Gallant Read online

  I had a bird once. I kept it in a cage. But one day someone let it go. I was so angry, then, but now I wonder if it was me. If I rose in the night, half-asleep, and slipped the lock and set it free.

  Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.

  As she reads, she lets her fingers wander over the strange drawings. In the unsteady light, her eyes play tricks on her, twisting the blooms of ink until they seem like they’re moving.

  She doesn’t like to linger on the later entries, the darker ones, so she pages past them, catching only fragments.

  . . . I slept in your ashes last night . . . It was never this quiet . . . His voice in your mouth . . . I want to go home . . .

  Until all at once, it stops. The jagged writing drops away, leaving only empty space, blank pages stretching to the very last page, where the letter waits.

  Olivia Olivia Olivia

  Her gaze drops to the bottom of the page.

  You will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant

  She squints at the word, for years a mystery—still a mystery.

  She flings off the covers and gets to her feet.

  For so long, Gallant was nothing but that word, the last one her mother ever wrote. Now she knows it is a place, and she is here, and if she is not allowed to stay beyond the night, well then, she wants to see as much of it as possible. To learn the contours of the house where her mother lived, as if knowing one will help explain the other.

  The key turns with a click, and she steps silently into the hall. Every other room is dark, save one, a narrow strip of light beneath the door. She shields her candle and sets out, slipping barefoot down the hall.

  Olivia has always relished sound, but she knows how to be quiet.

  Some nights, back at Merilance, she’d creep out of bed and wander through the darkened house, pretend it was a kind of conquest. She’d twirl down the empty halls, just because she could. Count the steps from one side to the other, fog the windows with her breath and draw shapes in the steam, the only witness the ghoul that sat on the stairs and peered at her between the railings.

  There, in the dark, she could pretend the place was hers.

  But for all she tried, the grim gray building never played its part. It was too cold, too hollow, too much itself, and every night when she climbed back into bed, she was reminded that Merilance was a house, but it would never be a home.

  She tells herself that Gallant won’t be one either, not if Matthew has his way, and yet, as she makes her way down the stairs, the polished banister beneath her palm, it all feels so—familiar. With every silent step, the house leans in and whispers hello, whispers welcome, whispers home.

  She retraces her steps, crossing the foyer to the sitting room, the fire nothing but a handful of ticking embers now, the broken vase swept up from the floor. From there, she wanders deeper into the heart of the house. She discovers a dining room, the table long enough to seat a dozen; a lounge with furniture that looks untouched; a kitchen, still warm.

  As Olivia crosses the house, the candle wavers, and so does her shadow. When she shifts the light from hand to hand, it leaps unsteadily around her, so it takes her a moment to realize she is not alone.

  The ghoul stands halfway down the hall.

  A woman—or at least, the pieces of her, hanging in the air like smoke. A curtain of dark hair. A narrow shoulder. A hand, drifting out as if to touch her.

  Olivia jerks backward in surprise, expecting the ghoul to disappear. It doesn’t. Instead, it turns its back on her and moves swiftly down the hall, drifting in and out of sight like a body between lamplights.

  Wait, she thinks, as it plunges away from her, as it reaches the door at the end and passes straight through. Olivia hurries after it, feet pounding across the rug, candle nearly guttering as she throws the door open onto shallow darkness. As she steps inside, the taper reveals a study, high-ceilinged and windowless. She turns, searching the corners, but the ghoul is gone.

  Olivia lets out an unsteady breath. She always wondered if the things she saw were bound to Merilance. Whether the building was haunted, or she was. Apparently, it wasn’t the school. She turns to go, and the candle wavers in her hand, light dancing over bookshelves, a dark wood desk, before catching on the curve of metal resting there.

  Olivia frowns, stepping toward the strange shape, nearly as tall as she is.

  If there is a word for it, she doesn’t know.

  It looks mechanical. Half clock and half sculpture. A kind of . . . orb, made of concentric rings, each set at a different angle. Up close, she sees that there are two houses set inside the piece, each one balanced on its own metal ring.

  Her fingers twitch. She cannot shake the feeling that the slightest push would set the whole thing off balance and bring the model crashing to the floor. And yet, she cannot help herself. Her hand drifts up, and—

  The door groans behind her.

  Olivia turns, too fast, and the candle in her hand goes out, plunging the room into black.

  Fear grips her, sudden and sharp. She abandons the study, blinking furiously, willing her eyes to adjust. But the shutters are all latched, and the darkness in the house is thick as syrup. She feels her way back down the hall, reminding herself she is not afraid of the dark, even though she has never known a dark like this. The house seems to grow around her, the hallways branching, multiplying, until she is sure she is lost.

  And then, to her right, her vision lifts, the darkness thinning until she can just make out the edges of the space. Somewhere, there is a light. Not bright, but watery and white. She turns down a narrow hall and finds another, smaller foyer. And there, at the back of it, a door.

  There are two kinds of doors in a house.

  The kind that lead from room to room, and the kind that lead from inside to out—and this is one of those. Thin light spills through a small glass pane set into the wood. She has to stand on her toes to see through the window, and when she does, she finds a crescent moon hanging in the sky, showering the garden below in strands of silver.

