Page 2 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)

With exceeding slowness, Alba Blanche unfolded the letter. Her gaze fell upon the words, written in ink and engraved forevermore upon her heart: To my daughter, Alba Margherita Blanche Estelle …

— from the manuscript for MORNINGSTAR, extensively revised by the author

As she hid in the shelter of a potted shrub behind Belvoir’s Library just before dawn, Georgiana wondered if she had—perhaps—tipped over the edge into rashness.

Iris Duggleby, her friend and unexpected co-conspirator, pulled her cloak more firmly around herself. It was November, and dark, and unpleasantly cold. Iris’s nose, just visible from beneath her hood, was the color of garden rhubarb.

“Do you know,” Iris said to the alley at large, “we could be in our beds right now.”

“Yes.”

“Underneath the covers. Where it is warm.”

Georgiana bit her lip. “I know this may seem a bit untoward.”

Iris tucked her hands into her armpits to warm them. “I like untoward. This is bordering on outlandish. Remind me why we are here at this hour?”

“You did not need to accompany me. I told you, I—”

Iris waved a hand, winced, then stuck it back beneath her arm. “Yes, yes. You told me. I heard you. And yet here I am.”

Georgiana felt a stab of guilt at Iris’s visible shivers, at her very presence in the alley.

She had not intentionally brought her blunt, abstracted friend into the project of ascertaining Lady Darling’s identity.

Iris was an antiquities scholar. While she possessed a marked facility for languages and considerable knowledge of Etruscan coins—Georgiana thought it was coins, though it might have been urns or maybe bowls—she was not particularly well-versed in the realm of scandalous novels.

But Iris was a friend of long standing. Though her continued association with Georgiana after the revelation of Georgiana’s novels had meant the loss of many social invitations—and likely some potential suitors—Iris had been stubbornly determined to keep up her friendship with Georgiana anyway.

Spinsters, she’d said blithely, have the freedom to do as we like.

And when Georgiana had outlined her ridiculous plan for how to unmask her rival, Iris had blinked, nodded, and then insisted upon joining her.

“I have spent the last fortnight trying to identify this Darling woman,” Georgiana began.

“This darling woman? I thought you did not like her.”

“What? No, I meant—” Georgiana’s words strangled themselves slightly in her throat, and she coughed and tried again. “It is her nom de plume.”

“This darling woman?”

“No—for heaven’s sake, Iris. Her pseudonym is Lady Darling. I am confident I have mentioned it before.”

“Have you?”

She was positive she had. She’d read The Bride of Ottaviano in the intervening fortnight and had discovered several more infuriating, inexplicable parallels, all of which she had related to Iris.

The last time they’d been at Belvoir’s together, Georgiana was fairly certain she’d wielded the novel like a cudgel.

“Of course I have. I—No. Never mind. It does not signify. What I am trying to say is that I have spent the last two weeks trying to track down this Lady Darling —”

“That is the most unlikely name.”

“I said the exact same thing! I—” She paused. “Are you doing this on purpose? To rile me?”

Iris’s face was very blank and very innocent. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m quite certain you’ve only mentioned Lady Darling once or twice to me before.”

“I’m not—”

“Once or twice an hour. ”

It dawned on Georgiana, rather belatedly, that Iris was teasing her. She straightened the seams of her gloves and tried to pretend she was not blushing. As she did, she looked again down the shadowed alley behind Belvoir’s where she and Iris had stationed themselves.

Georgiana’s own foray into scandalous novels had begun a decade ago.

At the time, her late father’s attentions had focused primarily upon her two older brothers.

Georgiana had wanted it that way—it was preferable by far for the earl’s gaze not to linger too long upon one.

But when she’d turned fifteen, her father had begun to talk about Georgiana’s launch into society: the debut that would lead to her marriage and make her someone else’s burden to bear.

And for perhaps the first time in her life, Georgiana had revolted.

Her rebellion, as was her wont, had been executed very quietly and with as much secrecy as possible.

Tucked away in her bedchamber, she had written six novels and then sold them all, for a sum that had seemed astounding at the time, and had turned out to be barely enough.

She would not be handed off like a possession. She would not let her personhood become subsumed by a man’s, all control of her own future denied to her. She would not do it .

But when the time had come for her to make her debut, she had not yet saved quite enough money to declare her independence.

Instead, forced in front of the ton , she’d playacted the empty-headed fool so no one would ever suspect her secret.

It had been then that she’d discovered her talent for creating characters went beyond the page.

She had a knack for voices and accents; she had spent so long watching from the margins that she could take on another person’s mannerisms with the same ease that she changed her frock.

She had disguised herself as a charwoman when she had brought her manuscripts to Jean Laventille to print.

When she’d researched incarceration for Septimus’s Tower, she’d convincingly played the role of newspaper journalist. And when she’d visited half a dozen family tombs in Derbyshire to write The Mesmerist, she’d adopted the guise of a fresh-faced country lass in search of the dastardly fellow who had abandoned her mother.

In her attempt to unmask Lady Darling, she’d been forced to resurrect her talent for disguise.

