She shrugs, her stomach growling at the sight of the porridge pot on the stove, the contents long cooled to glue, but Edgar points her to the sink. She rinses the cut as he digs up a first aid box and lays out iodine and gauze. As he works, his hands are steady, his touch is light.
“I was in the army,” he says casually, a safety pin between his teeth. “Had to patch up my share of battle wounds.” He smiles, studying her hand. “But I think you’ll live.” He cleans the cut and binds it, winding a narrow white bandage around her palm and pinning it there. It feels like overkill for such a narrow cut, but he treats it with a surgeon’s care. “Do try to keep your blood on the inside, though.”
Something shudders in the doorway, and Olivia glances toward it, hoping to catch her mother’s half-formed face. But it’s yet another ghoul, this one younger, thinner, wasting, nothing but jutting ribs, a knee, a nose.
“Old houses,” says Edgar, following her gaze. “Full of sounds you don’t quite hear, and things you don’t quite see.”
She waits until he’s finished with her hand and then asks, Is Gallant haunted? And even though she knows the answer is yes, she’s surprised when Edgar nods.
“I’m sure it is,” he says. “A house like this has too much history, and history always brings its share of ghosts. But it’s not a bad thing,” he adds, packing up his kit. “Ghosts were people once, and people come in all ways, good and bad and what’s between. Sure, maybe some are out to frighten, but others, I think, are just watching, wishing they could help.”
She looks back at the ghoul. It shrinks beneath her gaze, slipping back behind the doorframe.
As Edgar puts away the first aid kit, Olivia picks at the bandage on her hand.
Back at Merilance, someone was always getting scraped up, burning their fingers on the stove, or plucking gravel out of their knees. If you were lucky, the matrons would wave you off, say it was the cost of being clumsy. If you weren’t, they’d douse it in rubbing alcohol, which hurt twice as much as any wound.
Sometimes a younger girl would cut herself and cry at the sight of blood. Sometimes an older one would pick her up and say, “It doesn’t hurt,” as if the words alone would make it true. An incantation, a spell to banish pain by denying its existence.
No one ever said them to Olivia—no one ever needed to—but she’s lost count of the times she said them to herself.
When Agatha rapped her knuckles with a ruler.
It doesn’t hurt.
When Clara pricked her with a sewing pin.
It doesn’t hurt.
When Anabelle tore the pages from her mother’s book.
“Does it hurt?” asks Edgar when he sees her fussing with the bandage.
The question catches her off guard, but Olivia shakes her head. He cuts a thick slice of bread and butters it and drops it in a skillet. The smell is heavenly, and she watches, mouth watering as he smears the toast with raspberry jam.
And sets it in front of her.
“There,” he says, “that will put the life back in you.”
Olivia takes a bite, melting a little with the sugar on her tongue.
He nods at her sketchpad. “What have you got there?”
Olivia licks the jam from her fingers and thumbs through the pages so he can see the last few drawings she’s made, of the garden, and the orchard, and the wall.
“These are very good,” he says, even though they’re just beginnings, the pencil layered on itself, finding light and dark and line. “I remember, your mother always liked to draw.”
Olivia frowns, thinking of the strange ink splotches in the journal. She wouldn’t call those drawings. She takes another bite, the raspberries bursting brightly in her mouth. Edgar sees her smile as she chews.
“Hannah made the jam,” he says. “Tom used to drizzle honey over—” He stops himself, startled, as if he tripped. A shadow crosses his face, there and then gone. “But the berries were so sweet last year, hardly needed any sugar.”
Olivia lifts a hand to ask, but Edgar is already moving toward the door, saying something about a shutter that needs fixing, and she is left to add the name to the list in her head, along with all the other secrets Gallant seems to be keeping. The uncle who did not write her letter. Matthew’s supposed curse. The colorless weeds in the garden. The wall that is not a wall. And this Tom no one wants to speak of. She conjures the field of Priors in her head, the short tombstones like spaced-out teeth, but she didn’t see a Thomas there.
Olivia finishes her toast, tucks the sketchpad beneath her arm, and goes searching for the study. Moving through the halls, she’s struck again by the size of this place, designed for forty instead of four. A skeleton staff, that’s what it’s called when there are so few left to manage a manor so large, but the residents of Gallant are less a skeleton than a handful of mismatched bones. And the house, the house is a maze, hall after hall and room after room, some grand and some small and most closed up, hills of furniture buried beneath crisp white sheets.
Beyond a pair of double doors she discovers a sprawling room, the kind designed for feasts or balls. Its floor is pale wood, inlaid with those same twisting circles. Its ceiling vaults high overhead, two stories, maybe three, and glass doors run along the far wall, a balcony beyond.
It is the grandest space she’s ever seen, and she doesn’t know what comes over her, but she twirls, bare feet whispering across the wood.
And then, at last, she finds the study.
She was beginning to think it was a trick of her mind, a dream, that she would search the entire house only to learn that no such room existed.
But here is the narrow hall, the waiting door.
Her fingers trail over the wallpaper, the way they did the night before, and the polished handle of the door gives way. There is no window, and she doesn’t want to risk a lamp, so she leaves the door open, light spilling in from the hall. She pads forward, floorboards creaking softly underfoot until she reaches a thin dark rug that pools beneath the desk.
There on top is the strange metal sculpture, two houses set within concentric rings. Not just any house, but two small replicas of Gallant.
They perch on either side, facing each other at the center of the curving frame. Metal rings surround each house, and more surround the two together. Olivia cannot help herself. She lifts her fingertip to the outer ring, and gives it the slightest push, and the whole thing trips into motion.
She holds her breath, afraid that any second it will topple and clatter to the floor, but it’s as if it were designed to move. The two houses turn like dancers, sliding away and then coming back to face each other. Each follows its own arc, each the center of its own small orbit. She watches, mesmerized, studying the steady revolution until it slows.
The houses move through their orbits one last time, and Olivia reaches out again to stop the motion as they come to face each other. She leans closer. It’s strange, but from this angle, the rings between them look almost—almost—like a wall.
Olivia turns to a clean page in her sketchbook and draws the sculpture, trying to capture the sense of movement, the clean, almost mathematical lines of the device. She rounds the desk, to get another angle, and notices the drawer. It juts out like a bottom lip, a bit of paper caught in the corner. She tugs at the handle, and for a moment it sticks, then judders open.