Gallant, page 8
He walks through the ruined garden.
Past the empty fountain and across the barren grounds, through the brittle land that rolls away from the house like a bolt of cloth left to rot in the cupboard. Moth-eaten. Threadbare.
The fruit is rotten. The ground is parched. The house is falling like sand through the glass. He has eaten every morsel, every scrap, and nothing is left. He is feasting on himself, now. Wasting a little more with every passing night.
He is a fire running out of air. But it is not over yet. He will burn, and burn, and burn until the house crumbles, until the world gives way.
All he needs is a breath.
All he needs is a drop.
All he needs is her.
And so he sits back in his throne and closes his eyes and dreams.
Part Three
Things Unsaid
Chapter Eleven
Olivia is so tired, and yet, again, she cannot sleep.
Her limbs sink into the bed, heavy from the fresh air and the garden’s work, but her mind is tangled up in questions. She tosses and turns, feeling the hours tick past as she watches the candle drip and gutter on her bedside table, and she is about to give up and throw the covers off when she hears it.
The subtle creak of the door drifting open.
Even though she turned the lock.
Olivia holds her breath as bare feet whisper on the wood behind her, and then, a body lowers itself onto the other side of the bed, the mattress denting with the weight. Slowly, she wills herself to turn over, sure that it is only a trick of her tired mind, sure that the room will be empty and she will see—
A young woman sits on the edge of the bed.
She is older than Olivia, but not by much, her skin sun kissed, ribbons of brown hair spilling down her back. When she turns her head, candlelight dances across her high cheek, her narrow chin, tracing the angles and lines from the portrait that morning. The ones pressed here and there into Olivia’s own face.
Her mother looks over her shoulder. A smile flickers across her face, all mischief. And in that moment she is young, a girl. But then the candle shifts, and the shadows cut the other way, and she is a woman again.
Her fingers slide over the sheets, and Olivia doesn’t know whether to reach for her mother’s hand or retreat, and in the end, she does neither, because she cannot move. Her limbs are leaden in the bed, and perhaps she should be afraid, but she isn’t. She cannot take her eyes from Grace Prior, not as she climbs onto the bed, not as she lowers herself beside Olivia, not as she curls herself in like a mirror, reflecting the angles of her daughter’s limbs, the bend of her neck, the incline of her head, as if it were a game.
Her bare feet are stained with dirt, the same way Olivia’s were before she soaked away the soil, as if she’s been running in the garden. But her mother’s hands are delicate and clean, as her fingers graze the air over the bandage around Olivia’s palm, worry flitting across her face. Her hand drifts up to Olivia’s cheek.
The touch, when it lands, is warm, the gesture gentle. The candlelight doesn’t reach the sliver of space between their bodies, and her mother’s face is dark, unreadable. But Olivia can see the shine of her teeth when she smiles and leans in and speaks.
Her voice is soft, familiar, not high and sweet, but low and soothing.
The faintest rasp, like gravel, in her throat.
“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia,” says her mother, as if it’s an incantation, the last words of a spell, and maybe it is, because just like that, she wakes up.
There is a dead thing in her bed.
The candle has gone out. The room is pitch black, and yet Olivia can see the ghoulish figure, nestled there, the way her mother was, one rotting hand still lifted to her cheek.
Olivia’s limbs have come unstuck, and she recoils, scrambling back, not realizing how close she is to the edge of the bed until it disappears beneath her and she tumbles off the side, landing hard on the wooden floor. The pain is enough to clear her head, and she surges to her feet.
But the ghoul is already gone.
Olivia lets out a shaky breath and lifts her good palm to her cheek, holding in her mother’s touch.
But that part only happened in the dream. The things she sees cannot touch her. They are not really there.
She paws through the dark, finds a box of matches and a fresh taper. Light strikes and blooms, shadows dancing as she takes up her sketchpad and pencil and begins to draw. Not the ghoul of Grace Prior, but the woman she was in the dream. Quick, rough lines, the pencil hissing as she tries to capture not so much her mother’s face but the softness of her touch, the sadness in her eyes, the way she said her name. Olivia, Olivia, Olivia. Her pencil scratches across the paper, racing ahead of the fog, the forgetting.
