What is wrong with him? she asks.
But Edgar only shakes his head. Bad dreams, he says.
And then he closes the door.
Olivia lingers in the darkened hall, between two streams of light—the one pouring through her open door, and the thin strand beneath Matthew’s. And when she finally retreats back to her own room, her own bed, the unfinished sketch lying faceup on the crumpled covers, she runs her fingers over the graphite and thinks of dreams. The kind that reach through the folds of sleep and into your bed. The kind that can caress your cheek or drag you down into the dark.
There is no rest in sleep.
These dreams will be the death of me.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, there is blood on her sheets.
Olivia flinches at the sight, wondering if it’s her time, but the stains are less dots or streaks and more fingers dug into the bedding. Sure enough, the bandage on her palm has come loose, the cut opened in her sleep, a restless night played out in handprints.
She goes to the bathroom sink, brushing the dried blood from her hands as if it were dust. She rinses her palm, waits to see if it will bleed again, but it doesn’t. She runs a thumb over the narrow line, the scab like a raised red thread, a vine, a root. She decides to let it air as she searches her mother’s closet, pulls out a dress the soft, dark green of summer leaves. It skims her knees, and when she turns, the skirt flares out like petals.
Her sketchpad lies abandoned in the sheets. Her mother’s half-formed face stares up from the paper, the other half, where the candlelight could not reach, rendered as a streak of shadow. Olivia closes the pad and tucks it under her arm.
As she steps into the hall, her eyes go straight to Matthew’s door. She creeps forward, pressing her ear to the wood, and hears—nothing. Not the unsettling sobs or the ragged breath, not even the rasp and rustle of sheets. Her fingers drift to the knob, but the memory of his pain forces her back, and she turns, heading instead for the stairs.
Below, the house is quiet.
Perhaps everyone is still asleep. Olivia looks around and realizes she has no idea what time it is. Back at Merilance, there were bells, whistles, sharp sounds to mark the passing hours, to summon the girls to and from their beds, to usher them from prayers to class to chores and back again. Here, the only time that seems to matter is the passing of the sun, the moment when day becomes night.
But the house has roused itself. The shutters have been thrown, sunlight spilling through the foyer and down the halls, catching dust motes in the air.
Someone cries out, and she jumps, only to realize the sound isn’t human, but the high-pitched whistle of a kettle. By the time she reaches the kitchen, it is singing, alone on the stove. Olivia turns the burner off.
“Well, you’re up early.”
She turns and finds Hannah mounting the cellar stairs, a bag of flour in one arm. Her brown curls are wrangled back, a smile creasing the corners of her mouth, but her eyes are tired.
“Oh to be young again,” she says, setting the flour down hard enough to send up a small white cloud. “And need so little sleep.” She nods at the kettle. “You do the tea, I’ll do the toast.”
Olivia lifts the kettle, careful to avoid the cut on her palm. She scalds the pot, and ladles in a spoonful of loose tea as Hannah slices bread, and for a few moments they move like cogs in the same clock, like the houses in the study sculpture, circling each other in an easy arc. As the tea steeps and the bread toasts, she opens the sketchpad, paging back past the drawing of her mother to the image of the strange metal globe.
She turns the paper toward Hannah and taps the page, the question clear.
What is this?
For a second, the only sound is the knife scraping butter over toast. But it is a heavy kind of silence, the one people use when they know the answer to something but can’t decide if they should tell it. “Old houses are full of old things,” she says at last. “Matthew might know.” Olivia rolls her eyes—so far her cousin has been no help at all.
“Fine day,” adds Hannah, sliding two plates of jam-and-buttered toast across the counter. “Too fine to be inside. Take this one out to Edgar, would you? He’s somewhere in the yard.”
Olivia sighs at the dismissal.
It takes both hands and all of her focus to get one cup of tea, two plates of toast, and the sketchpad out into the garden without spilling or breaking or losing anything. But Hannah is right; it is a fine day. A shine of dew lingers on the grass beneath her feet, but the mist and chill are burning off, and the sky overhead is a milky blue.
She finds Edgar up on a ladder, mending one of the shutters. He waves good morning, nods for her to set the toast on the ground. Olivia hesitates, worried that something might get at it there, a bird or a mouse. Only, now that she thinks of it, she hasn’t seen any animals.
It’s strange, really, on all this land. She doesn’t know much about the countryside, of course, but she saw cows and sheep on the drive up, and she imagines a dozen smaller things, rabbits, sparrows, moles, might take up residence on the estate.
Even at Merilance they found the occasional mouse, and the sky was always full of gulls. If Gallant were a storybook, there would surely be a dog by the hearth or a cat sunning on the drive, a flock of magpies in the orchard, or a crow on the wall. But there’s nothing. Only an airy silence.
She carries her breakfast to the stone bench and flops down on it.
According to Matron Agatha, proper girls sit with their knees together and their ankles crossed. Olivia sits cross-legged, knees falling open and green skirt fanning across her lap as she eats.
The sun catches the metal rim of a bucket nearby, a pair of gloves draped over the edge, but the cut on her palm is still fresh, so she leaves it, decides to draw the house instead.
She turns to a blank page, begins to draw, and soon Gallant takes shape beneath her hand, growing from a few quick strokes into a thing with walls and windows, chimneys and steepled roofs. Here are the wings and the ballroom balcony and the garden door. Here is the bay window, the only one that has no shutters, and here is the dark shape of the piano beyond.
She is just adding Edgar on his ladder, little more than a thin shadow cast against the massive house, when she hears footsteps coming through the garden.
Movement is a kind of voice. She can tell a person from the way they walk. Edgar shuffles slightly, one leg stiffer than the other. Hannah’s steps are steady and short and surprisingly quiet. Matthew’s stride is long but weighted, as if his boots are too big or too heavy.
She hears her cousin trudging down the path and looks up to find him pulling on his garden gloves. She waits for him to cut a look her way, to comment on the fact that she is still here, but he says nothing, only kneels and begins to tend the roses. There can’t be more weeds so soon, and yet there are, gray strands coming free with every tug.
His sleeves are rolled up, and she can see the bruises blooming where the gloves end at his wrists, and he looks so thin she fears that if the sun hits him just right, she might be able to see through, so she nudges the rest of her toast toward him. The plate scrapes, china on stone, and his eyes flick up.
“I’m fine,” he says in a hollow, automatic way, even though he looks worse than most of the ghouls, so she pushes the plate again, eliciting another awful scratch, and he scowls at her, annoyed, and she scowls back, and a moment later he tugs off one glove and takes the toast. He doesn’t say thank you.