She’d turned up incognito at Lady Darling’s own publisher, and the bank Belvoir’s used, and the newspaper that had most recently reviewed The Bride of Ottaviano —but all to no avail.

The secret of the novelist’s identity was closely guarded.

A fact which Georgiana would be more sympathetic to if Lady Darling did not represent a threat to her career, her independence, and the continued security of her own blasted mother.

She’d finally made some progress when she struck up a conversation about Lady Darling with Belvoir’s assistant gardener.

The boy—no more than eighteen—had seemed rather transfixed by Georgiana’s countenance.

She was just starting to feel guilty about ensorcelling the poor lad when his gaze had dropped to her extremely modest bosom and his face had fallen.

She’d smiled even more resplendently then, done dramatic and unforgivable things with her eyelashes, and promptly scraped every morsel of information she could from the boy upon the subject of Lady Darling.

After some dithering, he’d informed her that on the first Saturday of each month, someone appeared at the library’s back door to fetch the novelist’s correspondence. At dawn.

Georgiana’s commitment to the project was such that she now awaited both the sun and the mysterious caller deep within the predawn back alley.

It might be a maidservant or a woman of business, of course. But then again— dawn . It was a peculiar time to visit a library, to be sure.

Beside her, Iris’s teeth had begun to chatter. “Are you entirely certain this is n-necessary?”

Georgiana quashed another flare of guilt. “I’m not certain at all. I told you when you first asked that I could handle this situation alone. You do not need to be here.”

“N-not my accompaniment, you ninny. I should certainly like to witness the great unmasking. I meant all this sneaking about in the shadows. Could you not send her a note? Or have your publisher send her a note?”

“No,” Georgiana said again. “I don’t need…”

She hesitated. It would sound foolish, she knew, how ferociously she clung to her independence.

But she could not reason her way out of her feelings. She had brought others into her secrets before and had hurt them through her cowardice. She would not do so again.

“I have to do it myself,” she said finally. “I want to speak to her directly. I—”

There was a hint of movement in the shadows at the end of the alley, and Georgiana’s whole body came to attention in an instant.

“Shh,” she whispered. “There she is.”

She pulled Iris back to the relative seclusion of a relocated potted shrub—a small piece of assistance from the obliging gardener—and waited as the cloaked figure crept cautiously down the alley toward them.

In the gray suggestion of dawn, Georgiana could discern very little about the person, whose hood was pulled down low.

It did seem to be a woman, based on the generous shape of her figure beneath her cloak. But her face was utterly obscured.

As they watched, the woman came to the back door of Belvoir’s and knocked softly, a little one-two-one pattern. The door came open immediately.

Iris nudged Georgiana with a surprisingly sharp elbow. “Ought you—” she whispered.

Georgiana shushed her friend with a finger to her lips and a quick jerk of her head. Wait.

Was it Lady Darling? Or merely an associate of hers?

Georgiana did not know. If they revealed themselves too soon, the woman might deny everything.

But if they could make out her conversation—hear how the person at the door addressed her— perhaps they might have tangible evidence with which to confront her.

Unfortunately, over the next several minutes, no revelations presented themselves.

Though the woman had lowered her hood, she’d turned her back on Georgiana and Iris in the shrubbery.

The brief conversation between the unknown woman and the Belvoir’s employee was held in whispers low enough that Georgiana could not make out any intelligible phrases.

As she watched the mysterious visitor converse with whomever was inside the library, the first few discernible rays of wintry sun illuminated the alley.

The woman’s cloak wasn’t black—it was more of a worn, well-washed gray.

The hem, Georgiana could see, had been picked and rerolled to repair it; it was just slightly too short.

Perhaps this wasn’t Lady Darling. Surely Lady Darling would have enough money from the sales of her gallingly excellent books to afford a new cloak.

The door closed. Her conversation seemingly finished, the woman stepped back. She raised her hands to draw her hood over her hair, but just before she did, the light shifted, and a sunbeam caught upon her face.

Georgiana froze.

The woman’s hair was dark. Her mouth was a decadent curve, as red as wine and twice as intoxicating. Her nose was long and her chin was sharp, and Georgiana knew that if she were close enough to see, the woman’s eyes would be deep enough to drown in.

If she smiled, her face would light the alley. Georgiana remembered.

The woman secured her hood and turned her back to them again. Her hips swayed as she walked away—her figure had changed, she had changed. God, somehow she was even more now, more extravagant, more irresistible—

“Georgie,” Iris whispered. “If you want to go, go now, or else she’s going to get away!”

Georgiana realized she had stopped breathing. She sucked in a frantic gulp of air and plastered herself against the wall, deeper into the shadows. “No,” she gasped. “No, never mind. I’ve made a mistake.”

“What on earth—are you all right?”

Iris’s voice was low, just above a breath, but somehow, it did not matter.

Somehow, the woman heard.

She spun toward them. Her hood fell back, revealing that mobile face, that opulent mouth. “Who’s there?”

Georgiana did not move. She could not. Her legs were blocks of ice. Her throat had closed.

Catriona Rose Lacey—for it was she, there was no doubt of it, even from a distance of five feet and nine years—shoved her hand into her reticule. “Reveal yourself! I have a pistol, and I’m not afraid to use it.”