Page 35 of Ladies in Hating
She’d also attempted to speak with Mort, the Renwick cook, but had been foiled by the fact that he appeared to be invisible. Graves refused to speak of him too.
In the end, Lady Georgiana had ended up the recipient of much of Cat’s chatter as she pieced together the stories that she’d uncovered about the ghost. It was a woman—of that there was no doubt—but even with the family Bible and the account books she’d found in the master’s office, Cat had not been able to pindown which tragic figure of the house’s history the ghost might be. She’d detailed her theories at length, aloud, over something pale green that might have been celery, and, to her surprise, Georgiana had stiffly proffered some suggestions for Cat’s continued research.
She was in the process of enacting one of Georgiana’s ideas—cross-referencing the parish records with the family Bible for discrepancies—when she heard the sound of Bacon’s agitated barking.
She lowered the register to her lap and lifted her head, waiting to see if Georgiana would soothe the dog, but—
The barking went on and on, increasing in volume and pitch, and there was not a single corpuscle of Cat’s being that would remain quiescent when an animal was in distress. She stood, dusted bird fluff and other undesirable things from her skirts, and headed out in the direction of the barking.
The sound seemed to stretch oddly in the corridor, and she walked briskly farther and farther into the bowels of the house. The barking seemed to get softer and then louder again without obvious explanation, and Cat looked helplessly over her shoulder as she quickened her pace.
There was no one there. The halls looked the same as they always did—water-stained, papered in crimson silk, a black vine here and there curling down where the ceiling abutted the wall.
By the time she reached the source of Bacon’s excited sounds, she had half run all the way to the oratory, a fact which did not make any sort of sense. She ought not have been able to hear the dog all the way in the library.
She did not have time to puzzle out the mystery of the traveling bark, however, as the dog’s noises were now clearly in chorus with the exasperated mumbles of his mistress. Cat squintedaround the wide dim space—none of the silver candelabra were lit, as usual—and had to peer past the stone altar and Saint Sebastian statue in order to locate the woman and the dog.
When she finally identified them, she squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. But—no. No change. She was not imagining the sight.
The walls of the oratory were studded with shields bearing colorful crests. Alternating between the shields were perhaps ten small doors, each roughly waist-high. The doors were black, and the lattice-work that crisscrossed the front of each door appeared to be made out of bones.
Carved to look like bones, rather. Cat was fairly certain they were not real bones.
More startling than the lattice bones, however, was the fact that one of the doors stood open, and a pair of lavender striped boots stuck haphazardly out of the opening.
“Bacon!” Georgiana’s exasperated voice emerged from somewhere northward of the boots. “Bacon, dash it, come here!”
The dog barked again, and Cat could not mistake the gleeful tone in his vocalization.
“Bacon, you utter menace, leave that alone!” Georgiana’s voice pitched in the direction ofwail.
Cat felt her mouth curling up as she approached Georgiana, and even Her Ladyship’s ridiculous boots—honestly,lavender,how long could they possibly last in that color—could not quash her amusement. “Lose your fellow again?”
Georgiana jerked in surprise, and Cat winced as she appeared to thump her head against whatever was inside the passageway.
“No,” Georgiana said, as if by reflex.
“You haven’t? Just having a look inside then? How is it in there?”
“Stygian,” Georgiana said grimly. “And—yes, dash it. Bacon was chasing abat,of all things, and it went in here. I think—I very much fear that this is where they roost.”
“Oh.” Cat devoted a single moment to pondering Georgiana’s current position deep inside a tunnel of bats and then decided she preferred never to think about such a thing again. “I see. And now he will not emerge?”
“No.” Georgiana said it stiffly—she said most things to Cat stiffly—but for once it seemed clear that her stiffness was only a mask for her discomfort.
“Have you tried, er, backing out of the tunnel and calling to him?”
“Of course I have! That was the first thing I tried, and the second too, and then I decided to get closer and lure him out, andthenI tried to catch him, and—well. And now I am here.”
The gentle waving of Georgiana’s ankles took on a sudden clarity. “Are you… stuck?”
Georgiana’s voice went even more cool and formal, as though she were addressing the king. “I am not stuck. It is only that it is very dark, and my sleeve seems to have become fastened upon something, and I have not yet been able to work it free.”
“So you are stuck?”
There was a long, strained silence. And then Georgiana’s voice came again from the depths as though through gritted teeth. “Evidently.”
Cat bit her lip to clamp down on the laugh that wanted to bubble up. Ah God, there was something terribly endearing about this woman—about the contrast between her formality and the sheer absurd protectiveness she directed toward her little dog.
