With that, she produces an envelope. And even before she hands it over, Olivia can see that it’s addressed to her. Her name curls across the envelope in peculiar cursive, the letters falling slantwise like rain.
Olivia Prior
The top of the envelope has been torn open, the contents removed and then returned, and she feels a brief, indignant flare at the invasion. But annoyance quickly gives way to curiosity as the head matron passes her the envelope, and she withdraws the letter, written in the same strange hand.
“My dearest niece,” it begins.
I confess, I do not know exactly where you are.
I have sent these letters to every corner of the country. May this be the one that finds you.
Here is what I know. When you were born, your mother was not well. She took you and fled from us, pursued by delusions of danger. I fear that she is dead and can only hope that you still live. You must think yourself abandoned, but it is not so. It has never been so.
You are wanted. You are needed. You belong with us.
Come home, dear niece.
We cannot wait to welcome you.
Your uncle,
Arthur Prior
Olivia reads the letter again, and again, her mind spinning.
Niece. Uncle. Home. She does not realize how hard she’s gripping the letter until it crumples.
“Fate has smiled on you, Miss Prior,” says the head matron, but Olivia cannot take her eyes from the paper. She turns the envelope over, and there on the back is an address. The words and letters jumble, meaningless, in her mind, aside from the word at the top.
Gallant.
Olivia’s ribs seem to tighten around her heart.
She traces her thumb over the word, the same one that ended her mother’s journal. It never made sense. Once, long ago, she’d looked it up in one of the matron’s heavy dictionaries, learned that it meant brave, especially in trying times. Courage under duress. But for her mother—for Olivia—it is not a description. It is a place. A home. The word washes over her like a high tide, knocking her off balance. She feels a little dizzy, a little ill.
Come home, the letter says.
Stay away, her mother warned.
But here her uncle says, Your mother was not well. That much has always been clear from the journal, but they were her mother’s final words, surely she had a reason for—
The head matron clears her throat. “I suggest you go collect your things,” she says, hand flicking to the door. “It is a long drive, and the car will be here soon.”
I am so happy. I am so scared.
The two, it turns out, can walk together, hand in hand.
Chapter Four
The ghoul sits cross-legged on a nearby bed, watching as Olivia packs.
One eye floats above a narrow chin, the features broken up by sunlight. It looks almost sad to see her go.
The matrons have given her a slim suitcase, just large enough to fit her two gray dresses, her sketchpads, her mother’s journal. She tucks her uncle’s letter in the back, his invitation side by side with her mother’s warning.
You will be safe, as long as you stay away.
We cannot wait to welcome you.
One mad, the other absent, and she doesn’t know which to believe, but in the end it doesn’t matter. The letter might as well be a summons. And perhaps she should be afraid of the unknown, but curiosity beats a drum inside her chest. She is leaving. She has somewhere to go.
A home.
Home is a choice, her mother wrote, and even though she has not chosen Gallant, perhaps she will. After all, you can choose a thing after it’s chosen you. And even if it turns out not to be a home, it is at least a house with family waiting in it.
A black car idles in the gravel moat. She has seen these cars come to Merilance, summoned by the head matron when it is time for a girl to go. A parting gift, a one-way ride. The door hangs open like a mouth, waiting to swallow her up, and fear prickles beneath her skin, even as she tells herself, Anywhere is better than here.
The matrons stand on the steps like sentinels. The other girls do not come to see her off, but the doors are open, and she catches the silver whip of Anabelle’s braid glinting in the hall.
Good riddance, she thinks, climbing into the belly of the beast. The engine turns, and the tires churn across the gravel moat. They pull through the arch and out onto the street, and Olivia watches through the back window as the garden shed vanishes and Merilance falls away. One moment, it is shrinking. The next, it is gone, swallowed up by the surrounding buildings and the plumes of coal smoke.
Something wriggles inside her then, half terror and half thrill. Like when you take the stairs too fast and almost slip. The moment when you catch yourself and look down at what could have happened, some disaster narrowly escaped.
The car rumbles beneath her, the only sound as the city thins, the buildings sinking from three stories to two, two to one, before growing gaps, like bad teeth. And then something marvelous happens. They reach the end of all those buildings, all that smoke and soot and steam. The last houses give way to rolling hills, and the world transforms from gray to green.
Olivia opens the suitcase and plucks her uncle’s letter from the journal.
My dearest niece, he wrote, and she holds on to the promise in those words.
She reads the letter again, soaking in the ink, scouring the words and the space between for answers and finding none. Something wafts off the paper, like a draft. She brings the letter to her nose. It is summer, and yet, the parchment smells of autumn, brittle and dry, that narrow season when nature withers and dies, when the windows are shuttered and the furnaces belch smoke and winter waits like a promise, just out of sight.
Outside, the sun breaks through, and she looks up to find fields unraveling to either side, heather, wheat, and tallgrass blowing softly in the breeze. She wants to climb out, to abandon the car, sprawl among the waving blades and spread her arms the way the girls did when it snowed last year, even though it was only an inch of white and they could feel the gravel every time they moved.
But she does not climb out, and the car drives on through the countryside. She doesn’t know how far they’re going. No one told her, not the head matron before she left, not the driver who sits up front, fingers tapping on the wheel.
She slips the letter in her pocket, holds it there like a token, a talisman, a key. Then she turns her attention to the journal, lying open in her lap. The window is cracked, and the pages turn in the breeze, airy fingers flipping past scribbled entries interrupted here and there by stretches of darkness. Pools of black that look like spills until you squint and realize there are shapes inside the shadows.
Not accidents at all but drawings.
So unlike the careful sketches in Olivia’s own pads, these are wild, abstract blooms of ink that swallow up entire pages, bleeding through parchment. And even though they sprawl across the pages of her mother’s book, they feel as though they don’t belong.
They are strange, even beautiful, organic things that shift and curl across the page, slowly resolving into shapes. Here is a hand. Here is a hall. Here is a man, the shadows twisting at his feet. Here is a flower. Here is a skull. Here is a door flung open onto—what? Or who? Or where?
As beautiful as they are, Olivia does not like to look at the pictures.
They unsettle her, skittering across her sight like silverfish on the cellar floor. They make her eyes blur and her head ache, the way they almost come together, only to fall apart again, like ghouls, under her scrutiny.