Page 14 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)

I have arrived at Renwick House and anticipate an entirely disastrous excruciating uneventful visit.

— from Georgiana Cleeve to her mother, Edith Cleeve

Georgiana had not gone down to dinner. It was not a fit of pique, she told herself firmly. She was not hungry, that was all.

Her stomach had not growled. That had been the dog.

To be perfectly frank—which seemed a reasonable thing to be, in the privacy of one’s own mind—she was afraid to go down to dinner.

She was afraid, devil take it, to face Cat again.

God! She ought to have predicted that the woman would be here. Cat had certainly turned up everywhere else!

How had Cat even heard about the opening of Renwick House? How had she secured entry? Georgiana had heard the news of its opening from her man of business. How had Cat?

Part of her wanted to impute some terrible motivation to Cat’s presence. But Cat had seemed as flabbergasted as she, Georgiana, had felt. And—

Hell. Damn it. Cat had offered to share ideas, to discuss their manuscripts.

No part of that overture made sense if she intended to imitate Georgiana’s work.

And somehow, in the weeks since she’d discovered Lady Darling’s identity, Georgiana’s suspicions had faded—replaced, it seemed, with the hot-and-cold flush of memory.

The last time she’d seen Cat at Woodcote, Georgiana had been walking home from a neighbor’s house with her mother. She’d heard Cat laugh, warm and familiar, and then spotted her dashing through the trees toward the pond, her skirts hiked up and her toes bare in the dirt.

The next day, the old earl had evicted the Lacey family.

There had been no warning, not even a clear motivation.

His unpredictability had been one of the ways he’d terrorized the household—one day he would wave away a spilled inkwell and on another he would scream at a footman whose boot scraped too loudly upon the floor.

That day, he’d shouted. Percy had watched from the stairs, the back of his hand pressed to his mouth, and Georgiana had wondered if their father had hit him there. The earl did not do it often—hit his sons—but the memory of his violence lingered in the air, in the knot at the pit of her belly.

Alistair Cleeve had not even let the Lacey family take their belongings when they’d gone. Two nights later, Georgiana had sneaked into their room and found the things they’d left behind. The scrap of lace that Cat used to tie off her braid. A pair of smooth black stones Cat had collected.

Georgiana had put the stones in her pocket, and their weight had dragged at her skirts. It had taken her years to set them aside. She could have spoken—she could have tried to find the Lacey family in London. She could have done anything at all.

But instead—as she’d done with Selina at Belvoir’s, as she’d done throughout her childhood—she’d hidden in the shadows and let her father ruin those she loved.

Georgiana threw herself to her feet and began to pace the once-luxurious bedchamber. Bacon, who had been engaged in an attempt to tuck his face under his tiny tail, lifted his head to peer curiously at her as she circumnavigated the room.

The chamber was as confounding as the rest of the building.

The rug was silk, heartbreakingly water-stained, a blue strewn with crosses embroidered in gold.

The walls were covered in a damask that had once been a rich purple and was now going lavender-gray.

Every stick of furniture in the room was made of ebony wood, and each piece was carved with a pattern of skulls.

She’d never seen so many skulls in her life! They were on the door pulls, the pillars in the transept, even the friezes that lined the hallways. Had the original architect meant for the house to look like a catacomb?

Actually, the more she considered that notion, the more plausible it seemed.

The enormous room that she’d entered that morning resembled nothing so much as an immense abbey.

Beside the white stone altar stood a statue of Saint Sebastian—pierced, naturally, with arrows all over.

The room—Graves had called it the oratory—was lined with small latticed doors.

When she’d asked Graves where the doors led, Graves had responded, “Hell.”

The mysteries of Renwick House seemed to grow more numerous with every passing moment, and ideas for novels were spiraling through Georgiana’s mind faster than her hand could capture them.

The mansion was a trove of oddities and secrets, and she had explored only three rooms before the catastrophe of Cat’s arrival.

She could not go now. She could not give the place up.

Only—hell. She could see why Cat would not want to leave either. They both wrote in the Gothic tradition. They both described the strange and uncanny. Of course Cat would want to remain, just as much as Georgiana did. They had the same career, the same passions—

She scrubbed her hand across her face and attempted to wipe that last word from her mind.

