Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3)

by Sierra Simone

  “I know this whole thing is shit. You being my brother, being Ralph’s son, having to confront all the baggage the Guest family comes with. But I wanted you to have a small thing that proves there is some good at Thornchapel . . . I wanted you to know that a Guest could be a good person.”

  St. Sebastian looks up at Auden then, and his eyes are like the lake at night, dark and restless and deep. “I already know a Guest can be a good person, Auden,” he says softly. “Because you are good.”

  And he slides the ring onto his thumb.

  He pulls Auden into a hug. A tight embrace, with no room between them, and of all the depraved things Auden wishes to do with this man, the fucking, the crawling, the crying—the one thing he yearns to do the most is not depraved at all.

  He wants to kiss him. Slow and sweet, under the moon, next to the lake. He wants to taste his lips and feel his breath and hold his beautiful martyr close.

  St. Sebastian breaks the hug before Auden can do it, toying with the ring on his thumb. “Thank you,” he says, and then he climbs back up toward the fire, somehow quieter in boots than Auden could ever be even barefoot, and this time, Auden doesn’t follow.

  He sits on a log and stares at the water for a long time, thinking of the kiss he didn’t take, and thinking of the years that lay ahead, and the price this love will extract from him before all is said and done. And when he does finally stand up and rejoin the group, it’s with a troubled mind.

  For the first time in six weeks, he has the very real fear that he won’t be able to do this. That his control and his desire not to hurt Saint won’t be enough, and all of them will suffer for it.

  I won’t let it happen, he thinks as he helps them clean up by the fire. I won’t.

  But what if he does?

  What then?

  Midsummer

  Proserpina

  In the dream, she sits on a blanket in front of the Equinox stones.

  In front of her is Thornchapel, looking like a postcard, as immoveable and natural to its landscape as the rocky tors on the horizon. And behind her is Dartmoor in summer: blooming moors rucked up around granite crags; deep, wooded seams tracing rivers and streams; flower-speckled meadows and contented sheep, all divided by walls made of hedge or stone.

  “Proceed with your question,” a woman says next to her, and Proserpina realizes she was in the middle of a conversation with her.

  “I’m not sure what I was going to say,” Poe murmurs.

  The woman reaches out and covers Poe’s hand with hers. “Yes, you are,” the woman says. She has bright green eyes and dark, dark hair. She’s wearing a buttercup-yellow dress that spills around her tucked legs, and a small bracelet of wildflowers.

  Estamond.

  “You were going to ask me a question, remember?” Estamond prompts. “About John Barleycorn?”

  Right, yes. As soon as Estamond says the name aloud, Poe knows she’s right. She’d heard the name in the village earlier, and . . . “Who’s John Barleycorn?” she asks.

  Estamond’s hand around hers tightens, and her voice goes low and serious. “John Barleycorn is a memory,” she says, looking right into Poe’s eyes.

  This isn’t like the time she said it to Randolph Guest, Poe somehow knows. This isn’t a dismissal. It’s a warning.

  “Remember,” Estamond says urgently. “Remember this. You must, because it will happen again.”

  “I’ll remember,” Poe promises.

  Estamond’s hand goes slack on hers, the sky goes dark. Suddenly, she’s standing in front of the altar in the thorn chapel, and Estamond’s lying on top of it, the torc around her neck and a small knife in the grass.

  The altar is how it was before Poe’s mother was found—covered in a gentle swell of earth and grass—and the door, the door is behind it—it’s open—

  Poe opens her mouth to scream, and Estamond says, in a voice as dead as old bones, “It will happen again.”

  Poe screams. And screams and screams.

  John Barleycorn is a memory.

  “Poe,” a voice says. Male, American, young. “Poe, wake up. It’s just a dream.”

  John Barleycorn is a memory.

  Who is John Barleycorn?

  Poe bolts upright in her bed, nearly smacking Becket in the face with her forehead as she does.

  “Goodness,” Becket says mildly, and then pulls her close to his chest when he sees her shaken expression. “Hey, you’re okay. Shh. I’m here.”

