For pasted onto the brick was a poster – a woman’s face etched in thin black ink. Someone had glued it rather shoddily, the flapping corner folding her delicate features in half. Even reduced to lines and paper, the woman was fair, with light hair curled beneath a plain, black hat. The artist had captured her with her chin lifted – almost in challenge – and she stared out at him with eyes so pale he wondered whether the ink had run.
But it was the final line that caused him to stand there, watching the poster flap backwards and forwards, watching the wind try and tear it from the brick, her beautiful face creasing and un-creasing each time.
Unlock your mind.
Unlock your mind.
Unlock …
Chapter Four
It took Ava a moment to blink the sleep from her eyes, to remember that she was back at her father’s, back in her truckle bed. For a moment she’d expected to find Madame Morell leaning over her, her lips pinched into a line.
Ava sighed, rolling onto her back to stare up at the ceiling and the damp stains that spread their dark tendrils from the window to the opposite wall. The last time she had lain in this bed she hadn’t slept at all. Instead she’d drawn her thorned thoughts until her fingers were black, and the sky outside the window had gone from blue, to indigo, and back again.
Frowning, Ava reached down, fingertips tracing the mattress seam delicately, feeling for the smallest sliver of a gap. For she had left it here, and …yes. Her fingers bumped the bundle of pages, covered in soft leather.
Her notebook.
She turned the pages and saw only questions – hundreds of them, captured in the soft line of his jaw, the crease that appeared between his eyebrows when he frowned, the dimple in his cheek when he smiled. A thousand, spiralling questions, all without answer, formed from all the spooling thoughts that had chased her away from Liverpool; drawnand redrawn as though if she asked enough questions she could deduce the answer.
Why did he change his mind?
Why did he stop loving me?
She glanced at the grate, at the glowing embers. It was hard to look at these drawings now. Hard to look back at the longing, the hope that she’d etched into each shadow, each smudge.
She’d planned to give this to him. She’d hoped – in some foolish, naive way – that he would see how much she loved him and apologize. Tell her it’d all been a mistake and that he did want to marry her, after all.
She was glad now that she hadn’t.
She turned to a new page, one unmarred, unblackened, and sucked in a breath before fetching her charcoal. Her hand moved quickly, tracing the shape of the cobbles, the way the light had pooled, and there, in the centre—
The man from the train station. His face tilted upwards, to drink the rain from the sky.
When she was done she looked back at the fire for another long moment, before slipping the notebook back under the mattress instead.
Oliver was already bent over the stove when Ava padded into the kitchen, stirring buttered eggs in their cast-iron pan. He turned as she entered, eyebrows lifting slightly. ‘Did you not sleep?’
‘I slept,’ said Ava, wincing as she pressed her fingertips into the bunched muscles at her neck. ‘Though I swear, that truckle bed has spikes instead of springs.’
He snorted. ‘You might be better on the settee.’
‘The one with all its cushions stacked against the window, you mean?’
She couldn’tseeher brother rolling his eyes, though she couldhearit in his voice. ‘I thought perhaps we’d move the cushions back first. What do you reckon?’
‘I reckon we do more than that,’ Ava said. ‘Mrs Moss will have kittens when she sees the house.’
‘Can we please worry about thatafterbreakfast? Lay the table, will you?’
Ava opened the wooden cabinet behind her to fetch the plates – not the fancy ones they kept behind the glass but the chipped ones in the cupboard below.
And then a knock came at the back door.
And they both froze.
‘I thought Pa said she was in Manchester,’ said Ava – for there was only one person who knocked upon the back door.
