“In this one, a knight finds a beautiful woman riding in the woods on Halloween. He pledges his fealty to her, and she accepts only on the condition that he give her his entire life, and never do so begrudgingly. The minute his heart falters, he is to inform her and leave her side, because she only wants a true and willing defender. When they ride into fairyland, she tells him that he can only return to his former life if he leaves her right then, because the way to the human world will close at dawn. She tells him this thinking he will leave her, abandon her out of longing for his old life or maybe fear. But she underestimates her knight, and he stays loyal, not only staying by her side, but eating the first fruit he finds in the fairy realm to ensure he is bound to her forever. Rose hips, by the way. That’s the fruit he eats.”
Becket makes a face. “Not the fairy food I would choose.”
I stack this volume, The Riddling Rose, and Amusing Tales on one side of me, and then Dr. Davidson’s book on the other. “I know there’s only so much we can glean from stylized sources like these, but I think there’s something here, some common kernel of truth we can uncover. If the door has been used like a door, for moving back and forth, for taking lovers or for doing business or even just for wandering around, then that has to mean there’s some other way to live with it other than what the Guests and Kernstows insisted on.”
“Do you think the door used to appear more often? Do you think it could appear and disappear on its own, without human—or mortal, as it were—intervention?”
I’m already shaking my head because I don’t know, I don’t know yet. “Let’s start by dividing what we’ve found across the sacrifice watershed. Books mentioning death and sacrifice go here, and anything else goes here. And then we can begin indexing anything useful from the non-sacrifice pile.”
“Auden is going to be so pleased,” observes Becket as he picks up a book to page through.
“Well, maybe less pleased when we make him help us later tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Proserpina
Three nights later, the only sounds in the library are the popping of the fire, the melancholy drone of Becket’s indie playlist, and the sound of pages turning. The first long library table has become a mess of stacks and piles that only makes sense to me and the spreadsheet I’ve made to tabulate everything. The second table is the shared workspace of everyone else as they flip through each text and scan for mentions of what we’re looking for. Only Rebecca is spared going through the books tonight, as Tobias has forwarded over his official archaeological report, and she seems to have an irritated interest in familiarizing herself with the tombs that so rudely interrupted her labyrinth project.
“If I read another Victorian version of Tam Lin, I will crawl into the fire,” Auden says calmly, shutting his book.
“What happened to being open to all manner of library drudgery?” I ask, batting my eyelashes.
“I said that before I truly understood how many books were in this room. I feel like we must have looked through every single one of them by now.”
“Not even close, lord of the manor.”
“What I want to know,” Delphine says, giving a big stretch and then a very pretty pout, “is when we can be done for the night.”
“Tired?” asks St. Sebastian from where he’s reading, his boots propped up on the table.
“No,” Delphine answers pertly. “Bored. We used to have fun here, remember? What happened to having fun?”
Becket left the priesthood, Saint and Auden learned they were brothers, and Rebecca learned that you let my ex-Domme spank you in public.
“Poe,” Rebecca says before I can translate any of that diplomatically, “didn’t you say there were plagues here during the medieval times and during the Restoration?”
“Yes, although as Becket pointed out a couple weeks ago, we don’t know what kind of illness precisely—”
Rebecca waves a hand, her eyes still on her iPad screen and Tobias’s report. “That’s all right. I was actually more curious about the dates, if you have them handy.”
“I have the records catalogued. One moment.”
“Take your time,” Rebecca murmurs, eyes scanning her screen.
It takes more than a moment, but soon I have a healthy stack of church registers, Elizabethan travelogues, and bound editions of medieval coroners’ rolls. Since Becket and I have recently combed through them, it’s easy to find what I’m looking for inside each one.
“Okay, the first recorded in real time, as it were, was during the reign of King Stephen, so the mid-1100s. But later, during a sickness that came in the 1400s, a clerk calls it the Saxonn Morbus, and mentions briefly that it came with Wessex in the sixth century and has repeatedly cropped up in the valley ever since. But then travelogues from the late 1500s describe a claim by locals that Merlin the wizard cursed the valley with the sickness before the Saxons ever made it here. There’s one more episode of illness in the 1600s, recorded by a traveling clergyman, who claims the sickness was inflicted on the villages of the valley—Thorncombe and the denizens of Thornchapel in particular—by God for refusing to abandon their papist ways.”
Rebecca has looked up from her iPad and is looking over at the tables with a line carved between her brows. “Auden,” she says in a tight voice. “Every one of those dates lines up with Tobias’s pollen anomalies.”
Auden squints. “The roses, you mean?”
“Yes. Whenever a plague has come to the Thorne Valley, the roses have come too. Or I suppose we could say that whenever the roses come, so does the sickness. Except Poe’s texts only refer back to the Saxon era, while Tobias’s pollen record shows two more incidences in the Neolithic. One of which is contemporary with the cists and the rose-carved chamber. The only significant gap seems to be between the time of the cists and the time of the Saxons. A period of almost fifteen hundred years without the roses showing up once.”