  The garden. The one she first glimpsed when the car pulled around the drive, the promise of something lovely tucked behind the house.

  Even in the dark, it is a sight. Trees and trellised roses, gravel paths and groomed flowers and a carpet of grass. She wants to throw the door open and spill out into the night, wants to walk barefoot through the blades, wants to feel the velvet petals of the roses, lie on a bench beneath the moon, wants to breathe in the beauty before she is sent away.

  She tries the door, but it is locked.

  Olivia pats the pockets of her nightgown, wishing she’d brought her set of picks. But then she feels the gold key that fit her bedroom door. It’s a simple shape, little more than a W. And in a house with so many doors, would you really want more than one key? Olivia slides it into the lock and holds her breath and turns, expecting resistance. Instead, she feels the satisfying thunk of a bolt sliding free.

  The handle is cool under her touch, and when she turns the knob, the door sighs open, just a crack, carrying cool night air and—

  A man surges out of the dark.

  He comes straight through the wooden door and into the foyer. Half his face is missing, and Olivia staggers back, away from the door and the man who is not a man at all but a ghoul. It scowls at her with one eye, a stained hand thrust out, not in welcome, but in warning. It cannot touch her, she tells herself, it isn’t there, but when it stomps forward, fingers curling into fists, she turns and runs blindly through the dark, somehow finds her way back to the staircase and the upstairs hall and her bedroom door, pulling it shut behind her.

  And even though it’s only wood, she feels safer with it closed.

  Olivia’s heart pounds in her ears as she climbs under the covers, pulling her mother’s journal to her like a shield. She has never been afraid of the dark, but tonight, she relights the lamp. As she sits, her back to the headboard and her eyes on the shadows, she realizes—

  She left the key in the door downstairs.

  Chapter Seven

  Olivia doesn’t remember falling asleep.

  She doesn’t remember getting up either, but she must have, because it’s morning, and she’s sitting at the little desk before the window. The shutters have been flung wide, and sunlight streams in, warm and bright where it falls on the desk, on her hands, on the journal there, the gilded G pressed into the cover. Her mother’s book, and yet, this one is different. It’s red where hers was green, and there are no twin lines gouged into the cover, and when she turns through the pages, the writing blurs, dissolving every time she tries to read it.

  She squints, trying to make sense of it, sure that the letters are about to come together.

  A hand comes to rest on her shoulder, the touch gentle and warm, but when she turns her head to look, it is rotting, bone visible through ruined skin.

  Olivia sits up with a gasp.

  She is still in bed. The shutters are latched, thin light seeping round the edges. Her heart pounds and her head spins and it takes her a moment to realize what that was: a dream. It is already slipping through her fingers, the details going thin, and she presses her palms against her eyes and tries to remember. Not the ghoulish hand, but the journal.

  Olivia flings off the bedsheets and goes to the desk, half expecting to find the red book waiting on top, but it’s not there. Her gaze drops to the drawer in the front of the desk, the little keyhole like a spot of ink. When she pulls, the drawer resists, but it’s a silly excuse for a lock, and it takes only a hairpin and a handful of seconds to get it open.

  Inside, she finds a pincushion stuck with needles. A small embroidery hoop, half-formed poppies in the center of pale cloth. A pot of ink, a handful of sketches on loose paper, and a few sheets of stationery, embossed with two elegant letters: GP.

  Grace Prior.

  Of course. This was her mother’s room.

  Olivia runs her hand over the desk, the wood worn smooth with age. A strange urge washes over her, and she goes back to the bed, turning through the rumpled sheets until she finds the journal she’s always had, with its dented green cover. She sets it gently on the desk. There is no groove for it, no outline where the sun has bleached the wood, and yet, it fits. The pretty green book, so out of place at Merilance, belongs here, blends right in, like drawings made by the same hand.

  Olivia pulls out the chair and sits in her mother’s shadow, hands resting lightly on the cover. The dream drifts back to her, and she closes her eyes and tries to conjure more before it slips away.

  Knuckles rap on the door, and she jumps. She slides the journal into the drawer like a secret and gets to her feet just as Hannah sweeps in like a gust of wind, a tea tray balanced on one hip.

  “The house gets cold in the morning,” she says brightly. “Thought you could do with a little warming up.”

  Olivia nods in thanks and steps aside as Hannah deposits the tray on the desk and reaches up to free the latch. The shutters fall open, filling the room with fresh air and streaks of sun. And then, Hannah draws the gold key from her pocket and sets it on the desk. Olivia winces at the sight of it, the reproach of the metal dropping onto wood.

  “You mustn’t go out in the dark,” says Hannah, and the way she says it, it’s like she’s reciting a rule.

  There were a great many rules back at Merilance. Most of them felt hollow, pointless, concocted just to show the matrons’ control. But there is real worry in Hannah’s eyes, so Olivia nods, even though she will not be here another night.

  With the shutters thrown back, Olivia realizes her room is at the front of the house, the window looking out onto the drive, the ribbon of road and the distant iron arch proclaiming GALLANT. She looks down, but there is no car waiting to take her back to Merilance, only the fountain and the pale stone woman standing at its center.

