Gallant(26)

Olivia sighs at the dismissal.

It takes both hands and all of her focus to get one cup of tea, two plates of toast, and the sketchpad out into the garden without spilling or breaking or losing anything. But Hannah is right; it is a fine day. A shine of dew lingers on the grass beneath her feet, but the mist and chill are burning off, and the sky overhead is a milky blue.

She finds Edgar up on a ladder, mending one of the shutters. He waves good morning, nods for her to set the toast on the ground. Olivia hesitates, worried that something might get at it there, a bird or a mouse. Only, now that she thinks of it, she hasn’t seen any animals.

It’s strange, really, on all this land. She doesn’t know much about the countryside, of course, but she saw cows and sheep on the drive up, and she imagines a dozen smaller things, rabbits, sparrows, moles, might take up residence on the estate.

Even at Merilance they found the occasional mouse, and the sky was always full of gulls. If Gallant were a storybook, there would surely be a dog by the hearth or a cat sunning on the drive, a flock of magpies in the orchard, or a crow on the wall. But there’s nothing. Only an airy silence.

She carries her breakfast to the stone bench and flops down on it.

According to Matron Agatha, proper girls sit with their knees together and their ankles crossed. Olivia sits cross-legged, knees falling open and green skirt fanning across her lap as she eats.

The sun catches the metal rim of a bucket nearby, a pair of gloves draped over the edge, but the cut on her palm is still fresh, so she leaves it, decides to draw the house instead.

She turns to a blank page, begins to draw, and soon Gallant takes shape beneath her hand, growing from a few quick strokes into a thing with walls and windows, chimneys and steepled roofs. Here are the wings and the ballroom balcony and the garden door. Here is the bay window, the only one that has no shutters, and here is the dark shape of the piano beyond.

She is just adding Edgar on his ladder, little more than a thin shadow cast against the massive house, when she hears footsteps coming through the garden.

Movement is a kind of voice. She can tell a person from the way they walk. Edgar shuffles slightly, one leg stiffer than the other. Hannah’s steps are steady and short and surprisingly quiet. Matthew’s stride is long but weighted, as if his boots are too big or too heavy.

She hears her cousin trudging down the path and looks up to find him pulling on his garden gloves. She waits for him to cut a look her way, to comment on the fact that she is still here, but he says nothing, only kneels and begins to tend the roses. There can’t be more weeds so soon, and yet there are, gray strands coming free with every tug.

His sleeves are rolled up, and she can see the bruises blooming where the gloves end at his wrists, and he looks so thin she fears that if the sun hits him just right, she might be able to see through, so she nudges the rest of her toast toward him. The plate scrapes, china on stone, and his eyes flick up.

“I’m fine,” he says in a hollow, automatic way, even though he looks worse than most of the ghouls, so she pushes the plate again, eliciting another awful scratch, and he scowls at her, annoyed, and she scowls back, and a moment later he tugs off one glove and takes the toast. He doesn’t say thank you.

She returns to drawing Gallant, but she cannot shake the sense she’s being watched, can feel the weight of eyes against her back. She glances over at Matthew, but his head is down, his attention on his work. She looks over her shoulder, but all she sees is the wall.

Olivia twists round and turns back to her sketchpad, flipping through until she finds the abandoned drawing. She looks from the paper to the wall, trying to find the place where she went wrong, is still tapping her pencil against the page when Matthew’s shadow falls across the paper.

He glances down at the sketchpad, his expression souring at the sight of the wall. She holds her breath, waiting for him to speak, and when he doesn’t, she turns to a blank page, and writes.

What happened to your father?

But when she holds up the paper, Matthew’s eyes barely land on it before he looks away. She shoves it back in front of him, forcing him to read, but his eyes refuse to settle on the words. “Wasting your time,” he mutters, and at last she understands. It’s not that he doesn’t want to read, it’s that he can’t.

He sees the understanding on her face and scowls.

“I’m not stupid,” he snaps. Olivia shakes her head. She knows too well what’s it like when people take one weakness and define you by it. “I just—I never got the hang of it. The letters won’t sit still. The words get jumbled up.”

She nods, and then begins again, pencil scratching across the page.

“I told you—” he growls, but she holds up her index finger, a silent order to wait as she sketches as quickly as she can. The man takes shape on the paper, not as he was, half-formed at the garden door, but as he was in the portrait hall. Arthur Prior. She turns the sketch toward her cousin, and she might as well have slammed a door in his face.

“He died,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how.”

Matthew fixes his gaze ahead, past the garden, to the wall.

Olivia turns the page, pencil hovering. She’s still trying to put her other questions into pictures when he says, “There must always be a Prior at the gate.”

His voice is low and brims with bitterness, but the words spill out like something memorized.