“We don’t know that he murdered her,” Poe says.
“Becket saw—”
“Becket saw Ralph with her body,” Poe says slowly. “Burying her. We don’t know what happened before that. We assumed . . . but what if we assumed wrong?”
“But why . . . ?” Saint asks and then trails off, like he doesn’t want to finish asking so he won’t have to hear the answer.
She doesn’t respond for a moment, and then she says, softly, “I think she would have chosen it. If she felt there was no other way.”
“We can’t know that,” I tell her firmly. “We can’t know if she consented, and we can’t know what her reasons for coming here were.”
“Convivificat,” Poe says to the ceiling. “She brought that word with her. I keep thinking, why would you fly across an ocean with a warning in your pocket?”
“Because my father asked her to come, Poe,” I say. “She called and he did whatever it was that he did so well—bending people to his will. He made her come here and then he killed her.”
“Like you said,” she agrees after a beat, “we can’t know for sure. But it’s this possibility that she consented to it, and I can’t stop thinking about it. About what happened, about what she felt and thought as she walked through the stone row that day. About why she might have chosen it.”
A chill, deep and relentless, is settling into my marrow.
A true king would never let anyone go in a king’s place.
A Kernstow told me that once.
“And I can’t stop thinking about the fairy stories down in the library,” adds Poe, dragging me free from my thoughts.
Saint releases his piercing from where he’s been tugging on it with his teeth. “Because the door is safer in those stories? More benign?”
She shakes her head against my chest, silky, tangled hair sliding over my skin. “Not benign, not at all. If anything, I think the door might be more powerful in those stories, because they go further in describing the world beyond the door. It’s more than an omen, it’s a path.”
“No,” I hear myself say. “It’s not. Freddie Dansey tried to reach through and couldn’t, remember? It can’t be a path.”
Poe’s voice turns thoughtful. “I think there must be certain times when it’s open in both directions, but that can’t be all of it. There must be something else as well.”
She sighs, a sad, frustrated exhale. “And I keep thinking that if I can find the answer to that, then I might have answers for all the other questions too.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Auden
When I wake, I have a moment where I’ve forgotten everything since Beltane, and there’s only a warm curl of satisfaction in my chest as I open my eyes to see two submissives asleep in my bed. We’d showered after talking, and then Saint—without any prompting from me—had climbed naked into bed, and we’d cuddled Poe between us, letting the rain lull us into a cozy, snuggly sleep.
It’s only as I roll over and register wet leaves stuck to the window—buttery gold and startling crimson—that I remember it’s October and that maybe St. Sebastian is my brother and that my best friend is sick with something that might kill her.
I remember that the door is open.
I push myself to a sitting position and look over at my lovers. Poe is a lush sprawl of sleep—deeper sleep than she’s been getting lately, which is probably related to the man curled behind her, his legs tangled with hers and his arm thrown over her stomach. For his part, his lips are pressed together and his eyes are moving under their lids—he’s dreaming.
My two dreamers.
Though it’s still early, it’s not so early that I’ll be able to go back to sleep, so I dress myself quietly and go into the en suite. I don’t have the energy to shave away the stubbled shadow that’s cropped up overnight, and all that’s left to do is brush my teeth and tame my hair.
I stare at my reflection when I’m done, studying my irises.
All my life, I’ve looked in the mirror and seen brown and green; ever since I can remember, I’ve had my father’s eyes. But since the equinox, my eyes have been changing. It started with a ring of deep crimson around the edges, and then the ring began to bleed inward. Threads and tendrils of its fresh-bruise color, staining my irises all the way up to the starbursts of coffee and amber around my pupils. Perhaps by Samhain, they will be completely changed.
I’m not sure what happens then.
I finish, check on Poe and Saint one last time, and then go downstairs for tea. I find Rebecca sitting at the kitchen table near the range, a puffy blanket over her shoulders and a mug of steaming tea between her hands. There are plasters on her fingers and on the inside of her forearms.