They had the same interests, rather. They were interested in the macabre and the peculiar, and Renwick House was full to the brim with exactly those things.

She would not order Cat to go—nor even had the power to do it if she wished to.

Perhaps Cat had been right. Perhaps they could… divide up the house in some way.

Perhaps Georgiana could write her a note?

Dear Cat, please do me the favor of remaining in the east and west wings of the house. I will keep to the north and south, as your proximity seems to wreak havoc upon my brain. It has been nine years, and I find myself once again obsessed by your mouth.

She groaned and threw herself onto the bed. The ceiling above her head was also water-stained—that explained the state of the beautiful rug—but water did not currently seem to be extruding from the plaster. She hoped it would not rain.

She squeezed her eyes shut and resolved to stop being such a coward. She would face Cat tomorrow. Tomorrow, they could develop a plan for their respective research that would keep them as far away from one another as was possible whilst living in the same house.

Tomorrow, she would do it. Over breakfast.

Something growled and she thought for a moment that it was her stomach. But—no. Had that been Bacon?

She sat up on the bed.

The little dog had risen on his hind legs, his front paws balanced on the back of the chair. He was staring straight at the damask-covered wall. His fur bristled as she watched, and then he emitted another low, threatening growl.

Georgiana felt cold, suddenly, from her chest to the tips of her fingers. There was nothing there. It was only a blank wall.

Wasn’t it?

She heard a small sound, as of an old house settling, and then a second, in quick staccato time. A double beat, precisely like a heart.

A shudder passed over her, and she moistened her lips. “Bacon?”

He barked, one short sharp warning note. And then he resettled himself on the chair’s cushion, as though his guardian duties had been discharged.

Georgiana stared at the wall for a long moment and attempted to talk some sense into herself. The house was old, and in disrepair, and evidently designed to appear as unnerving as possible.

Ghosts did not exist, and dogs could not sense their presence. There was no need to act the fool any further today.

She made herself resume her recumbent pose in the bed. And then she tried—with less success—to make herself stop thinking about ghosts and Cat and the familiar haunting of her own past.

Georgiana did not see Cat at breakfast, and the disappointment that welled inside her at Cat’s absence was truly, spectacularly horrifying.

She had risen early to practice the way she would phrase her acceptance of the compromise Cat had proposed. She’d shaped her mouth around the syllables and memorized her lines just as she had when she’d been an eighteen-year-old debutante, desperately pretending to be someone she was not.

And then Cat wasn’t even there to bear witness to Georgiana’s monologue!

Of course she was not, Georgiana thought morosely. The woman would vanish when Georgiana was finally prepared.

Graves moved slowly about the breakfast room, which was dominated by a vast table featuring a lacquered pattern of white diamonds on a field of black.

The porcelain shone a bright white against the black table, and might have been impressive had every bowl and plate not featured a webbing of cracks.

Georgiana fetched herself some eggs and poured coffee from a pot on the sideboard.

The eggs were an unappetizing shade of pale brown, except where they were lightly flecked by white shell fragments.

The coffee, unfortunately, was also pale brown, though it did not appear to have been adulterated with milk.

Everything was cold.

“I’m afraid I’m late for breakfast,” Georgiana said to Graves, infusing her voice with the confidential tenor of someone confessing a minor and sympathetic failing.

“Had to take Bacon out this morning and got a trifle lost on the grounds.” At the sound of his name, Bacon raised his head from its position on her slipper and looked hopefully at the breakfast table.

Graves did not turn around. “What makes you think you are late?”

“Ah—” Georgiana looked down at the eggs and grimly loaded her fork. “Nothing at all.” She forced herself not to wince as she delivered the bite into her mouth, crunched unpleasantly, and took a large swallow of—liquid. She could not call it coffee.

“You ought not wander the grounds.”

Georgiana jumped. Somehow Graves had come very close without her noticing, and the woman’s monotone voice was nearly at her ear. “I’m sorry?”

“Especially at night,” Graves said. “Stay in the house.”

“Oh—no. Just in the morning.” She felt almost compelled to apologize. “For the dog, you know.”

“Stay close,” Graves said. Her face evinced no expression whatsoever. “She’s out there.”