She’s halfway through the sketch when someone screams.
The pencil skips, the tip breaking as Olivia twists toward the noise.
She has heard screams before. The shrill shout of children playing games. The injured howl following a broken arm. The terrified yelp of a girl waking to find insects in her bed.
This scream is different.
It is keening.
It is shuddering breath.
It is a strained and desperate sob, and Olivia is already on her feet, hurrying toward her bedroom door, trying to pull it open. She panics for an instant when it holds, before remembering the small gold key. It turns with a click, and Olivia plunges out into the hall, half expecting the screams to halt the moment she crosses the threshold.
But they keep going.
A door hangs open down the hall, the pool of light on the floor filled with moving shadows, and she can hear Hannah and Edgar now, the struggle of bodies, and she realizes who is screaming the same instant she reaches the door and sees Matthew thrashing in the bed.
The screams resolve into words, into pleas. “I can’t leave him. I can’t leave him. WHY WON’T YOU LET ME HELP HIM?”
His eyes are open, but he is somewhere else. He doesn’t see Hannah, whispering urgently, her hair wild, doesn’t see Edgar as he fights to hold him down, doesn’t see Olivia standing wide-eyed in the doorway.
“It is just a dream,” soothes Hannah. “It’s just a dream. It cannot hurt you.”
Her mother’s promise pouring out of Hannah’s mouth, but the words aren’t true.
He is clearly hurting.
A wretched sob escapes his throat, and it is unnerving, to see her cousin like this, split open, the vivid red of him laid bare. He looks so young, so scared, and Olivia tears her gaze away from the bed to the rest of the room. To the tray of food he barely touched, to the shutters latched tight beyond the glass, to a sharp-edged shape against the far wall, a sheet cast over it.
A cry wrenches her back to the bed. Hannah and Edgar are trying to force Matthew’s hands into a pair of leather straps. Panic ripples through her, and she has to stifle the urge to rush forward, to pull them away. It shocks her, the force of that feeling, and she manages one step before Edgar’s eyes knife toward her, and she sees the pain in them, the grief that stops her cold.
Matthew strains and pleads as the loops pull tight around his wrists, and then falls feverishly back against the bed, chest heaving. Thin lines of salt slide down his cheeks and into his hair. She doesn’t know if they are sweat or tears.
“Please,” he murmurs, voice cracking. “They’re hurting him.”
That word, a barb at the edge of his voice. Not me, but him.
“No,” says Hannah, pressing him down. “They cannot hurt him anymore.”
She tips a cloudy glass of liquid to Matthew’s lips, and soon his pleading fades to pained murmurs. “He’s resting now,” she says, exhaustion brimming in her throat. “You must rest, too.”
Olivia didn’t see Edgar pull away from the bed. Didn’t see him come toward the door. Toward her. Not until he is right there, blocking her view of the room.
Go back to bed, he signs, his face tired.
What is wrong with him? she asks.
But Edgar only shakes his head. Bad dreams, he says.
And then he closes the door.
Olivia lingers in the darkened hall, between two streams of light—the one pouring through her open door, and the thin strand beneath Matthew’s. And when she finally retreats back to her own room, her own bed, the unfinished sketch lying faceup on the crumpled covers, she runs her fingers over the graphite and thinks of dreams. The kind that reach through the folds of sleep and into your bed. The kind that can caress your cheek or drag you down into the dark.
There is no rest in sleep.
These dreams will be the death of me.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, there is blood on her sheets.
Olivia flinches at the sight, wondering if it’s her time, but the stains are less dots or streaks and more fingers dug into the bedding. Sure enough, the bandage on her palm has come loose, the cut opened in her sleep, a restless night played out in handprints.
