Page 16 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)
Unnatural cold drafts.
Dancing lights.
Incident with Bacon.
Ghostly moans?
— from Georgiana’s private journal, page titled “Spectral Phenomena for Cat,” torn out and fed to the fire with a muttered curse
The first disaster was caused by the dog.
Four days into her planned fortnight at Renwick House, Cat paused her reading at the sound of furious barking.
She had become accustomed to the peculiarities of the Renwick library.
The early morning was too misty and far too noisy in the southern half of the room, where the birds nested—generally, she spent the early mornings in her bedchamber with chocolate and a stack of books she’d borrowed the day before.
(The chocolate had come from the village. Nothing at all edible had emerged thus far from the kitchens at Renwick, and Cat had taken a perverse pleasure in watching Lady Georgiana attempt to choke down the nightly horrors of their dinners.)
In the late morning, though, the birds settled and Cat resumed her place in the library, curled in her favorite chair. It was bizarre to have so much time to read and write; she kept thinking she’d forgotten to turn up at the pie shop.
Bizarre—but wonderful too. She had never in her life had such freedom to pursue the solitary pleasures of the mind.
Even when she’d been at Woodcote and had access to that enormous library, she’d kept away except for very late at night, when no one was likely to notice the butler’s daughter stealing in to borrow a book or read in a shadowed corner.
But because Cat was still herself, she found she was also inclined to talk.
She wrote daily to Jem and Pauline and tried to keep her tendency to fret out of her letters.
Jem wrote back exactly as often as one might expect from one’s fifteen-year-old younger brother—which was to say, never—but Pauline had already written once, a long, cheerful, newsy letter that smelled faintly of starch.
Outside of her correspondence, Cat tracked down Graves to discuss the history of the Renwick ghost. Graves’s reticence on the subject had led Cat to Devizes, where she’d made conversation with a dozen equally unforthcoming villagers.
She’d also attempted to speak with Mort, the Renwick cook, but had been foiled by the fact that he appeared to be invisible. Graves refused to speak of him too.
In the end, Lady Georgiana had ended up the recipient of much of Cat’s chatter as she pieced together the stories that she’d uncovered about the ghost. It was a woman—of that there was no doubt—but even with the family Bible and the account books she’d found in the master’s office, Cat had not been able to pin down which tragic figure of the house’s history the ghost might be.
She’d detailed her theories at length, aloud, over something pale green that might have been celery, and, to her surprise, Georgiana had stiffly proffered some suggestions for Cat’s continued research.
She was in the process of enacting one of Georgiana’s ideas—cross-referencing the parish records with the family Bible for discrepancies—when she heard the sound of Bacon’s agitated barking.
She lowered the register to her lap and lifted her head, waiting to see if Georgiana would soothe the dog, but—
The barking went on and on, increasing in volume and pitch, and there was not a single corpuscle of Cat’s being that would remain quiescent when an animal was in distress. She stood, dusted bird fluff and other undesirable things from her skirts, and headed out in the direction of the barking.
The sound seemed to stretch oddly in the corridor, and she walked briskly farther and farther into the bowels of the house. The barking seemed to get softer and then louder again without obvious explanation, and Cat looked helplessly over her shoulder as she quickened her pace.
There was no one there. The halls looked the same as they always did—water-stained, papered in crimson silk, a black vine here and there curling down where the ceiling abutted the wall.
By the time she reached the source of Bacon’s excited sounds, she had half run all the way to the oratory, a fact which did not make any sort of sense. She ought not have been able to hear the dog all the way in the library.
She did not have time to puzzle out the mystery of the traveling bark, however, as the dog’s noises were now clearly in chorus with the exasperated mumbles of his mistress.
Cat squinted around the wide dim space—none of the silver candelabra were lit, as usual—and had to peer past the stone altar and Saint Sebastian statue in order to locate the woman and the dog.
When she finally identified them, she squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. But—no. No change. She was not imagining the sight.
The walls of the oratory were studded with shields bearing colorful crests. Alternating between the shields were perhaps ten small doors, each roughly waist-high. The doors were black, and the lattice-work that crisscrossed the front of each door appeared to be made out of bones.
Carved to look like bones, rather. Cat was fairly certain they were not real bones.
More startling than the lattice bones, however, was the fact that one of the doors stood open, and a pair of lavender striped boots stuck haphazardly out of the opening.
“Bacon!” Georgiana’s exasperated voice emerged from somewhere northward of the boots. “Bacon, dash it, come here!”
The dog barked again, and Cat could not mistake the gleeful tone in his vocalization.
“Bacon, you utter menace, leave that alone!” Georgiana’s voice pitched in the direction of wail.
Cat felt her mouth curling up as she approached Georgiana, and even Her Ladyship’s ridiculous boots—honestly, lavender, how long could they possibly last in that color—could not quash her amusement. “Lose your fellow again?”
Georgiana jerked in surprise, and Cat winced as she appeared to thump her head against whatever was inside the passageway.
“No,” Georgiana said, as if by reflex.
“You haven’t? Just having a look inside then? How is it in there?”
“Stygian,” Georgiana said grimly. “And—yes, dash it. Bacon was chasing a bat, of all things, and it went in here. I think—I very much fear that this is where they roost.”
