Gallant(25)

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.”