When the conversation settled for a moment, Mina looked across the table at Alice, another of the Seymour daughters who only came home on Sundays. Alice was a housemaid up in Mayfair and frequently brought home stories that the other servants told, circulating the tales in a web of gossip that reached from one great house to another.

Someone like Lord MacAlasdair would certainly have servants.

“There was a gentleman throwing his weight around in the office the other day,” Mina began, “and I was wondering if you’d heard anything about him. MacAlasdair?”

Alice put down her fork and considered the question. Only for a moment, though. Then she grinned, and her green eyes lit up with the joy of knowing Something Interesting. “The Scottish bloke? New?”

“I don’t know how new. But Scottish, yes.”

“Well, if he’s the same one, he took a house in Mayfair a month ago. Came with just a valet and a housekeeper.” Alice leaned forward. “And do you know what?”

Mina grinned back at her sister. “Yes,” she said, as she’d been saying on these occasions for twenty-three years, ever since she’d started talking well enough to tease her sister, “which is why I asked you. I love hearing answers I already know.”

Alice stuck out her tongue and went on. Around them, the family was listening. Gossip from the city was always interesting.

“Ethel”—another of Lady Wrentham’s housemaids—“walks out with a policeman who knows the cook at MacAlasdair’s.”

“I thought he didn’t have a cook,” said Bert.

“He’d have hired one after he came, wouldn’t he?” Florrie shot back, leaning across Mina to do so. “Stupid.”

“I’m not—” Bert was beginning to raise his voice when a glance from Mr. Seymour stopped the incipient fight. Mina, whose best dress would have been much the worse for intercepting flung peas, sent her father a grateful smile.

“Go on, Alice,” said Mrs. Seymour. “Does he still need servants? Your Aunt Rose knows a girl who’s looking for a place in a kitchen.”

Alice shook her head. “No. Well, maybe. He has already hired maids, though, and”—a significant pause—“Mrs. Hennings, the cook, she says he gives all of them two hours off every night!”

Few Drury Lane actresses could have given a statement more dramatic flair than Alice did with her announcement, and the Seymours, at least, were an appreciative audience. Even Bert, who knew little of domestic service but had heard stories from his sister, whistled—and got a glare from his mother for it.

“Any two hours?” Mrs. Seymour asked, her son’s table manners safely corrected.

“No, just at dusk.” Alice lowered her voice again. “He doesn’t want any of them in the house then. Only he lets Mrs. Hennings stay in the kitchen, as she’s got rheumatism, and any who want can stay there with her. But they’re not to go into the house proper.”

“I bet he’s got a mad wife,” said Florrie, who had been spending her pocket money on penny dreadfuls lately. “And he has to take her out sometimes to…to feed her, I guess, or let her walk around the place, and he can’t let anyone else be around or she’ll tear them to shreds.”

“That’s silly,” said Bert. “Why wouldn’t he just keep her in the attic? Or tie her up?”

“Because…” Florrie hesitated, buttered a roll, and then saw a way out of the problem. “Because he’s still passionately in love with her. Even though she’s mad. And he wants to be kind to her.”

“He didn’t seem the sort to be madly in love with anybody,” said Mina, remembering being called Cerberus and MacAlasdair’s demand that she stop being ridiculous. “And he certainly didn’t seem very kind.”

“His maids probably don’t agree with you there, my girl,” said Mr. Seymour, chuckling. “Still, he sounds like a strange sort.”

“That’s for certain,” Mina said. “Alice, could you talk to Ethel for me? I think I’d like to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Hennings when she has a moment.”

Two

Contrary to all general wisdom about cooks, Mrs. Hennings was neither short nor stout nor elderly, but rather a tall woman of handsome middle age, with the sort of black eyes that novels inevitably called “flashing” and glossy black hair that made Mina touch her own brown curls with envy. Her own figure was undoubtedly voluptuous, but that was as close as she came to the stereotype.

The kitchen of MacAlasdair’s house was far more conventional than the cook. It included a black stove like a mountain of ironwork, shelves of stoppered jars, racks of pots and pans, and smoke-stained walls ascending toward rafters that Mina could barely see. Even though it was only dusk, the stars not yet out, the shadows were deep in the corners of the room. Sitting at the long oak table in the center of the room, she felt dwarfed and mouse-like.

Tea helped. She added three lumps of sugar to her cup, stirred, and sipped.

“You haven’t been here long, Alice says,” she began.

“Well, not here,” said Mrs. Hennings, gesturing around the room. The light caught a gold ring on her hand. Mrs. was more than a courtesy title, then, at least for her. “I’ve been in London for some years now. Worked at Bailey’s before his lordship hired me.”

“The hotel?” Mina grinned. “When I was small, we used to watch the people going in, some nights. My brother and sister and I. Saw all kinds of lords and ladies. George used to swear he spotted a sultan or a rajah or the like once, but Alice and I never credited it.”

Mrs. Hennings joined Mina in laughing. The atmosphere in the room lightened a little, although when Mina glanced toward the corner of the room, the shadows seemed even deeper.

Well, it was getting on toward night.

“He might have been telling the truth, at that,” said Mrs. Hennings. “We had a few.” She set down her teacup. “But that isn’t why you wanted to talk to me.”

“No,” Mina said. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me something about his lordship. What kind of a man he is.”

Mrs. Hennings’s eyebrows lifted. “I see,” she said. “Made you an offer, has he?”

