At the back of the shop, just when I think I’m done looking, I see it.
I see the necklace.
I’ve never seen it before in my life, and yet the moment I notice it, I know it’s the necklace. For what or for whom, I don’t know, but I’m meant to see it and to have it. To own it and to give it.
It hangs from the neck of a marble bust and catches the light, and when I drift closer, I see that it’s more than an array of gold and precious stones. The thin collar of it drips into a sparkling fringe that would hang down the wearer’s chest—but rather than dangling from the collar in a series of straight lines, the fringe fits and interlocks together to create a tableau, a narrative of metal and precious stones.
And the narrative is this: from a delicate branch, a small, exquisitely crafted wren is trying to rise into the air. One slender wing is raised in flight, while the other is snared by the branches, by their dark, glittering thorns. The bird’s eye is rendered with onyx, but its wings are done in tiny pearls and pink diamonds, and there is something unearthly about it, both in its beauty and in its obvious distress. It’s like a bird from fairyland caught in a mortal tree—or maybe the other way around.
The struggle is wrought in every curve of its body, in the strain of its wings and in the tiny, barely-perceptible parting of its beak. But that flashing eye is filled with defiance, and its form is still so graceful. Beauty caught in the teeth of heartbreak.
I reach out, not really to touch it, but out of a touching instinct. Even though I know it’s only gems and metal, even though I know it’s only a rendering and not a real bird.
Not a real beauty caught in its own painful cage.
It’s trying so, so hard to fly, and if only it would stop struggling, if only it would stop thrashing—
I don’t know how I end up asking the attentive shopgirl for the price. I don’t know how I end up paying what is even for me an exorbitant sum. I don’t know why I write down the address I do when I arrange to have it delivered.
But I do know, when I write the card accompanying the necklace, that I see not a bird in my mind’s eye, but a beautiful girl washed in shades of silvery-pearl and pale pink, standing alone in the Long Gallery at Thornchapel. I know that I see that same girl crying, pleading, pretending she’s okay.
I sign my name to the short card—For you — from Rebecca Quartey—and then I leave the shop, heading for the Tube at last and thinking of birds and blond-haired girls that hide their wounds and hurt alone.
You’re supposed to be a genius. So what in God’s name are you thinking right now?
Buying a gift that expensive is something one does for subs and partners and spouses, not for cheating exes. Because Delphine is nothing like a girlfriend or a sub to me anymore, she is nothing to me at all. Nothing but the ache in my chest and the reason I cry cuddling a stupid blanket at night. The reason I haven’t been to my own club in weeks.
What are you doing?
I go back to work; I finish the day without crying again. I think of trapped birds the entire time, and when I get home, I am confronted not only with the vast emptiness of my Delphine-less loft, but with the lonely ache in my body.
I want sex.
I want a lot of it, and I want the kind that leaves you hollowed out and exhausted after. I want to zip on my favorite vinyl bodysuit, and I want to find a willing sub with a nice, plush body, and a mouth like a doll’s, and big, honey-brown eyes—
Fuck.
No. See, this is the problem: I don’t just want sex.
I want sex with Delphine.
It’s why I haven’t gone to Justine’s, it’s why I haven’t found some other pliant sub to spend time with, even though I easily could, and even though several months ago, I would have.
And I don’t know why. I’m not going to forgive her, I’m not going to take her back. She knew no one was allowed to leave marks on her body but me, and then she let some American spank her in front of everyone anyway. She was the only person I’ve ever trusted with myself—really myself, not the prodigy in the pages of Architectural Digest, not the dutiful daughter who sacrificed her frontal lobe on the altar of the family business.
I let her in, I let myself care about her and love her, and most damningly, I let myself be vulnerable, and she gave that gift as much thought as she would a box of unsolicited skincare products sent to her to promote on her Instagram feed. I was opened up, peered at for half a second, and then tossed aside like a bottle of artisanal lip serum.
How can I forgive that? How could I ever trust her again? Even with something as contained as an orgasm?
