Gallant(19)

Chapter Nine




The first things Olivia learned to draw were flowers.

It would have been easier, of course, to draw pots and hearths, dining benches and sleeping cots, things she saw every day. But Olivia filled the pages of her first sketchbook with flowers. The silk ones she saw every time she was sent to the head matron’s office. The stubborn yellow weeds that forced their way up here and there between the gravel. The roses she saw in a book. But sometimes, she’d invent her own. Fill the corners of every page with strange and wild blooms, conjuring whole gardens out of empty space, each more expansive than the last.

But none of them were real.

For all her skill, she couldn’t wander through them as she does now, couldn’t feel the grass beneath her feet, the soft petals tickling her palm. Olivia smiles, the sunlight warm against her skin.

She passes beneath a trellised arch, draws her hand along a waist-high hedge. She never knew there were so many different kinds of roses, so many different sizes or shades, and she doesn’t know the names for any of them.

She sinks onto a sun-soaked bench, the sketchpad open on her knee, her fingers itching to capture every detail.

But her eyes keep drifting to the garden wall.

It sits, watching from the distance, and she knows that is a strange verb, watch, a human word, but that is how it feels. As if it’s staring at her.

Her pencil whispers over the paper, the gestures swift and sure as she finds the outline of the wall. It is more of a ruin, really, as if a stone house once stood there on the site, but has since fallen down, leaving only a single side. Or perhaps a wall once surrounded the estate. She looks around for other ruins, but the rest is rolling green. Gallant sits in a basin, surrounded by open pasture and distant hills. A wall seems rather pointless in a place like this.

Olivia finishes her drawing, and frowns. It isn’t right.

She studies the two walls, one on paper and the other on grass, searching for her mistakes, some wrong angle or misplaced line, but she cannot find it. So she turns the page and tries again. She starts at the edges and works in, finding the outline.

“Why are you still here?”

Matthew trudges toward her, a bucket hanging from one hand, and she braces for a tirade or a tantrum, holds her breath and waits for him to order her away, drag her through the house and out onto the steps like a piece of misplaced luggage. But he doesn’t, just crouches at the edge of a planting.

She studies him, watching as he runs his gloved hands through the rose bushes, the gesture almost gentle as he peels apart the thorny limbs, searching for weeds.

How strange, to think that they are cousins.

That yesterday she was alone.

And today she is not.

All her life, she has wanted a house and a garden and a room of her own. But tucked inside that want was something else: a family. Parents who smothered her with love. Siblings who teased because they cared. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews—in her mind a family was a sprawling thing, an orchard full of roots and branches.

Instead she has been given this single, scowling tree.

Her pencil scratches, carving the lines of him. In daylight, the resemblance is obvious in the width of his brow, the slope of his cheek—but so are the differences. His eyes are bluer in the light, his hair a warmer shade, the light brown shot through with gold. The three or four years that have given him height and breadth, the difference between a plant left to scrounge for sun and one clearly nurtured. And yet, there is something worn about him, thin. It’s in the way he’s shaded, the shadows under his eyes, the hollows in his cheeks. He looks as though he hasn’t slept in weeks.

Matthew works slowly, methodically, pulling each intrusive weed and dropping it in a basket. She reaches out, runs her fingers over the velvet petals, leans in to sniff, expecting . . . she isn’t sure. Perfume? But the flowers hardly smell at all.

“They’re grown for color, not for scent,” he says, pulling up another weed. This time she notices how pale it is. Perhaps it only seems that way, against the too-bright reds and pinks and golds of the garden. But in his hand the tendril looks completely gray, devoid of color.

He unwinds another weed from the stem of a rose and rips it free, dropping the strange intruder into the bucket.

“They run beneath the soil,” he says. “Push up and strangle everything.”

He glances at her as he says it, and she signs, as quickly as she can:

What happened to my uncle?

Matthew frowns. She tries again, slower, but he shakes his head. “You can flap your hands all you like,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Olivia grits her teeth and turns to a fresh page in her sketchbook, writing the question out in quick and sloping cursive. But when she holds the page up toward him, he is no longer looking. He is on his feet again, walking away toward another row of roses. Olivia hisses through her teeth and follows.

A few steps, and then he turns on her, his eyes fever bright.

“Edgar says you cannot speak. Are you deaf as well?”

Olivia scowls in answer.

“Good,” he says. “Then listen close. You need to leave.”

She shakes her head. How can he understand? This place is paradise compared to where she was. Besides, this was her mother’s home. Just because Grace left, why must Olivia? She is a Prior, too, after all.