Gallant(49)

Olivia returns to the study, her cousin on her heels.

She goes to the wall behind the desk, to the place where shelf meets paper.

“What are you doing?” he asks as she runs her hand over the wall, trying to find the seam. It was there in the other house, and so—

Her fingers find a groove in the papered wall. She presses her palm flat, and the hidden door gives, just a little, before swinging open onto a narrow corridor. She knows if she follows it, she will find herself standing in the kitchen.

Matthew stares at her as if she’s just performed a magic trick.

“How did you know . . .” he begins, and she doesn’t have the time to tell him, to draw the ghoul, its hand over her mouth, so she goes to the model with its two miniature houses, its concentric metal rings. She points first at one house and then the other, drawing an invisible line between the two.

Matthew’s eyes narrow and then brighten.

“What’s there is here,” he muses, and she nods and turns to the drawing she did in the garden, the one of Gallant itself, taps the pencil expectantly as if to say, Where else? Understanding blooms across his face.

“Follow me.”

Every house has secrets.

Merilance had no hidden tunnels or false walls, but it did have a loose floorboard in the hall, a nook just wide enough to hide in at the top of the north stairs, a dozen cracks and shadows to exploit. Gallant’s secrets are far greater.

Olivia learns them now, presses each into her mind like a wildflower between the pages of her sketchpad.

There is the passage she’s already found, the lightless tunnel that runs between the study and the kitchen. Matthew shows her another. He leads her to the ballroom, to the wooden molding that runs along the far wall, as high as her waist. She watches him feel along the wood until he finds the notch.

“Here,” he says, taking her fingers and guiding them to the trim. It feels like a chip, broken away, but when she presses down, the wooden panel swings out, revealing a cubby too small for all but a child—or a narrow girl. She crouches down, squinting into the dark, until Matthew lifts a lamp, and by it, she can see a set of squat stone steps.

“It leads down into the cellar,” he explains.

The cellar. She has only seen it once, the morning after she arrived, when Hannah emerged with the basket on her hip. But she can think of a hundred places she’d rather go than the drystone crypt beneath the house. Still, as she eases the door shut, she forces herself to note the chip in the wood, how far it is from the corner, until she’s sure she could find it in the dark.

They are not alone on their quest. As Matthew leads her through the house, she sees them, watching. A ghoul in the corner. Another on the stairs. Half-formed faces she knows from the paintings in the hall outside the study. Members of a family she never knew she had. Priors, just like the ghouls beyond the wall, the ones who never made it home.

She follows Matthew into the music room next. Her fingers itch, wishing they could simply sit and play, wishing he would teach her another song. But he doesn’t stop at the piano. He goes past it, to the right corner of the room, finds the groove where two strips of wallpaper seem to meet.

“Right here,” he says, pressing his hand flat to the wood. And for a moment, she expects him to command the hidden door, to order it open or closed the way he did the garden gate. But there is no blood on his palm, and he gives no order, simply presses down, and a panel pops out.

“Come on,” he says, gesturing for her to follow.

The stairs are so steep and narrow, they are nearly a ladder. He leads the way up and at the top, they step out into Matthew’s room.

He sinks onto the edge of his bed to catch his breath.

“My brother made a game of it,” he says, “finding all the secret places.” And though he’s hiding it well, she can see the weariness sweeping through his face, the faint tremor in his hands.

He gestures at the wall across from the bed, at a garden tapestry that hangs there. When she draws it back, she finds a door. Not a hidden one, folded straight into the molding or the wood, but an ordinary door, the tapestry obviously added to put it out of sight.

A small gold key hangs from the lock, and Olivia looks to Matthew for permission. He nods once, and she turns the key. It whispers in the lock, and the door opens, not onto a bathroom or a hall, but another bedroom, a little smaller than his own.

The shutters are open, the curtains pulled back, the late afternoon light spilling in over a desk, a chest, a bed. A tattered bear propped on the pillow, a pair of shoes nestled neatly by the bedside table. Thomas’s room.

She pictures Hannah coming in here every morning. Edgar latching the shutters every night. They may go through the motions, but the room still feels abandoned. The floorboards too stiff, the dust that hangs in the air, even after being swept from every surface.

Olivia returns to Matthew’s room and closes the door, turning the little gold key in the lock. He sighs and rises from the bed. And as she follows him out, down the main stairs, she thinks of all the halls and all the rooms and all the hidden doors in Gallant. Perhaps she won’t need any of them. Perhaps the boy will still be there, in the fountain’s empty bowl, and she will never set foot again inside the other house. Perhaps it will be that easy—but she doubts it.

Three hours until dusk. Matthew is resting, but Olivia’s skin hums with nerves, and she goes out into the garden to get some air. The day is warm, and she walks between the flowers, eyes trailing over pink and gold and green before she sees it at the garden’s edge.