“Lord, no!” Mina’s face burned. The topic was embarrassing enough, but a sudden, treacherous memory of MacAlasdair’s powerful body leaning over her desk suggested that such an offer might have its attractions.

She couldn’t meet Mrs. Hennings’s eyes for a moment. She looked off into the corner again, and this time she thought she saw something move.

Well, rats showed up in the best-kept kitchens, Mina had heard. She didn’t want to call anything of the kind to the cook’s attention, though.

“He’s…he came to visit my employer the other day,” she said, “and he seemed cross. I was hoping to find out—”

She hesitated, caught between several choices of phrase. “Whether he’s actually a murderer” was almost certainly too blunt. “What exactly is wrong with the man” probably was too. And she didn’t want to bring Moore into it unless she had to.

More movement caught her eye. That was a large rat, if it actually was a rat. A cat, maybe? If so, Mina was surprised it wasn’t under the table begging. In her experience of cats, their reaction to food was almost universal.

“Hoping to find out if there’s anything I can do to help things go more smoothly,” she finished belatedly.

“That would depend on what ‘things’ are, wouldn’t it?”

“I wish I knew,” said Mina.

Mrs. Hennings smiled quickly, which might have been either sympathy or a rebuff. “His lordship’s a private creature, I fear. Certainly doesn’t confide in me, at least not about anything other than a fondness for lemon tart.”

“But he’s a pleasant enough man, generally? Not angry or demanding?”

“Pleasant enough from what I’ve seen. If he does cut up rough with anyone, it’s not been me, nor any of the maids. I’d have known, believe me.” Mrs. Hennings rolled her eyes.

Mina smiled, remembering some of Alice’s stories of hysterics in the scullery. “Speaking of maids,” she said, “I suppose they’re all out at the moment? I’ve heard his lordship’s generous that way.”

“The night’s too pretty to be inside, if you’ve a choice in the matter.” Mrs. Hennings made a wry face and patted her left knee. “I broke this as a girl, and it’s never been quite right since, so I’m as happy to sit down at the end of the evening. As long as—what the bleeding hell?”

Her gaze had suddenly focused on something over Mina’s shoulder, something that had drained the blood from her face. Mina whipped her head around to look.

There was a man stepping out of the shadows.

No, not a man.

Not entirely.

It was nothing but shadow and silhouette, something that didn’t quite look human. It stepped unerringly toward them, moving with a slowness that was more frightening than speed.

It had no need to hurry.

She should scream, Mina thought. Maybe it would bring help, though she couldn’t imagine what sort of help would be effective against a…ghost? Spirit? It didn’t look solid. Still, she should scream and run. But her throat was locked tight, her legs numb.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.

Movement, at the corner of her vision.

Mina turned her head, so slowly she thought she could feel each muscle working individually. There was another one of the shadows, stepping toward her from the other corner of the room.

Pain shot through Mina’s arm, not intense but sudden and sharp enough to break through her paralysis. She looked down for a second and saw Mrs. Hennings’s hand just above her elbow, the other woman’s nails digging in through layers of cloth.

Then they were both on their feet, Mina’s chair clattering to the ground behind her. She grabbed the half-full teapot and hurled it at the closer of the two shadow-men. She was beyond surprise or dismay when she saw it go through the shadow and smash against the floor. Tea spread out, a dark pool against the polished stone.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” Mrs. Hennings recited too high and too fast as both women backed away from the figures approaching them. “I shall not want. He—”

Unimpressed, a shadow flicked one whip-arm out toward her. She shrieked as it curled around her knee, or maybe Mina shrieked, or perhaps they both did. Mina lunged toward the cook, grabbing for one of her arms, even as the shadow-man tugged forward. Mrs. Hennings fell hard. Her head made a noise like a cracking egg when it hit the stone floor, and she stopped struggling.

Oh God.

The shadow-man paused for a second. Its head turned toward the cook’s still form. Then it seemed to shrug, and the tentacle withdrew. As if Mrs. Hennings had never been there, the figure and its companion continued their advance—this time toward Mina alone.

Oh God.

The shadows were between her and the door to the outside. The windows were too small and too high to crawl through. Mina fumbled behind her, found the doorknob, and yanked open the door that led to the rest of MacAlasdair’s house.

She ran, darting around tables and through doors and not really knowing where she was headed, holding on to enough self-possession not to flee upstairs but to try and find a way out of the house, hoping that the spirits wouldn’t follow her even then.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.

One of the shadows had gotten close enough, a room or twelve back, that the tip of its “arm” had brushed Mina’s ankle as she fled. Pain and numbness had run up from the spot almost instantly, as if she’d fallen hard on the leg. She tried to ignore it now.

She wondered if Mrs. Hennings was dead. If so, she suspected it was a better fate than Mina would have. Whatever the shadows intended, a broken skull would probably be kind in comparison. Moore had been beaten, the papers had said, with a large object. Maybe the shadows didn’t need an object; maybe they just needed to touch a human body for long enough.

She had no strength left for either panic or sorrow at that thought. It just was, like one more table to veer around.

Another room. This one had light coming from under the door. Not normal light: a strange, wavering reddish glow, as if someone inside was messing about with Chinese lanterns. Was there someone inside?

She sprinted for the door anyhow. Maybe anything that strange would be able to take care of the shadows chasing her. If not, it was still a door, and it was still ahead of her. She reached out and grabbed the doorknob.

It didn’t turn. Mina twisted frantically at it, with one hand and then two, and nothing happened.