Gallant, p.7
Gallant, page 7
Olivia pries it free, and holds the tendril to the light.
It’s strange, thin and spined and the color of ash. Back at Merilance, everything felt like it was rendered in shades of gray, but now she realizes that wasn’t really true. The colors were there, just faded, washed-out versions of themselves, but this—this is a graphite sketch against a watercolor scene.
Olivia continues down the row, working her way along the path until she hits the end of the rose bed. She glances down the sloping garden to the wall, where Matthew kneels, smoothing mortar into half a dozen cracks. It seems pointless to mend the wall, when it is clearly falling down.
The sun is high now, and the shade of the orchard beckons. She drifts away from the roses and into the copse of trees, scanning the ground for weeds or fallen fruit. But something else draws her eye. Beyond the orchard, a cluster of short pale shapes. At first glance, she thinks they must be stumps, but then the sun strikes stone, and she realizes they are graves.
It is a field of Priors, interrupted here and there by other names. The latest grave belongs to Matthew’s father, Arthur. Buried here last fall. Nearby a pair of legs stretch out, ankles crossed. Shoulders slumped forward. A head, mostly missing. A ghoul. Olivia hurries toward it, hoping it will be her mother, but when the ruined face looks up, it belongs to a man. Not the one who blocked her way the night before, but another, older.
The ghoul glares at Olivia with what’s left of its face and points a half-formed hand toward the house. A chill rolls over her and she retreats, away from the graveyard and the orchard and back into the sunlit garden.
Down by the wall, Matthew is upright, studying his work, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. The day is warm, and her hands are sweating in the too-big gloves. She tugs them off and wanders back toward the bench where she left her sketchpad.
But as she bends to pick it up, she sees a gray stem pushing up through the soil, twining round the bench’s leg. Olivia takes hold of the weed and pulls, but it is stubborn and strong. She tugs harder, her palm prickling where it meets the tendril. And then, too late, she feels it move.
A quick, sharp jerk, followed by the rake of heat across her palm. Olivia winces and drops the weed, looking down at her hand, where the spines have sliced a narrow line. Blood wells on her skin.
She looks around for somewhere to wipe it. If she were wearing her own gray shift instead of her mother’s yellow dress, she would use the hem, but she can’t bring herself to stain the soft cotton, so she kneels to wipe the blood on the grass when a hand comes out of nowhere, closing like a cage around her wrist.
“Stop,” snaps Matthew, wrenching her upright. He sees the blood streaked across her palm, and pales.
“What have you done?” he asks, and there’s no kindness in his voice, no care. If anything, he seems mad at her. She gestures down at the stubborn weed, the one that cut her.
But it isn’t there.
Matthew produces a kerchief, and binds it tight around her weeping palm, as if it were a mortal wound.
“Get inside,” he orders, pointing at the house, an echo of the ghoul in the graveyard, down to the scowl. “Have someone see to that. Now.”
She wants to point out that it is just a cut, that it hardly even hurts, that it’s not her fault hands bleed so much, that one clumsy mistake hardly merits this much anger. Instead she just grabs her sketchpad and stomps up the grassy slope, through the garden and back into the house.
She was only trying to help.
His voice in your mouth,
telling me to come back,
to come back, to come home.
Chapter Ten
Olivia finds Edgar in the kitchen.
“Oh dear,” he says, looking down at her hand, the kerchief gone rust-red where the cut bled through.
She shrugs, her stomach growling at the sight of the porridge pot on the stove, the contents long cooled to glue, but Edgar points her to the sink. She rinses the cut as he digs up a first aid box and lays out iodine and gauze. As he works, his hands are steady, his touch is light.
“I was in the army,” he says casually, a safety pin between his teeth. “Had to patch up my share of battle wounds.” He smiles, studying her hand. “But I think you’ll live.” He cleans the cut and binds it, winding a narrow white bandage around her palm and pinning it there. It feels like overkill for such a narrow cut, but he treats it with a surgeon’s care. “Do try to keep your blood on the inside, though.”
