Or will she take her place beside him?
“I can’t wait for readers to see where it leads.”
Check out the cover and read an excerpt below.Gallanthits shelves March 1, 2022.
HarperCollins
It is a grim stretch of stone, an iron door locked and bolted at its center.
There is no breeze tonight.
No moon, and yet he is bathed in moonlight.
It catches the edges of his tattered coat.
It shines on the bones where they show through his skin.
He trails his hand along the wall, searching for cracks.
He catches it in one hand, with all the grace of a snake.
He bends his head to the crack.
Fastens his milk-white eyes on the other side.
In his hand, the mouse squirms, and the master squeezes.
“Hush,” he says, in a voice like empty rooms.
The mouse has stopped squirming in the cage of his grip.
He tips them out onto the wasted soil and wonders what will grow.
Part One
The School
Chapter One
Rain drums its fingers on the garden shed.
It sags to one side, like a wilting plant, made of cheap metal and moldering wood.
Away from the girls.
Away from the matrons.
Away from the school.
The shed itself is not a secret.
It sits behind the school, across the gravel drive, at the back of the grounds.
It gives them the creeps, they say.
It is the dead thing in the corner.
Or what’s left of it.
It moves like a silverfish at the edge of Olivia’s sight, darting away every time she looks.
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.
Not that it matters.
Now, it is only a ghoul, lurking at her back.
Olivia leans back against the wall.
When she was younger, she liked to pretend thatthiswas 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.
Home is a choice.
In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.
Outside, everything is gray.
The word “school” conjures images of neat wooden desks and scratching pencils.
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 else’s clothes.
How to exist in a world that does not want you.
How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.
The orphaned and unwanted.
But if you goand now and then, girls doyou will not be welcomed back.
And yet, some days Olivia is still tempted.
And every morning she wakes up, in the same place.
She keeps her eyes on the ground, searching for color.
A little weedy bloom, jutting up between the stones.
They look the same, the matrons, in their once-white dresses with their once-white belts.
But they’re not.
And then, there’s Matron Agatha.
“Olivia Prior!”
she booms, in a breathless huff.
“What are you doing?”
Olivia lifts her hands, even though she knows it’s futile.
Now it doesn’t matter what Olivia says.
No one knows how to listen.
she asks, speaking loud and slow, as if Olivia is hard of hearing.
“Now it’s time for dinner, which you have not helped to make.
“To bed,” says the matron, though it isn’t even dark.
Olivia would rather eat glass, but she only nods and does her best to look contrite.
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 ruffle of receding skirts.
Each of the matrons has her own room.
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.
But it is just her own reflection.
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.
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.
