If someone had closed the door with a sledgehammer before she came to it, Adelina Markham would still be alive. So why does thinking of her mother—imagining her standing in front of this open door and looking through it—make her more confused and not less?
“Again, Auden,” says Rebecca, and shoulders bunching and feet bracing, Auden heaves the hammer and swings it at the door.
The crack resounds throughout the chapel and the clearing, and once again when he drops the hammer, the stone is unchanged. He shifts enough to take aim at the old wooden jambs, which should splinter easily on contact, but they don’t. He hits them over and over, at the bottom, at the middle, at the top, and they remain whole and secure to the doorframe, not budging an inch.
Rebecca takes a turn with the sledgehammer, with the same results.
The hammer is scratched and nicked, both Rebecca and Auden are panting and sweaty, and dangling yarn and smashed berries are everywhere, and the door is unchanged.
They haven’t shut it.
They haven’t even come close.
“Fuck,” Auden says, still panting. He wipes his brow with his forearm and leaves behind a smear of berry juice as he does.
“Fuck,” Rebecca agrees. Poe doesn’t think she’s imagining the glassy shine to Rebecca’s eyes or the working of her throat.
Which is when they see the beam of a fourth flashlight swaying over the roses. They turn to see Delphine in one of her I go shooting in the Cairngorms outfits, a thin summer jumper and gray knickerbockers. She tromps up to them in her knee-high boots, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright. She looks quite proud of herself.
“Are you doing something at the altar? May I help?” And then:
“Golly! What happened to your clothes?”
Delphine
She’d put on the necklace every night.
Some nights, she put it on for only a few minutes, turning this way and that on her dressing table stool and watching the jewels glitter in the light. Other nights, she put it on and wore it to bed, savoring the weight of it on her chest and throat.
It felt like a collar would feel, she imagined.
Cool, heavy.
Final.
When she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend Rebecca was in the room with her, watching her from a chair while she commanded Delphine to do all sorts of depraved things wearing the necklace and the necklace alone.
And then the past two nights, when she felt so low that she might as well be buried, she put on the necklace and then knelt. She knelt to no one, she knelt for no reason, really. The world was not changed by her kneeling, and Rebecca certainly wouldn’t be, because how would she ever know?
But still Delphine felt soothed by doing it. Like if she could wear this gift of Rebecca’s—this unexpected, expensive, lovely, lonely, sad, sexy gift—and she could kneel thinking of Rebecca, then she was somehow closer to the version of her life that she should have been living. The version where she hadn’t fucked everything up by being needy and lonely—and then lying about being needy and lonely.
Then there was the other gift Rebecca sent. The gift that was also meant to be worn, but in a very particular way.
Delphine was still new to wanting penetrative play—had been new to it before Rebecca had broken things off—but when she took it in her hands and studied it, when she found all the buttons and inspected all its curves, she felt not trepidation, but a forbidden kind of excitement.
But still she wondered what it meant. Surely the aim was for Delphine to use it—to fuck herself with it—but did Rebecca want to know when she did? Did Delphine want Rebecca to know when she did? If they were broken up, then what was the point of sending a vibrating toy that looked to be the absolute latest in vibrating toy technology? Of sending a necklace that cost more than a purebred Lusitano?
She didn’t know. And so she couldn’t quite let go of the fear that Rebecca was playing with her somehow. That if Delphine did as she wanted and used the toy—if Delphine sent Rebecca videos of her masturbating while wearing only the necklace every single night—disapproval would wait at the other end. Or rejection. Or—worst of all—disgust at Delphine’s clinginess, at her trying-too-hard-ness. And Delphine’d had enough of being the needy one, she really had. It made her feel crazy and lonely and alone, and being dumped and still in love was already lonely enough.
Maybe she wouldn’t have her orgasms but she would have her dignity.
There really ought to be a Latin phrase for that.
And now, today, she’s tormented by the necklace and the toy both, tormented with what she no longer has.
She misses Thornchapel, she misses it so much. She misses Poe, who would let her sit in the library and flop around and sigh while Poe scanned in book after book. She misses Auden and his crooked smile, and the hugs he never stopped giving her when she needed them, even after she abruptly ended their engagement last winter. She misses Becket’s warm reassurance. She even misses St. Sebastian and the way he scuffed around the corners of each room, scowling at Auden and Proserpina like he personally blamed them for every beat of his heart.
It’s more than that. She misses the house, the huge Jacobean library and the rustling trees, the walled garden and the forest. She misses seeing the hills glowering above them, and she misses the chatter of the river below. She misses drinks by the fire, sparklers with Poe while barefoot on the lawn, she misses the cute little village and Sir James snuffling her hand and Abby’s delicious suppers and fucking in the chapel and watching bonfires spit sparks into the night.
She misses Rebecca too, of course, but that goes without saying. That’s like saying she misses water when she’s thirsty or air when she can’t breathe—it’s implied.
She looks around her bedroom and realizes that at some point, this ceased being home. She’s not sure how it happened or when, and she’s not even sure why, because she still loves this house with Daddy and Mummy and Rumswizzle and Gimlet, their naughty springer spaniels. She grew up here, her stables are just over the hill, all her favorite stuffed animals are still perched on her bed, all her favorite books are still here on the shelves.