  Hannah’s gaze drops to the desk drawer, the hairpin still jutting from the lock. Olivia holds her breath, braced for the rebuke, but the woman only chuckles, soft and honest. “Your mother was a curious girl, too.”

  Olivia remembers then, what Edgar said, that Hannah had been here the longest, and the woman must be able to see the question as it scrawls across Olivia’s face, because she nods and says, “Yes. I knew Grace.”

  Grace, Grace, Grace. The name unravels through her mind.

  “Matthew doesn’t remember her,” continues Hannah. “He was still a child when she left, but I was here when she was born. I was here when she ran away. The whole house, what was left of it, waited, but I knew she wasn’t coming back.”

  Tell me, Olivia signs, hoping Hannah can read the longing in her eyes if not her hands. Tell me everything.

  The woman sinks into the chair, looking suddenly tired. She runs a hand through her hair, and Olivia sees the threads of gray stealing through the mess of brown curls. She pours her a cup of tea, but Hannah only chuckles and nods for her to drink. Olivia brings it to her lips. It tastes like mint, and honey, and spring, and she wraps her fingers around the cup as Hannah speaks.

  “When I first saw you, on the steps, I thought you were a ghost.”

  Olivia gestures down at her pale limbs, but Hannah smiles and shakes her head. “No, not like that. It’s only, you look just like her. Your mother. Grace was a willful child. A clever girl. But she was always restless here.” Hannah laces her fingers in her lap. “Her own mother left when she was young, and her father took ill when she was just about your age, and died within the year. Her older brother, Arthur, was away, and that year, your mother and I, we had the whole house to ourselves. So much space, and yet, she was always looking for more. Always wandering. Always searching.”

  I had a bird once. I kept it in a cage.

  “She was such a handful, your mother, and the house was too big for the two of us, so I hired Edgar to help. And then Arthur came back with a lovely girl—Isabelle, that was her name—and they married in the garden. I made the cake myself. Matthew was born, and then Thomas was on the way and—”

  She swallows suddenly, as if she can take those last words back.

  “Well,” she says, “it was a happy time. But even then, Grace had one eye on the door.”

  But one day someone let it go.

  “Arthur was steady, but she was smoke, always looking for a way out.” Hannah’s gaze drifts around the room. “I came in here one morning, and she was gone. The shutters were thrown, and the window was open, as if she’d flown away.”

  Olivia looks to the window.

  Now I wonder if it was me.

  Hannah clears her throat. “You may blame her for leaving, but I never could. This is not an easy place to live.”

  Neither was Merilance, thinks Olivia darkly. She would have chosen Gallant any day, if anyone had asked. This place is a palace. This place is a dream.

  Hannah looks up, studying Olivia’s face. “She wrote to me, once. Before you were born. Wouldn’t say where she was or where she was going. Wouldn’t say anything about your father, but I knew something was wrong. I could see it in the way she wrote.”

  Hannah trails off, and Olivia can see a shine in her eyes, the warning of tears.

  I grow wide, but you grow thinner by the day. I can see you withering. I am afraid tomorrow I will see straight through you. I am afraid the next, you will be gone.

  “She didn’t say goodbye, but I saw the end in every word, and I knew—I just knew—something had happened.”

  A single tear escapes down the woman’s weathered cheek.

  “I worried, after, about you both. And when she didn’t write again, I feared the worst for Grace. But I had a feeling that you were out there. Perhaps it was just a hope. I began to make a list of places you might be, if you’d even been born, if she’d chosen to take you somewhere. But in the end, I couldn’t—that is, I never tried to find you.”

  But someone did. Someone called her home.

  “I think part of me hoped that you were somewhere safe.”

  That word again—safe. But what is safe? Tombs are safe. Merilance was safe. Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.

  “I’ve watched so many Priors wither here,” Hannah mutters to herself. “All to guard that blasted gate.”

  Olivia frowns. She touches Hannah’s hand, and the woman startles, coming back to herself. “I’m so sorry,” she says, wiping the tears from her cheek and rising to her feet. “And here I just came to tell you there’s a pot of porridge on the stove.”

  Olivia stares at Hannah as she hurries away, a hundred questions tangled in her head. Halfway to the door the woman stops, one hand diving back into her pocket. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she says, “I found this downstairs. I thought you might like it.”

  She draws out a card the size of her palm and turns it toward Olivia, who stiffens at the image there. It is a portrait. A young woman’s face, looking off to one side. It could be a picture of her, in several years’ time, if the hair were darker, the chin a bit more pointed. But the look in the eyes is hers—all mischief—and she realizes two things.

  That she’s looking at an image of her mother.

  And that she’s seen her before.

  Or rather, pieces of her, floating in the hall downstairs.

  Which means that Hannah is right, and wrong. Her mother is never coming home.

  She is already here.

  Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me. I would write the words a thousand times if they’d be strong enough to hold you here.

  Chapter Eight

  Grace Prior is dead.

  After all those years, Olivia knew her mother wasn’t coming back. And yet, there was always that narrow sliver of hope. Like a door left ajar. Now it swings shut.

  She sinks onto the ottoman, the portrait in her hands.

  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.