Gallant(18)

In the next portrait, he is full-grown, and she realizes, she has seen him before, right here, in the house. What’s left of him, at least. Half a face, an outstretched hand, a body barging through the garden door. The ghoul she met last night. The one who kept her from the garden.

In the portrait, he is hale and hearty, one hand on a garden trellis and the other wrapped around his wife, Isabelle. She’s thin as a willow, her gaze off to one side, as if she already knows she will leave.

After that should be Matthew, but the wall is bare, as if still waiting for the next portrait to be hung. And yet, when she steps closer, she can see the ghost of one, the wallpaper a slightly different color, and higher up, the small hole where a nail was driven in. She draws her palm over the bare wall and wonders why her cousin is missing.

A door sits at the other end of the hall, and she moves toward it, hoping it’s the study she found the night before, the one with the strange sculpture on the desk. But when the handle turns, the door falls open onto a different room.

Heavy curtains have been drawn across a window, but they do not meet, and in the break between them, a ribbon of sunlight spills through the room, onto the glossy black body of a piano.

Olivia’s fingers twitch at the sight of it.

There was a piano back at Merilance, an ancient thing shoved up against one wall. For a few years, the sound would wander through the halls, the awkward melody of someone learning, stiffly pecking out the notes. The girls shuffled through like cards, Matron Agatha impatient to see if any were worth the work.

Olivia was seven when it was finally her turn.

She couldn’t wait. Drawing had come so naturally, as if her hands were shaped to the task, a direct line between her eyes and her pencil. And the piano might have been the same. The joy she’d felt at those first ringing notes. The thrill of commanding such sound. The thunder of the low keys, the kettle whistle of the high. Each and every one its own mood, its own message, a language played out in C and G and E.

Her hands wanted to race ahead, but the matron tsked in warning, rapping her knuckles every time her fingers strayed from scales.

Olivia had lost her temper then and slammed the lid down over the keys, nearly clipping the matron’s hand. She hadn’t, of course, but it didn’t matter. She was dismissed, those few spare notes still ringing in her ears.

Anger had pooled in her stomach, rising every time she heard another girl clumsily tapping out the notes, until one night she’d slipped out of bed and into the room where the piano was kept, a pair of cutters in one hand. She’d pried up the lid, revealing the delicate body of wires and hammers that made the music from the keys. Keys she couldn’t touch.

They reminded her of the diagram in the old anatomy text, the muscles and tendons of the throat laid bare. Cut here to silence a voice.

She couldn’t do it.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Arthritis soon crept into Agatha’s hands, and the lessons were abandoned. The piano sat untouched until the wires loosened and the notes all fell out of key. But Olivia always longed to play.

Now she drifts forward into the shaft of sunlight, creeping softly toward the instrument, as if it might wake. It lies still, teeth hidden beneath the onyx lid. She eases it back, exposing the pattern of black and white, the shine worn to matte with use, faint indents in the ivory. Her right hand hovers, then comes to rest on the keys. They are cool beneath her fingers. She presses down, plays a single note. It carries softly through the room, and Olivia cannot help but smile.

She traces her way up the scale. And as she hits the highest note—

Something moves.

Not in the room with her, but beyond, glimpsed in the gap between the curtains.

She steps past the piano and pulls the curtain aside, revealing a giant bay window, the bench lined with pillows, and beyond the glass, the garden.

Olivia Prior has dreamed of gardens. Every grim gray month at Merilance, she longed for carpets of grass, for riotous blooms, for a world engulfed in color. And here it is. Last night it was a moonlit tangle of hedge and vine. Now it is sun-drenched, stunning, a field of green interrupted everywhere by red, gold, violet, white.

There is a vegetable patch to one side, rows of leeks and carrots rising from the soil, and a copse of pale trees to the other, their branches dotted pink and green. An orchard. And then, her gaze drifts past it all, beyond the trellised roses and down the soft green slope, to a wall.

Or at least, the remains of one, a ruined stretch of stone, its edges crumbling, its front threaded over with ivy.

Another shudder of motion draws her attention back to the garden. Matthew is kneeling, head bowed, before a line of roses. As she watches, he straightens and turns, shielding his eyes as he looks up at the house. At her. Even from here, she can see the frown sweep like a shadow across his face. Olivia backs away from the glass. But she is not retreating.

It takes a few minutes and two wrong turns, but she finds the second foyer again, and the garden door. The one she unlocked the night before. There’s something on the floor, a dark residue, as if someone’s tracked dirt into the house, but when she bends to touch it, she feels nothing. As if the stain has pressed itself straight into the stone. She remembers the ghoul, forcing her back, his hand thrust out. But there is no one to stop her now, and the door is no longer locked. It swings open at her touch, and she inches around the odd shadow on the floor.

And steps out into the sun.