They reminded her of the diagram in the old anatomy text, the muscles and tendons of the throat laid bare. Cut here to silence a voice.
She couldn’t do it.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Arthritis soon crept into Agatha’s hands, and the lessons were abandoned. The piano sat untouched until the wires loosened and the notes all fell out of key. But Olivia always longed to play.
Now she drifts forward into the shaft of sunlight, creeping softly toward the instrument, as if it might wake. It lies still, teeth hidden beneath the onyx lid. She eases it back, exposing the pattern of black and white, the shine worn to matte with use, faint indents in the ivory. Her right hand hovers, then comes to rest on the keys. They are cool beneath her fingers. She presses down, plays a single note. It carries softly through the room, and Olivia cannot help but smile.
She traces her way up the scale. And as she hits the highest note—
Something moves.
Not in the room with her, but beyond, glimpsed in the gap between the curtains.
She steps past the piano and pulls the curtain aside, revealing a giant bay window, the bench lined with pillows, and beyond the glass, the garden.
Olivia Prior has dreamed of gardens. Every grim gray month at Merilance, she longed for carpets of grass, for riotous blooms, for a world engulfed in color. And here it is. Last night it was a moonlit tangle of hedge and vine. Now it is sun-drenched, stunning, a field of green interrupted everywhere by red, gold, violet, white.
There is a vegetable patch to one side, rows of leeks and carrots rising from the soil, and a copse of pale trees to the other, their branches dotted pink and green. An orchard. And then, her gaze drifts past it all, beyond the trellised roses and down the soft green slope, to a wall.
Or at least, the remains of one, a ruined stretch of stone, its edges crumbling, its front threaded over with ivy.
Another shudder of motion draws her attention back to the garden. Matthew is kneeling, head bowed, before a line of roses. As she watches, he straightens and turns, shielding his eyes as he looks up at the house. At her. Even from here, she can see the frown sweep like a shadow across his face. Olivia backs away from the glass. But she is not retreating.
It takes a few minutes and two wrong turns, but she finds the second foyer again, and the garden door. The one she unlocked the night before. There’s something on the floor, a dark residue, as if someone’s tracked dirt into the house, but when she bends to touch it, she feels nothing. As if the stain has pressed itself straight into the stone. She remembers the ghoul, forcing her back, his hand thrust out. But there is no one to stop her now, and the door is no longer locked. It swings open at her touch, and she inches around the odd shadow on the floor.
And steps out into the sun.
Chapter Nine
The first things Olivia learned to draw were flowers.
It would have been easier, of course, to draw pots and hearths, dining benches and sleeping cots, things she saw every day. But Olivia filled the pages of her first sketchbook with flowers. The silk ones she saw every time she was sent to the head matron’s office. The stubborn yellow weeds that forced their way up here and there between the gravel. The roses she saw in a book. But sometimes, she’d invent her own. Fill the corners of every page with strange and wild blooms, conjuring whole gardens out of empty space, each more expansive than the last.
But none of them were real.
For all her skill, she couldn’t wander through them as she does now, couldn’t feel the grass beneath her feet, the soft petals tickling her palm. Olivia smiles, the sunlight warm against her skin.
She passes beneath a trellised arch, draws her hand along a waist-high hedge. She never knew there were so many different kinds of roses, so many different sizes or shades, and she doesn’t know the names for any of them.
She sinks onto a sun-soaked bench, the sketchpad open on her knee, her fingers itching to capture every detail.
But her eyes keep drifting to the garden wall.
It sits, watching from the distance, and she knows that is a strange verb, watch, a human word, but that is how it feels. As if it’s staring at her.
Her pencil whispers over the paper, the gestures swift and sure as she finds the outline of the wall. It is more of a ruin, really, as if a stone house once stood there on the site, but has since fallen down, leaving only a single side. Or perhaps a wall once surrounded the estate. She looks around for other ruins, but the rest is rolling green. Gallant sits in a basin, surrounded by open pasture and distant hills. A wall seems rather pointless in a place like this.
Olivia finishes her drawing, and frowns. It isn’t right.
She studies the two walls, one on paper and the other on grass, searching for her mistakes, some wrong angle or misplaced line, but she cannot find it. So she turns the page and tries again. She starts at the edges and works in, finding the outline.
“Why are you still here?”
Matthew trudges toward her, a bucket hanging from one hand, and she braces for a tirade or a tantrum, holds her breath and waits for him to order her away, drag her through the house and out onto the steps like a piece of misplaced luggage. But he doesn’t, just crouches at the edge of a planting.
She studies him, watching as he runs his gloved hands through the rose bushes, the gesture almost gentle as he peels apart the thorny limbs, searching for weeds.
How strange, to think that they are cousins.
That yesterday she was alone.
And today she is not.
All her life, she has wanted a house and a garden and a room of her own. But tucked inside that want was something else: a family. Parents who smothered her with love. Siblings who teased because they cared. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews—in her mind a family was a sprawling thing, an orchard full of roots and branches.
Instead she has been given this single, scowling tree.
Her pencil scratches, carving the lines of him. In daylight, the resemblance is obvious in the width of his brow, the slope of his cheek—but so are the differences. His eyes are bluer in the light, his hair a warmer shade, the light brown shot through with gold. The three or four years that have given him height and breadth, the difference between a plant left to scrounge for sun and one clearly nurtured. And yet, there is something worn about him, thin. It’s in the way he’s shaded, the shadows under his eyes, the hollows in his cheeks. He looks as though he hasn’t slept in weeks.
Matthew works slowly, methodically, pulling each intrusive weed and dropping it in a basket. She reaches out, runs her fingers over the velvet petals, leans in to sniff, expecting . . . she isn’t sure. Perfume? But the flowers hardly smell at all.
“They’re grown for color, not for scent,” he says, pulling up another weed. This time she notices how pale it is. Perhaps it only seems that way, against the too-bright reds and pinks and golds of the garden. But in his hand the tendril looks completely gray, devoid of color.
He unwinds another weed from the stem of a rose and rips it free, dropping the strange intruder into the bucket.
“They run beneath the soil,” he says. “Push up and strangle everything.”
He glances at her as he says it, and she signs, as quickly as she can:
What happened to my uncle?
Matthew frowns. She tries again, slower, but he shakes his head. “You can flap your hands all you like,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”