Leena’s eyes flickered to the phantoms. By the Saints, they were young. One still carried the gangliness of childhood. She couldn’t look away, staring unblinkingly at those smooth faces that would never fold and wrinkle with age, the tragedy of it all a sudden burden.
She heard Mr. St. Silas’s fingers tapping loudly on the oak desk, wrenching her out of her near trance.
Mr. St. Silas looked as if he were about to say something to her, but he refrained at the last second. Instead, he turned to write the Black Coat’s secret in the ledger.
Instantaneously, the transformation was visible. Leena watched as it drained the Black Coat entirely of his color, his broad face contorting into a pain that was both coarse and devastating. Once more, he looked as if he’d been struck repeatedly, although no one had touched him. As he stumbled forward toward the Saint, taking the payment slip with trembling fingers, he looked as though he had one foot in the grave already.
Once the door shut behind the Black Coat and his phantoms, Leena turned to Mr. St. Silas, no longer able to contain her searing need to know. “What are you doing to cause such agony to these confessors?”
Mr. St. Silas barely lifted his head from his accounts. “Nothing they have not agreed to.”
Leena remembered how desperate she had been when she’d knocked on the Saint’s door, how she would have agreed to nearly anything if it had meant safeguarding her brother’s life. Although Mr. St. Silas had never written her secret in those cursed ledgers, Leena knew she would’ve had no choice but to bear it if he had.Not only was the Saint taking advantage of the most desperate of souls, Leena was nowaidinghim.
Sometimes during the few weeks she had been in his employ, to make herself feel better, she had told herself that it was charity—that the Saint was giving money to those who needed it in exchange for a single secret. Except, it wasn’t, not really—not when the price to be paid was the confessor’s humiliation, their total degradation.
“How do you profit from this?” Leena whispered again, unable to think past all the terror she had witnessed him evoke, over and over. It all felt pointless. All these phantoms, the young and the old, did not gain any justice leaving the confession room. She hated to admit to herself that a small part of her had hoped that she could at least findthatfor them. “I have never seen even a single coin pass into your hands.”
Finally, Mr. St. Silas put down his pen and turned toward her with irritation. “I wonder, Miss Al-Sayer, what must I do to gain some silence? Should I, do you think, wear gauze over my mouth?”
“No, sir.” This time it was Leena who stood first, giving a stiff curtsey, barely restraining the mumbled, “For that would indeed deprive me of your charm.”
She heard his chair scraping behind her.
“Prepare yourself; this afternoon we are visiting the boarding school that Lord Avon attended.”
Leena could not dismiss the perpetual fear that Lord Avon had long since passed on with no way to call him back, thus entrapping her in this contract forever. She shook her head, as if that would be enough to dispel her anxious thoughts. There was still Weavingshaw, she told herself. Surely more visceral clues as to Lord Avon’s whereabouts would make themselves known there.
Yet, after this, Leena began to have a recurring dream that it was she, and not the Saint of Silence, who had gauze wrapped chokingly over her mouth.
Leena lay onher bed fully dressed, the visit to Hardwick’s Boarding School yet another useless and tiring endeavor. She’d developed a throbbing headache from how hard she’d squinted at every phantom (and the old school was riddled with them!), and also studying every portrait, every room, every scholarly statue, desperate foranysign of Lord Avon’s ghost.
When that had proved to be fruitless, Leena had returned to her own chamber and tried to call forth Lord Avon’s phantom the moment she heard the clang of cathedral bells chime midnight. Perhaps within the hours of noon or midnight—bewitching hours, where the cloak between the living and the dead was at its thinnest—Lord Avon might come. She had never tried this before, but perhaps…
But nothing stirred at Leena’s summons. A disappointing, frustratingnothing.
Leena tried to cast these feelings aside, as she needed to focus on her next task of this never-ending night—to find a way to see Rami.
As the clock struck one, Leena stood up, brushing down her maroon skirts. She opened her bedroom door and stood listeningfor a moment, her heartbeat thumping, before taking her first steps out into the hall once she was sure that it was empty.
She crept down the stairs slowly, her blood freezing every time a floorboard creaked, the sound echoing tellingly throughout the still house.
As she descended, she could see light slitting from below the closed door of one of the rooms that usually remained locked during daylight hours. Just before her foot reached the landing, a sudden harsh thump from behind the door sent her jumping. Her new heeled boots lost contact with the step and she fell back with a loudhumph.
The door suddenly opened then closed firmly again, and when Leena dared to look up, Mr. St. Silas was leaning against the frame, silently watching her attempts to scrambleup.
“Miss Al-Sayer.” Mr. St. Silas gave her one of his short, graceful bows. Although his voice held no anger, his sharp eyes bored into her like a hook. “I see that you, too, are in the habit of enjoying midnight…activities.”
Another shattering crash from behind the door caused Leena to startle again in spite of her best efforts. Worse, the thumping was followed by a choked male scream.
He noticed her alarmed eyes pivot toward the room, and a slow, caustic smile spread across his face.
“May I inquire as to what caught your interest at this time of night?” Although his tone remained conversational, there was no mistaking the hint of menace.
“It is my own time; I am free to come and go as I please,” Leena replied, sounding more steady than she felt—especially as the guttural sounds continued. “Guest of yours?” she asked, trying to match his tone, but the clenched hand on the banister gave her away.
“A confessor,” he corrected mildly. “A confessor who lied to me.”
The door swung open again. Leena instinctively took a step back into the safety of the darkness as Mr. St. Silas moved aside to allow whoever was in the room to exit.
