A tap on the door. The smell of tea wafted into the room, brought in by the same woman who had admitted Leena to the house all those nights ago. Leena remembered the way the woman had tried to drag her from Mr. St. Silas’s office, and the interaction soured her still.
“Mrs. Van, my housekeeper.” Mr. St. Silas again made the brief introduction as he arranged papers into a drawer in his desk.
The housekeeper’s sharp gaze landed on her, distrust lining her harsh eyes. She was a severe-looking woman with skin stretched so tight across her face that it looked ready to split down the middle and reveal the white skull underneath.
As Mrs. Van poured from the teapot, Leena could not avert hergaze from the woman’s hands. The palms were the same size as her own, but the fingers were so elongated that they curled over the teacup edge like the legs of a spider.
“Madam,” Mrs. Van said, as if reading her thoughts.
Leena startled and flushed for the obvious lapse in manners.
Once the housekeeper had left, Leena took a long sip of tea to settle her nerves. Her throat burned full of questions; she wouldn’t let anything curtail her now. “You told me previously that you’d like me to find a ghost for you,” she began.
“Among other things.”
She had been expecting this. Dread swelled in her chest. “What other things?” she asked slowly, fearing she already knew the answer.
“Nothing too odious, I assure you.” He waved a hand. “You have a gift, a curse, anability—whatever you’d like to call it—and I’d be a fool not to take full advantage.” At the look on her face, his mouth twisted upward. “As part of your duties, you will sit in on my consultations and alert me to any spirits hovering around my customers. You will not question me on why I seek those spirits.”
Leena pursed her lips at his autocratic manner. He’d been purposely vague about her “duties” when she’d first signed the contract. She had been too fever-touched at the time to ask him to list them. She’d caught that slip earlier on when poring over the copy he’d sent her, and she’d been berating herself for it ever since.
She wouldn’t allow him to have the upper hand again.
Mr. St. Silas’s smooth voice cut through her thoughts. “When did you see your first ghost?”
The question startled her and pulled out memories from the recesses of her mind: hazy summers, grand estates, dizzying excitement, dashed hopes.
She remembered that time with a certain perplexity, as if she’d suddenly woken up in a new country and must now learn to speak the language.
“Three years ago,” Leena replied, weighing her answers carefully, “when I was employed as a lady’s companion in Hythe House.”
They watched each other, alert to every minuscule change in the other’s posture. Mr. St. Silas’s shoulders subtly stiffened at the mention of Hythe House.
Interesting.
“You worked for Lord Hargreaves, I presume?” he asked.
“I did, though I met him but a handful of times. I mainly worked for his mother, Her Ladyship. She is Algaraan, and Lord Hargreaves wanted a well-educated girl who could converse with her in her language.” She kept her tone matter-of-fact; she would make sure that pulling answers from her would be like pulling teeth.
Mr. St. Silas drummed his fingers on the desk. “You didn’t finish, Miss Al-Sayer. What triggered your ability to see the dead?”
She took another long sip of her tea, noticing that he didn’t touch his. She remembered the fever that had started it all—collapsing in the estate gardens, then waking to ghosts.
Finally she shrugged, hoping the gesture would annoy him. “I don’t know.”
They both continued to level a look at each other, she over her teacup, he in obvious skepticism.
“It’s the truth. One day I woke up like this and it has never left me since.”
“Out of curiosity”—Mr. St. Silas toyed with the pen in his hand idly—“was there a ghost stalking Hargreaves?”
Leena stirred her tea and added a lump of sugar to it, then grimaced at the taste. She hadn’t had sweetened tea in years, and she’d become accustomed to the bitterness. She busied herself stirring, trying to buy herself time to think. She didn’t trust herself to lie.
“Ah,” Mr. St. Silas said, and for a moment she saw through the nonchalance to the suppressed interest underneath. The pen stilled in his hand even if his posture remained relaxed. “You saw the ghost of his wife, didn’t you?”
Leena’s hand twitched, and she hated that he must’ve noticed the nervous action.
“Did she really die of a wasting illness?” he pressed. “Shocking, isn’t it? She’d been seen in perfect health only days before.”