Something shudders in the doorway, and Olivia glances toward it, hoping to catch her mother’s half-formed face. But it’s yet another ghoul, this one younger, thinner, wasting, nothing but jutting ribs, a knee, a nose.
“Old houses,” says Edgar, following her gaze. “Full of sounds you don’t quite hear, and things you don’t quite see.”
She waits until he’s finished with her hand and then asks, Is Gallant haunted? And even though she knows the answer is yes, she’s surprised when Edgar nods.
“I’m sure it is,” he says. “A house like this has too much history, and history always brings its share of ghosts. But it’s not a bad thing,” he adds, packing up his kit. “Ghosts were people once, and people come in all ways, good and bad and what’s between. Sure, maybe some are out to frighten, but others, I think, are just watching, wishing they could help.”
She looks back at the ghoul. It shrinks beneath her gaze, slipping back behind the doorframe.
As Edgar puts away the first aid kit, Olivia picks at the bandage on her hand.
Back at Merilance, someone was always getting scraped up, burning their fingers on the stove, or plucking gravel out of their knees. If you were lucky, the matrons would wave you off, say it was the cost of being clumsy. If you weren’t, they’d douse it in rubbing alcohol, which hurt twice as much as any wound.
Sometimes a younger girl would cut herself and cry at the sight of blood. Sometimes an older one would pick her up and say, “It doesn’t hurt,” as if the words alone would make it true. An incantation, a spell to banish pain by denying its existence.
No one ever said them to Olivia—no one ever needed to—but she’s lost count of the times she said them to herself.
When Agatha rapped her knuckles with a ruler.
It doesn’t hurt.
When Clara pricked her with a sewing pin.
It doesn’t hurt.
When Anabelle tore the pages from her mother’s book.
“Does it hurt?” asks Edgar when he sees her fussing with the bandage.
The question catches her off guard, but Olivia shakes her head. He cuts a thick slice of bread and butters it and drops it in a skillet. The smell is heavenly, and she watches, mouth watering as he smears the toast with raspberry jam.
And sets it in front of her.
“There,” he says, “that will put the life back in you.”
Olivia takes a bite, melting a little with the sugar on her tongue.
He nods at her sketchpad. “What have you got there?”
Olivia licks the jam from her fingers and thumbs through the pages so he can see the last few drawings she’s made, of the garden, and the orchard, and the wall.
“These are very good,” he says, even though they’re just beginnings, the pencil layered on itself, finding light and dark and line. “I remember, your mother always liked to draw.”
Olivia frowns, thinking of the strange ink splotches in the journal. She wouldn’t call those drawings. She takes another bite, the raspberries bursting brightly in her mouth. Edgar sees her smile as she chews.
“Hannah made the jam,” he says. “Tom used to drizzle honey over—” He stops himself, startled, as if he tripped. A shadow crosses his face, there and then gone. “But the berries were so sweet last year, hardly needed any sugar.”
Olivia lifts a hand to ask, but Edgar is already moving toward the door, saying something about a shutter that needs fixing, and she is left to add the name to the list in her head, along with all the other secrets Gallant seems to be keeping. The uncle who did not write her letter. Matthew’s supposed curse. The colorless weeds in the garden. The wall that is not a wall. And this Tom no one wants to speak of. She conjures the field of Priors in her head, the short tombstones like spaced-out teeth, but she didn’t see a Thomas there.
Olivia finishes her toast, tucks the sketchpad beneath her arm, and goes searching for the study. Moving through the halls, she’s struck again by the size of this place, designed for forty instead of four. A skeleton staff, that’s what it’s called when there are so few left to manage a manor so large, but the residents of Gallant are less a skeleton than a handful of mismatched bones. And the house, the house is a maze, hall after hall and room after room, some grand and some small and most closed up, hills of furniture buried beneath crisp white sheets.