  Poe presses her face into Becket’s shoulder, the dream still too real to shake off. She can still feel Estamond’s dead hand in hers, limp and cool, and she can still see the door—open and waiting. Covered in roses blacker than midnight.

  “Your father sent me up,” Becket says, stroking her hair. “He wanted you to know that the guests will be here soon.”

  Poe nods against his shoulder. Her mother’s funeral the day before hadn’t been large by any means—Adelina had been gone for twelve years after all—but a few friends who had been close had flown in, along with some family, including Poe’s favorite aunt Sarah—a businesswoman from New York. They’re coming to the house for lunch today before they leave town again, and it’s her job to play hostess. Which she doesn’t mind at all, but it does mean getting up and putting on real clothes.

  With a long sigh, she straightens away from Becket and swings her feet to the floor. “Okay,” she says, shaking off the dream and the memory of the altar and Estamond. “I’m up.”

  It’s another sunny day, hot and relentless, and most of the guests choose to stay in the air conditioning, balancing plates on their laps and setting cups on the floor at their feet as they talk in low murmurs in the living room and sitting room.

  Poe mingles as best she can, trying to make sure everyone is comfortable and fed and that her friends aren’t bored. Which they aren’t. Early on, Rebecca found her burning a batch of cupcakes in the kitchen and ordered her out, taking over the job and conscripting St. Sebastian into helping after he unwisely slouched into the kitchen to hide. Becket, Auden, and Delphine, on the other hand, are completely at ease and charming everyone they talk with, keeping the conversations light and flowing.

  After an hour or so of circulating, Poe finally sits down and has something to eat. She’s shoveling potato salad into her mouth when an older black woman sits down next to her, a beer bottle in one hand.

  “Hello, Proserpina,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I had a chance to introduce myself before this was all over. Your mother was one of my favorite students a long time ago, and I was lucky enough to later count her among my colleagues.” She extends a hand. “Katy Davidson.”

  Poe hurriedly swallows and sets down her food. “Dr. Davidson! Yes!”

  Dr. Davidson smiles at her. “I take it you heard about me from your mother? If so, I promise I wasn’t as bad as she probably made me sound. Every student thinks their first excavation director is a dragon until they go on to supervise a site themselves.”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Poe assures her. “But I read your book last month, the one about ancient British religion?”

  Dr. Davidson gives her a kind look. “I hate to ask this, but which one? I have a few.”

  “The Hunt and the Hearth: Perspectives on Ritual Practice in the British Isles from the Neolithic to the Saxon Age,” Poe recites promptly. And then seeing Dr. Davidson’s expression, she adds, “I’m a librarian. Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. And yes, of course it would be that one you read. Adelina wrote the foreword.”

  “She did.” Poe pauses, not sure exactly how to phrase her next question, not sure if it’s even appropriate. “In the foreword, she mentioned that her first dig was with you, in the Thorne Valley. When she was there—I know it was a long time ago—but do you remember if she seemed . . . overly interested in the valley? Preoccupied with it, maybe?”

  Dr. Davidson raises an eyebrow. “You mean, did she seem like she’d want to come back there on her own, years later?” />
  Poe should feel a little self-conscious for how quickly Dr. Davidson reads into her question, but she doesn’t. “Yes.”

  “We were excavating kistvaens up by Kernstow Farm,” Dr. Davidson says. “Naturally she was interested in the house and the area around it, knowing her family came from there. I would have found it strange if she wasn’t.”

  “And Thornchapel?” Poe presses. “Did she seem interested in Thornchapel then?”

  Dr. Davidson pauses to think. “She did seem interested. Which I understand must seem ominous now, in light of where she died, but at the time, it was very unremarkable. I’m the only archaeologist who’s ever had permission to dig there, you know, just the once in the late eighties. The dig was years over by then, but I got permission from Ralph Guest to give the students a tour there one day, just so I could show them the standing stones. Adelina hardly stood out to me for wanting to know more about it. It didn’t hurt that Ralph Guest was also very handsome.” She tips the neck of her bottle toward the doorway to the sitting room, where Auden is leaning casually against a bookcase and charming the hell out of some old professor. “Just like his son. I think the students fell in love with Ralph as much as the chapel. He was married, of course, and couldn’t have been more scrupulous about it, so I don’t mean to imply any encouragement on his part. But still, he made an impression.”

