What happened to you? she wonders, consulting the image as if it’s not static, a collection of lines and oil paint. As if it can tell her anything.
Why did you leave? she asks, knowing she means both Gallant and herself. But the girl in the portrait only looks away, as if distracted, already planning her escape.
Olivia blows out an exasperated breath. She’d have more luck, she thinks, asking the ghoul. Perhaps she will. She rises, setting the portrait on the desk, and starts toward the door, only to pass a mirror and realize she’s still in her nightgown.
Yesterday’s dress sits on the floor, drab, discarded. Her suitcase lies open, the second gray shift waiting there. These clothes belong to someone else, a student at Merilance, an orphan in a garden shed. Olivia cannot bring herself to put that life back on, to feel it against her skin.
She goes to the wardrobe and studies the dresses still hanging inside, trying to reconstruct her mother from swatches of fabric, to shape the image of a woman she has never known. They are all too large on Olivia, but not by much. A few inches spread across a body. A few years between. How old was Grace when she left? Eighteen? Twenty?
Olivia picks out a butter-yellow dress and a pair of flats, a size too large. Her heels slip out with every step, making her feel like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. Which, she supposes, is exactly what she is. She sighs and kicks off the shoes, resolving to go barefoot as she takes up her sketchpad and sets off in search of answers.
Gallant is a different place in daylight.
The shutters are open, the windows flung wide, the shadows retreating as daylight spills in and a cool breeze drives the stale air from the massive house. But the sun has lifted a veil, and she can see that the house is not quite so grand as she first thought. Gallant is an old estate, fighting the fall into disrepair, an elegant figure beginning to droop. Skin sagging a little over bones.
On the stairs, she stops and peers down at the foyer floor. She did not see it in the dark, but now, from up here, the inlaid pattern resolves into a series of concentric circles, each one tipped at its own angle. It reminds her, instantly, of the object she found in the study. The tilted metal rings around the model of the house. Houses. There were two.
As she continues down the stairs, sounds rise up to meet her.
The low murmur of voices, the metal scrape of a spoon against a bowl. Her stomach growls, but as she nears the kitchen, the voices draw tighter into strings of speech.
“Is it really a kindness, to keep her here?” asks Edgar.
“She has nowhere to go,” answers Hannah.
“She can go back to the school.”
Olivia’s hands tighten on the sketchpad. Defiance blooms inside her chest. She will not go back to Merilance. That is a past, not a future.
“And if they will not take her?”
Olivia backs away from the kitchen.
“She doesn’t know what it means, to be a Prior. To be here.”
“Then we must tell her.”
Her bare feet stop. She hovers, ears pricked, but then Edgar sighs and says, “It is Matthew’s choice, not ours. He is the master of the house.” And at that, she rolls her eyes and turns away. Five minutes with her cousin, and he made it clear, she is not welcome here. She doubts he means to tell her why.
If she wants to know, she’ll have to find the truth herself.
Olivia continues down one hall and up another, the walls here lined with family portraits. Paintings run the length of the hall, and the faces in them ripple and age, going from children in one portrait, to adults in the next, to parents with their own family in the third.
Small plaques mounted to the base of every frame announce the people in them.
It begins with Alexander Prior, a stoic man in a high-collared coat, Matthew’s same gray-blue eyes leveled on her. There is Maryanne Prior, a sturdy woman, broad-shouldered and proud, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. There is Jacob and Evelyn. Alice and Paul.
It is so strange, to see her face reflected, distorted, echoed in so many others. Here is the line of her cheek and the curve of her mouth. Here is the angle of her eye and the slope of her nose. The details scattered like seeds across the portraits. She has never had a family, and now she has a tree.
You are one of us, they seem to say. Olivia studies their faces—she has drawn her own a dozen times, searching for clues, but now, among so many Priors, she can begin to separate her features and find the ones that do not fit, the details that must have been her father’s. Her black hair, for one, and the pallor of her skin, and the exact color of her eyes, not gray-blue, like Matthew’s, or gray-green like her mother’s, but the flat untinted gray of slate, of smoke. A charcoal sketch among the oil paintings.
She passes whole generations of Priors before she finds her mother’s face again, even younger here, sitting on a bench beside a boy who looks like Matthew, the same tawny hair, the same deep-set eyes. She realizes it must be her uncle, Arthur, even before she sees the plaque.
In the next portrait, he is full-grown, and she realizes, she has seen him before, right here, in the house. What’s left of him, at least. Half a face, an outstretched hand, a body barging through the garden door. The ghoul she met last night. The one who kept her from the garden.
In the portrait, he is hale and hearty, one hand on a garden trellis and the other wrapped around his wife, Isabelle. She’s thin as a willow, her gaze off to one side, as if she already knows she will leave.
After that should be Matthew, but the wall is bare, as if still waiting for the next portrait to be hung. And yet, when she steps closer, she can see the ghost of one, the wallpaper a slightly different color, and higher up, the small hole where a nail was driven in. She draws her palm over the bare wall and wonders why her cousin is missing.
A door sits at the other end of the hall, and she moves toward it, hoping it’s the study she found the night before, the one with the strange sculpture on the desk. But when the handle turns, the door falls open onto a different room.
Heavy curtains have been drawn across a window, but they do not meet, and in the break between them, a ribbon of sunlight spills through the room, onto the glossy black body of a piano.
Olivia’s fingers twitch at the sight of it.
There was a piano back at Merilance, an ancient thing shoved up against one wall. For a few years, the sound would wander through the halls, the awkward melody of someone learning, stiffly pecking out the notes. The girls shuffled through like cards, Matron Agatha impatient to see if any were worth the work.
Olivia was seven when it was finally her turn.
She couldn’t wait. Drawing had come so naturally, as if her hands were shaped to the task, a direct line between her eyes and her pencil. And the piano might have been the same. The joy she’d felt at those first ringing notes. The thrill of commanding such sound. The thunder of the low keys, the kettle whistle of the high. Each and every one its own mood, its own message, a language played out in C and G and E.
Her hands wanted to race ahead, but the matron tsked in warning, rapping her knuckles every time her fingers strayed from scales.
Olivia had lost her temper then and slammed the lid down over the keys, nearly clipping the matron’s hand. She hadn’t, of course, but it didn’t matter. She was dismissed, those few spare notes still ringing in her ears.
Anger had pooled in her stomach, rising every time she heard another girl clumsily tapping out the notes, until one night she’d slipped out of bed and into the room where the piano was kept, a pair of cutters in one hand. She’d pried up the lid, revealing the delicate body of wires and hammers that made the music from the keys. Keys she couldn’t touch.