Elswyth hurried to the door at the end of the hall, placing her hand on the silver knob.
A voice came from behind her.
“A strange hour to be making calls.” She froze, hand hovering above the doorknob. The voice was deep, laced with an accent, and sounded subtly amused. She turned, and a shape stepped into a beam of moonlight: Kehinde, with his dark skin set with scars, his black suit, and his ebony cane.
“Mr. Ogunlana,” Elswyth said, looking around the room. “I did not expect you to be awake.”
He smiled. “Clearly, or you would not be trying to escape.”
“Escape! No, no, of course not—”
Kehinde wagged a finger at her. “Ah, ah. I know exactly what you are doing.”
“I find that unlikely,” Elswyth said, losing her patience.
“So you donotbelieve the recent murders attributed to this Reaper have something to do with your sister’s disappearance? Youaren’tsneaking through the servants’ entrance because Percival has forbidden you from leaving the house unsupervised?” He shrugged, clearly still amused. “Well then, I must have been mistaken, and we can all go back to bed.”
Elswyth’s shoulders slumped. “How did you know?”
He reached out and knocked on the wooden wall to his right. “It’s an old house; the boards creak, and the walls talk. But I’m afraid that I can’t let you out that door.”
Frustration swelled in Elswyth. She’d been so close to beginning her search for Persephone in earnest. She’d spent nearly a month as Mrs. Rose’s captive, forced to suffer through frivolouslessons, unable to search for her sister. A month spent plotting a single night, a night she could escape into the city and see if there truly was a connection between the Reaper and her sister’s disappearance. She’d been so careful, so cautious. Only for Kehinde to spoil it. “And if I refuse to return to bed, what will you do? Restrain me?”
Kehinde shrugged, leaning against the wall to his right. “If you make it necessary, then yes.”
Something grabbed Elswyth’s wrist. She flinched, but her fingers stuck to the doorknob as roots grew from the wood of the door and crawled over her hand. A living shackle formed there, holding her fast. She pulled, but it was no use—she was stuck.
“I’m sure my uncle will be pleased to hear that you detained his houseguest,” Elswyth said, still stubbornly trying to wrench her hand free. How had Kehinde manipulated the wood of the door? He was standing five feet away. But perhaps there was some connection she could not see, some system of roots beneath the wooden walls.
Kehinde dropped his hand from the wall, and the roots retreated from Elswyth’s wrist, returning to the wood of the door.Manipulating dead wood as well,she thought.No small feat. It seems that Mr. Ogunlana is more than he appears.
“Percival has asked you to stay in the house at night,” Kehinde said, gesturing back down the hall. “It would be an abuse of his hospitality, don’t you think?”
“If only you had been so watchful of my sister,” Elswyth spat, “then I would not need to be here at all.”
A chill settled over Kehinde’s usually cheerful features.
“Yes. That is what people say, isn’t it? Everyone—your father, society, the police—assumes that Persephone’s death is somehow our fault. They call your uncle a fool and I’m sure they call memuch worse… Some even call us murderers. All while your uncle grieved for her.”
“I did not mean to—”
“You will not put us through that misery again,” Kehinde said. “I will not let you.”
Kehinde stared at her, his expression unyielding. In the moonlight, his face seemed carved from wood.
“That is precisely the reason you should let me go, Mr. Ogunlana. If I can discover what really happened to my sister, then you and Lord Devereux will be cleared of suspicion. Either way, I will go to the Rows. Perhaps you may stop me tonight, but I will try again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. You cannot restrain me forever.”
Kehinde scowled. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“You Elderwoods are all the same. Common sense chases you and you run faster. Curse the day I ever met your uncle.”
Elswyth hesitated over the door, noting the way Kehinde’s scars twisted as he scowled. “Does that mean you’ll let me go?”
Kehinde took his cane, donned his hat, and then moved to the door. “It means I’m going with you.”
The labyrinth of slums known as the Rows lay across the city from the West End, far from the glamour of St. James and Mayfair and Belgravia. The tenements seemed to grow around Elswyth as their carriage descended into the twisting alleyways. Chimneys rose from gabled roofs like trees from craggy mountainsides, supporting a canopy of laundry wires and time-worn shop signs. The streets were rougher here, the carriage bouncing on old cobblestones as round as skulls, and the buildings were slanted, ancientthings, their crooked brick walls leaning over the street as though they would fall at any moment. Here and there wooden shacks rested against them, sometimes two or three, like mushrooms sprouting from the trunks of great trees.
Despite the condition of its buildings, the main causeway of the Rows was not so different from any in London. The smell of smoke and soot lingered in the air, mixed with heady scents from the spice factories, where floromancers worked day and night fabricating cinnamon and ginger and cardamom. At the end of the long street, the city sloped downward to where the docklands began, and the masts of ships bobbed above the river, concealed by mist.
