“No old people, either. And if we assume these are intentional misdirections…”

“We should be looking for what’s not there, rather than what is!”

Sam rifled through his stack of research, pulling out the large family tree he’d copied out and unrolling it on the table. “If we’re looking for people in the upper class, it’s most likely a member of the family. Someone who died either when they were, let’s say, younger than eighteen or older than sixty.”

Alva came around to his side, standing next to him, her arm brushing his. “There are a lot of people who lived long lives here,” she said. “It looks like making it into one’s sixties or seventies isn’t so unusual for the de Boers.”

“Most of these people I’ve already looked into, though,” he replied. “It’s somebody who didn’t seem important on a first pass—someone who doesn’t show up in the news articles, for good or ill, whose death at least wasn’t recorded as violent—there. Mary de Boer, 1775–1838. That roughly aligns with when the hauntings started. Or there was one who killed himself in his late fifties … but that would have been after the stories started. Maybe Edward de Boer; he died in 1831 at the age of seventeen. No cause of death mentioned. These are from the family Bible, so they aren’t very complete.”

“I heard about the suicide,” Alva said, picking up the top book. “But that wasn’t even very long ago. No more than fifteen or twenty years. This is the book Henry got from the reading room.”

Sam looked over. “After all that, I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet,” he said. “See if she says anything on the de Boers. And do you think there’s any chance of some food?”

She snorted as she sat back down, flipping the book open. “I’m quite certain if you asked Cook for some you’d make her entire year,” she said.

“I wish your staff would talk to my housemaid,” he said, walking towards the door. “She won’t even bring me a cup of tea if Henry’s not around.”

After procuring a satisfyingly heavy tray from the kitchen—he was willing to bet Alva hadn’t eaten at all that day, and he wanted to be sure he could tempt her—he walked back to the dining room, thinking about what she had told him. Alva’s story, and all the other, unspoken stories living between the words, thrummed against the back of his mind in a constant rhythm. The bleak look on her face, the dispassionate tone of her voice as she related horrors to him, clung like spider webbing to his heart.