She was vulnerable first, my thoughts whisper. She told you she loved you, and you acted like it didn’t matter.
But that was different. It was so different. Even if I can’t explain exactly why.
Here’s what I should do. I should get dressed in something dramatic, go straight to Justine’s, and then enthusiastically fuck my way out of a broken heart. Fuck my way into falling out of love with Delphine Dansey.
Yes. Yes, I’m going to do that. I even walk over to the rack of cotton garment bags where I keep my fetish clothes. I even unzip one, like I’m really going to pull on a leather miniskirt and its matching corset and go right to the club.
But when I try to imagine it, when I try to imagine someone else kneeling in front of me, or underneath me, or on all fours and waiting for whatever sweet hell I’m about to unleash on them, my brain goes all fuzzy and my stomach twists beneath my rib cage. The need between my legs collapses and cools into something that’s less like lust and more like indifference.
Precisely like indifference, in fact, because try as I might, I don’t want anybody else.
I don’t want anyone kneeling in front of me if they’re not her, I don’t want anyone underneath me if they don’t smell like berries and violets and money. I don’t want anyone saying yes, Mistress or yes, Rebecca to me unless it’s in that ridiculously upper-class voice, that voice of sharp consonants and high-falling vowels. I don’t want to come unless it’s against her mouth, her fingers, and I don’t want to look at anyone else coming unless it’s her.
Perhaps that’s the piece of it I’ve forgotten to mourn. I’ve been hurt and angry about the betrayal, about my wounded pride and my ravaged heart, but I haven’t yet fully grieved what I’ve lost. Not just a girlfriend, but a kitten, a sub. The brat I was eagerly anticipating disciplining for weeks and months—and years—into the future.
She had been mine. Her body, her cunt, her giant, bright eyes. Her giggles and her gasps. Her welts, her bruises, her everything. There had been a person in this world whom I could pour all of the care and attention and affection I had to give, a person who filled me up instead of draining me dry.
All of that is gone now . . . all of it except the lust.
I drop my hand from the garment bag and go to my kitchen instead. If Auden were here, we’d do gin or whisky, or rum if I could talk him into it, and if Delphine were here, which she never will be again, we’d have champagne or prosecco or something else sweet and bubbly. But it’s just me, so I pour myself a glass of red wine and sit at my desk, opening my laptop as I do.
I don’t know why I bought Delphine a necklace more expensive than a holiday home in Scotland when what I really want is her lipstick smeared on my cunt. When what I really want is for her to feel this need at the same magnitude as I do.
I want her to feel this same need more than I want her to feel guilty and miserable—and not only because when I find myself wishing guilt and misery on her, I start to feel sick and clammy, like the thought of her unhappy still has the power to afflict me, like my ill wishes are rebounding back on myself. But if she were to be miserable with lust, with wanting what only I can give . . .
The thought stirs me. Imagining her alone on her girlhood bed in the Cotswolds, tossing and turning on bespoke bed linens, needing more than just an orgasm, needing the rush and catharsis that only a mistress can provide. Imagining her pantin
g, flushed, desperate to come . . .
I navigate to a certain website and start scrolling. It’s not pornography that I’m looking at, but a gift, and one that would be a lot more useful to us both than a necklace with a sad bird on it.
Wanting her is not forgiveness.
Lusting for her is not absolution.
She can make me wet and I can hate her. She can consume my thoughts and still earn my scorn. And if I’m unhappy, if I’m lonely . . . if there’s a voice that whispers to me of all the times she opened herself to me and I walled myself off in response—well.
At least I’ll be able to get off this way.
I send the gift with the same note I sent with the necklace.
For you — from Rebecca Quartey.
And then imagining her receiving it, using it while she wears nothing but a bird made of pearls and diamonds, I slide my hand down my trousers and into my knickers.
And for the first time in two weeks, I come.
Chapter Six
Auden
“—pollen analysis, but it could be next week, or it could be next year, depending on the twats at the lab.”