She goes to the bathroom sink, brushing the dried blood from her hands as if it were dust. She rinses her palm, waits to see if it will bleed again, but it doesn’t. She runs a thumb over the narrow line, the scab like a raised red thread, a vine, a root. She decides to let it air as she searches her mother’s closet, pulls out a dress the soft, dark green of summer leaves. It skims her knees, and when she turns, the skirt flares out like petals.
Her sketchpad lies abandoned in the sheets. Her mother’s half-formed face stares up from the paper, the other half, where the candlelight could not reach, rendered as a streak of shadow. Olivia closes the pad and tucks it under her arm.
As she steps into the hall, her eyes go straight to Matthew’s door. She creeps forward, pressing her ear to the wood, and hears—nothing. Not the unsettling sobs or the ragged breath, not even the rasp and rustle of sheets. Her fingers drift to the knob, but the memory of his pain forces her back, and she turns, heading instead for the stairs.
Below, the house is quiet.
Perhaps everyone is still asleep. Olivia looks around and realizes she has no idea what time it is. Back at Merilance, there were bells, whistles, sharp sounds to mark the passing hours, to summon the girls to and from their beds, to usher them from prayers to class to chores and back again. Here, the only time that seems to matter is the passing of the sun, the moment when day becomes night.
But the house has roused itself. The shutters have been thrown, sunlight spilling through the foyer and down the halls, catching dust motes in the air.
Someone cries out, and she jumps, only to realize the sound isn’t human, but the high-pitched whistle of a kettle. By the time she reaches the kitchen, it is singing, alone on the stove. Olivia turns the burner off.
“Well, you’re up early.”
She turns and finds Hannah mounting the cellar stairs, a bag of flour in one arm. Her brown curls are wrangled back, a smile creasing the corners of her mouth, but her eyes are tired.
“Oh to be young again,” she says, setting the flour down hard enough to send up a small white cloud. “And need so little sleep.” She nods at the kettle. “You do the tea, I’ll do the toast.”
Olivia lifts the kettle, careful to avoid the cut on her palm. She scalds the pot, and ladles in a spoonful of loose tea as Hannah slices bread, and for a few moments they move like cogs in the same clock, like the houses in the study sculpture, circling each other in an easy arc. As the tea steeps and the bread toasts, she opens the sketchpad, paging back past the drawing of her mother to the image of the strange metal globe.
She turns the paper toward Hannah and taps the page, the question clear.
What is this?
For a second, the only sound is the knife scraping butter over toast. But it is a heavy kind of silence, the one people use when they know the answer to something but can’t decide if they should tell it. “Old houses are full of old things,” she says at last. “Matthew might know.” Olivia rolls her eyes—so far her cousin has been no help at all.
“Fine day,” adds Hannah, sliding two plates of jam-and-buttered toast across the counter. “Too fine to be inside. Take this one out to Edgar, would you? He’s somewhere in the yard.”
Olivia sighs at the dismissal.
It takes both hands and all of her focus to get one cup of tea, two plates of toast, and the sketchpad out into the garden without spilling or breaking or losing anything. But Hannah is right; it is a fine day. A shine of dew lingers on the grass beneath her feet, but the mist and chill are burning off, and the sky overhead is a milky blue.
She finds Edgar up on a ladder, mending one of the shutters. He waves good morning, nods for her to set the toast on the ground. Olivia hesitates, worried that something might get at it there, a bird or a mouse. Only, now that she thinks of it, she hasn’t seen any animals.
It’s strange, really, on all this land. She doesn’t know much about the countryside, of course, but she saw cows and sheep on the drive up, and she imagines a dozen smaller things, rabbits, sparrows, moles, might take up residence on the estate.
Even at Merilance they found the occasional mouse, and the sky was always full of gulls. If Gallant were a storybook, there would surely be a dog by the hearth or a cat sunning on the drive, a flock of magpies in the orchard, or a crow on the wall. But there’s nothing. Only an airy silence.
She carries her breakfast to the stone bench and flops down on it.