But it’s no longer home.
She wants to go home.
Once she makes up her mind about this, all other considerations fall away. She doesn’t bother herself with whether anyone’s down from London—Poe will be there, certainly, or Abby can drive up from the village to let her in—and she doesn’t bother herself with whether Rebecca will be there or not.
Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it doesn’t change anything.
She packs her things—clothes, makeup, random cords and lights and equipment for content production. She packs the necklace and the toy too. And then with a kiss on her mummy’s head, and a quick explanation that she’s going to stay with Auden and Poe for a bit, she walks out the door.
Her mummy follows her out to her baby blue Aston and gives her a big hug before she gets in. Delphine’s spent the last several weeks toggling between therapy and tears, and she can tell her mother is a little reluctant to let her go. But when they pull back from the hug, Daisy seems relieved too. Relieved to see Delphine excited and animated and sunny about something.
“Call me every day,” Daisy makes Delphine promise. “And please come home whenever you need.”
“I will, Mummy.”
Daisy makes a specific kind of maternal expression—the it’s my job to worry about you expression. “I want you to do the things you want and keep living your life.”
“But . . . ?” Delphine prompts, expecting Daisy to cite Delphine’s mental health and the breakup with Rebecca as reasons why she shouldn’t go.
Her mum shakes her head. “No but. Full stop. I want you to go where you feel called to go. Just know that Daddy and I are yours. First and foremost, we belong to you. If you need us, we’ll be there.”
“Mummy, I know,” Delphine says, giving her mother a final kiss on the cheek. Her parents are good. Good parents. The
y were not at all like Auden’s father, grasping and cruel and cold. “I know.”
And then she gets into the Aston and drives south.
When she gets to Thornchapel a few hours later, night is already settling in, and the house is empty. Auden’s car is there, the car Poe uses is there, but when Delphine pushes her way past the unlocked front doors, she finds an empty hall, an empty dining room and library.
She climbs up through the stairs in the south wing, all the way up to the tower, calling their names and making kissing noises to summon Sir James Frazer. Still nothing—although when she looks out of the tower’s windows to the sloping lawn and the gathering forest, she thinks she sees torch beams bobbing in the distance. Very faint, very deep into the woods. In the direction of the chapel.
They’re out at the chapel. Without her.
Smiling and also fussy about all the fun she’s missed while off licking her wounds—and also smiling some more because she’s so excited to see Auden and Poe, she’s so excited to be in the chapel again—she retrieves one of her bags from the Aston and trots up to the story with all the bedrooms. For a moment, she considers using the one she and Rebecca briefly shared, but then she decides she’s not ready to see it, she’s not ready to be in there, and so she picks an empty guest suite instead. She puts her bag on the crisply made bed, which is dressed in a bespoke linen set she’d had commissioned when she and Auden were engaged and she thought she was helping renovate her future home.
She has her yoga clothes, but as the nights are cool and damp, she settles on her more autumnal outdoor things, and dresses quickly. The great tragedy of her fashion life is that she loves tweed and cashmere and suede as much as the next horse-mad girl, but finding these things in her measurements is beyond difficult. Most of the companies specializing in those clothes don’t carry anything close to her size, and the ones that do only have extremely limited options. But if there’s one thing Delphine is ever truly stubborn about, it’s dressing the way she wants, and so she spends her time searching for dupes or having bespoke versions made. She pieces together outfits store by store, tailor by tailor, because she doesn’t always have the energy to fight fatphobic doctors or too-small Tube seats or the unceasing waves of trolls online, but she can do this. She can wear the things that make her feel like who she is.
After she’s dressed, she finds a torch in the mudroom and then goes out to the woods, practically skipping as she goes. She missed this, she missed all of this. The dark, the magic, the mystery. The sex and the parties and the fun. She wonders what they’re doing now—a ritual? Something less than a ritual but still more than a party?
But then as she approaches, she hears something unfamiliar, something jarring. Totally inharmonious with the sounds of the forest around them. And then she sees that there’s not two torches—but three.
Rebecca.
Rebecca is here.
Rebecca is here like Delphine both hoped and feared she would be.
Brazen your way through. Brazen brazen brazen.
“Are you doing something at the altar? May I help?” she chirps. “Golly! What happened to your clothes?”
Rebecca turns to her in her oddly inside-out clothes, and there’s horror on her face, pure horror, and seeing it hits Delphine in the chest like a cannonball.
She stops.
Rebecca takes a step forward, and in the torch light, Delphine can see that both Rebecca and Auden are breathless and sweaty. And then she sees Poe—also in inside-out clothes—and then she sees the door.
“Oh,” Delphine breathes. She’s not sure which is making her the most twisted-up and nervous—Rebecca’s obvious displeasure at her being here or the presence of this silly door that they’d all tried so hard not to open. She has to admit right now that there’s nothing silly about the door. There’s nothing silly about it at all.
“Is that another flashlight?” Poe asks, clicking hers off and squinting past Delphine to the entrance of the chapel. “I think that’s another flashlight.”
