Gallant(30)

That bed is empty now, the sheets thrown back, the leather straps hanging to the floor.

Dread rolls through her. It was just a dream, but Matthew is not here, and she is certain that if she looks out into the garden, she will see a body slumped in the grass. Her window faces the front and the fountain. Matthew’s room is across the hall, so it must look onto the garden and the wall. But when she goes to the window, the shutters are not just latched—they’re locked.

Olivia hurries back down the hall, is halfway down the stairs when she hears it. Not a scream, or a shot, but a soft sequence of notes, rising and falling in scale.

Someone is playing the piano.

The melody wafts like smoke, thin and wispy, and Olivia’s heart struggles to slow as she follows the sound down the stairs and through the maze of halls to the music room, the light spilling from the open door, and there is the glossy black shell of the piano, and Matthew, head bowed over the keys.

At first glance she almost mistakes him for a ghoul, hunched forward so far he looks nearly headless. But a ghoul wouldn’t be able to touch the keys, let alone coax such music forth, and when he shifts, the lamplight falls on firm but narrow shoulders, limns the edges of his hair. He is solid enough.

Her gaze goes past him then, to the bay window, the moonlit garden sprawling beyond the glass. She searches the darkened lawn, but there is no body. Of course there is no body. It was just a dream.

Olivia shifts in the doorway, and the movement draws Matthew’s notice.

He glances up, meeting her gaze in the glass. For a moment, his hands stop, the melody suspended, and she holds his gaze, waits for the annoyance to flash across his reflection. But there is no anger in his shoulders, no frustration in his jaw. Only weariness. He looks back down and starts again.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he says, and her eyes go to the bruises around his wrists. She knows his dreams are just as vivid as her own, images that taste and feel and sound like truth. Three nights in this house, and already she feels rattled. Judging by the cast of Matthew’s skin, the hollows beneath his eyes, he has dealt with them far longer, and the dreams have been far worse.

There is no rest in sleep. These dreams will be the death of me.

“Don’t hover,” he says, but there’s an invitation in the words, to come in or to go. Olivia drifts forward.

There are only two seats in the room, the bay window and the piano bench, and she cannot bring herself to sit in the window with her back to the garden, so she sits on the edge of the bench, watching his fingers drift over the keys, hands moving with the ease of practice. The song that wafts through the room is soft and winding and lonely. She knows that isn’t the right word, but it is the only one that fits. The notes are lovely, but they make her feel like she is back in the garden shed.

“Do you play?”

Olivia shakes her head no, wonders if he can see the sadness in her face, or the hungry way she looks at the keys. But Matthew isn’t looking at her. He isn’t looking down either. Instead, he keeps his gaze on the window, on the night, on the moon-soaked garden and the distant wall, its edges traced with silver light.

He takes a long, slow breath and says, “My father showed me, when I was young.”

He softens, a ghost of a smile crosses his face, and she does not recognize this Matthew.

He was a kind boy once.

His hands are so gentle on the keys. “My mother loved to hear him play. I wanted to learn, too, but he didn’t know how to teach, couldn’t remember how he had learned himself, so he sat me down one day and nodded at the keys and said, ‘Watch and listen and figure it out.’”

Matthew’s left hand never stops, but his right drifts to the keys right in front of her, plucking out three notes and looping them, over and over.

“Like this,” he says. He withdraws again, and Olivia brings her own hand to the keys.

Something moves behind them, but Matthew doesn’t seem to notice. Olivia looks up at the window, and in the reflection, glimpses the ghoul of an old woman, leaning in the shadow by the door, its face tilted as it listens.

“Go on,” urges Matthew, and she begins to play. She knows it’s not playing so much as making a circle of sound, but it’s something, it’s a start, and she feels herself smiling, caught up in the melody.

“My brother Thomas never got the hang of it,” he says, and Olivia fumbles at the mention of that name. “He couldn’t sit still long enough to learn. But I never thought of it as still. It’s . . . something in you goes quiet, to make room for the song. These days, it feels like the closest thing I ever find to rest.”

Olivia holds her breath, waiting for him to go on, to tell her what happened to Thomas, to explain why he is alone in this too-big house, why he cannot leave, though her mother did, why he spends his nights lashed to a bed, crying out for help.

But he doesn’t say more. The moment passes.

Tomorrow she will find a way to ask these questions, tomorrow she will make him answer, but tonight she lets Matthew play in peace. Tonight the ghoul slips out of the room, and Olivia closes her eyes and lets the melody curl around her, her mind going quiet, to make room for the song. The darkest part of the night passes and thins. Together they keep the music going until dawn.





Chapter Fifteen




For the first time in years, Olivia sleeps late.

She barely remembers returning to her room or climbing back beneath the sheets. She knows only that it was already morning, pale light spilling in through the fog-laced garden and onto the piano as Matthew played. But when she reached her room, the shutters were still drawn, the room still dark, and sleep crashed over her, dragging her down not into dreams, but into sweet, familiar nothing.