“Doing all right today, Bex?” I ask with forced cheer as I fill the kettle with water and then flick it on.
“The same,” she says tiredly. “This fever, and now these little wounds. And I keep thinking if I could just rest . . . but then when I try, I dream of the wren . . . ”
I come to sit next to her and carefully put my hands over hers, looking down at her wrists and arms, where a few small wounds are beaded with tiny scabs. They look like pinpricks.
Thorn pricks.
“Bex,” I say, “I think you need to tell your father that you’re sick.”
She gives an emphatic shake of her head. “No.”
“He’s going to deduce something’s wrong eventually if you continue making excuses not to return to London,” I tell her. “And if you’re really sick with—well, with whatever this is—then he deserves to know.”
Another shake. “I’ve already been to the doctor, Auden. They’re already sending me to a specialist. I have no answers yet, no solution, and I refuse to worry my parents with this until I do. And besides, he thinks I’m staying here because I’m making nice with Delphine. Which is nearly true.”
It is. I can tell from the tension strung between them that they still haven’t resolved whatever it is that’s made them both so miserable, but despite that, there is no more devoted nursemaid than Delphine. She’s been fussing over Rebecca since the day Rebecca showed up, clammy and peaked, and hasn’t stopped making her broth and wrapping her in blankets ever since. At first, it was a little surprising, since Rebecca usually hates anyone doing anything for her that she can do herself, but once I saw the way she looked at Delphine, with confused, complicated longing, I understood that it wasn’t about the nursing and the fussing for Rebecca. It was the intimacy of it, the proximity. The having Delphine curled on a nearby sofa editing photos while Rebecca slept, the familiarity and affection in Delphine’s touch as she tucked blankets around Rebecca’s lap or wound a scarf around Rebecca’s braids before bed. It was submission laced with indelible love, and in Rebecca’s shoes, I wouldn’t have been able to resist it either.
“Speaking of, where is your little nurse?”
Rebecca flicks her eyes up to the ceiling. “I made her sleep last night. She needs it. And I thought I could sneak down here and work, but I haven’t even made it through one email yet.”
The kettle clicks off, and I stand up. “You shouldn’t be working,” I say, trying to keep the impatience out of my tone. “Tell your father you have a cold or something, but then stop expecting so bloody much of yourself when you can’t even lift a tea mug without your hands shaking.”
I turn to see a hot glare bent my way. “I can still work,” she says stubbornly.
“You’re practically ready for A&E.” I sit down with my mug and level a look at her. “Which reminds me, have you thought any more about—”
“I’m not going back to the doctor until my specialist appointment,” she says firmly. “And I’m not going to A&E. Christ, Auden, what do you think they’re going to do with me? They’ll either send me home or treat me for something I don’t have, because what I do have is an ancient rose disease they’ve never seen before.”
“We don’t know that they can’t help,” I maintain. “We have antibiotics now, antivirals, steroids, scans
—we don’t know that they can’t help. And we still don’t know it’s the same illness—”
“Stop, Auden. Just stop,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment before opening them again. “We can be reasonably certain it is, and I’m not saying I won’t go to the hospital if I’m very, very ill, but I am saying that they won’t know the cure for this, and we do.”
“The door,” I say, fear pushing on my chest like the gravity of a hostile planet. “Closing the door.”
“We can decipher this without anyone having to die,” she says, gentler now. “And I want to be here to help when the time comes.”
I put my hand back over hers. Her fingers are clammy and cool. “Promise me that you will take care of yourself. That you will make the choice to go to the hospital before it’s too late.”
“Of course,” she says.
“Because I will do it for you if I have to,” I tell her.
She doesn’t argue with me, although I can tell by the hard twist of her mouth that she would fight me every step of the way.
“And you know Delphine would help,” I say, which is perhaps cheap of me, but I don’t care. Keeping my friend alive is more important than fair play.
