He glances at Olivia. “Still here,” he mutters, but Hannah only smiles and pats her bandaged hand.
“Nearest car’s in the shop,” she says. “Be a few days before it can come out.”
Olivia can see the glimmer in the woman’s eyes, a glint like mischief. Another lie. But Matthew only sighs and sets the soap aside.
“Sit and eat,” urges Edgar, but her cousin shakes his head, murmurs about not being hungry, even though his too-thin body is begging for a meal. He leaves, taking the air out of the room as he goes. Hannah and Edgar pick at their food, each trying to fill the space with easy talk, but it comes out stiff, awkward.
Olivia catches Edgar’s eye. Is he sick?
He flashes Hannah a look and then says, “Matthew’s tired. Tired can be a kind of sick, if it lasts long enough.”
He’s telling the truth, some version of it, but a draft runs through the words. There is so much they are not saying. It hangs in the air, and Olivia wishes they could go back to before Matthew came in. But their plates are empty now, and Hannah gets to her feet, saying she’ll make him a tray, if Edgar will take it up. And Edgar sees Olivia staring at him, hands raised to ask about Matthew and the house, but he stands and turns his back. She hates that he can do that, that all he has to do to silence her is look away.
She stifles a yawn, even though it’s not yet nine, and Hannah offers her a shortbread biscuit and tells her a hot bath and a warm bed will do her well before shooing her from the kitchen.
She takes the long way to the stairs, past the narrow foyer and the garden door. It must be a cloudy night. No moonlight streams in through the little window, but the hall isn’t empty. Her uncle’s ghoul stands like a watchman, its back to her and its eyes on the dark.
The master of the house is hungry.
He is worn thin with it, that hunger. It gnaws, like teeth on bone, until he cannot stand the ache. Until his fingers flex, stiff in their joints. It is unyielding. This place is unyielding.
He walks through the ruined garden.
Past the empty fountain and across the barren grounds, through the brittle land that rolls away from the house like a bolt of cloth left to rot in the cupboard. Moth-eaten. Threadbare.
The fruit is rotten. The ground is parched. The house is falling like sand through the glass. He has eaten every morsel, every scrap, and nothing is left. He is feasting on himself, now. Wasting a little more with every passing night.
He is a fire running out of air. But it is not over yet. He will burn, and burn, and burn until the house crumbles, until the world gives way.
All he needs is a breath.
All he needs is a drop.
All he needs is her.
And so he sits back in his throne and closes his eyes and dreams.
Part Three
Things Unsaid
Chapter Eleven
Olivia is so tired, and yet, again, she cannot sleep.
Her limbs sink into the bed, heavy from the fresh air and the garden’s work, but her mind is tangled up in questions. She tosses and turns, feeling the hours tick past as she watches the candle drip and gutter on her bedside table, and she is about to give up and throw the covers off when she hears it.
The subtle creak of the door drifting open.
Even though she turned the lock.
Olivia holds her breath as bare feet whisper on the wood behind her, and then, a body lowers itself onto the other side of the bed, the mattress denting with the weight. Slowly, she wills herself to turn over, sure that it is only a trick of her tired mind, sure that the room will be empty and she will see—
A young woman sits on the edge of the bed.
She is older than Olivia, but not by much, her skin sun kissed, ribbons of brown hair spilling down her back. When she turns her head, candlelight dances across her high cheek, her narrow chin, tracing the angles and lines from the portrait that morning. The ones pressed here and there into Olivia’s own face.
Her mother looks over her shoulder. A smile flickers across her face, all mischief. And in that moment she is young, a girl. But then the candle shifts, and the shadows cut the other way, and she is a woman again.
Her fingers slide over the sheets, and Olivia doesn’t know whether to reach for her mother’s hand or retreat, and in the end, she does neither, because she cannot move. Her limbs are leaden in the bed, and perhaps she should be afraid, but she isn’t. She cannot take her eyes from Grace Prior, not as she climbs onto the bed, not as she lowers herself beside Olivia, not as she curls herself in like a mirror, reflecting the angles of her daughter’s limbs, the bend of her neck, the incline of her head, as if it were a game.