She narrowed her eyes at him. “How so?”
He shrugged. “War breeds secrets.”
She was no longer surprised that he spoke of bloodshed in terms of commerce, in tallies and profits. “And if war does not come to Morland? If the aristos remain in power?”
“Undoubtedly, I will continue to turn that to my advantage as well.”
All Leena wanted to do was return to her chamber and ruminate on this new world she had awoken to. She bowed to him. “If that is all you need of me, Mr. St. Silas—”
“That is not all.” St. Silas’s voice stopped her before she could make an escape. “Make your way to the carriage, Miss Al-Sayer. We are going to visit Lord Avon’s old house in town.”
—
It was an elegant mansion in the exclusive Maybury District, whitewashed, with ivy trailing the bricks and a trim garden with cut hedges. St.Silas had managed to procure an invitation, and he took her through each room over and over again until Leena was so exhausted she swayed on her feet. She’d known from the moment they’d stepped into the house that it was bereft of ghosts, but she’d forced herself to work past her fatigue in hopes that she might be wrong.
All the while St. Silas paced relentlessly on the wooden floors, his steps echoing across the domed ceilings, as restless as a phantom. As the butler gave them the initial tour, his expression grew darker.
“Have you been to this townhouse before?” Leena whispered to him as the aging butler showed them the family portraits of the new Lord Crawford who’d purchased the house in Maybury after Lord Avon’s death.
The Saint’s nod was short and succinct, designed to repel any further questions.
Still, Leena persisted. “What was the reason you visited the first time?”
He gave her a quelling look, and Leena said no more.
On the carriage ride back to his residence, his mouth was tight with displeasure as the silence grew heavy. He stared stonily out at the rapidly filtering landscape, from the mansions that littered the opulent Maybury District to the throughways that became progressively more cobbled and narrow.
It took longer to return to the Northern Quarters than normal. The soldiers who patrolled the gates between the districts demanded papers from every carriage after that morning’s riots. They stopped the carriage whenever they caught sight of Leena’s Algaraan features through the window, but waved it on once they recognized St. Silas.
Unsurprised but still annoyed at how being accompanied by St. Silas had made an otherwise horrendous journey smooth, Leena instead focused on breaking the silence with a question that had been plaguing her mind all day. “Are you searching for Lord Avon due to his connection with the Wake?”
The twilight bathed St. Silas’s face in a bluish glow. He dragged a hand downward from his forehead to his mouth, and it occurred to Leena that he looked exhausted. She wondered what he did between forcing confessions from his customers, tormenting those who lied to him, and hunting dead nobles.
She was not surprised by his cold silence so she pressed on, listing points on her fingers. “This is what I know so far about Lord Avon: He was the last of the Avon line. He led the Wake for an unknown purpose, but presumably to restore wealth. He was mysteriously murdered—a fact that has been well hidden. Upon his death, he lost Weavingshaw to a Mr. Martin, a tradesman who was able to purchase the estate very shortly after Lord Avon’s passing.” She looked him squarely in the eyes despite his lack of response, not quite fully believing the next point. “And as far as we arebothaware, he left behind nothing of value to tether him to this earth—no object or person.”
She tugged an escaped strand of hair behind her ear in exasperation before continuing. “And here we reach an impasse. If you remain cloistered in your beastly dark tower, reticent in all your answers, I will have nothing more to go on and we will likely spend our entire lives searching for a ghost that may have never been here to begin with.”
If a pistol could not drag answers out of St. Silas, perhaps logic could.
The carriage had, some minutes ago, reached its destination, yet they both continued to sit in the cold, neither one making a move to leave. Outside, one of the horses stamped an impatient hoof on the street, puncturing the silence between them.
All the impatience St. Silas had shown in the townhouse returned, and he glanced at his timepiece as if this conversation was taking up too much of his time.
Leena didn’t allow his action to discomfit her. She sat rigid on the seat, waiting for an answer.
When he did give it, it was a single word—as if that could explain everything. “Weavingshaw.”
“What about it?” Leena asked over the sudden thrash of rain against the window.
“Lord Avon was going to lose Weavingshaw due to generations of accumulated debt. The lands around the estate are unsuitable for farming, and the waters are too wrathful to fish. Even the coal from the mines is not nearly enough. That’s why he created the Wake, to ensure his hold on the estate.”
Leena’s hand gripped the seat cushion. The rest of her was very still. “He traded prisoners, likecattle,for a house made of mortar and stone?”
“The Avons would have sunk to any form of depravity to keep hold of Weavingshaw,” he replied, and perhaps by this point he’dheard so many sordid confessions that the degradation of the prisoners didn’t faze him. “They consider it the house of their blood.”
“I cannot imagine that sort of devotion.” Leena was an immigrant’s daughter. She’d be lost in the streets of her homeland, a foreigner in the cities her ancestors built.
She thought of Lord Avon’s portrait—the golden noble drenched in privilege but who had still been unsatisfied. St. Silas claimed that His Lordship had died from a sword through the heart, and Leena suddenly wished that it had been a convict who had done it. That a disfigured form of justice could still exist.
