Silas went still. When she turned away from the topiary, she saw that he was staring at her, that same unreadable expression on his face. It made her furious, though she did not know why.
“What?” she asked, perhaps too harshly. She felt she could be harsh with him—they were both outsiders, her by deformity and him by birth, and so she never felt the need to be false around him. It was refreshing in a way.
“I only realized that the story must have reminded you of Persephone. I apologize. I did not mean to upset you.”
Elswyth examined his face. It was the first time Silas had ever said Persephone’s name. She looked to Venus and then back to Silas.
“What?” Silas asked.
“I suppose you knew each other. If she truly was Venus’s friend. You would have been at the same parties.”
“You overestimate how much Venus wishes to be seen with me.”
“But you did know her?”
Silas appraised Elswyth and then sighed. “I spoke with her once, at a ball. You knew your sister. Tell me, how eagerly would Persephone Elderwood be seen speaking with a bastard and a rake? We were introduced, and she promptly turned her back to me and sought out the better-bred gentlemen in the room.”
Elswyth nodded, intently watching his expression. “I understand how it feels to be ignored. Sometimes it makes me furious.”
To her surprise, Silas smiled. “My, you’re getting better at this.”
“At what?”
“Interrogating gentlemen under the guise of friendly conversation.”
Elswyth flushed. “That is not what I—It’s rude to insinuate anything other than—”
“Lord Forrester and Mr. Plum led me to believe you were utterly tactless. But you must be well-practiced by now. If I’m correct, you’ll ask me where I winter next, and then if I was in the city during autumn of last year. I’ll save you the trouble.Winteringis a verb only for the very rich, which I am not, and around the time your sister disappeared, I was in Cairo on business for Dr. Gall. It is all quite well documented.”
Elswyth frowned. Had she really been so obvious? She felt foolish again, like she’d been playing a game where everyone knew the rules but her.
Silas must have marked her expression. He looked away. “I don’t blame you, Miss Elderwood, for suspecting the foreigner. Isuppose I should be flattered that it took you this long to interrogate me.”
“Your ancestry has nothing to do with this,” Elswyth said.
“Shockingly, I believe you. You are so different from your sister in that respect. You see the roots of things, I think, where she saw only the flowers. I wonder how two sisters could be so different. One so strikingly observant, the other so notoriously vapid.”
Elswyth snapped at him. “Watch your tongue when you speak of my sister or you will find poison on it.”
Silas, to her surprise, looked shocked. “Calm yourself, Elderwood. You wouldn’t want to make another scene.”
Silas flagged down a passing servant and took two glasses of champagne from his silver tray. He handed one to Elswyth, and she surprised herself by taking it. Nearby, lords and ladies mingled, watching them. They must have made a strange pair, standing before the topiary. She composed herself and spoke again, this time in a near-whisper. “I will not hear my sister’s name dragged through the mud. Not by the likes of you.”
“Why do you care so much?” Silas asked. “Why carry on this charade of looking for your sister? You must have loathed each other.”
Elswyth wiped a bead of sweat from her champagne glass and then sipped. “Do you have siblings, Sir Silas?”
“If Lady Harrow had been able to provide my father with heirs, do you think I’d be allowed to parade around London dressed in finery?”
“So no, then. Look over there, then at the wall,” Elswyth said. She nodded to the nearby entryway where woody vines and purple flowers draped over the arch. “What do you see?”
“Wisteria vines?” Silas said.
“You see wisteria vines. I see the night my sister rolled her ankleescaping down the wisteria outside her room, to kiss some boy from the village. And there, in Lady Melrose’s gown, in the silk, I see the first hand-me-down dress that Persephone ever gave me. Horribly purple. In your hand, in the brandy, I see the first time I ever got drunk, when Persephone stole a bottle from the kitchens and we snuck into the gardens at night. Everything I see, everything I touch, everything I hear has threads that lead back to her. And so I cannot exist in the world without her.”
Silas moved to speak, but Elswyth kept talking. She wasn’t sure what emotion she felt in her throat—something like sadness, something like rage, something like joy, all crawling over one another to be the first to escape her lips.
“You cannot understand what it means to grow side by side with someone and have them taken from you. Persephone might have been vapid and vain and occasionally cruel. And with that, she was intelligent in her own way, and wild in her moments of joy, and yes, she had a keen eye for the beauty of the world. She saw the flowers, as you say, and I loved her because so often I forget them. When two trees grow next to each other, they each fill the place the other leaves empty in their quest for the sun. And when one dies, it lives on in the ways it shaped the living. A single sister is but half a soul. And half of me died with her.”
