Page 12 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)
She had made a discovery so shocking that she never remembered it but with the utmost horror.
— from Cat’s private copy of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO by Ann Radcliffe
Cat was still plucking straw from her hair when the cart-driver abandoned her at the end of Renwick House’s gravel driveway. She glanced after him, impressed despite herself at the speed he’d managed to inspire in his pair of elderly donkeys.
She’d taken the mail coach as far as Devizes, and then she’d been forced to secure alternate transportation. It was only ten miles south to Renwick, and she’d assumed it would not be difficult to find someone to bring her to the old estate.
She’d been wrong. The looks she’d received as she’d asked around the bustling market village of Devizes had ranged from skeptical to outright horrified.
No one seemed to believe that Renwick House was open to visitors, and they certainly had not been inclined to take her there.
Eventually she’d been forced to offer enough coin that she probably could have hired a post-chaise from London for the same price, and even then, the man had refused to go in sight of the house.
This, she decided, was not unnerving. It was exhilarating.
Eventually, she gave up on the straw-plucking project and set off down the drive. The house itself was not yet visible, shielded as it was by blackthorn and enormous, moss-covered oaks.
Was it typical, she wondered, for the limbs of the oaks to grow so long and twisted? For the dark, leafless branches to seem to grasp, fingerlike, toward the center of the drive?
Exhilarating, she reminded herself briskly. Inspiring.
And then she came through the trees and confronted Renwick House.
House was an absurd misnomer, one of those aristocratic pretenses at humility that only served to vex rational humans familiar with the general outlines of a house.
It was instead a huge structure, built roughly in the shape of a cross, with delicate stone archways connecting each of its four immense wings.
At the center stood a soaring tower, capped by a marble peak as tall and slender as a birch.
Dainty arched buttresses spilled from the top of the tower to its lower levels, fancifully decorated with spires and crenellations.
It could have been beautiful. It ought to have been beautiful—the building was not so very old, though its architecture followed medieval styles.
But it was falling apart.
The state of the house was a cold shock against Cat’s memories of the place.
She recalled the architecture, the way the building bristled with flourishes, the stone unyielding and yet somehow as delicate as sugar paste.
She remembered the way the marble seemed darker against the ice-gray color of the winter sky.
She remembered the forest, the looming size of the house springing almost out of nowhere as one came around the trees.
But she did not recall the disrepair of the place, which was dire.
Shocking. Vines trailed up the walls and curled through shattered windows.
The timber that had been used in the construction of some of the walls appeared to be melting, although surely that was some illusion of the eye.
The planks had been covered in white—something?
plaster?—that was peeling away in strips, like a snake shedding its skin.
As she watched, a bat emerged from one of the windows and hurled itself into the sky. And then another. And then a whole host of them, dozens and dozens, blackening her view of the clouds.
She blinked several times, and then closed her mouth with a snap.
It was wonderful. It was perfect. If the building did not fall down around her ears and crush her, she was going to write the best Gothic novel England had ever seen.
She made her way toward the front door, which was roughly quadruple her height, an effect that would have been more imposing if it did not feature dozens of mouseholes all along the bottom.
She knocked.
Nothing happened. No sounds emerged from within the house. She waited as patiently as she was able—at least sixty seconds or so—then knocked again.
Still nothing.
Had Yorke been mistaken when he’d told her that the place was outfitted with a housekeeper and a cook? Perhaps the new employees had turned tail and run when they’d been confronted with the state of the place.
She set her teeth, grasped the immense iron handle—shaped, hideously and deliciously, like a skull, its mouth a yawning scream—and pulled.
It was dim inside and smelled of damp, and the walls were lined with emblazoned shields and strange tiny doors.
Unfortunately Cat’s brain failed to properly take in any of those sights, because a blurred white shape darted through the cavernous hall.
Jesus, she thought wildly, and angels and ministers of grace, defend us.
Ghosts. There were ghosts in the house.
She could not decide whether to fling herself backward, sprint away, or whip her notebook out of her traveling bag and scribble down her impressions. She stood paralyzed, dazed and befuddled, until her wits came sluggishly back to life.
Pull yourself together, Catriona, she ordered herself firmly . That is not a ghost. It is a dog.