As I predict, she softens a little at Delphine’s name. I drop my hand from hers and take a drink of my tea. This is the closest to a truce we’ll get today, and I decide to take my victory and not push for more. She also sips her tea, and we sit in a companionable silence, watching the wet trees wave outside the window.
“Your eyes, Auden,” she says after a moment.
“I know.”
She looks down at where the steam curls from her mug in twisting, ephemeral blooms. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
A question I’ve asked myself often.
“And what,” she asks, lifting her face to the glass, where the trees burn with autumn against a dark gray sky, “happens on Samhain?”
The other question I’ve been asking myself.
The answer I refuse to name.
After I finish my tea, Sir James finds me and starts his morning circles in front of the door until I let him out. I pull on a navy peacoat and some boots and go out to the south lawn, where my dog is currently finding every puddle left by the rain last night.
Though thunderclouds frown above us, there is still plenty of fog clinging to the grounds, and it gets thicker closer to the river and the trees. I walk the borders of the forest like a farmer checking his fences, noting that the roses have breached the cover of the woods and are climbing toward the house again. I’ve directed the team that comes in twice a week to tend to the grounds to cut them back, I’ve told them that it’s an invasive species that must not be allowed to spread to the lawn or the other Thornchapel gardens, but every time the gardeners trim them, the roses return, thicker and even farther onto the lawn than before. As if desperate to make it to the house.
The rose bushes hulk ominously in the fog today, and last night’s rain drips from the blossoms like tears. I think of Tobias’s report, of the pollen analysis showing layers and layers of an unknown rose pollen, and I wonder if my battle against this stupid plant is pointless. I wonder if it’s all pointless.
Scrubbing at my face with my hands, I walk back out of the fog and up the slope to the house, which is when a figure resolves itself out of the misty air. For a moment, I think it must be Becket—the trench coat and upright posture means it can’t be Saint—but no, this person is too short, and their hair a bit too long—
“This looks a right mess, Auden, I hope you know that,” Tobias says as I approach him, gesturing toward the muddy scar where the maze used to be. The cists—empty and with their lids replaced—cup rainwater in little pools along their tops, reflecting dark sky back at us.
“You only just finished tearing into everything, you twat,” I say fondly, giving him a handshake. “Why on earth are you here?”
“They’ve found a potential earthwork from the Battle of Bovey Heath, which is where they would like to build a Lidl or something, and obviously the earthen bank might contain evidence of revetting and palisade construction—I’m sorry, am I boring you?”
I make a face at Tobias. “Yes.”
He gives me a sulk, all sapphire eyes and pretty mouth. “I listen to you when you talk about—I don’t know—building permits and things.”
“When have I ever talked to you about building permits?”
“That’s rather beside the point at the moment. Because as I was saying, I had to come to Bovey Tracey to do an initial survey, and while I was mourning what a waste of my immense mental acumen it was for me to be there, I had a thought about your graves.”
“They’re not my graves,” I say automatically. But I’m deeply curious to hear what he thinks, especially with the keen interest in his face as he looks at them now. I’m also deeply grateful that the fog is currently hiding the roses from view. If Tobias sees them, I have no doubt at all he’ll be able to extrapolate all the correct assumptions about pollen layers and mysterious rose varietals, and then there’ll be no keeping him away from the chapel. Or the door.
“Well, this might sound strange at first, but it’s a very clever theory, so if you’re astute enough, you may be able to keep up. Also have you done something to your eyes? They look . . . odd.”
Tobias peers at my face, and I use the same lie I used last time I was in the Harcourt + Trask office. “Contacts,” I say lightly. “They act as sunglasses.”
“Sunglasses,” Tobias says, lifting his eyes meaningfully to the storm clouds above us. “Yes, I can see why you’d need those today.”
“I’ve been struggling with proper pupillary dilation lately,” I explain. “Anyway, back to your very clever theory.”