“Oh.” Cat devoted a single moment to pondering Georgiana’s current position deep inside a tunnel of bats and then decided she preferred never to think about such a thing again. “I see. And now he will not emerge?”
“No.” Georgiana said it stiffly—she said most things to Cat stiffly—but for once it seemed clear that her stiffness was only a mask for her discomfort.
“Have you tried, er, backing out of the tunnel and calling to him?”
“Of course I have! That was the first thing I tried, and the second too, and then I decided to get closer and lure him out, and then I tried to catch him, and—well. And now I am here.”
The gentle waving of Georgiana’s ankles took on a sudden clarity. “Are you… stuck?”
Georgiana’s voice went even more cool and formal, as though she were addressing the king. “I am not stuck. It is only that it is very dark, and my sleeve seems to have become fastened upon something, and I have not yet been able to work it free.”
“So you are stuck?”
There was a long, strained silence. And then Georgiana’s voice came again from the depths as though through gritted teeth. “Evidently.”
Cat bit her lip to clamp down on the laugh that wanted to bubble up. Ah God, there was something terribly endearing about this woman—about the contrast between her formality and the sheer absurd protectiveness she directed toward her little dog.
Cat ought not be endeared by Lady Georgiana Cleeve, but—she was. She could not help herself.
“Shall I tug upon your ankle?” she offered. Honestly, her voice had a note of mirth in it that she really should suppress.
“I would rather die.”
“Depending upon how long you stay in there, you could perhaps arrange it.”
“I don’t—” Georgiana’s protest trailed off into something muttered and incoherent. “Never mind. If you would not mind fetching something edible, I wonder if we might lure Bacon out.”
Cat took this under advisement, then crouched and whistled, soft and low, the way her father had always whistled to the hounds back at Woodcote. “Come on,” she murmured, then whistled again. “Come along, pretty boy.”
Bacon barked again, and Georgiana wriggled to the side, and then the little white form shot out from the depths of the passageway and launched himself enthusiastically at Cat.
She caught him, wincing at the state of his fur—then recalled her adventures in the library with the birds and hugged him to her chest instead. “Naughty thing,” she said. “Great terrible lad.” She raised her voice. “I’ve got him now. I shan’t let him go back in.”
“Wonderful.” Georgiana sounded as though the words were being torn from her mouth against her will. “Thank you.”
“Ever at your service.” She said it in her roundest tones, just to aggravate the woman, but was denied the treat of Georgiana’s response, due to the fact that Her Ladyship’s upper body was still ensconced in a tunnel.
“Perhaps,” Georgiana said, “you might take Bacon to my chamber. It is… across from yours. So I understand.”
Cat blinked. “Do you not want to take him yourself?”
“I shall reunite with him there,” Georgiana said, her voice brittle.
Cat crouched again, still clutching the dog, and tried to peer into the depths. “Are you really that entangled? I was only jesting about tugging on your ankle. Shall I wriggle in beside you?”
“Please,” Georgiana croaked, “don’t.”
Cat sat back on her heels. “All right. But I’m not going to abandon you here, whatever you think of me.”
“I don’t—it’s not—” Georgiana swore once, and Cat felt her eyebrows climb toward her hairline at the sound of the oath in those cut-glass tones. There was something almost—
No. No. It was not erotic. She wished she could stop thinking that particular word in the context of Lady Georgiana.
Georgiana chose that moment to yank herself free from whatever had been trapping her in the tunnel, to the tune of the noisy tearing of expensive fabric. Cat hastily scrambled backward, Bacon cuddled to her chest, as Georgiana emerged from the doorway.
She was panting. Her throat was flushed pink, and her hair was falling down all over her face.
Her right sleeve was a tangled mass of shredded fabric and loose threads, mostly detached from the rest of her frock.
She had a brilliant red scrape up the side of her right arm, which drew the eye inexorably up to her pale bare shoulder, past the bows hanging drunkenly off the side of her bodice, and down again to the outer curve of her breast, delicately grazed by her silk chemise.
Cat swallowed. She was staring, she knew she was—only she had never seen Georgiana like this. Disheveled. Almost… touchable.
She liked it. Her blood felt hot. She wanted to move closer, wanted to press her advantage. Wanted to see Georgiana come the rest of the way undone.
Bacon squirmed in her arms, and reality hit her like a cricket bat. “God,” she said, and her voice was lower than she meant. “You’re hurt—”
Georgiana was already in motion, flinging closed the latticed door and finding the femur-shaped bar that secured it. “I’m fine. There. You can put him down. He can’t get back in now. I can’t imagine how he got in there in the first place. The door was—I thought they were all barred—I—”
Cat had never heard Georgiana babble before. “You’re hurt,” she said again. “I can help you, if you like.”
She felt hot and unsettled, and though she’d meant her offer of help sincerely—
It was not all altruism. There was some part of Cat’s mind that had snagged on the image of her own hand on Georgiana’s arm. Of how she might caress that ivory skin with her thumb. And then with her mouth.
And so when Georgiana plucked the dog from her grasp and said stiffly, “I can take care of it myself,” Cat felt a wash of relief.
At least, she told herself she felt so.
She told herself she was grateful for how Georgiana had pulled away, as she lay in bed that night and thought of Georgiana’s parted lips. The way the silk had fallen against her body. The spiky amber scent of Georgiana’s skin.
She tried very hard to mean it.