The white form—still rather blurred—shot in her direction and then launched itself at her skirts. She avoided total collapse by a hair’s breadth, and as she watched, the dog rebounded off her knees, toppled over, rolled vigorously back up to standing, and then began to dash circles around her body.
Its tongue lolled preposterously out of its mouth as it ran, flapping wildly in the breeze created by its own momentum.
She could not help herself. She giggled.
If the sound had a tinge of relieved hysteria to it, well—no one was around to hear it but the dog.
She crouched down to greet the dusty and decidedly corporeal animal, which stood upon its hind legs and attempted to bathe her face. “Hello,” she said, amusement still curled in her voice. “Hello, my darling.”
It fell over once more, evidently through the force of its own delight. The dog’s ears were mismatched, one pointed up and the other flopped rakishly downward, and its eyes were a trifle overlarge.
It was—she discovered as it thrust its head into her palm—exceedingly soft.
“You are a most unexpected resident,” she told it. “Are you the housekeeper, then?”
It responded with increasing vigor and face-licking, and, oh, she loved dogs, loved their warmth and solidity and earnest trust. She gave up on cleanliness entirely, dropped her traveling bag, and let herself collapse completely onto the floor.
She kept up a stream of nonsense and gathered the wiggly little body into her lap. “No, I take it you’re not the housekeeper. A ratcatcher? The cook’s familiar? Perhaps you are a dust mop.”
The dog made no verbal reply—which, honestly, was a relief—and instead melted rather pathetically into her chest.
“Where have you come from?” Cat murmured. “To whom do you belong?”
She was just on the point of standing to investigate her surroundings when a voice emerged from the gloom, diamond sharp and devastatingly familiar.
“Bacon!”
Cat’s head spun. She could not move. She was glued to the floor as solidly as though she were a stalagmite.
She had obviously run mad. First, she’d hallucinated a ghost, and now, her brain was telling her with absolute conviction that somewhere in her immediate vicinity Lady Georgiana Cleeve was shouting about breakfast meats.
“Bacon!” called the voice again. “Where are you? Dash it”—now the prim voice was a sour mutter—“where could you possibly have gone?”
Out of the shadows strode a tall elegant form, and the little dog seized the moment to leap off Cat’s lap and fling itself into the grasp of—indubitably—Lady Georgiana.
“There you are, you silly thing,” Georgiana said, her tone gone velvety with pleasure. “I was so worried.” And then she buried her face in the dog’s grimy white fur and sighed.
No, Cat thought, and only when Georgiana’s head snapped up did she realize she’d said it aloud.
Georgiana’s face performed a rapid transformation from lingering elation to stupefaction.
“No,” Cat heard herself say again. “That is not your dog.”
She refused to admit it. Her Ladyship was made of ice and hauteur.
The Georgiana who had sneered down her nose in Laventille’s office—the Georgiana who had abandoned Cat in the rain at Saint Botolph’s—could not possibly be the same woman who had just happily smashed her face into the fur of a peculiar-looking canine.
Cat’s brain refused to resolve the two pictures. It was not possible.
Georgiana’s expression continued its remarkable metamorphosis. Her teeth clicked closed, and her eyes narrowed. “What—how are—” She wrenched her words to a stop, clutched the animal tighter in her arms, and then demanded, “Are you here to steal my dog?”
The remark was so patently ludicrous that Cat laughed.
To her consternation, Georgiana’s response to this inappropriate burst of amusement was neither continued accusation nor increasing outrage.
Instead, a wash of pink started at the base of her ivory throat and spread slowly and luxuriously all the way up to her hairline.
It was dim inside, but Cat could still see the expansive flush all over Georgiana’s skin, a hot rush that camouflaged the ring of pale freckles around her mouth.
Cat made herself stop looking—it was not sweet, for heaven’s sake, and it certainly wasn’t erotic— and scrambled to her feet. “I am not here to steal your dog.”
“No,” Georgiana said. Her lashes worked rapidly, and she looked everywhere except at Cat’s face. “No, of course not. It is only that…”
“It is only that from the moment you saw me, you could not help but accuse me of crime and skullduggery?”
“No. Well, yes, I suppose, but—” Georgiana paused, visibly composed her face, and then said distinctly, “What are you doing here, Catriona?”