Page 20 of Ladies in Hating
He worked so hard, and she hated and loved his drive in equal measure. She was so proud of him—and in the same breath, she regretted that he could not simply laugh and play the way he had when he’d been small.
Back when they’d still lived at Woodcote.
Before the events that had brought them to the edge of subsistence. Before she’d fought and struggled and clawed their way back out.
She tightened her fingers around the arm of her chair. She could not let Lady Georgiana threaten her career. Even if the woman did not make her accusations public, readers might begin to notice the similarities that Georgiana had pointed out. And though Cat had not seen signs that her sales had flagged with the publication of their similar novels, she could not be certain her luck would continue.
If a private visit to Renwick House would provide original fodder for a new book, then she had no choice but to go there.
Even if it meant quitting the pie shop.
Her fingers twitched on the chair. She would do it. Shehadto do it. She would write to Yorke, and secure a contract with Laventille, and make her way to the Renwick estate, and she would do it all withoutoncethinking of—
“Ouch,” she muttered. “Shit.”
She’d squeezed the arm of the chair so hard that her thumb was bleeding again.
Jem looked up from his book. “Something wrong?”
She shoved her hand beneath her skirts and made herself smile innocently. “Not a single thing.”
Chapter 7
FROM ESSEX: Last night’s heavy gale and acute electrical storm were accompanied, in the churchyard of Saint Botolph’s, by phenomena of a supernatural sort…
—fromTHE LONDON HERALD, November 1822
The trouble was, not thinking about a person had a way of devolving into an obsession.
Geneva Desrosiers’s books wereeverywhere: at the bookseller, at Belvoir’s, inside Jean Laventille’s office when Cat went to sign her new contract. When Cat clambered onto the mail coach to High Ongar, she realized belatedly that the woman beside her had the latest Desrosiers book open in her lap.
What was she to do now? She could not exchange her seat. To do so would be to admit defeat, and she would simply rather die.
Instead, Cat spent the entire two-hour journey sneaking tiny peeks at the text. She told herself she was looking for similarities to her own work, an excuse which would have been more plausible had she not been so deeply engrossed in the story.
It was with some relief that she finally arrived at Saint Botolph’s Church and freed herself from the temptation of Lady Georgiana’s exquisite prose.
Yorke had arranged for Cat’s stay at Renwick House to begin a week hence. In the meantime, she had plunged into research for her next novel, which she planned to set at Renwick House and which would feature a haunting generational curse. Saint Botolph’s—the subject of numerous hysterical newspaper articles in recent days—had seemed the ideal place to gather information on supernatural visitations as she awaited her trip to Wiltshire.
A cool autumn rain clung mistily to her cloak as she disembarked from the mail coach and plotted her approach to the site. The ruins of the ancient church were tucked into the edge of Epping Forest. A new canal project had been designed to extend straight through the churchyard—a construction effort that had necessitated the excavation of the yard and the bodies that had once been interred therein.
According to newspapers, the bones had not taken this disturbance lightly. The workmen had reported ghostly lights, terrifying nightmares, and, on one memorable occasion, an animated corpse walking in full medieval dress through their worksite at midnight.
What anyone had been doing on location at midnight, Cat could not say, but she was dreadfully interested in the story anyway.
The problem, she reflected, was that Saint Botolph’s was not currently open to the public. This small obstacle had not stopped her research in the past, however, and she did not mean to let it pose an impediment this time either. She circled back into the forest’s shadows and made her meandering way through sweeping oaks and beeches to approach the churchyard from behind.
There were still dozens of workers at the site, though Cat suspected the crowd was somewhat thinner than it had been before the animated corpse incident. She tucked herself behind a cart filled with chalk and pulled out her pocket notebook to sketch out the scene: piles of bricks and slate, trenches visible to the north and south, and the peculiar serenity of the leaf-blanketed churchyard at the heart of it all.
It was deliciously eerie. She scratched her pencil faster across the pages, jotting down quick snippets of imagined dialogue as they formed in her mind. This was where the ceremony would take place to imbue the mysterious count with immortality—and this was where the cost would be exacted upon his descendants half a century later…
She was so engrossed in the blossoming plot that she did not hear the approaching strangers until they were nearly atop her.
“What’s this?” demanded a rough voice on the other side of the chalk cart. “What are you doing out here? There’s no trespassing on the grounds!”
Cat’s head came up. Devil take it, had she been discovered?
But no. Another voice replied, a woman’s, sugar-sweet and ingenuous: “I’m so sorry. I was only looking for my uncle, and I’m afraid I must have become turned around.”
