Olivia was seven when it was finally her turn.
She couldn’t wait. Drawing had come so naturally, as if her hands were shaped to the task, a direct line between her eyes and her pencil. And the piano might have been the same. The joy she’d felt at those first ringing notes. The thrill of commanding such sound. The thunder of the low keys, the kettle whistle of the high. Each and every one its own mood, its own message, a language played out in C and G and E.
Her hands wanted to race ahead, but the matron tsked in warning, rapping her knuckles every time her fingers strayed from scales.
Olivia had lost her temper then and slammed the lid down over the keys, nearly clipping the matron’s hand. She hadn’t, of course, but it didn’t matter. She was dismissed, those few spare notes still ringing in her ears.
Anger had pooled in her stomach, rising every time she heard another girl clumsily tapping out the notes, until one night she’d slipped out of bed and into the room where the piano was kept, a pair of cutters in one hand. She’d pried up the lid, revealing the delicate body of wires and hammers that made the music from the keys. Keys she couldn’t touch.
They reminded her of the diagram in the old anatomy text, the muscles and tendons of the throat laid bare. Cut here to silence a voice.
She couldn’t do it.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Arthritis soon crept into Agatha’s hands, and the lessons were abandoned. The piano sat untouched until the wires loosened and the notes all fell out of key. But Olivia always longed to play.
Now she drifts forward into the shaft of sunlight, creeping softly toward the instrument, as if it might wake. It lies still, teeth hidden beneath the onyx lid. She eases it back, exposing the pattern of black and white, the shine worn to matte with use, faint indents in the ivory. Her right hand hovers, then comes to rest on the keys. They are cool beneath her fingers. She presses down, plays a single note. It carries softly through the room, and Olivia cannot help but smile.
She traces her way up the scale. And as she hits the highest note—
Something moves.
Not in the room with her, but beyond, glimpsed in the gap between the curtains.
She steps past the piano and pulls the curtain aside, revealing a giant bay window, the bench lined with pillows, and beyond the glass, the garden.
Olivia Prior has dreamed of gardens. Every grim gray month at Merilance, she longed for carpets of grass, for riotous blooms, for a world engulfed in color. And here it is. Last night it was a moonlit tangle of hedge and vine. Now it is sun-drenched, stunning, a field of green interrupted everywhere by red, gold, violet, white.
There is a vegetable patch to one side, rows of leeks and carrots rising from the soil, and a copse of pale trees to the other, their branches dotted pink and green. An orchard. And then, her gaze drifts past it all, beyond the trellised roses and down the soft green slope, to a wall.
Or at least, the remains of one, a ruined stretch of stone, its edges crumbling, its front threaded over with ivy.
Another shudder of motion draws her attention back to the garden. Matthew is kneeling, head bowed, before a line of roses. As she watches, he straightens and turns, shielding his eyes as he looks up at the house. At her. Even from here, she can see the frown sweep like a shadow across his face. Olivia backs away from the glass. But she is not retreating.
It takes a few minutes and two wrong turns, but she finds the second foyer again, and the garden door. The one she unlocked the night before. There’s something on the floor, a dark residue, as if someone’s tracked dirt into the house, but when she bends to touch it, she feels nothing. As if the stain has pressed itself straight into the stone. She remembers the ghoul, forcing her back, his hand thrust out. But there is no one to stop her now, and the door is no longer locked. It swings open at her touch, and she inches around the odd shadow on the floor.
And steps out into the sun.
Chapter Nine
The first things Olivia learned to draw were flowers.
It would have been easier, of course, to draw pots and hearths, dining benches and sleeping cots, things she saw every day. But Olivia filled the pages of her first sketchbook with flowers. The silk ones she saw every time she was sent to the head matron’s office. The stubborn yellow weeds that forced their way up here and there between the gravel. The roses she saw in a book. But sometimes, she’d invent her own. Fill the corners of every page with strange and wild blooms, conjuring whole gardens out of empty space, each more expansive than the last.
But none of them were real.
For all her skill, she couldn’t wander through them as she does now, couldn’t feel the grass beneath her feet, the soft petals tickling her palm. Olivia smiles, the sunlight warm against her skin.