Page 37 of Ladies in Hating
She tried very hard to mean it.
Chapter 12
Georgie, darling, please find enclosed the instructions you requested on removing manure stains from wool. I wonder at your use of the word “uneventful.”
—from Edith Cleeve to her daughter
The second disaster, as it turned out, was also caused by the dog.
Georgiana had more or less rebounded from the bat incident—her pride, at least, had made some recovery, though her favorite green dress was going to require several sets of hands and possibly some powerful solvents—when Bacon dragged her bodily into a part of Renwick House that she had not yet explored.
Her writing had been going well since their arrival at the estate. She had roughed out a general outline before she and Bacon had departed London, and her exploration of Renwick—particularly the parts that seemed most in danger of crumbling to the ground—had proven excellent fodder for the rest. She had thought to spend her afternoons closeted in her bedchamber and engrossed in her manuscript, only—
Well. She did not believe in ghosts. But Bacon kept barking at the empty spot on the wall, and every time she bent over her papers, she felt an odd warmth between her shoulder blades, and—
The bedchamber had not proven an auspicious place for writing, that was all.
Cat was utterly unpredictable in her schedule—she’d acquiesced to the suggestion of shifts in the library quite readily and then promptly ignored their agreed-upon times—and so Georgiana had been forced to find various out-of-the-way places to write in order to hide from her.
And she was. Hiding. It was hopeless to pretend otherwise.
Over dinner, Cat talked as cheerfully as though they had never been rivals—as though Georgiana had not accused her of all manner of crimes. She described her research, her ghostly candidates from Renwick history, her visits to the village. She seemed to think they were friends now—her good humor, it seemed, could not be so easily stamped out.
They werenotfriends. Georgiana had several close female friends, and she did not spend her nights imagining them with their clothes off.
Her avoidance of Cat was made impossible, however, by Bacon’s discovery of the rose garden.
In the progress of her research, Georgiana had wandered down as far as she could in the east wing, which devolved into timber and rubble instead of papered walls at that end of the house. It was morning, and Bacon ought not have needed to go out again so soon—but the moment he espied a patch of sunlight where part of the roof had collapsed, he made happy canine sounds and frolicked in the direction of the outdoors.
She followed hastily behind him. The rubble looked old andundisturbed; the rest of the roof did not seem in imminent danger. But she could not bring herself to feel entirely sanguine about the situation.
“Bacon,” she hissed, “come back. We can go out the south wing, where it’s safe.”
He didn’t listen, of course. He flicked a happy tongue-out glance in her direction, displayed a distinct lack of gratitude for her repeated efforts on his behalf, and plunged through a crevice in the exterior east wall.
Whereupon he vanished into the outdoors.
“Bloody hell,” she whispered. “Bacon!”
The gap between the timbers in the wall was small, but not too small for her to squeeze through to go after him. She popped through the narrow space in a puff of crumbled glue and plaster dust and emerged, blinking, into… into…
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she peered around the sun-dazzled space.
The wall did not open into the forest around Renwick, as she’d expected. Instead, her plunge through the gap had landed her in an enclosed courtyard, open to the sky and terraced in a dizzying pattern of black and white. Its vine-covered walls topped her head, and everywhere she looked she saw roses. Tiny ones, pale as apple blossoms; huge extravagant pink blooms, all dissipated and lavish; roses she could hold in the palm of her hand, darker than blood.
It was December. There should not be roses in December.
But there they were, thousands of them, from tight buds to blooms blown wide. She could smell them, a honeyed scent that went to her head like wine.
Bacon had capsized beneath a gap in the vines, and she hurried forward, trying to shake free of the peculiarity of the place.No doubt he was rolling in something horrid; there was nothing he enjoyed so much as the scent of excretion coating his tiny body.
But at the base of the wall, she stopped. Right there, right above where Bacon had led her, a plaque was set into the sandstone bricks. The vines had not covered it—she could still make out the words:
Sarah Sophia Penhollow
1724–1751
Gooseflesh prickled all along her arms beneath the wool of her pelisse. Everything seemed to grow suddenly darker—as though a cloud had passed over the sun.