According to Matron Agatha, proper girls sit with their knees together and their ankles crossed. Olivia sits cross-legged, knees falling open and green skirt fanning across her lap as she eats.
The sun catches the metal rim of a bucket nearby, a pair of gloves draped over the edge, but the cut on her palm is still fresh, so she leaves it, decides to draw the house instead.
She turns to a blank page, begins to draw, and soon Gallant takes shape beneath her hand, growing from a few quick strokes into a thing with walls and windows, chimneys and steepled roofs. Here are the wings and the ballroom balcony and the garden door. Here is the bay window, the only one that has no shutters, and here is the dark shape of the piano beyond.
She is just adding Edgar on his ladder, little more than a thin shadow cast against the massive house, when she hears footsteps coming through the garden.
Movement is a kind of voice. She can tell a person from the way they walk. Edgar shuffles slightly, one leg stiffer than the other. Hannah’s steps are steady and short and surprisingly quiet. Matthew’s stride is long but weighted, as if his boots are too big or too heavy.
She hears her cousin trudging down the path and looks up to find him pulling on his garden gloves. She waits for him to cut a look her way, to comment on the fact that she is still here, but he says nothing, only kneels and begins to tend the roses. There can’t be more weeds so soon, and yet there are, gray strands coming free with every tug.
His sleeves are rolled up, and she can see the bruises blooming where the gloves end at his wrists, and he looks so thin she fears that if the sun hits him just right, she might be able to see through, so she nudges the rest of her toast toward him. The plate scrapes, china on stone, and his eyes flick up.
“I’m fine,” he says in a hollow, automatic way, even though he looks worse than most of the ghouls, so she pushes the plate again, eliciting another awful scratch, and he scowls at her, annoyed, and she scowls back, and a moment later he tugs off one glove and takes the toast. He doesn’t say thank you.
She returns to drawing Gallant, but she cannot shake the sense she’s being watched, can feel the weight of eyes against her back. She glances over at Matthew, but his head is down, his attention on his work. She looks over her shoulder, but all she sees is the wall.
Olivia twists round and turns back to her sketchpad, flipping through until she finds the abandoned drawing. She looks from the paper to the wall, trying to find the place where she went wrong, is still tapping her pencil against the page when Matthew’s shadow falls across the paper.
He glances down at the sketchpad, his expression souring at the sight of the wall. She holds her breath, waiting for him to speak, and when he doesn’t, she turns to a blank page, and writes.
What happened to your father?
But when she holds up the paper, Matthew’s eyes barely land on it before he looks away. She shoves it back in front of him, forcing him to read, but his eyes refuse to settle on the words. “Wasting your time,” he mutters, and at last she understands. It’s not that he doesn’t want to read, it’s that he can’t.
He sees the understanding on her face and scowls.
“I’m not stupid,” he snaps. Olivia shakes her head. She knows too well what’s it like when people take one weakness and define you by it. “I just—I never got the hang of it. The letters won’t sit still. The words get jumbled up.”
She nods, and then begins again, pencil scratching across the page.
“I told you—” he growls, but she holds up her index finger, a silent order to wait as she sketches as quickly as she can. The man takes shape on the paper, not as he was, half-formed at the garden door, but as he was in the portrait hall. Arthur Prior. She turns the sketch toward her cousin, and she might as well have slammed a door in his face.
“He died,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how.”
Matthew fixes his gaze ahead, past the garden, to the wall.
Olivia turns the page, pencil hovering. She’s still trying to put her other questions into pictures when he says, “There must always be a Prior at the gate.”
His voice is low and brims with bitterness, but the words spill out like something memorized.
“Always. That’s what my father said. As if we’ve always been at Gallant. But we haven’t. The Priors didn’t build this house. Gallant was already here. It called out to our family, and like fools, we came.”
Olivia frowns, confused. The house did not write her that letter. Someone in it did. Someone who wanted her to come. Someone who claimed to be her uncle.
