Page 32 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)
“To Wiltshire?” Georgiana felt a tingle run across her skin, a thin electrical vibration. Was this some further connection to Renwick House?
“Mm.” Jem hesitated. He toyed with the spectacles he’d hooked into his open collar, then looked up. “Kitty, I’ve been meaning to ask…” He trailed off and ran a large frustrated hand through his hair.
Cat’s face had gone worried. “What’s wrong? You can tell me, Jem.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I…” He sucked in a breath and plunged on. “Do you know anything about my father?”
Georgiana felt awkward—intrusive, somehow. Should she stand? Go to the kitchen with Pauline? But neither brother nor sister was looking at her, and she did not want to interrupt.
Cat blinked. “Your father? You mean—”
“Yes.” He flicked an anxious glance over Cat’s face.
“It’s only that—you know I read all sorts of things for Mr. Yorke.
Testamentary records and correspondence and…
Well, in any case, a few weeks ago, I read something that mentioned an inheritance.
For the illegitimate son of a duke. In Wiltshire.
” He looked down at his hands. His fingers flexed and released, and the light played over the prominent bones at his wrists.
“And then one day, I heard him speaking to someone in his office. The door was closed, but I could have sworn he mentioned… me.”
“Jemmy,” Cat murmured. Her voice was very soft.
Jem tensed, his shoulders drawing up and in. “I know it sounds ridiculous. Do you think I don’t know that? Of course he would have mentioned me—I’m his clerk. I know. I just—I could not help but wonder…”
Georgiana’s heart clutched in her chest. For all his studious determination, his lanky frame, he was just a boy, wishing desperately for something good to come true.
“I don’t know anything about your father,” Cat said.
“I’m sorry, Jemmy, but it’s true. Your mother never said a word to me about him, and if our”—she stumbled over the word and tried again—“ our father knew, he took it to the grave.” She moistened her lips.
“But Jemmy, a duke’s issue would be known.
Would be named in the will, if there was to be an inheritance.
The way it works in my books isn’t—it isn’t real . ”
Jem broke her gaze and looked hard into the fire. A tendon flexed in his throat. And then he nodded.
Georgiana felt the backs of her own eyes burn as she looked at him. She could see the image of him as a child, his fingers clasped around the toy her father had not let him keep—and overlaid with that, the image of him now, putting away this tiny, close-held fantasy.
“There is a duke,” she heard herself say, “in Wiltshire.”
Cat and Jem turned to her as one.
“There’s no dukedom there, of course,” she said. She could feel heat in her face. Not just from the fire. “But the Duke of Fawkes has a country estate not far from Woodcote. His seat is in the north, but he used to come to Wiltshire every year to hunt with—with my father.”
No one spoke, and Georgiana felt the silence press in on her. Her anxiety, which had settled as the evening had worn on, came back, scraping along her skin.
“I don’t know if there is any connection between yourself and Fawkes,” she said, her voice quiet in the quieter room. “I don’t mean to imply that I do. But it seems to me that it’s not impossible.”
Jem’s gray-green eyes reflected a thousand tangled emotions as he looked at her, and he appeared to hold them all back by force of will. “Thank you, Georgiana.” He rose again and gripped his spectacles in one hand. “It really was very nice to meet you. I’m glad you came for dinner.”
Cat watched him take the stairs two at a time. Her fingers wrapped and then unwrapped themselves in the ribbon at her waist, a small, repeated twist and then release.
“I’m sorry,” Georgiana said. “Perhaps I should not have said anything. I don’t mean to give him false hope, only it was just—”
“No.” Cat relinquished the ribbon and rubbed a hand across the back of her neck.
“No, it’s all right. It’s… very hard to know the right thing to do.
” She laughed, a wry unsteady breath. “When he was ten and our father died, I used to imagine how much easier things would be when he was grown. And I think he”—her voice wobbled—“must have sensed it. He tried so hard to grow up for me. He was so quiet, so polite. I used to wish he would shout, or break a plate, or try to skip a rock in the bath.”
Georgiana reached out and closed her fingers over Cat’s.
Cat took a slow breath and squeezed Georgiana’s hand. “When I tell him hard adult truths, I fear I am stealing his childhood from him. But I do not wish to lie to him either.”
“He seems like a very good person.”
Cat’s laugh was a trifle damp. “He is. He truly is.” She tipped her head to the side and laid it lightly upon Georgiana’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I haven’t—made things worse?” Georgiana regretted the question as soon as it left her mouth—the sheer naked vulnerability of the words—but Cat did not seem to mind.
“Not at all. Things have not been easy between Jem and me lately, and… perhaps you are right. Perhaps there’s no harm in letting him dream. Heaven knows he’s had precious little time for it.”
Georgiana breathed slowly and watched her exhale ruffle Cat’s hair.
Cat was still staring into the fire when she murmured, “Would you do something for me?”
“Of course,” Georgiana said instantly.
Part of her wanted to regret the fervency of her response. But Cat was there beside her, and their fingers were locked together, and Georgiana could smell Cat’s sweet warm scent—apples, pastry, cloves. There was nothing in the world she would not have given Cat in that moment.
Cat tipped her head up so that her breath brushed against the skin of Georgiana’s throat. “Stay the night.”