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Part One
The School
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Chapter One
Rain drums its fingers on the garden shed.
They call it a garden shed, but in truth there is no garden on the grounds of Merilance, and the shed is barely even that. It sags to one side, like a wilting plant, made of cheap metal and moldering wood. The floor is littered with abandoned tools and shards of broken pots and the stubs of stolen cigarettes, and Olivia Prior stands among them in the rusted dark, wishing she could scream.
Wishing she could turn the pain of the fresh red welt on her hand into noise, overturn the shed the way she did the pot in the kitchen when it burned her, strike the walls as she longed to strike Clara for leaving the stove on and having the nerve to snicker when Olivia gasped and let go. The white-hot pain, the red-hot anger, the cookās annoyance at the ruined mash, and Claraās pursed lips as she said, āIt couldnāt have hurt that much, she didnāt make a sound.ā
Olivia would have wrapped her hands around the other girlās throat right there if her palm werenāt singing, if the cook werenāt there to haul her off, if the gesture would have gained her more than a momentās pleasure and a weekās punishment. So sheād done the next best thing: stormed out of the stuffy tomb, the cook bellowing in her wake.
And now sheās in the garden shed, wishing she could make as much noise as the rain on the low tin roof, take up one of the neglected spades and beat it against the thin metal walls, just to hear them ring. But someone else would hear, would come and find her, in this small and stolen place, and then sheād have nowhere to get away. Away from the girls. Away from the matrons. Away from the school.
She holds her breath and presses her burned hand against the cool metal shed, waiting for the ache in her skin to quiet.
The shed itself is not a secret.
It sits behind the school, across the gravel drive, at the back of the grounds. Over the years, a handful of girls have tried to claim it as their own, to smoke or drink or kiss, but they come once and never come back. It gives them the creeps, they say. Damp soil and spiderwebs, and something else, an eerie feeling that makes the hair stand up on their necks, though they donāt know why.
But Olivia knows.
It is the dead thing in the corner.
Or whatās left of it. Not a ghost, exactly, just a bit of tattered cloth, a handful of teeth, and a single, sleepy eye floating in the dark. It moves like a silverfish at the edge of Oliviaās sight, darting away every time she looks. But if she stays very still and keeps her gaze ahead, it might grow a cheekbone, a throat. It might drift closer, might blink and smile and sigh against her, weightless as a shadow.
She has wondered, of course, who it was, back when it had bones and skin. The eye hovers, higher than her own, and once she caught the edge of a bonnet, the fraying hem of a skirt, and thought, perhaps, it was a matron. Not that it matters. Now, it is only a ghoul, lurking at her back.
Go away, she thinks, and perhaps it can hear her thoughts, because it flinches and draws back into the dark again, leaving her alone in the grim little shed.
Olivia leans back against the wall.
When she was younger, she liked to pretend that this was her house, not Merilance. That her mother and father had just stepped out and left her to clean up. They would be coming back, of course.
Once the house was ready.
Back then, sheād sweep away the dust and cobwebs, stack the pot shards and make order of the shelves. But no matter how tidy she tried to make the little shed, it was never clean enough to bring them back.
Home is a choice. Those four words sit alone on a page in her motherās book, surrounded by so much white space they feel like a riddle. In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.
By now, the rain has slowed from pounding fists to the soft, infrequent tapping of bored fingers, and Olivia sighs and abandons the shed.
Outside, everything is gray.
The gray day is beginning to melt into a gray night, thin gray light lapping against the gray gravel path that surrounds the gray stone walls of Merilance School for Independent Girls.
The word āschoolā conjures images of neat wooden desks and scratching pencils. Of learning. They do learn, but it is a perfunctory education, spent on the practical. How to clean a fireplace. How to shape a loaf of bread. How to mend someone elseās clothes. How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone elseās home.
Merilance may call itself a school, but in truth, it is an asylum for the young and the feral and the fortuneless. The orphaned and unwanted. The dull gray building juts up like a tombstone, surrounded not by parks or rolling greens but the gaunt and sagging faces of the other structures at the cityās edge, chimneys wheezing smoke. There are no walls around the place, no iron gates, only a vacant arch, as if to say, Youāre free to leave, if you have somewhere else to go. But if you goāand now and then, girls doāyou will not be welcomed back. Once a year, sometimes more, a girl pounds at the door, desperate to get back in, and that is how the others learn that itās well and good to dream of happy lives and welcome homes, but even a grim tombstone of a place is better than the street.
And yet, some days Olivia is still tempted.
Some days, she eyes the arch, yawning like a mouth at the gravelās edge, and thinks, what if, thinks, I could, thinks, one day I will.
One night, she will break into the matronsā rooms and take whatever she can find and be gone. She will become a vagabond, a train robber, a cat burglar, or a con artist, like the men in the penny dreadfuls Charlotte always seems to have, tokens from a boy she meets at the edge of the gravel moat each week. Olivia plans a hundred different futures, but every night, she is still there, climbing into the narrow bed in the crowded room in the house that is not, and will never be, a home. And every morning she wakes up in the same place.
Olivia shuffles back across the yard, her shoes sliding over the gravel, with a steady shh, shh, shh. She keeps her eyes on the ground, searching for color. Now and then, after a good hard rain, a few green blades will force their way up between the pebbles, or a stubborn sheen of moss will latch onto a cobblestone, but these defiant colors never last. The only flowers she sees are in the head matronās office, and even those are fake and faded, silk petals long gone gray with dust.
And yet, as she rounds the school, heading for the side door she left ajar, Olivia sees a dash of yellow. A little weedy bloom, jutting up between the stones. She kneels, ignoring the way the pebbles bite into her knees, and brushes a careful thumb over the tiny flower. Sheās just about to pluck it when she hears the stomp of shoes on gravel, the familiar rustle and sigh of skirts that signal a matron.
They look the same, the matrons, in their once-white dresses with their once-white belts. But theyāre not. Thereās Matron Jessamine, with her tight little smile, as if sheās sucking on a lemon, and Matron Beth, with her deep-set eyes and the bags beneath, and Matron Lara, with a voice as high and whining as a kettle.
And then, thereās Matron Agatha.
āOlivia Prior!ā she booms, in a breathless huff. āWhat are you doing?ā
Olivia lifts her hands, even though she knows itās futile. Matron Sarah taught her how to sign, which was well and good until Matron Sarah left and none of the others bothered to learn.
Now it doesnāt matter what Olivia says. No one knows how to listen.
Agatha stares at her as she shapes planning my escape, but sheās only halfway through when the matron flaps her own hands, impatient.
āWhereāisāyourāchalkboard?ā she asks, speaking loud and slow, as if Olivia is hard of hearing. She is not. As for the chalkboard, itās 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.
āWell?ā 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.
āYou were supposed to be in the kitchen,ā says the matron, marching Olivia down the hall. āNow itās time for dinner, which you have not helped to make.ā And yet, by some miracle, thinks Olivia, judging by the scent wafting toward them, it is ready.
They reach the dining room, where girlsā voices pile high, but the matron pushes her on, past the doors.
āThose who do not give, do not partake,ā she says, as if this is a Merilance motto and not something sheās 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.
āTo bed,ā says the matron, though it isnāt even dark. āPerhaps,ā she adds, āyou can use this time to reflect on what it means to be a Merilance girl.ā
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 th...
