Gallant(3)

Olivia would rather eat glass, but she just nods and does her best to look contrite. She even curtsies once, bobbing her head low, but it is only so the matron cannot see the twist of her lips, the small, defiant smile. Let the old bat assume that she is sorry.

People assume a lot of things about Olivia.

Most of them are wrong.

The matron shuffles away, clearly not wanting to miss dinner, and Olivia steps into the dorm. She lingers at the foot of the first bed, listening to the rustle of receding skirts. As soon as Agatha has gone, she emerges again, slipping down the hall and around the corner to the matrons’ quarters.

Each of the matrons has her own room. The doors are locked, but the locks are old and simple, the teeth on the keys little more than simple peaks.

Olivia draws a bit of sturdy wire from her pocket, remembering the shape of Agatha’s key, the teeth a capital E. It takes a bit of fussing, but then the lock clicks, and the door swings open onto a neat little bedroom cluttered with pillows, little mantras embroidered across their fronts.

Here by the grace of God.

A place for all things, and all things in their place.

A house in order is a mind at peace.

Olivia’s fingers trail over the words as she rounds the bed. A little mirror sits on the windowsill, and as she passes, she catches a glimpse of charcoal hair and a sallow cheek, and startles. But it is just her own reflection. Pale. Colorless. The ghost of Merilance. That’s what the other girls call her. Yet there is a satisfying hitch in their voices, a hint of fear. Olivia looks at herself in the mirror. And smiles.

She kneels before the ash wood cabinet beside Agatha’s bed. The matrons have their vices. Lara has cigarettes, and Jessamine has lemon drops, and Beth has penny dreadfuls. And Agatha? Well. She has several. A bottle of brandy sloshes in the top drawer, and beneath that, Olivia finds a tin of cookies, iced with sugar, and a paper bag of clementines, bright as tiny sunsets. She takes three of the iced cookies and one piece of fruit, and retreats, silently, to the empty dorm to enjoy her dinner.





Chapter Two




Olivia lays the picnic out atop her narrow bed.

The cookies she eats fast, but the clementine she savors, peels it in a single curl, the sunny rind unraveling to reveal the happy segments. The whole room will smell like stolen citrus, but she doesn’t care. It tastes like spring, like bare feet in grassy fields, like somewhere warm and green.

Her bed is at the far end of the room, so she can sit with her back to the wall as she eats, which is good, because it means she can keep her eye on the door. And the dead thing sitting on Clara’s bed.

This ghoul is different, smaller than the other. It has knobby elbows and knees and an unblinking eye, one hand tugging on a tatty braid as it watches Olivia eat. There is something girlish in the way it moves. The way it pouts, and tips its head, and whispers in her ear when she’s trying to sleep, soft and voiceless, the words nothing but air against her cheek.

Olivia scowls straight at it until it melts away.

That is the trick with the ghouls.

They want you to look, but they can’t stand being seen.

At least, she thinks, they cannot touch her. Once, in a fit of frustration, she flung her hand out at a nearby ghoul, but her fingers went straight through. No eerie draft against her skin, not even the breath of something in the air. She felt better then, knowing it was not real enough, not there enough, to do more than smile or scowl or sulk.

Beyond the door, the sounds are changing.

Olivia listens to the shuffle and scrape of dinner ending down the hall, the rap of the head matron’s cane as she stands to give her nightly lecture—on cleanliness, perhaps, or goodness, or modesty. Matron Agatha will be listening too, no doubt, ready to stitch the words onto a cushion.

From here, the speech is nothing but a rasp, a rustle—Another mercy, she thinks as she brushes the crumbs from the bed and hides the sunny ribbon of the orange peel under her pillow, where it will smell sweet. She reaches for the trinkets on her shelf.

Every bed has a shelf, though the contents change. Some girls have a doll, passed on as charity or sewn themselves. Some have a book they like to read, or a bit of embroidery on a hoop. Most of Olivia’s shelf is taken up with sketchpads and a jar of pencils, worn short but sharp. (She is a gifted artist, and if the matrons of Merilance do not exactly nurture it, they don’t neglect it either.) But tonight her fingers drift past the sketchpads to the green journal sitting at the end.

It was her mother’s.

Her mother, who has always been a mystery, an empty space, an outline, the edges just firm enough to mark the absence. Olivia lifts the journal gently, running her hand over the cover, worn soft with age—the closest thing she has to a memory of life before Merilance. Olivia arrived at the grim stone tomb when she was not yet two, dirt-smudged in a dress trimmed with tiny wildflowers. She might have been out on the step for hours before they found her, they said, because she never cried. She doesn’t remember that. Doesn’t remember anything of the time before. She can’t recall her mother’s voice, and as for her father, she only knows she never met him. He was dead by the time she was born, that much she’s gleaned from her mother’s words.

It is a strange thing, the journal.

She has memorized every aspect, from the exact shade of green on the cover, to the elegant G scripted on its front—she has spent years guessing what it stands for, Georgina, Genevieve, Gabrielle—to the twin lines not pressed or scraped but gouged below it, perfect parallel grooves that run from one edge to the other. From the strange ink blooms that take up entire pages to the entries in her mother’s hand, some long and others only a handful of words, some lucid, and others cracked and broken, all of them addressed to “you.”