A quick, sharp jerk, followed by the rake of heat across her palm. Olivia winces and drops the weed, looking down at her hand, where the spines have sliced a narrow line. Blood wells on her skin.
She looks around for somewhere to wipe it. If she were wearing her own gray shift instead of her mother’s yellow dress, she would use the hem, but she can’t bring herself to stain the soft cotton, so she kneels to wipe the blood on the grass when a hand comes out of nowhere, closing like a cage around her wrist.
“Stop,” snaps Matthew, wrenching her upright. He sees the blood streaked across her palm, and pales.
“What have you done?” he asks, and there’s no kindness in his voice, no care. If anything, he seems mad at her. She gestures down at the stubborn weed, the one that cut her.
But it isn’t there.
Matthew produces a kerchief, and binds it tight around her weeping palm, as if it were a mortal wound.
“Get inside,” he orders, pointing at the house, an echo of the ghoul in the graveyard, down to the scowl. “Have someone see to that. Now.”
She wants to point out that it is just a cut, that it hardly even hurts, that it’s not her fault hands bleed so much, that one clumsy mistake hardly merits this much anger. Instead she just grabs her sketchpad and stomps up the grassy slope, through the garden and back into the house.
She was only trying to help.
His voice in your mouth,
telling me to come back,
to come back, to come home.
Chapter Ten
Olivia finds Edgar in the kitchen.
“Oh dear,” he says, looking down at her hand, the kerchief gone rust-red where the cut bled through.
She shrugs, her stomach growling at the sight of the porridge pot on the stove, the contents long cooled to glue, but Edgar points her to the sink. She rinses the cut as he digs up a first aid box and lays out iodine and gauze. As he works, his hands are steady, his touch is light.
“I was in the army,” he says casually, a safety pin between his teeth. “Had to patch up my share of battle wounds.” He smiles, studying her hand. “But I think you’ll live.” He cleans the cut and binds it, winding a narrow white bandage around her palm and pinning it there. It feels like overkill for such a narrow cut, but he treats it with a surgeon’s care. “Do try to keep your blood on the inside, though.”
Something shudders in the doorway, and Olivia glances toward it, hoping to catch her mother’s half-formed face. But it’s yet another ghoul, this one younger, thinner, wasting, nothing but jutting ribs, a knee, a nose.
“Old houses,” says Edgar, following her gaze. “Full of sounds you don’t quite hear, and things you don’t quite see.”
She waits until he’s finished with her hand and then asks, Is Gallant haunted? And even though she knows the answer is yes, she’s surprised when Edgar nods.
“I’m sure it is,” he says. “A house like this has too much history, and history always brings its share of ghosts. But it’s not a bad thing,” he adds, packing up his kit. “Ghosts were people once, and people come in all ways, good and bad and what’s between. Sure, maybe some are out to frighten, but others, I think, are just watching, wishing they could help.”
She looks back at the ghoul. It shrinks beneath her gaze, slipping back behind the doorframe.
As Edgar puts away the first aid kit, Olivia picks at the bandage on her hand.
Back at Merilance, someone was always getting scraped up, burning their fingers on the stove, or plucking gravel out of their knees. If you were lucky, the matrons would wave you off, say it was the cost of being clumsy. If you weren’t, they’d douse it in rubbing alcohol, which hurt twice as much as any wound.
Sometimes a younger girl would cut herself and cry at the sight of blood. Sometimes an older one would pick her up and say, “It doesn’t hurt,” as if the words alone would make it true. An incantation, a spell to banish pain by denying its existence.
No one ever said them to Olivia—no one ever needed to—but she’s lost count of the times she said them to herself.
When Agatha rapped her knuckles with a ruler.
It doesn’t hurt.
When Clara pricked her with a sewing pin.
It doesn’t hurt.
When Anabelle tore the pages from her mother’s book.
“Does it hurt?” asks Edgar when he sees her fussing with the bandage.
The question catches her off guard, but Olivia shakes her head. He cuts a thick slice of bread and butters it and drops it in a skillet. The smell is heavenly, and she watches, mouth watering as he smears the toast with raspberry jam.