—
After the cotton-mill owner, it was as if a floodgate had opened.
Either her mind did not pay any further attention to thenothingsecrets that passed or she did not care, for her entire horrified concentration was focused on the ones that came after. Those gruesome secrets ricocheted in her mind endlessly, building an empire from which she could not escape.Bleedingconfessions—as she learned to call them in her head—sometimes appeared only once daily, sometimes not at all, and sometimes one after the other, each tearing across her skin and wounding her without salve or gauze.
Throughout it all, she watched Mr. St. Silas carefully.
Leena had been right. There existed no blade powerful enough to rip through the Saint of Silence, butknowledgewas not a knife; it was far more lethal. And, if Mr. St. Silas had taught her anything, it was that even the most trivial of secrets can lead to ruin.
Leena’s daily routine became fixed very quickly even within those first few days, revolving entirely around Mr. St. Silas’s own schedule.
Everything he did, he did with vicious proficiency. If he slept, he slept but little. He drank his coffee searingly hot, always with two spoonfuls of sugar. He took his meals alone. His servants moved silently through the house; his bruisers bowed their heads to him.He frequently took private meetings in his study—bankers, aristos, tradesmen—the entire city within his palm. All his commands were met with swift compliance. There were no half measures with Mr. St. Silas—not in his cunning, not in his ambition, and not even in the way he had his coffee.
Each morning began the exact same way.
The secrets documented in those black ledgers. The gloves.
The ripping of serrated emotion.
Then, the payment.
She supposed the only difference in his own routine was her entrance into it. Some days she would only see a single ghost swirling by a customer; other days the dead were ceaseless, continuously blowing in like the drafts of cold autumn air. Whatever information she quietly provided to Mr. St. Silas about the hauntings of his customers was used to expertly change the direction of his questioning, enabling him to reach the source of his confessor’s pain and shame more quickly and ruthlessly, extracting lies like the splitting of flesh.
At first Leena, who knew the rumors around the Saint of Silence, believed he himself was the cause of the agony that the confessors experienced at leaving his confession room. But the more she observed him, the more she realized with dread that these changes occurred each time a confession was written on the sheets of those carefully handled ledgers.
Something unnatural occurred on those pages. Something horrible.
Leena’s attention kept coming back to the ledgers obsessively. He’d never written her own confession in those books, she now realized, and she was fixated on the reason why. She noticed that Mr. St. Silas handled them as if they were a mix of something both hallowed and poisonous, for his bare skin never grazed the pliant leather covers.
The answers she sought mustsurelylie within them, and Leenawas eager to claw the pages open and devour their contents. But he never left them unguarded, and Leena never found an opportunity to try.
Obsession, Leena thought wryly, must be a new bad habit she had developed, for if it was not the ledgers she was brooding over, it was Lord Avon’s ghost and her absolute lack of any advancement in that regard. How could she ever find any time to start her search when Mr. St. Silas had her in his confession room for half of every day? Nor was she permitted to leave the premises and comb through the city without him. He had claimed contemptuously that it was for her own safety, when all Leena longed to do was to check up on Rami and Margery, and she felt like a prisoner within the limits of her own life.
And Mr. St. Silas, for all his initial urgency to find his phantom, seemed now to grind to a standstill in the matter of the ghost hunting, as if it no longer mattered to him at all.
Still she continued to observe him—every gesture, big or small, filed away to be carefully analyzed in the privacy of her chamber.
Even now, as he drank his coffee and focused on writing in his ledger, she watched him covertly.
Searching for any sign that might lead to his ruin.
Leena’s botany bookhad been gone for three weeks.
And every moment in between she had worried about Rami, and how he was faring. Every day she longed to steal out and visit both him and Margery, to assure herself that they were both safe and well.
Instead she was perpetually confined to the confession room.
Leena had learned to curb her tongue around the ghosts that swirled in with the confessors, manacled to the living. The worst phantoms were the ones that followed the customers who came to confess at noon; it was thatdamnedhour. It breathed life into the dead. Those ghosts looked more solid; their misery carried weight.
Leena kept her head lowered, mutinous eyes on the paper as she wrote Mr. St. Silas notes about all the ghosts that followed his customers.
Whenever Mrs. Van brought in the refreshments, Leena tried to keep her wrathful gaze to herself.
She cursed Mrs. Van for informing her master aboutA Guide to Botany.She cursed the new clothes that had been commissioned for her and hand-delivered by the housekeeper to her room—eachof the six boxes filled with corsets made of whalebone, silk stockings, soft cotton chemises, dresses of the finest material in colors of dark gray, light blue, and forest green. They even included gloves and a smart hat for when she needed to present herself outside the shop. No longer did she dress in her own worn but loved clothes; now she felt as sterile and cold as the rest of the establishment.
When she initially stepped into the confession room attired in her expensive new garments, Mr. St. Silas looked her up and down with a barely concealed smirk, causing her to gnash her teeth together forcefully to stop herself from replying in kind.
It was in these new clothes that she now sat and watched as the confessors yet again fell prey to Mr. St. Silas’s damning silence.