“I didn’t see anyone at the house,” Delphine says, turning to see someone tall moving through the roses. “Oh, hullo, Father Hess.”
Becket
If his counseling in Plymouth was a chore, then his retreat in Argyll was a revelation. The cottage designated for clergy retreats was at the edge of an ancient churchyard, set on a knoll overlooking a cemetery and a crumbling church—and the steel-gray water beyond it all. Across the loch, stern hills rose, green at the bases where the sheep grazed, rusting with heather at the top. Though these hills were bald and mostly bare, they reminded Becket of the mountains back home. Warm Virginia mountains with trees upon trees upon trees.
The retreat was meant to clarify Becket’s commitment to the Church. He was meant to spent the day in ordered contemplation and prayer, and indeed, that was his aim when he’d arrived there. He did feel shame for what he’d done—not the act itself, but the flagrancy of it, the carelessness, the way its situation cheapened what sex and Poe meant to him. And he did feel a deep confusion about what his purpose was and where his path was supposed to lead.
He did need clarity. Above all, he needed it.
But once he arrived at the cottage, already stocked with plain but hearty fare and plenty of tea, he found that his plan to account for every moment with disciplined, scrutinizing prayer simply . . . melted away. He stepped out of the cottage after setting down his bags and looked out over the graveyard, over the loch, and for the first time in a long time—for the first time since Beltane, maybe, or the last time he’d been joined with Poe—he felt like he could breathe.
Living with zeal was never easy. It felt like living with another version of himself, but one that was nestled just inside his skin, a version that cried out for deserts and blood. But there were times when it was easier, when the zeal felt more like a river flowing than a vast and hungry ocean.
It was easier here. With the air on his throat, because he wasn’t wearing a collar, with his hours open and open and open. He let the zeal off its leash and did what it asked.
Instead of reciting a set number of prayers, he bent over his Bible and murmured until his voice went hoarse. Instead of forcing himself to eat regularly, he ate when he remembered to, and spent the rest of the time talking to God. Instead of going to Mass on Sundays, he sat on the knoll and watched fog swirl through the gravestones and had Masses inside his own heart. He spoke the words to the lift of the wind and to the distant wash of the loch.
Pray, my brothers and sisters, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to God.
Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.
There was a time, Becket knew, when holy people were not safe. When they were not tame. When they were not the gentle shepherds, but the keepers of mysteries and the guardians of fire. As a priest, he turned wine into blood and bread into flesh—why had that ever become a tame thing, a safe thing? God was not safe. The numinous was not safe.
So why then had he hemmed in his faith with safety? His hunger with rules? His zeal with bloodless, methodical praxis?
He loved rituals, rites, and liturgies, that was unchanged. He loved the motions of them, the ancient words, the less-than-ancient words made to sound older than they were. But he’d been reduced by them, he saw now. Or perhaps not him personally, but his understanding, his relationship with God and belief. He’d hoped to wrestle it into submission, that relationship, and make it something that matched the way other people believed. He’d hoped to hide his zeal, stuff it into the corners of himself, bind it and lash it to his heart so it could never make it to his mouth or to his hands and deeds. So that it could never make itself known.
All he’d wanted, all he’d ever wanted, was to believe like other people did. Communally and pleasantly, and with glad hearts that could easily bear the distance between themselves and God.
Not wild and alone. Chasing after God like an abandoned bridegroom.
But it was the wildness that terrified you that summer, he reminded himse
lf. It was the zeal that led you to ruin that day.
Indeed, he had hurt someone in his zeal before. And for that sin, he atoned daily, hourly, with prayers and self-denials and tears. But he also couldn’t live like he had been, not for a single day more, not for a single moment more, and it was there above the loch that he found the clarity he was looking for.
Yes, the zeal was dangerous. Yes, it could consume him if he wasn’t strong enough.
But he was tired of fighting it. Tired of pushing away love and sex and feral fun, tired of keeping his hunger for God locked in a box because he felt like he had to.
He would leave the Church, and he would return home. To Thornchapel.
But there’s no warm welcome waiting for him when he gets there a week later. The front door is cracked open as if someone forgot to close it on their way in, but there’s no sign of Proserpina or anybody else—including the dog. Becket sets his bag in the hall—he’s never needed a permanent place to stay before, but he’s been asked to vacate his belongings from the rectory within the week, and so he’ll ask Auden if he can live here until he has a plan for his new, post-collar life.
A worry for another day. Right now his plans begin and end with Thornchapel.
He walks through the house to the terrace overlooking the lawn, thinking perhaps the others are having an evening party in the walled garden or maybe they’re in the small glass-and-wood outbuilding that houses the pool. But there is only the breeze and the darkness, and Becket stands in the doorway a moment, debating what to do.
Footsteps echo behind him, and he turns with a smile on his face, already knowing the only person that scuffing, heavy tread could belong to. St. Sebastian emerges through the doorway in his usual boots and jeans, blinking at Becket as he transitions from the cozy light of the mudroom to the velvet dark of Dartmoor.
“I was just looking for everyone,” Becket says. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Auden is, would you? Or Proserpina?”
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 14