Beyond a pair of double doors she discovers a sprawling room, the kind designed for feasts or balls. Its floor is pale wood, inlaid with those same twisting circles. Its ceiling vaults high overhead, two stories, maybe three, and glass doors run along the far wall, a balcony beyond.
It is the grandest space she’s ever seen, and she doesn’t know what comes over her, but she twirls, bare feet whispering across the wood.
And then, at last, she finds the study.
She was beginning to think it was a trick of her mind, a dream, that she would search the entire house only to learn that no such room existed.
But here is the narrow hall, the waiting door.
Her fingers trail over the wallpaper, the way they did the night before, and the polished handle of the door gives way. There is no window, and she doesn’t want to risk a lamp, so she leaves the door open, light spilling in from the hall. She pads forward, floorboards creaking softly underfoot until she reaches a thin dark rug that pools beneath the desk.
There on top is the strange metal sculpture, two houses set within concentric rings. Not just any house, but two small replicas of Gallant.
They perch on either side, facing each other at the center of the curving frame. Metal rings surround each house, and more surround the two together. Olivia cannot help herself. She lifts her fingertip to the outer ring, and gives it the slightest push, and the whole thing trips into motion.
She holds her breath, afraid that any second it will topple and clatter to the floor, but it’s as if it were designed to move. The two houses turn like dancers, sliding away and then coming back to face each other. Each follows its own arc, each the center of its own small orbit. She watches, mesmerized, studying the steady revolution until it slows.
The houses move through their orbits one last time, and Olivia reaches out again to stop the motion as they come to face each other. She leans closer. It’s strange, but from this angle, the rings between them look almost—almost—like a wall.
Olivia turns to a clean page in her sketchbook and draws the sculpture, trying to capture the sense of movement, the clean, almost mathematical lines of the device. She rounds the desk, to get another angle, and notices the drawer. It juts out like a bottom lip, a bit of paper caught in the corner. She tugs at the handle, and for a moment it sticks, then judders open.
Inside, a handful of loose paper, crisp and white, and a small black book. She peels it open and finds page after page of notes in a blocky hand. No, not notes. Places.
The Larimer School
50 Bellweather Place
Birmingham
Hollingwell Home
12 Idris Row
Manchester
Farrington Orphanage
5 Farrington Way
Bristol
Olivia turns past page after page, until she finds it, there, in the middle of the fourth.
Merilance School for Independent Girls
9 Windsor Road
Newcastle
Footsteps sound in the hall.
Years of raiding matrons’ rooms has trained her well, and in a moment the book is back and the drawer is shut and she is on the floor behind the grand old desk, tucked between the chair and the wood, heart fluttering even as her limbs go still.
She holds her breath and waits as the footsteps cross the threshold, as they cross from the bare wood onto the rug.
“How odd,” says Hannah, “I could have sworn this door was shut.”
Her voice is light and loud; she isn’t talking to herself.
“You’re not the first child to hide in this house,” she says. “But most of them were playing games. Come on out now. I’m too old to get down on the floor.”
Olivia sighs and rises to her feet. When Hannah reaches for her, she retreats a step, on instinct, her bandaged palm tucked like a secret behind her back.
Hannah’s hand falls, sadness dancing in her eyes.
“Goodness, girl, you’re not in trouble. If you want to look around, have at it. After all, this is your house.”
My house, thinks Olivia, the words tangling like hope inside her chest. Hannah’s gaze drifts to the sculpture on the desk, and her mood seems to sour at the sight of it.
“Come on,” she says, “it’s getting late.”
When the sun begins to set, they close the house up like a tomb.
Olivia follows Hannah from room to room, standing on chairs and stools to help pull the massive shutters in and slide the windows down. It seems such a waste, to shut themselves inside when the weather is so nice, but Hannah explains, “A place this wild, the outside is always trying to get in.”