  She doesn’t know, Proserpina thinks. She doesn’t know that Ralph wasn’t scrupulous at all.

  Her dad has been deliberately vague about Adelina’s death—telling family and friends only that she was murdered and the case is technically unsolved. It’s cleaner that way, given that the police weren’t able to officially name Ralph as the murderer due to lack of evidence, and given that it would only drag Auden’s name through the mud by association. And it also means that all of the amorous connections between Ralph and her mother could be buried along with her, protecting them from pointless whispers and lurid gossip.

  Which means Poe keeps her voice as light and innocent as possible when she asks her next question. “And my mother? She seemed in love with him too?”

  “Well, yes,” the archeologist replies. “But again, so did everyone else.”

  “I see.” And Poe really does see. If she’d been her mother, young and excited and abroad, and she’d come to Thornchapel and met a man who looked like Auden . . .

  Yes, she would have fallen in love with him too.

  “Thornchapel has that effect on people,” Poe adds. “It makes everything seem like—like a secret. One that’s waiting just for you.”

  “A secret,” Dr. Davidson says, nodding and then taking a drink. “Yes.”

  “I only knew my mom as a child, but I do remember that about her. She loved secrets. She always said that’s why she chose her field—she could have her pick of secrets to find.”

  Dr. Davidson looks at her thoughtfully. “You know, when Adelina came to my dig that year, she was in the same place a lot of students are toward the end of their undergrad. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to concentrate her studies, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to stay in academia afterward, or maybe move to commercial archeology and earn actual money. But I think she found something in the Thorne Valley that led her to the ancient Mediterranean. Can you guess what it was?”

  Poe remembers her mother’s foreword. “Human sacrifice.” She makes a face, which the professor laughs at.

  “You know what’s interesting, though,” Dr. Davidson says, nodding at the bookshelves across the room. “I see a Bible there. I see Homer, I see Livy. Abraham and Isaac, Iphigenia and the vestal virgins. In a time when almost all history was oral, when almost nothing was recorded, these stories persisted and survived. They reverberated through the memories of generations. And of course—” Dr. Davidson nods at the crucifix hanging on the wall “—I can think of one human sacrifice that created an entirely new religion.”

  “Well, but that’s not—it’s not the same,” Poe says. Even though the more she thinks about it, the less she’s sure.

  “Maybe not,” Dr. Davidson agrees with a shrug. “In the purest sense of history, Jesus would have been an executed criminal. But you have to agree that the theology of the crucifixion is a sacrificial theology. One where Jesus consented for his blood to be shed for humanity’s absolution, where his life was a price paid for the lives of others. That is human sacrifice—human self-sacrifice—and that brings me to the point I’m trying to make, which is that there is something more to ritual murder than horror. Can you guess what it is?”

  Poe shakes her head. It’s hard to think of anything other than horror when it comes to killing another person.

  “Power,” Dr. Davidson says. “The horror the ancients felt—that we feel—that is a kind of power. The inspiration millions have taken from the oblation on the cross—that is a kind of power. Fear, legacy, exhortation, security, absolution—power, power, power. That power is what drew your mother to study it. That power is why the memory of ritualized murder stays with us, even though the practice itself is long over.”

  But is it over? Poe wants to ask. Estamond killed herself in the thorn chapel. Ralph Guest killed her mother. According to her father and even Reverend Dartham, people have been going to the thorn chapel far more recently than the Bronze Age. And not just people, but her own family. And Auden’s.

  Remember, Estamond had said. It will happen again.

  Poe picks up her drink and considers. She’s not afraid of asking questions, especially of teachers, but “questions inspired by dreams” is new territory for her.

