Page 47 of Ladies in Hating
After they ate, Cat moved to the kitchen’s rear door, intending to set the crumbs out for the birds. Only, as she set her weight against the ebony slab, she found she could not move it. “How peculiar,” she murmured.
“What’s peculiar?” Georgiana’s voice was close to her ear, and Cat felt a shiver rise uncontrollably through her.
She cleared her throat. “The door is locked. Perhaps Graves fastened it when she left to go… wherever it is that she went.”
Georgiana’s expression tightened, and Cat too felt a tiny thrill of unease.
The door had not been fixed closed when she’d last been in the kitchen. She was certain of it.
“Let us try another door,” Georgiana said, and for once Cat felt no compulsion to argue with Georgiana’s high-handedness.
But the north wing’s main exit also seemed to be fastened shut. Neither of them could stir the door an inch.
They moved hastily on to the south wing, Bacon clutched tight in Georgiana’s arms.
“Do you think,” Cat said cautiously, “that the ghost—”
“Ghosts do not exist.”
“All right. But let us imagine, for the sake of conversation, that the screaming you heard last night was in fact—”
“I dreamt it. Ghosts aren’t—” Georgiana broke off as they reached the large exterior door to set Bacon down. He whined and pawed at the mouseholes at the door’s bottom edge. Georgiana shoved at the door, then ran her fingers helplessly along the frame while Cat had her own go with the handle.
Nothing. The door would not budge.
Georgiana paused suddenly in her fruitless appraisal of the doorjamb. “I can see it,” she said. Her voice sounded uneven, and her hands fell to her sides.
“See what?” Cat’s own voice wobbled, just a touch.
“The bar that’s holding the door closed. I can see its shadow, just here, in the light.”
“What?”
Georgiana’s expression, when she turned to face Cat full-on, was grim. “I believe—” She hesitated, swallowed. Tried again. “I believe that we are trapped inside the manor.”
Chapter 16
Please do not fret over my irregular correspondence. My stay at Renwick House has beencatastrophic doomedproductive!
—from Cat Lacey to her brother, Jem
They were unmistakably, emphatically trapped in Renwick House.
They had tried every door. When they attempted to quit the house via the west wing, the exit was once again barred. They’d checked the windows as well, but the sashing was made of some sort of iron, and even if they’d shattered the panes, only Bacon would have fit through the ensuing opening.
At that point, by some silent agreement, they made their way toward the rose garden.
“This is surely the most reasonable way out,” Georgiana was saying, though whether to brace up her own spirits or Cat’s was difficult to say. “There must be some means of egress in the courtyard walls to provide the gardener with access to the grounds.”
“Yes,” Cat said, “though you are assuming that said means of egress will not be barred as well.”
“I don’t understand it.” Georgiana sounded breathless as she shoved her way through the gap in the ruined wall and into the courtyard outside. “Why would someone have obstructed all the doors? Could Graves have done it when she left?”
Cat propelled herself through the narrow opening as well, with rather more struggle and cursing than Her Slim-Hipped Ladyship. “What possible motivation could Graves have to entrap us here?”
“Perhaps she wanted us to stay put?” Georgiana said doubtfully. “To wait upon her return?”
Georgiana had emerged into the cold December sun, and Cat had to stop and deliberately recall how to breathe. The light lingered in the hollows of Georgiana’s cheekbones, traced the almost translucent curve of her ear.
