“Where—is—your—chalkboard?” she asks, speaking loud and slow, as if Olivia is hard of hearing. She is not. As for the chalkboard, it’s wedged behind a row of jam jars in the cellar, where it has been since it was first bestowed upon her, complete with a little rope to go around her neck.
“Well?” demands the matron.
Olivia shakes her head and picks the simplest sign for rain, repeating the gesture several times so the matron has a chance to see, but Agatha just tsks and grabs her wrist and hauls her back inside.
“You were supposed to be in the kitchen,” says the matron, marching Olivia down the hall. “Now it’s time for dinner, which you have not helped to make.” And yet, by some miracle, thinks Olivia, judging by the scent wafting toward them, it is ready.
They reach the dining room, where girls’ voices pile high, but the matron pushes her on, past the doors.
“Those who do not give, do not partake,” she says, as if this is a Merilance motto and not something she’s just thought up. She gives a curt little nod, pleased with herself, and Olivia pictures her stitching the words onto a pillow.
They reach the dormitory, where there are two dozen small shelves beside two dozen beds, thin and white as matchsticks, all of them empty.
“To bed,” says the matron, though it isn’t even dark. “Perhaps,” she adds, “you can use this time to reflect on what it means to be a Merilance girl.”
Olivia would rather eat glass, but she just nods and does her best to look contrite. She even curtsies once, bobbing her head low, but it is only so the matron cannot see the twist of her lips, the small, defiant smile. Let the old bat assume that she is sorry.
People assume a lot of things about Olivia.
Most of them are wrong.
The matron shuffles away, clearly not wanting to miss dinner, and Olivia steps into the dorm. She lingers at the foot of the first bed, listening to the rustle of receding skirts. As soon as Agatha has gone, she emerges again, slipping down the hall and around the corner to the matrons’ quarters.
Each of the matrons has her own room. The doors are locked, but the locks are old and simple, the teeth on the keys little more than simple peaks.
Olivia draws a bit of sturdy wire from her pocket, remembering the shape of Agatha’s key, the teeth a capital E. It takes a bit of fussing, but then the lock clicks, and the door swings open onto a neat little bedroom cluttered with pillows, little mantras embroidered across their fronts.
Here by the grace of God.
A place for all things, and all things in their place.
A house in order is a mind at peace.
Olivia’s fingers trail over the words as she rounds the bed. A little mirror sits on the windowsill, and as she passes, she catches a glimpse of charcoal hair and a sallow cheek, and startles. But it is just her own reflection. Pale. Colorless. The ghost of Merilance. That’s what the other girls call her. Yet there is a satisfying hitch in their voices, a hint of fear. Olivia looks at herself in the mirror. And smiles.
She kneels before the ash wood cabinet beside Agatha’s bed. The matrons have their vices. Lara has cigarettes, and Jessamine has lemon drops, and Beth has penny dreadfuls. And Agatha? Well. She has several. A bottle of brandy sloshes in the top drawer, and beneath that, Olivia finds a tin of cookies, iced with sugar, and a paper bag of clementines, bright as tiny sunsets. She takes three of the iced cookies and one piece of fruit, and retreats, silently, to the empty dorm to enjoy her dinner.
Chapter Two
Olivia lays the picnic out atop her narrow bed.
The cookies she eats fast, but the clementine she savors, peels it in a single curl, the sunny rind unraveling to reveal the happy segments. The whole room will smell like stolen citrus, but she doesn’t care. It tastes like spring, like bare feet in grassy fields, like somewhere warm and green.
Her bed is at the far end of the room, so she can sit with her back to the wall as she eats, which is good, because it means she can keep her eye on the door. And the dead thing sitting on Clara’s bed.
This ghoul is different, smaller than the other. It has knobby elbows and knees and an unblinking eye, one hand tugging on a tatty braid as it watches Olivia eat. There is something girlish in the way it moves. The way it pouts, and tips its head, and whispers in her ear when she’s trying to sleep, soft and voiceless, the words nothing but air against her cheek.
Olivia scowls straight at it until it melts away.
That is the trick with the ghouls.
They want you to look, but they can’t stand being seen.
At least, she thinks, they cannot touch her. Once, in a fit of frustration, she flung her hand out at a nearby ghoul, but her fingers went straight through. No eerie draft against her skin, not even the breath of something in the air. She felt better then, knowing it was not real enough, not there enough, to do more than smile or scowl or sulk.