Page 34 of Ladies in Hating
“What?”Now Cat looked utterly dumbstruck. “You do not like bats and you don’t believe in ghosts? Are you not a Gothic novelist?”
“Of course I am. I am a writer of novels. Book-length works offiction.”
“Good Lord. Do your readers know of this—this—” Cat seemed at a loss for words for the first time in their acquaintance. “This trickery? This outrightfraud?”
Her tone was too threaded through with amusement for her remarks to be anything but jest, and so Georgiana said dryly, “The trickery of fiction? Yes, I believe they are aware of it.”
“Shocking,” Cat said. “An absolute scandal. You’re awfully lucky I haven’t a taste for blackmail.”
Georgiana remembered this too—how quick Cat was with banter, how easy with a quip.
Only Georgiana had never shared in it before, back whenthey’d been adolescents at Woodcote. She had never been part of that circle of camaraderie and laughter.
She did not know how to keep it going. She did not know what to say to keep Cat’s face lit with amusement.
Slowly, the warmth in Cat’s expression cooled as Georgiana did not respond. Georgiana could see the recollection as it dawned: that they had been in conflict, that Georgiana had accused Cat of theft.
Their moment of accord vanished like a snuffed flame.
“Never mind,” Cat said, and Georgiana felt a ludicrous swoop of disappointment. “If you do not want the story of the ghost, then I shall make her the primary focus of my research. I will probably be here in the library for the next few days, reading through these family histories. And you’ll—what? Explore the grounds?”
“I plan to. I will—” She hesitated.
“Yes?”
“I’ll let you know if I see anything that cannot be explained by the laws of nature.”
At that, Cat’s smile reappeared, as though it could not be repressed for long—as though it were her most natural state. “Good. Over dinner?”
“Over dinner,” Georgiana repeated, and then left to fetch Bacon from the bookshelf full of birds.
Chapter 11
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 andfartoo 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 Cathad 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.