I slide my iPad and some folders into my satchel, my phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder as I step away from my desk. It’s a strikingly lovely late August evening, with rosy sunlight still pouring through the skylight and illuminating the empty desks and vacant glassed-in meeting rooms.
I’m the last one here, as usual, and I’m on the phone with Tobias Talbot-Ullswater, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation at Thornchapel, who also happens to be completely ridiculous and completely wonderful, and also a very good friend. I take one last look around my desk as he talks, deciding as I do that I’m going to return to Thornchapel early this week. It’s been more than two weeks since Proserpina came back, but I still have this slow, simmering panic when we’re far apart, like maybe my heart will stop beating if I’m away from her for too long. Like it’s how I told her, that there’s two halves of my heart, one in her chest and one in St. Sebastian’s, and now with St. Sebastian gone, I’m barely clinging to life.
The only thing that makes his leaving bearable is knowing that he was right. Knowing that if he stayed, I’d destroy him, just like our father destroyed everyone he ever desired.
Tobias says something else about soil samples and palynology—pollen analysis—and I try to focus on the conversation at hand.
“Tally,” I say, turning off the lights as I take the stairs to the ground floor. “I hate to be an obnoxious, landed-gentry prick, but I rather don’t care about pollen at the moment.”
“I find it very charming when you are an obnoxious, landed-gentry prick,” Tally purrs. “It’s much more charming than when you’re skipping around London with your floppy hair and your Smythson bag, pretending that you’re some anonymous, architect-y boy who works extra architect-y hours to impress people who patently don’t care.”
I think for a moment.
“It’s not a Smythson bag,” I finally say.
Tally laughs. Everything’s a joke to him: friendships, money, sex . . . even his job. When he graduated with his MPhil in archaeology, there were several respectable paths open to him: a position at an aunt’s vaguely-connected-to-art-literacy-but-also-maybe-a-tax-shelter foundation, a job with an antiquities firm, or the tried and true path to professorship. But no, Tally discarded all of those options and became a rescue archaeologist instead, getting very muddy with very little acclaim . . . and making very little money while doing it.
I asked him why once, and he’d just grinned and said he’d needed the cover of commercial archaeology to disguise his domestic sexual tourism. And with Tally, that’s either entirely true or entirely a lie. But since I—as he rightly pointed out—am playing the part of anonymous, architect-y boy, I can hardly cast stones and demand a better answer. The fact that we’ve both devoted our working lives to bourgeois obscurity is probably its own answer anyway.
“Now that you’ve done the preliminary examination, do you know when you’ll be finished with the full excavation?” I ask, locking up the Harcourt + Trask doors and then leaving the building. It’s an easy distance from the office to my townhouse, and it’s a nice evening, so I decide to walk. “I’m just trying to gauge what this means for the labyrinth project, and when we’ll be free to resume construction again.”
“Another two weeks,” Tally says with complete and utter confidence.
Then:
“Actually, I don’t know. Maybe four weeks. Maybe ten. We’re accustomed to working fast, but you’ve got eight kistvaens here, you poor, prehistorically cursed sod. Even I can’t blitz through eight Bronze Age graves in a week, at least not sober, and you know I can’t find the gin I like out here in the hinterlands.”
“So they are Bronze Age?” I ask. “For sure?”
“Undoubtedly. Younger than most of the monuments up on the moors, possibly younger than the stone reaves on the lip of your valley. But pre-Halstatt, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“They are certainly graves as well, except for the carved chamber near the subterranean staircase. We found no burial goods or human remains of any kind in there. It seems designed to have been empty. Which is curious, because the cist facing it almost certainly belonged to some sort of chieftain or king.”
I pass by the Egyptian consulate, weaving past a food delivery person with an insulated carrying box on his back. “A king? How can you know?”
“We found a torc. A torc is—”
“I know what a torc is, Tally.”
“Oh. Well. I suppose you should just come and take control of this dig then, since you’re such an expert.”
