Gallant(17)

Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me. I would write the words a thousand times if they’d be strong enough to hold you here.





Chapter Eight




Grace Prior is dead.

After all those years, Olivia knew her mother wasn’t coming back. And yet, there was always that narrow sliver of hope. Like a door left ajar. Now it swings shut.

She sinks onto the ottoman, the portrait in her hands.

What happened to you? she wonders, consulting the image as if it’s not static, a collection of lines and oil paint. As if it can tell her anything.

Why did you leave? she asks, knowing she means both Gallant and herself. But the girl in the portrait only looks away, as if distracted, already planning her escape.

Olivia blows out an exasperated breath. She’d have more luck, she thinks, asking the ghoul. Perhaps she will. She rises, setting the portrait on the desk, and starts toward the door, only to pass a mirror and realize she’s still in her nightgown.

Yesterday’s dress sits on the floor, drab, discarded. Her suitcase lies open, the second gray shift waiting there. These clothes belong to someone else, a student at Merilance, an orphan in a garden shed. Olivia cannot bring herself to put that life back on, to feel it against her skin.

She goes to the wardrobe and studies the dresses still hanging inside, trying to reconstruct her mother from swatches of fabric, to shape the image of a woman she has never known. They are all too large on Olivia, but not by much. A few inches spread across a body. A few years between. How old was Grace when she left? Eighteen? Twenty?

Olivia picks out a butter-yellow dress and a pair of flats, a size too large. Her heels slip out with every step, making her feel like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. Which, she supposes, is exactly what she is. She sighs and kicks off the shoes, resolving to go barefoot as she takes up her sketchpad and sets off in search of answers.

Gallant is a different place in daylight.

The shutters are open, the windows flung wide, the shadows retreating as daylight spills in and a cool breeze drives the stale air from the massive house. But the sun has lifted a veil, and she can see that the house is not quite so grand as she first thought. Gallant is an old estate, fighting the fall into disrepair, an elegant figure beginning to droop. Skin sagging a little over bones.

On the stairs, she stops and peers down at the foyer floor. She did not see it in the dark, but now, from up here, the inlaid pattern resolves into a series of concentric circles, each one tipped at its own angle. It reminds her, instantly, of the object she found in the study. The tilted metal rings around the model of the house. Houses. There were two.

As she continues down the stairs, sounds rise up to meet her.

The low murmur of voices, the metal scrape of a spoon against a bowl. Her stomach growls, but as she nears the kitchen, the voices draw tighter into strings of speech.

“Is it really a kindness, to keep her here?” asks Edgar.

“She has nowhere to go,” answers Hannah.

“She can go back to the school.”

Olivia’s hands tighten on the sketchpad. Defiance blooms inside her chest. She will not go back to Merilance. That is a past, not a future.

“And if they will not take her?”

Olivia backs away from the kitchen.

“She doesn’t know what it means, to be a Prior. To be here.”

“Then we must tell her.”

Her bare feet stop. She hovers, ears pricked, but then Edgar sighs and says, “It is Matthew’s choice, not ours. He is the master of the house.” And at that, she rolls her eyes and turns away. Five minutes with her cousin, and he made it clear, she is not welcome here. She doubts he means to tell her why.

If she wants to know, she’ll have to find the truth herself.

Olivia continues down one hall and up another, the walls here lined with family portraits. Paintings run the length of the hall, and the faces in them ripple and age, going from children in one portrait, to adults in the next, to parents with their own family in the third.

Small plaques mounted to the base of every frame announce the people in them.

It begins with Alexander Prior, a stoic man in a high-collared coat, Matthew’s same gray-blue eyes leveled on her. There is Maryanne Prior, a sturdy woman, broad-shouldered and proud, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. There is Jacob and Evelyn. Alice and Paul.

It is so strange, to see her face reflected, distorted, echoed in so many others. Here is the line of her cheek and the curve of her mouth. Here is the angle of her eye and the slope of her nose. The details scattered like seeds across the portraits. She has never had a family, and now she has a tree.

You are one of us, they seem to say. Olivia studies their faces—she has drawn her own a dozen times, searching for clues, but now, among so many Priors, she can begin to separate her features and find the ones that do not fit, the details that must have been her father’s. Her black hair, for one, and the pallor of her skin, and the exact color of her eyes, not gray-blue, like Matthew’s, or gray-green like her mother’s, but the flat untinted gray of slate, of smoke. A charcoal sketch among the oil paintings.

She passes whole generations of Priors before she finds her mother’s face again, even younger here, sitting on a bench beside a boy who looks like Matthew, the same tawny hair, the same deep-set eyes. She realizes it must be her uncle, Arthur, even before she sees the plaque.