Chapter 7 Bleeding Confessions #2
Leena closed her eyes briefly in hopes the image was not real.
But no, it remained. A phantom now hovered by the man, the first ghost she had seen in Mr. St. Silas’s confession chamber, and she could not tell how young the woman was beneath the blackened and ashy skin.
The smell of burned flesh filled her nose, even though Leena was sure it was only her imagination creating such an acrid scent.
In some odd way, this was one of the few times Leena was glad she could see these beings and bear testament to a suffering that would otherwise go unnoticed. Never once had the old tradesman mentioned the dead factory workers. Only the fire and how it had affected his investments.
The question spilled from Leena’s own now-parched throat before she could stop it, her eyes never leaving the charred phantom. “Were there any casualties from the fire?”
She did not know why it mattered that she asked that question, for she knew that the tradesman’s confirmation that the fire had resulted in death would not be enough to save this woman from her ensnarement to this world.
Yet Leena had never shaken off that part of herself that desperately wanted to release these phantoms from whatever kept them here, although she had learned not to give in to it.
Very rarely was she successful in freeing these ghosts, and the bitter sting of her failures always made her feel useless.
Rami was right, Leena thought to herself; she was now far more submerged in the emotions of the dead than the living.
She saw Mr. St. Silas half tilt his head toward her, his dark eyes shuttered, his mouth a thin line of irritation at her interruption.
Jerkily, the man nodded.
With one final warning look toward her, Mr. St. Silas shifted his focus back to the man. No longer did he use silence as a weapon. Now the interrogation was callous. “How many dead?”
A staggered breath from the older man. “In the hundreds.”
Leena’s eyes flickered to the burned woman once more, wanting to see if this would finally release her, but it did not.
“Do not waste my time. A factory fire that occurred ten years ago is not uncommon knowledge,” St. Silas said, every word a strike. “What is your secret?”
The old man released a breath. “Back then, thieves used to run rampant in my factory. To prevent the pilfering of precious merchandise, I-I…” He stuttered, swallowing the words, before continuing in a whisper. “I locked them all in.”
It took Leena a moment to understand.
There was no curiosity in Mr. St. Silas’s face. It was clear that while Leena’s disbelieving mind could not grasp the reality of the tradesman’s words, Mr. St. Silas understood perfectly and was not surprised by it.
“Locked you in?” Leena demanded, appalled, staring once more at the phantom behind his shoulder. Then she realized her slip. “I-I meant…who is it that you locked in?”
She knew, even without directly looking at him, that Mr. St. Silas had pounced on her slip of the tongue, his eyes narrowing again.
With trepidation, knowing she would answer for it momentarily, Leena instead focused on the man’s shuddering voice.
“My workers, as I did not know who among them was responsible. When their shift began in the morning, I’d lock the doors until they were released home in the evening, with every person searched before their release.
This ensured”—his voice broke—“that they could not steal material from under the nose of the foreman.”
The images roared through her mind—the fire licking at the cotton wheels, the workers pounding at the locked doors. This was why her father had wanted a union. She could not tear her eyes from the phantom, hovering with half her face unrecognizable from the fire.
In Leena’s peripheral vision, she saw Mr. St. Silas document the secret in his ledger, and in that moment she hated him more than she’d thought possible. She hated that he made her sit here and listen to such heartbreak, and she hated that he remained so unaffected by it.
“You may leave.” Mr. St. Silas dismissed the man, handing him a slip of paper with the amount he was to be paid. “Knock on the second room on the right, and Jeremy will settle your account.”
Vaguely, Leena noted that the number written upon the slip of paper had a higher value than any of the day’s previous confessions. It would make sense, she supposed. The more fatal the secret, the higher the recompense.
Leena was jarred back to the present by the sound of the tradesman staggering from the room.
A change had suddenly overtaken the old man.
He looked ten years aged, his steps hobbling, his back now bent, the weathered face contorting beneath some invisible pain.
She was unable to look away from this horrifying transformation, her eyes staring unbelievingly at the man.
She had never known remorse to have such physical manifestations.
Her head swiveled once about the room in search of something that could cause this kind of instantaneous alteration, but she found nothing.
The door shut behind him, the ghost of the burned woman silently trailing after the tradesman as she, too, vanished.
The silence that followed was deadly.
For a few moments, Leena stared fixedly at her white-knuckled hands folded in her lap, her mind still swirling from all she had witnessed.
Finally, when she could bear the stillness no longer, she raised half-weary, half-defiant eyes toward Mr. St. Silas. “I did not mean to—”
“Tomorrow, before the start of your shift, you will drop off your botanical book at my study. For every interruption, every missed opportunity to inform me of vital information, every inattentive moment you pass, I shall rip out a page and feed it to the fire.” His smile was sardonic. “Three pages are already owed.”
A Guide to Botany?