Shoppers mill under the green Harrods awnings, and I can already hear the noise from Brompton Road. “Or you could demonstrate your proficiency in your field by telling me more about this grave you think belonged to a king.”
A heavy, put-upon sigh. “You are a very needy client.”
“That cannot be true.”
“It is. You’re lucky you’re so pretty, you know, or I’d be packing up my things right now. Poof—there goes gentle, forbearing, noble Tobias, and now you’re at the cold and disorganized mercy of the labs for all future answers.”
“Tally.”
“Christ. Fine. So we found a torc in the tomb closest to the chamber, along with significantly better burial goods than in the other tombs. We found amber beads, tin beads, jet beads. Axe heads, textiles, what we think might be furs, and also beakers of what might have been a fermented drink. You know, like Mardi Gras, but with more axes and tin. Typically in a cluster like this, I might expect to see other high-profile graves nearby, but there is only the empty chamber, and the other seven graves are more standard in their burial fare. Very poor in the bead department, with wooden earrings instead of gold ones, that kind of thing. Also, the torc chap was buried, not cremated like everyone else.”
That does surprise me, and I find myself asking Tally to clarify as I cross Brompton Road. “Buried? You know that for certain?”
“Bones are usually a dead giveaway for that. Get it, Auden? A dead giveaway?”
I groan.
Tobias heaves a sad sigh. “I am very deeply undervalued by you, you know.”
“So you say. But Rebecca had mentioned something to me about soil acidity and bones—”
“Yes, yes, up on the moors, the acidity is quite vicious, but we’ve gotten lucky with your little valley. Much more well-behaved in terms of pH. So not only do we have a skeleton instead of burned remains, but the skeleton is complete enough that we can see our king probably didn’t die of natural causes. There is a preserved cord of horsehair rope around his neck and damage to the skull—which appears deliberate and not caused by any subsequent weathering or soil instability in the grave. If I were to be dramatic, then I would say you’ve got a victim of human sacrifice in that tomb. Killed and tucked into his eternal sleep facing the rose-carved chamber.”
I stop walking for a moment as the crowds of people surge past, cars rolling next to me like a honking, metal river.
Human sacrifice.
King.
I push my free hand through my hair. “And if you weren’t being dramatic? What would you say then?”
For the first time on the call, Tally’s voice is more pensive than playful, and when he speaks, he speaks slowly. “I suppose I would say that it’s still damned odd. The whole site. Dartmoor residents of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age preferred the moors and the outcrops for most of their monuments and burials . . . so why this valley? And if so, why not nearer to the monuments already erected close by? Why are there no other monuments marking the area, like a cairn or a stone circle? Or were there other monuments, and your terrible ancestors pulled them down in order to build a folly or a carriage house or something? If the other graves are contemporary to the king’s, were those people also killed? Did they die before him? After him? And what was the empty rose-chamber used for? It demonstrates a huge amount of invested time and expertise, and then not to be used as a tomb . . . I’m not sure there’s a corollary for that in the record, at least not in Britain or Ireland. Or Brittany, that I can recall.”
I tug at my hair for a second before dropping my hand. It doesn’t have to mean anything. These are old bones, and old bones can’t hurt anyone.
The Thorn King is an old story, Auden, I can remember Poe saying. Too old to touch us.
And what had I told her then? Sometimes the oldest stories are the most dangerous ones of all.
So I don’t know what I believe. I don’t want this to matter, but we’re past what I want now.
“Auden, I have to disclose all of this to the county archaeologist, and after that, it’s very likely a discovery like this will attract some media attention. It might be worth considering if you’d like to get ahead of the interest by publicizing the finds now.”
All these years of scorning my father for treating the Thorne Valley like his own private theme park, condemning him for hiding its secrets from outsiders, and now here I am balking at the idea of photographers and documentary crews swarming my property. I chew on the inside of my cheek for a moment. “May I have a bit longer to think about it?”
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 6