have,” Delphine pipes up. “Don’t forget that.”
Poe makes a face.
“Well, uh, yes,” says David. “That was part of it.”
“Wait, Daddy, how did we end up staying there?” Rebecca interrupts to ask Samson. “If you weren’t there on Beltane?”
“He’d commissioned me to draft up a proposal for the grounds, to see what it would look like if they were properly opened up to visitors. During that first visit, I met David, and . . . ” Samson falters a little, meeting David’s gaze and then looking away. “I think Ralph knew. He was perceptive like that, very gifted at reading people’s thoughts. He invited us to stay the summer as well—I could work in peace, with a break from all the noise and hustle of London—and Rebecca, you could be with your peers, with children it would have been good for you to associate with. How could I say no?”
“But really you wanted to stay to see Poe’s father,” Rebecca says. The words are blunt, but her tone is not.
The look Samson gives her is honest. Vulnerable. He laces his fingers through David’s, and David squeezes them tight. “Yes,” Samson says.
Rebecca glances away, but she doesn’t seem unhappy, only pensive.
“I have a question,” Auden says politely from the floor. “If that’s all right.”
“Of course,” says Poe’s dad.
“I know that both of you were there for largely emotional reasons, and that a fair amount of your time was spent recreationally,” Auden says.
“That’s tactfully put,” mutters Poe.
“But I know that you were also working on something together,” Auden goes on. “In the library. Almost all summer long, all of you were locked in there, and we weren’t allowed in. And I spent enough time trying to eavesdrop at the keyhole to know that you were actually talking and reading in there, not just . . .”
“Recreating?” offers Delphine.
“Right.”
David goes to take a drink and realizes his glass is empty.
“I’ll get it,” Samson says, reaching for the drinks globe next to the sofa. He pulls the whisky bottle free and makes to tip to David’s glass, but David snatches the bottle by the neck and drinks from it instead.
“Your dad is kind of a wreck,” Saint says into Poe’s ear. “Papers everywhere, drinking from the bottle. In love with your friend’s dad.”
“He’s a widowed professor with tenure,” Poe whispers back. “What do you expect?”
Fortified by the liquor, David hands the bottle back to a vaguely alarmed Samson. “Okay. Okay. Do you want to tell them, Sam?”
“Sam,” Rebecca repeats under her breath. “Sam.”
Samson touches his knee. “You start. I’ll help.”
David covers the hand on his knee and then takes a deep breath. “Okay. So. When we were finally settled there, it was early July. I learned that Ralph—along with the Danseys and the Hesses—had been trying to revive some of the older practices of Thornchapel, like we did on Beltane, but all year round. Your
mother and I became fascinated by this, we became just as obsessed as Ralph, just as eager as he was to learn every secret the thorn chapel had. When he said—when he asked us to help him try something—it was impossible to say no.”
“You have to understand what Ralph was like,” Samson says. “What it was like to be there with him, at Thornchapel. It was like being in a dream.”
“Like fairyland,” David says. “And Ralph was the fairy king. Offering you everything you ever wanted. Sex and magic and mysteries.”
“What was it that he wanted you to try?” Becket asks.
“He’d heard a story,” Samson says. “An old one, from someone in the village, that there was a door to—well, it sounds ridiculous to say it now—but that there was a door to Faerie somewhere on the Thornchapel grounds. Anyone else would have dismissed it as nonsensical folklore, but not Ralph. He felt powerfully that the story was rooted in some truth.”
“There was a song the people in Thorncombe sometimes sang,” Poe’s father says. “Here and there/king and door. Cup and spear/corn and war. Ralph felt like there had to be a connection.”
