And sets it in front of her.
“There,” he says, “that will put the life back in you.”
Olivia takes a bite, melting a little with the sugar on her tongue.
He nods at her sketchpad. “What have you got there?”
Olivia licks the jam from her fingers and thumbs through the pages so he can see the last few drawings she’s made, of the garden, and the orchard, and the wall.
“These are very good,” he says, even though they’re just beginnings, the pencil layered on itself, finding light and dark and line. “I remember, your mother always liked to draw.”
Olivia frowns, thinking of the strange ink splotches in the journal. She wouldn’t call those drawings. She takes another bite, the raspberries bursting brightly in her mouth. Edgar sees her smile as she chews.
“Hannah made the jam,” he says. “Tom used to drizzle honey over—” He stops himself, startled, as if he tripped. A shadow crosses his face, there and then gone. “But the berries were so sweet last year, hardly needed any sugar.”
Olivia lifts a hand to ask, but Edgar is already moving toward the door, saying something about a shutter that needs fixing, and she is left to add the name to the list in her head, along with all the other secrets Gallant seems to be keeping. The uncle who did not write her letter. Matthew’s supposed curse. The colorless weeds in the garden. The wall that is not a wall. And this Tom no one wants to speak of. She conjures the field of Priors in her head, the short tombstones like spaced-out teeth, but she didn’t see a Thomas there.
Olivia finishes her toast, tucks the sketchpad beneath her arm, and goes searching for the study. Moving through the halls, she’s struck again by the size of this place, designed for forty instead of four. A skeleton staff, that’s what it’s called when there are so few left to manage a manor so large, but the residents of Gallant are less a skeleton than a handful of mismatched bones. And the house, the house is a maze, hall after hall and room after room, some grand and some small and most closed up, hills of furniture buried beneath crisp white sheets.
Beyond a pair of double doors she discovers a sprawling room, the kind designed for feasts or balls. Its floor is pale wood, inlaid with those same twisting circles. Its ceiling vaults high overhead, two stories, maybe three, and glass doors run along the far wall, a balcony beyond.
It is the grandest space she’s ever seen, and she doesn’t know what comes over her, but she twirls, bare feet whispering across the wood.
And then, at last, she finds the study.
She was beginning to think it was a trick of her mind, a dream, that she would search the entire house only to learn that no such room existed.
But here is the narrow hall, the waiting door.
Her fingers trail over the wallpaper, the way they did the night before, and the polished handle of the door gives way. There is no window, and she doesn’t want to risk a lamp, so she leaves the door open, light spilling in from the hall. She pads forward, floorboards creaking softly underfoot until she reaches a thin dark rug that pools beneath the desk.
There on top is the strange metal sculpture, two houses set within concentric rings. Not just any house, but two small replicas of Gallant.
They perch on either side, facing each other at the center of the curving frame. Metal rings surround each house, and more surround the two together. Olivia cannot help herself. She lifts her fingertip to the outer ring, and gives it the slightest push, and the whole thing trips into motion.
She holds her breath, afraid that any second it will topple and clatter to the floor, but it’s as if it were designed to move. The two houses turn like dancers, sliding away and then coming back to face each other. Each follows its own arc, each the center of its own small orbit. She watches, mesmerized, studying the steady revolution until it slows.
The houses move through their orbits one last time, and Olivia reaches out again to stop the motion as they come to face each other. She leans closer. It’s strange, but from this angle, the rings between them look almost—almost—like a wall.
Olivia turns to a clean page in her sketchbook and draws the sculpture, trying to capture the sense of movement, the clean, almost mathematical lines of the device. She rounds the desk, to get another angle, and notices the drawer. It juts out like a bottom lip, a bit of paper caught in the corner. She tugs at the handle, and for a moment it sticks, then judders open.
Inside, a handful of loose paper, crisp and white, and a small black book. She peels it open and finds page after page of notes in a blocky hand. No, not notes. Places.