A minute passes as the six of us think about this. As the six of us digest the fact that the roses are currently crawling through the woods toward the rest of the valley now.
“Proserpina, do these sources describe the illness at all?” asks Auden. His voice is cool, but I can tell this news about the roses and the sickness bothers him. A lot.
“Um, it’s a fever primarily,” I say, looking back down at the books in front of me. “Marked by delusions, visions, waking dreams, that sort of thing. Once the delirium sets in, the victims are said to bleed from small wounds and . . . well, this is a thing—smell distinctly of roses. After several days of this, they succumb to a deep sleep, and from that sleep they never wake. Oh, and the sheep get sick too,” I add, flipping through one of the travelogues. “Some of the later writers speculated the disease actually came from the sheep, since the sheep started dying earlier than the people. One visiting doctor in the 1500s even called it ovium languorem—the sheep sickness.”
“The sheep sickness,” Auden says strangely. “Are you sure?”
“It’s right here.”
Saint shifts. “There was a dead sheep in the road the other day.”
“And one near the equinox stones,” adds Auden. “Is there anything else epidemiological in there? Any other indication of how it spreads?”
“Only that it seems to spread along the line of the river—of the valley. And only once, during the 1100s, does it sound like it spilled out of the valley and across the moors. Until it simply stopped.”
“Was there any kind of cure?” Delphine asks. “Or were they able to halt its spread somehow?”
I shake my head. “It sounds like once it started, it would spread through the valley unimpeded, but then it would abruptly end. And when it ended, those who were sick at the time were wholly recovered.”
“So the door brings the roses,” Saint says. “And the roses bring the illness?”
“The roses are growing now though,” Delphine says, sitting forward and looking at us all now. “Does that mean we’re going to get sick? Has anyone bee
n feeling sick? Other than Auden with his flower-cataracts?”
Becket’s music ends, and he stands to go start another playlist. “To be fair,” he says as he goes, “I think Auden’s flower-cataracts are different from what’s being described in the historical record.”
“Because he’s the Thorn King,” Saint says. “Like the Fisher King. His body and the land are tied together, so what happens to the land happens to him.”
“I’m not sure about the Fisher King angle, but we can safely assume they’re not the same for the simple reason that he doesn’t have the same symptoms,” Rebecca says. “If the records mentioned smelling of roses, surely they would mention human tears made of rose petals too.”
Auden seems not to be listening to this, as if his own illness isn’t something that concerns him in the slightest. “Do you think the sick people recovered because the door was closed?” he wonders aloud. “And if so, does that mean the cure is closing the door?”
“It seems plausible,” Rebecca says.
He lets out a deep breath. “That would explain a lot. It explains why someone would be willing to give their life to close the door. Because it’s not about closing the door at all, it’s about stopping what the door brings with it. Protecting people from it.”
Silence settles over the room. Becket’s still by his phone and the speaker, but he hasn’t turned on anything else. Instead, he folds his arms and looks down at his feet.
“What are we thinking then? If the illness comes again—”
“It hasn’t yet,” Saint cuts in. “I’m in the village every day, and nothing bad has happened.”
“But if it comes again,” Becket says in a solemn tone, “then what does that mean? If people do get sick and start dying, then what are we willing to do about it?”
This is when Auden will tell us in no uncertain terms that sacrifice is off the table, that he’ll hear no talk of it. This is when he’ll tell us that no matter what, he draws the line at death, and that we will find another way.
He doesn’t.
Instead he stabs a hand through his hair and stands.
“I need a drink.”
A few hours later, and Delphine and Rebecca have gone off to bed—together, I’ve noticed, just as I’ve noticed Delphine sporting marks on her ass when we were using the indoor pool yesterday—and Becket’s gone up to bed too, claiming he’s still struggling not to keep priestly hours. Saint hasn’t gone home yet, and Auden and I haven’t gone to bed yet, and the three of us are sitting out on the terrace looking up at the stars. It’s a chilly night, and Auden’s in a peacoat and I’m wrapped in a blanket. Saint is in a T-shirt.
We’re passing around a bottle of scotch.
The two of them have struck an uneasy truce for me, tolerating each other’s company so long as mine is the company being sought, even though I know they’re both deep in their feelings about what happened in the woods on the equinox.
He rejected me, Saint said about it, face twisting with angry shame. I offered him everything and he said it wasn’t good enough.
He’s not ready, was all Auden would tell me.
As per the usual with them, I’m guessing the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think Auden is right to wait until St. Sebastian is able to choose him no matter what—but at the same time, I miss being a three. For one night, one wonderful Beltane night, we were together as we should be. And then Ralph’s sins tore us apart.
Well, Ralph’s sins, and the stubbornness of two certain boys I know.
I suppose these months since May have given us practice in being a split triad, a three-pointed line with me in the middle, and so we’ve been limping along somehow. But it’s not the same, it’s not the same, and I’m so tired of being the hinge between them, of being the fulcrum on which they teeter and totter.
But something’s shifted tonight. Tonight, under the stars, it’s not only them who are distant from each other, but it’s me who is distant from them. My thoughts are still in the library. My heart is still at the door.