She stood up, chair scraping against the floor. He did not rise at her standing, as was customary, but continued to take off his black gloves, folding them into his waistcoat pocket.
“You…How did…” Never had Leena stuttered so painfully in her life. How on earth did he know about her book, her most prized possession above all else, tethering her to her mother and a childhood long gone?
She thought wildly. Had she been carrying it in her hands in front of him? And even so, how could he possibly know its value to her? Was it that wretched housekeeper rifling through her things who had informed him? Did he have some darker means of acquiring information about the people around him?
Finally, he stood up, giving her a slow bow.
“This concludes our day. I bid you good afternoon, madam.”
“Mr. St. Silas—” He only turned slightly at her address, for which she was glad; her face revealed her near-panic.
“Sir…I…I beg your pardon.” She swallowed hard.
“I lost my concentration, but it will not happen again. If you could only spare my book.” She could not, even against her better judgment, pretend indifference to the immeasurable worth of that book—especially when it was threatened with being ripped from her and slowly destroyed.
“Sparing it, Miss Al-Sayer,” he said, opening the door and barely glancing back at her, “is entirely at your disposal. Do your work well, and you will have nothing but peace from me.”
His disdainful voice remained echoing through her mind long after he was gone, stinging her like a slap. For such a man to offer peace to her would be the equivalent of a burning flame offering condolences to a forest—a harbinger of devastation.
—
After the cotton-mill owner, it was as if a floodgate had opened.
Either her mind did not pay any further attention to the nothing secrets that passed or she did not care, for her entire horrified concentration was focused on the ones that came after.
Those gruesome secrets ricocheted in her mind endlessly, building an empire from which she could not escape.
Bleeding confessions—as she learned to call them in her head—sometimes appeared only once daily, sometimes not at all, and sometimes one after the other, each tearing across her skin and wounding her without salve or gauze.
Throughout it all, she watched Mr. St. Silas carefully.
Leena had been right. There existed no blade powerful enough to rip through the Saint of Silence, but knowledge was not a knife; it was far more lethal. And, if Mr. St. Silas had taught her anything, it was that even the most trivial of secrets can lead to ruin.
Leena’s daily routine became fixed very quickly even within those first few days, revolving entirely around Mr. St. Silas’s own schedule.
Everything he did, he did with vicious proficiency.
If he slept, he slept but little. He drank his coffee searingly hot, always with two spoonfuls of sugar.
He took his meals alone. His servants moved silently through the house; his bruisers bowed their heads to him.
He frequently took private meetings in his study—bankers, aristos, tradesmen—the entire city within his palm.
All his commands were met with swift compliance.
There were no half measures with Mr. St. Silas—not in his cunning, not in his ambition, and not even in the way he had his coffee.
Each morning began the exact same way.
The secrets documented in those black ledgers. The gloves.
The ripping of serrated emotion.
Then, the payment.
She supposed the only difference in his own routine was her entrance into it.
Some days she would only see a single ghost swirling by a customer; other days the dead were ceaseless, continuously blowing in like the drafts of cold autumn air.
Whatever information she quietly provided to Mr. St. Silas about the hauntings of his customers was used to expertly change the direction of his questioning, enabling him to reach the source of his confessor’s pain and shame more quickly and ruthlessly, extracting lies like the splitting of flesh.
At first Leena, who knew the rumors around the Saint of Silence, believed he himself was the cause of the agony that the confessors experienced at leaving his confession room.
But the more she observed him, the more she realized with dread that these changes occurred each time a confession was written on the sheets of those carefully handled ledgers.
Something unnatural occurred on those pages. Something horrible.
Leena’s attention kept coming back to the ledgers obsessively.
He’d never written her own confession in those books, she now realized, and she was fixated on the reason why.
She noticed that Mr. St. Silas handled them as if they were a mix of something both hallowed and poisonous, for his bare skin never grazed the pliant leather covers.
The answers she sought must surely lie within them, and Leena was eager to claw the pages open and devour their contents. But he never left them unguarded, and Leena never found an opportunity to try.
Obsession, Leena thought wryly, must be a new bad habit she had developed, for if it was not the ledgers she was brooding over, it was Lord Avon’s ghost and her absolute lack of any advancement in that regard.
How could she ever find any time to start her search when Mr. St. Silas had her in his confession room for half of every day?
Nor was she permitted to leave the premises and comb through the city without him.
He had claimed contemptuously that it was for her own safety, when all Leena longed to do was to check up on Rami and Margery, and she felt like a prisoner within the limits of her own life.
And Mr. St. Silas, for all his initial urgency to find his phantom, seemed now to grind to a standstill in the matter of the ghost hunting, as if it no longer mattered to him at all.
Still she continued to observe him—every gesture, big or small, filed away to be carefully analyzed in the privacy of her chamber.
Even now, as he drank his coffee and focused on writing in his ledger, she watched him covertly.
Searching for any sign that might lead to his ruin.