Tobias narrows his eyes at me a final time, as if to say I’m watching you, but then with a theatrical sigh, he gestures back at the cists.
“A microcosm,” he says.
“The graves?”
“Yes, the graves. Druids built their temples in these irregular shapes, you know, the Romans used to make horrible fun of them for it, but it turned out those lopsided squares created triangles which lined up precisely with the elliptic motion of the sun, and then they would walk the path of the sun on crucial days. The later Celtic saints did it centuries later too, when they consecrated churches and wells and things. Walking a microcosmic path that mimicked the macrocosmic path of the heavens above.”
I look out over the cists, which are dispersed across the grounds in the most random possible order. “These are like the irregular temples then. There’s a logic to the pattern.”
“Precisely,” Tobias says, pulling something from the pocket of his Burberry trench coat. A paper. “I had to have a friend dig into some archives for me yesterday, since you hate the search for knowledge and stymy all attempts at scientific inquiry, and I managed to find the surveys from the excavation done on the chapel in your woods. Coupled with the Ordnance Survey of the valley at large, I was able to make this.” He unfolds the paper to show me a rough rendering of the monuments around Thornchapel. “Look familiar?”
I see it instantly. The way Tobias has drawn the landmarks—to miniature scale and with none of the interference of trees or sheep or medieval manor houses—I can see it.
I pivot slowly to look at the graves furthest to the east. “Those would be the equinox stones then.”
“And here”—Tobias says, tapping the paper—“I think this succession of three is meant to be the river.”
“So then these two would be the menhirs,” I say, stepping around a puddle to reach the two closest to the king’s tomb. “Which means this one, where you found the murdered figure with the torc—”
“Would be the grass-covered altar, yes,” Tobias says, getting excited now, rocking a little on his feet. “If I had to guess based on the organic materials we’ve pulled from them, I’d say these cists are a fair handful a centuries younger than the monuments around them. Which means there’s no doubt in my m
ind these tombs are referencing an existing sacred landscape. They’re not scattered or disordered at all, but placed by design to connect with the environment.”
“You told me last time I needed to ask what symbolic language they were speaking—this is it, isn’t it?”
“And now it’s my turn to ask why,” Tobias says, giving me a dimpled grin. “What would have prompted them to do this? An enduring worldview? An acute crisis?”
I think of the roses, of the illness, of the graves filled with the cremated dead, and I wonder if I already know the answer.
“The only flaw in my genius—yes, even I have flaws, let that come as a comfort to you—is that the carved chamber doesn’t correspond to anything on any map I can find, not the archaeological survey undertaken by Dr. Davidson, not even the Ordnance Survey outside your property lines, nothing at all.” He walks over to the king’s cist and the empty chamber directly across from it, the two structures set so closely together that it would be possible to hop from one stone lid to another.
“This must be the altar, of course it must be,” Tobias murmurs, mostly to himself. He looks between the grave and the hand-drawn map with furrows carved into his forehead. “But there’s nothing else for the chamber to be then. The edge of the forest, perhaps? Or maybe there’s a buried monument in the clearing? Or a monument that was quarried for stone for the chapel—which has happened before, you wouldn’t believe what people have done to standing stones in days past. Broken them up for barns and drystone walls.”
I let him talk. I let him talk because I already know what the rose chamber must represent. I know what the grave builders had meant it to be.
It is the door.
It is the door, and there is a murdered king buried right in front of it.
Tobias is needed in Bovey Tracey by nine-thirty and has to leave before long, and I manage to head off any inquiries about when he can go back to the chapel as I walk him back to his car by asking him as many questions as I can think of about microcosms and their ritual purposes. It distracts him sufficiently until I’ve dispatched him over the narrow bridge separating Thornchapel from the rest of the world, and then I decide to ignore his calls and texts for the next few days. Above all else, I don’t want him going back to the chapel right now. Above all else, I don’t want him or anyone else catching whatever it is Rebecca has.
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 30