Page 25 of Ladies in Hating
Percy’s mouth had opened to protest, but the man had not finished.
If you hope to secure a living in the Church, my boy, you cannot permit yourself to be soiled by this sort of association. Surely you must know that by now.
The professor had nodded at Georgiana then, polite, passionless. And then he’d turned his back on them both and walked away.
She’d felt hot all over, and then cold, frozen, sick with shame. She knew—of course she had known that she’d demolished her own reputation by revealing herself as a Gothic novelist. But she had not realized until that moment—until the professor’s cool, brusque words had slid between her ribs—thatanyonewho kept company with her might be so destroyed.
But she should have known, shouldn’t she? She’d cost her mother everything. Even her family.
She could not let that happen to Percy too.
She’d wheeled around, putting her back to Percy, fighting the burn in her nose and throat. And when he’d tried to follow, she had not let him come after her.
When their father had died two years later, Georgiana had not opened any of the correspondence that had come from her brothers. Though she knew her mother wrote to them, Georgiana had cut them off, a merciless slide of steel against the taproot of their family.
She had done it to protect them. And she’d been right. Without Georgiana to drag him down in the eyes of society, Percy had secured his living. Ambrose had taken up his new seat in the Lords. She’d seen in the papers last year that Ambrose had married, and the news had pierced her chest like a knife. Like an icicle, cold all the way down to her heart.
She missed them, and she loved them, and it wasbecauseshe loved them that she would not let them near her.
You chose this,she told herself fiercely.Do not pity yourself for the life that you devised.
Edith’s voice intruded gently on her thoughts. “Dearest. You need not encounter your brothers if you do not wish to. Wiltshire is large—there is room enough for you and your brothers both.”
Georgiana hesitated.
She had not thought to return to that familiar countryside ever in her life. Wiltshire might as well have been erased from the map of England in her mind—she could not go back. But then again, what her mother had said was true. Renwick House was an hour or more from Woodcote Hall. The land there was wide and open beneath the blue expanse of sky, and perhaps—
Perhaps she did not need to foreclose the entire western part of England in order to keep her brothers safe.
“I do,” she said after a long moment, “wish to see the inside of the haunted manor.”
Her mother smiled, small and satisfied. “I shall take it as done then.”
Georgiana took a breath. She stroked a palm across Bacon’s glossy back, then looked at her mother. “All right,” she said firmly. “On to Renwick House.”
Chapter 9
She had made a discovery so shocking that she never remembered it but with the utmost horror.
—from Cat’s private copy ofTHE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHOby Ann Radcliffe
Cat was still plucking straw from her hair when the cart-driver abandoned her at the end of Renwick House’s gravel driveway. She glanced after him, impressed despite herself at the speed he’d managed to inspire in his pair of elderly donkeys.
She’d taken the mail coach as far as Devizes, and then she’d been forced to secure alternate transportation. It was only ten miles south to Renwick, and she’d assumed it would not be difficult to find someone to bring her to the old estate.
She’d been wrong. The looks she’d received as she’d asked around the bustling market village of Devizes had ranged from skeptical to outright horrified. No one seemed to believe that Renwick House was open to visitors, and they certainly had not been inclined to take her there. Eventually she’d been forced tooffer enough coin that she probably could have hired a post-chaise from London for the same price, and even then, the man had refused to go in sight of the house.
This, she decided, was not unnerving. It was exhilarating.
Eventually, she gave up on the straw-plucking project and set off down the drive. The house itself was not yet visible, shielded as it was by blackthorn and enormous, moss-covered oaks.
Was it typical, she wondered, for the limbs of the oaks to grow so long and twisted? For the dark, leafless branches to seem to grasp, fingerlike, toward the center of the drive?
Exhilarating,she reminded herself briskly.Inspiring.
And then she came through the trees and confronted Renwick House.
Housewas an absurd misnomer, one of those aristocratic pretenses at humility that only served to vex rational humans familiar with the general outlines of a house. It was instead a huge structure, built roughly in the shape of a cross, with delicate stone archways connecting each of its four immense wings. At the center stood a soaring tower, capped by a marble peak as tall and slender as a birch. Dainty arched buttresses spilled from the top of the tower to its lower levels, fancifully decorated with spires and crenellations.
