“Too long,” he answers with a tired smile. Then, “Longer than Matthew, but not as long as Hannah.”
Did you know my mother? she asks.
“I did. We were all heartbroken when she disappeared.”
Olivia’s heart quickens, her mother’s words rising to her mind.
Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.
I don’t know what it feels like, but I want to find out.
Her mother wasn’t stolen away from Gallant. She left this place on purpose. Olivia’s hands move quickly, the questions spilling out.
Where did she go? Do you know why? Did she come back?
Edgar shakes his head, a slow and steady pendulum.
Is she dead?
That last question is the one she has always been afraid to ask, because the truth is, she does not know. Whenever she reads the final pages of the journal, she pictures her mother backing away toward the edge of a cliff. Step after step after step until the ground is gone and so is she.
There was a goodbye stitched into every word, and yet—
Is she dead? she asks again, because Edgar’s head has stopped moving. His shoulders rise. His face sags.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know.”
Frustration prickles through her, not at him, but at her, at Grace, the woman who vanished, leaving only a tattered notebook and a silent child on a stoop. At the way the story trails off, without the promise of an end.
They reach the upstairs landing, and Edgar leads her down a wide hall lined with doors, all of them closed.
“Ah, here we are,” he says, stopping at the second on the left.
The door whispers open onto a beautiful room, larger than any of the matrons’ quarters and twice as nice. Her eyes go to the bed—not a cot but a grand four-poster, pillows stuffed with down. Wide enough that she could fling out her arms and not touch the sides.
Edgar retreats, but not before Olivia signs thank you.
“For what?” he asks, and she gestures at the room, and the house, and herself before shrugging. For everything.
He nods, mustering a smile. “Hannah will be up shortly,” he says, and then he’s gone, drawing the door shut behind him.
Olivia stands there a moment, uncertain what to do. She has never had her own room, has always wondered how it would feel to have a space entirely hers, a door that she could close. And despite the strangeness of the scene downstairs, her cousin’s cruelty and the questions mounting in her mind, she twirls across the floor and flings herself onto the bed. She expects to rouse a plume of dust, but there is none, only her limbs sinking into soft down. She lies there, arms spread like a snow angel.
My room, she thinks, before reminding herself that it is only hers for the night.
She sits up and looks around, taking stock. There is an elegant wardrobe, and an ottoman, and a desk before a large window, the shutters latched. Across the room there’s a second door, and she opens it expecting to find a closet, or perhaps another hall, but it is a bathroom, a glorious space with a mirror and a sink and a claw-foot tub. Not a steel drum and a foot of tepid water but a massive porcelain bath, large enough to soak in.
There are no other girls elbowing their way to the sink, taking up the hot water and shouldering her so they can do their hair, examine their faces, so she lingers, studying her reflection, as she has so many times, scouring it the way she does her mother’s journal, searching for clues about who she is, where she came from.
Here are her eyes, slate gray. Her skin, pale but not porcelain. Her hair, the almost-black of charcoal.
Olivia notices a small hair comb on the counter, the spine patterned with blue flowers. She runs her fingers over the delicate tines, then takes up the comb and fastens it above her ear. The blue flowers are bright against her hair, which hangs dead straight and just long enough to skim her shoulders. She cut it that spring, in a fit of pique. She hated the solemn plaits the girls at Merilance were forced to wear, so she stole a pair of sewing shears and cut it to her collar, just short enough to make the braids impossible. She smiles a little whenever she thinks of the look on Matron Agatha’s face, the impotent rage.
She tugs the comb free, returns it to its place, and decides to run herself a bath.
The water, when it spills out, is hot and clear, steam rising to her fingers.
She strips and climbs in, savoring the almost painful heat. A trio of elegant bottles lines the wall beside the tub, all of them half full. The stoppers are stiff, and as she fights to open one, it slips and tumbles into the basin. In seconds, there are scented bubbles everywhere, and she laughs, a soft breathy sound, at the absurdity of this, of a day begun peeling potatoes at Merilance and ended here, in a house with no uncle and a boy who does not want her there, in a tub full of lavender soap.