  Oh, what the hell. “Do you know anything about someone named John Barleycorn?” she asks.

  The archeologist studies her for a moment. “Superficially, a folk character,” she says. “Burns has a poem about him, based on even older poems and songs. A man named John Barleycorn is cut, crushed, burned, and then his blood is drunk by his killers, and it gives them courage and heart.”

  Poe sees immediately. “So he’s not really a person at all. He’s the plant! Scythed and ground into grain.”

  “And brewed into delicious beer,” Dr. Davidson says, lifting her own bottle of John Barleycorn’s blood. “It makes for a good drinking song. But in the drinking songs, some might see the imprint of a deeper meaning. An older meaning.”

  “John Barleycorn is a memory,” Poe murmurs.

  Dr. Davidson looks surprised. “Exactly so. He represents the harvest—the cycle of sowing, growing, and reaping. He represents the spirit of the grain, which to the pre-Christian Europeans, was a real entity who needed a place to house himself when the grain was cut down. The practice of corn dollies—or leaving a hollow sheaf in the fields, depending on your geography—comes from this idea. The dolly or the sheaf would house the spirit of the grain through the winter, and then during sowing season, it would be plowed under the first furrow of spring, thus returning the god into the ground to grow again. The last grain to be harvested is the first to be sown, harvest into planting into harvest again. Death feeding life, and so on. I assume the human sacrifice subtext is plenty apparent here?”

  Poe nods.

  “The idea of the Year King is an enduring one, even if it’s lacking in actual evidence,” Dr. Davidson continues. “That a king is tied to the land in such a visceral way that his death is necessary to feed it. He must not grow old, he must not grow weak—he must be cut down when he is healthy and strong and vital—and then be fed back to the land that fed him. As the poem goes, John Barleycorn must die.”

  John Barleycorn is a memory. She understands why Dream-Estamond meant it as a warning now. Because Poe knows about Year Kings . . . about Thorn Kings. Which means the memory of John Barleycorn is the memory of them, and she thinks again of Estamond bending the torc around her neck, walking to the thorn chapel alone in the dark.

  “Dr. Davidson,” Poe asks, and then stops. And then starts again. “Do you have any theories as to why people would do this? Like, if they lived . . . recently. Not in
ancient times.”

  The older woman takes a drink, already shaking her head. “They don’t do this if they lived recently,” she says. “This isn’t a modern practice, Proserpina. It’s not even a pre-modern one. The idea of human ritual murder was already abhorred by the time of Christ, that’s how old it is. And at any rate, I only deal in what I can touch and what I can see. I can give you facts. If you want religion, you’ll have to go to your father.”

  “You promised.”

  The lunch is over and all the guests—excluding Samson Quartey—are gone. The house has been tidied up, the dogs are napping, and Poe’s just cornered her father and Samson talking on the deck.

  “You promised,” Poe reminds her father when he turns to face her. “You said if I came home, you’d tell me why you and Mom went to Thornchapel. You said you’d tell me what you were doing that summer.”

  She expects him to defer, to deflect. She expects him to hedge away from answering like he has so many times before. But he doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he looks over to Rebecca’s father, who nods at him, and it’s the kind of nod that makes Poe think they’ve already discussed this.

  “You’re right,” David Markham says. “But I think all of you deserve to hear it, all together.”

  It takes close to thirty minutes, but eventually everyone is gathered in the living room, sitting on overstuffed sofas and chairs—except for Auden, who sits on the floor so that everyone else can have a seat. His lap and legs are immediately covered with dogs looking for ear scratches, which he furnishes with a small smile and several low croons.

  David insists that everyone has a drink, and while he’s pouring whisky and gin for his guests, Poe hears Delphine say to Rebecca, “Did you hear Emily Genovese say yesterday she’s coming to London next month? For a film festival?”

  Rebecca’s voice is tense when she answers. “I didn’t.”

  “Maybe we should take her out to dinner,” Delphine muses. “Or see if she’d like to come to Justine’s! That would be a nice way to welcome to her to London, since she let us play at Orthia’s.”