“I’ve decided to go to school,” St. Sebastian says. We’ve turned off the lights in the back of the house, so that there’s nothing but starlight above us, and his voice seems to come out of the night itself. “I think . . . I think it is the right choice.”
“It is,” Auden says. “If you feel that it is, then it is.”
“I’ll be listing the house soon too, so I need to decide whether I’ll stay in Bristol full-time or not.”
“You’re welcome here,” Auden says firmly. “I hope you know that will never change.”
“No, I—I know. I know.”
“Good.”
The silence spills in again, like water sluicing from a gate. A fast, cold rush.
Even in the darkness, I can see stacks of books. I can see black roses around a door.
Missing something. You’re missing something.
“Proserpina,” Auden says softly. “Is everything all right?”
No, I want to say. We’re missing something. My mother died because our parents missed it too.
But what can I say that hasn’t been said already?
“Yes,” I say to the two men I love. “Everything is totally fine.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
St. Sebastian
After a long five days in Bristol learning how to be a student again, coming back to my childhood home is a relief, although I’m not sure why. It hardly even feels like home now, with most of the furniture donated or sold, with most of my mother’s things either packed away or gotten rid of, with my sprawling collection of books given to charity shops and the YOI in Exeter.
It’s a house of bare shelves and naked walls. There’s no more half-read magazines or pictures of Jesus watching me from the hallway. There’s no more old cookie tins filled with sewing things, there’s no more well-worn blankets folded over the back of the couch, there’s no more anything that says Jennifer and St. Sebastian Martinez lived here and were mostly happy.
Nothing, that is, except for my mother’s office, which is still a monument to disorder and imagination. More than anything else—her clothes, her books, her half-empty bottles of shampoo I left untouched for two years in her bathroom—her office was her. Not just her space, not only a retreat and a nest of paper and research, but her mind. Her thoughts and her energy extrapolated and manifested in secondhand books, photocopies, journals, organizational systems that were halfway utilized and then quickly abandoned. Pens and highlighters and little colored flags that she loved to stick everywhere—not only on her work things, but on her leisure reading and on where my homework needed correcting and on her bills too, until our entire house was filled with little stickies of yellow and blue and red.
Walking from a mostly empty house into this time capsule is shocking. Not only from the sight of all her things mostly as she left them, but the smell too, paper and ink and dust and a lingering hint of coffee and vanilla. It’s been almost two years, and it still smells like it did when she was alive. It smells like she just got up from her chair to go to Mass.
For a moment, I can barely move. It’s one thing to consciously remember her, but to have these sensory memories flooding in . . .
It’s awful and powerful and evocative. It’s unpleasant in such a way that I want to do it over and over again, like licking a battery. Like for that brief moment as I’m confronted with her scent, her things, the remnants of her thoughts, she’s so close to being alive again. So fucking close.
I go back to the kitchen, to the cabinet that’s just cereal and booze—all I need to live, really—and make myself a gin gimlet in a coffee mug and enter the office again. It still stuns me, it still nearly lays me flat, but I can push through it. I can keep going.
There are reasons beyond the emotional that I’ve avoided this room. It’s a mess, and I don’t mean that in a cutesy, “aren’t writers so charming” kind of way. I mean it in a “I could probably invite a reality show in here to clean it and it would make for
good television” kind of way. Luckily, I’d already made a start of it this spring, and the desk is mostly tackled at least. That only leaves the two other tables, the bookshelves, and the floor—which is cluttered with enough paper to cover another two or three tables.
With a sigh, I get to work.
With my mug-gin and some music going, it’s not as bad as I feared. The two-year-old bills and bank things can be trashed, most of her notes and research can be tossed too. There’s a fair number of things I suspect need to be returned to various local societies, so I set those aside. And then there’s the things I keep for purely sentimental reasons: a clipping of her first article published in the local paper; a love letter from Richard Davey; a St. Michael the Archangel holy card with bent edges; a picture of mermaids that Richard and I drew (well, he drew and I “helped”).
Soon the tables are done, and then I move to the floor, which is mostly photocopies and printed journal articles, and I sit cross-legged on the old carpet, tossing folder after folder into the recycling pile until I can see one whole side of the room.
I drag over a metal box—not big, but not small either—and flip it open, expecting old checks or cut-up credit cards or something. I’m already reaching for my mug-gin, deciding I’ll slip into the library to use the branch manager’s shredder for the checks—when I pause, my brain finally metabolizing what I’m seeing, what’s sitting in my lap, which is not old checks at all.
It’s money.
Lots and lots of money.
Pinky-orange colors. £50 pound notes. Hundreds and hundreds of them, some in rolls, some in stacks, some just loose. Some stuffed in crumpled envelopes and smashed into corners. So many that they spill out of the box like dry sand over the top of a beach bucket, sliding into my lap and onto the carpet, utterly incongruous with the faded and worn fibers there.
I stare at them like they’re fairy money that will turn into leaves the moment I touch them. I stare at them like they can’t be real.
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