Chapter 8 Little Distractions #2
As always, the Saint breezed through the waiver he gave to all customers before falling into bored silence.
Leena did not interrupt this time.
But that morning she had doused her hair with droplets of lavender water in an attempt to chase away the claustrophobia of the Saint’s confession room. To Leena, it felt like the equivalent of attempting to grow flowers in the cracks between stones.
The Black Coat rubbed his hands together for warmth, his bristled cheeks red with the chill.
After a long, tense moment, the confession came like thread unwinding from a spool.
“A few nights ago, there was a secret meeting held for the Rebels in an old warehouse in Ridgeways. It was discovered by free-patrolling soldiers, who did not hesitate to take aim. A few died, but most were taken to Newtorn Prison for treason.” The chair groaned as he shifted in his seat.
“I was supposed to be standing guard, but I took a few puffs of Tar that night to settle my nerves.” He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes with the pads of his thumbs. “I fell asleep at my post.”
There was something very wrong.
Leena watched as the ghosts that surrounded him became frenzied, the decayed tendons of their hands outstretched toward the Black Coat to hurt him, but their touch was like water.
Leena feared that they might turn and direct their anger at her—the only one whose body seemed to respond to ghostly attacks—and she hunched lower.
Her hand snaked to her pocket to hold her copper coins, feeling only marginally comforted by the metal in her damp palm.
Mr. St. Silas did not miss her shrinking movement and raised his brows coolly at her.
His expression shifted slightly when he realized that she was not deliberately trying to interrupt his session, but rather had reacted involuntarily.
His lips curved upward, and she remembered what he’d said once: Everything affects you.
Leena detested that her own unchecked response had proved, once again, that his sharp analysis of her was correct.
Shakily, she wrote the new information of the ghosts’ actions and handed it to Mr. St. Silas, who read it quickly.
He turned back to the Black Coat, now with a new acidic interest.
“Indeed?” he asked softly. Leena had seen the way the Saint rooted out liars.
His technique was as precise as a surgeon palpating for tender spots, but instead of repairing the weakness, he only pressed more firmly.
“Now, did you lead the soldiers to the meeting house yourself when you betrayed your rebel comrades, or did you merely pretend to be asleep somewhere and let the soldiers wander in by themselves?”
Leena whipped her head round to look at him.
The ghosts likewise reacted to Mr. St. Silas’s statement, halting their movements as if they had been called. Leena felt the room’s temperature drop a degree, but it went unnoticed by the two men.
The Black Coat’s eyes widened. Shock had rendered his words nearly unintelligible. “How could…You couldn’t have…but—”
He rose up suddenly, his face now markedly paler.
“Sit down,” the Saint ordered idly. “I have not finished.”
Slowly, the Black Coat sat.
The ensuing silence now carried its own claws, and Leena saw the way it ripped into the man, leaving him in tatters. He shuddered beneath its battery, slumping with his head in his hands. “The King’s soldiers paid well.”
Leena’s eyes flickered to the phantoms. By the Saints, they were young. One still carried the gangliness of childhood. She couldn’t look away, staring unblinkingly at those smooth faces that would never fold and wrinkle with age, the tragedy of it all a sudden burden.
She heard Mr. St. Silas’s fingers tapping loudly on the oak desk, wrenching her out of her near trance.
Mr. St. Silas looked as if he were about to say something to her, but he refrained at the last second. Instead, he turned to write the Black Coat’s secret in the ledger.
Instantaneously, the transformation was visible.
Leena watched as it drained the Black Coat entirely of his color, his broad face contorting into a pain that was both coarse and devastating.
Once more, he looked as if he’d been struck repeatedly, although no one had touched him.
As he stumbled forward toward the Saint, taking the payment slip with trembling fingers, he looked as though he had one foot in the grave already.
Once the door shut behind the Black Coat and his phantoms, Leena turned to Mr. St. Silas, no longer able to contain her searing need to know. “What are you doing to cause such agony to these confessors?”
Mr. St. Silas barely lifted his head from his accounts. “Nothing they have not agreed to.”
Leena remembered how desperate she had been when she’d knocked on the Saint’s door, how she would have agreed to nearly anything if it had meant safeguarding her brother’s life.
Although Mr. St. Silas had never written her secret in those cursed ledgers, Leena knew she would’ve had no choice but to bear it if he had.
Not only was the Saint taking advantage of the most desperate of souls, Leena was now aiding him.
Sometimes during the few weeks she had been in his employ, to make herself feel better, she had told herself that it was charity—that the Saint was giving money to those who needed it in exchange for a single secret.
Except, it wasn’t, not really—not when the price to be paid was the confessor’s humiliation, their total degradation.
“How do you profit from this?” Leena whispered again, unable to think past all the terror she had witnessed him evoke, over and over.
It all felt pointless. All these phantoms, the young and the old, did not gain any justice leaving the confession room.
She hated to admit to herself that a small part of her had hoped that she could at least find that for them.
“I have never seen even a single coin pass into your hands.”
Finally, Mr. St. Silas put down his pen and turned toward her with irritation. “I wonder, Miss Al-Sayer, what must I do to gain some silence? Should I, do you think, wear gauze over my mouth?”
“No, sir.” This time it was Leena who stood first, giving a stiff curtsey, barely restraining the mumbled, “For that would indeed deprive me of your charm.”
She heard his chair scraping behind her.
“Prepare yourself; this afternoon we are visiting the boarding school that Lord Avon attended.”
Leena could not dismiss the perpetual fear that Lord Avon had long since passed on with no way to call him back, thus entrapping her in this contract forever.
She shook her head, as if that would be enough to dispel her anxious thoughts.
There was still Weavingshaw, she told herself.
Surely more visceral clues as to Lord Avon’s whereabouts would make themselves known there.
Yet, after this, Leena began to have a recurring dream that it was she, and not the Saint of Silence, who had gauze wrapped chokingly over her mouth.