This time, his gaze was not on Leena but on Mrs. Van. Revulsion twisted his lips, a white fury flaring his nostrils as he bowed to Leena only, his attention lingering on Mrs. Van’s abnormally long fingers, then her neck, as if desiring to snap it. Leena felt trickles of fear slide down into her stomach, and she pulled Mrs. Van along as quickly as possible.
“Do you think he knows that you are…?” Leena whispered the moment they were out of sight.
“He must know,” Mrs. Van replied steadily. “And he would like to kill me for it.”
Leena’s heart quaked, her grip tightening on the housekeeper’s arm. “Be careful.”
A touch of a smile graced the older woman’s face before her expression folded into sternness once more. “Where would I be if I allowed myself to fear all the Lord Kilworths of the world?”
—
On that same day, just before dinner was served and while all the ladies were partaking in their afternoon naps, Leena and St. Silas entered a small parlor that held only Lord Hargreaves reading the paper. Leena watched as His Lordship and St. Silas bowed to each other, muttering polite nothings. It was a mild greeting between strangers, in such contrast to the raw agony of Lady Hargreaves.
“Have you managed to walk the grounds yet, Mr. St. Silas? Even in the rain they are a sight to behold this time of year,” Lord Hargreaves asked. It seemed a generic inquiry, but Leena did not miss the sudden narrowing of St. Silas’s eyes.
St. Silas looked steadily at Lord Hargreaves for a long, cool moment. “It is the season of wolves. It would be foolish to venture out unattended.”
“Ah yes, the wolves. Such…terrifying creatures.”
“Only to those who have blood on their hands,” St. Silas murmured. “Do you have blood on your hands, my lord?”
Lord Hargreaves’s regard did not waver. “Not nearly enough to be marked.”
“Not yet, at any rate,” St. Silas replied succinctly.
Leena had the unmistakable sense of two vicious animals circling each other, searching for weakness before the kill.
St. Silas did not await a reply. He bowed and exited the room, with Leena at his heels.
Still, Leena could not stop herself from turning back to see Hargreaves staring after them, his face leached of color.
Leena felt as if she were caught in the midst of a different sort of hunting party, where both the imagined and the real predator were at their door. She could not repress the question that escaped her lips, one that had been circling her mind for several nights as shelay awake listening to the animals’ terrible cries. “Do the wolves ever stop howling?”
St. Silas did not halt his long strides. “Why should they? They have scented blood.”
—
Leena, who had always been a careful observer of people—mostly because she existed on the fringes of their interactions—had begun to silently immerse herself in the lives of the upper-class guests about her.
It was a shocking and liberating discovery to find that, outside the company of St. Silas, the guests did not take any notice of her unless she all but shouted her presence. It was as if she was one of the many servants working silently to keep every function of the day moving smoothly. Leena used this to her advantage as she continued the search for the red diary, listening to the guests in part for clues, and in a larger part out of curiosity.
Several times when she was in one of the great parlors, crouched while rifling through a desk drawer or standing just by the fireplace, she’d been able to overhear the guests’ prattle. She’d been privy to the escalating tension between Lord Deverall and Mr. Cotts, pertaining to the horse the latter had bought from the former, which had once been hailed as the Great Thoroughbred but was now limping from an injury that had been suspiciously sustained just after the transfer of funds.
Then there was Lady Margaret Bishop and her daughter, Miss Cecilia Bishop, who thought everything absolutely drab and undistinguished, called Mr. Martin an embarrassment, but secretly wondered if they would be invited for the Early Spring Soiree; they were clearly petrified that they would notbe.
There were also several couples Leena tried to avoid, both old and young, who barely exchanged two words with each other, apart from a clipped “Will you stop making a cake of yourself, you olddrunk?” and “You grow more tedious with every passing year, m’dear.”
It should not, therefore, have come as a surprise when she caught snippets of Lady Beywood and two of her friends speaking of St. Silas. To find that he had immeasurably captivated the female members of the hunting party should not have made Leena feel out of sorts, confused and flushed, but it did.
Yet still she strained her ears to listen as they spoke of his form—tall, athletic, and graceful. Of the deep timbre of his voice; of his smile and the flash of white teeth; of his dark eyes and the thick hair that was cut too short to be considered fashionable and yet stillsuitedhim. And, most of all, when they spoke of how they felt when he gave them his undivided attention, Leenaunderstood.
It felt as if a new moon had decided to orbit their planet, changing the tides and storms forever.
It was those stormy feelings she was struggling with as they spent another fruitless night combing the second half of the great library.
After several futile hours of battling dust and darkness, Leena turned to St. Silas, trying to hide the defeat in her voice. “If we do not find the diary before we depart, we will return to Golborne with nothing.” She could not bear the thought of returning to the agony of the confession rooms. Even Golborne, with its stark outline and soot-coated rooftops, seemed like a choked dream from within the splendor of Weavingshaw and its rolling moors. “Where else can we look?”
St. Silas perched on the back of the settee, watching her with an odd look. For one paranoid moment, Leena was frightened he could read her thoughts and all the turmoil she had been combating—especially since Moira’s unexpected possession of her.