They eat in the kitchen, gathered round a table scraped and dented with wear. No lines of loud girls. No matrons perched like crows around the room. Just Hannah and Edgar, chatting easily as he pulls a tray from the oven, a towel over one shoulder, as she scoops vegetables into a bowl, as Olivia lays out four plates, even though Matthew isn’t there, and it scares her, how good this feels. Like hot soup in winter, the warmth spreading with every sip.
“Here we are,” says Edgar, depositing a tray of beef medallions on the table.
“What happened to your hand?” asks Hannah, catching sight of the bandage wrapped around her palm.
“Field injury,” says Edgar. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“You were a lucky find,” she says, kissing his cheek. The gesture is so simple, so chaste, and yet, there are years of warmth behind it. Olivia feels her cheeks flush.
“Just goes to show,” says Hannah, “I should put ads in the paper more often.”
An ad in the paper? Olivia asks, catching Edgar’s eye, but he only winks and rises.
“Put the right words into the world,” he says, “never know what you’ll catch.”
Olivia stills.
I have sent these letters to every corner of the country.
May this be the one that finds you.
“Besides,” says Edgar, taking his seat. “I thought our guest could use a proper meal.”
Guest. The word cuts through her like a cold wind. She tries not to wince as Hannah passes a bowl of roast potatoes and parsnips, seasoned with salt. “Eat up.”
It is a feast, and the day in the garden has left her famished. Olivia has never eaten so well. When she finally slows, Hannah asks about her life before the letter came. Olivia signs, and Edgar translates, and Hannah listens, one hand to her mouth as she explains how she was found on the steps of Merilance, how she has been there for nearly all her life.
Olivia does not tell them about the matrons, or the other girls, about the chalkboard or the garden shed or Anabelle. It is already beginning to feel like another life, a chapter in a book that she can simply close and leave. And she wants to. Because she wants to stay at Gallant. Even if Matthew does not want her there. She wants to stay and make this house a home. She wants to stay and learn its secrets, wants to know why they are so frightened of the dark, what happened to all the other Priors, what Matthew meant when he called this place cursed. But when she lifts her hands to ask, a shadow twitches in the doorway. She glances over, expecting a ghoul, but it’s Matthew. He goes to the sink, scrubbing the garden from his hands.
He glances at Olivia. “Still here,” he mutters, but Hannah only smiles and pats her bandaged hand.
“Nearest car’s in the shop,” she says. “Be a few days before it can come out.”
Olivia can see the glimmer in the woman’s eyes, a glint like mischief. Another lie. But Matthew only sighs and sets the soap aside.
“Sit and eat,” urges Edgar, but her cousin shakes his head, murmurs about not being hungry, even though his too-thin body is begging for a meal. He leaves, taking the air out of the room as he goes. Hannah and Edgar pick at their food, each trying to fill the space with easy talk, but it comes out stiff, awkward.
Olivia catches Edgar’s eye. Is he sick?
He flashes Hannah a look and then says, “Matthew’s tired. Tired can be a kind of sick, if it lasts long enough.”
He’s telling the truth, some version of it, but a draft runs through the words. There is so much they are not saying. It hangs in the air, and Olivia wishes they could go back to before Matthew came in. But their plates are empty now, and Hannah gets to her feet, saying she’ll make him a tray, if Edgar will take it up. And Edgar sees Olivia staring at him, hands raised to ask about Matthew and the house, but he stands and turns his back. She hates that he can do that, that all he has to do to silence her is look away.
She stifles a yawn, even though it’s not yet nine, and Hannah offers her a shortbread biscuit and tells her a hot bath and a warm bed will do her well before shooing her from the kitchen.
She takes the long way to the stairs, past the narrow foyer and the garden door. It must be a cloudy night. No moonlight streams in through the little window, but the hall isn’t empty. Her uncle’s ghoul stands like a watchman, its back to her and its eyes on the dark.
The master of the house is hungry.
He is worn thin with it, that hunger. It gnaws, like teeth on bone, until he cannot stand the ache. Until his fingers flex, stiff in their joints. It is unyielding. This place is unyielding.
