Page 4 of Ladies in Hating
“Have you?”
She was positive she had. She’d readThe Bride of Ottavianoin the intervening fortnight and had discovered several more infuriating, inexplicable parallels, all of which she had related to Iris. The last time they’d been at Belvoir’s together, Georgiana was fairly certain she’d wielded the novel like a cudgel. “Of course I have. I—No. Never mind. It does not signify. What I am trying to say is that I have spent the last two weeks trying to track down thisLady Darling—”
“That is the most unlikely name.”
“I said theexactsame thing! I—” She paused. “Are you doing this on purpose? To rile me?”
Iris’s face was very blank and very innocent. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m quite certain you’ve only mentioned Lady Darling once or twice to me before.”
“I’m not—”
“Once or twice anhour.”
It dawned on Georgiana, rather belatedly, that Iris was teasing her. She straightened the seams of her gloves and tried to pretend she was not blushing. As she did, she looked again down the shadowed alley behind Belvoir’s where she and Iris had stationed themselves.
Georgiana’s own foray into scandalous novels had begun a decade ago. At the time, her late father’s attentions had focused primarily upon her two older brothers. Georgiana had wanted it that way—it was preferable by far for the earl’s gaze not to linger too long upon one. But when she’d turned fifteen, her father had begun to talk about Georgiana’s launch into society: the debut that would lead to her marriage and make her someone else’s burden to bear.
And for perhaps the first time in her life, Georgiana had revolted. Her rebellion, as was her wont, had been executed very quietly and with as much secrecy as possible. Tucked away in her bedchamber, she had written six novels and then sold them all, for a sum that had seemed astounding at the time, and had turned out to be barely enough.
She would not be handed off like a possession. She would not let her personhood become subsumed by a man’s, all control of her own future denied to her. Shewould not do it.
But when the time had come for her to make her debut, she had not yet saved quite enough money to declare her independence. Instead, forced in front of theton, she’d playacted the empty-headed fool so no one would ever suspect her secret. It had been then that she’d discovered her talent for creating characters went beyond the page. She had a knack for voices and accents; she had spent so long watching from the margins that she could take on another person’s mannerisms with the same ease that she changed her frock.
She had disguised herself as a charwoman when she had brought her manuscripts to Jean Laventille to print. When she’d researched incarceration forSeptimus’s Tower,she’d convincingly played the role of newspaper journalist. And when she’d visited half a dozen family tombs in Derbyshire to writeThe Mesmerist,she’d adopted the guise of a fresh-faced country lass in search of the dastardly fellow who had abandoned her mother.
In her attempt to unmask Lady Darling, she’d been forced to resurrect her talent for disguise. She’d turned up incognito at Lady Darling’s own publisher, and the bank Belvoir’s used, and the newspaper that had most recently reviewedThe Bride of Ottaviano—but all to no avail. The secret of the novelist’s identity was closely guarded.
A fact which Georgiana would be more sympathetic to if Lady Darling did not represent a threat to her career, her independence, and the continued security of her own blastedmother.
She’d finally made some progress when she struck up a conversation about Lady Darling with Belvoir’s assistant gardener. The boy—no more than eighteen—had seemed rather transfixed by Georgiana’s countenance. She was just starting to feel guilty about ensorcelling the poor lad when his gaze had dropped to her extremely modest bosom and his face had fallen.
She’d smiled even more resplendently then, done dramatic and unforgivable things with her eyelashes, and promptly scraped every morsel of information she could from the boy upon the subject of Lady Darling. After some dithering, he’d informed her that on the first Saturday of each month, someone appeared at the library’s back door to fetch the novelist’s correspondence. At dawn.
Georgiana’s commitment to the project was such that she now awaited both the sun and the mysterious caller deep within the predawn back alley.
It might be a maidservant or a woman of business, of course. But then again—dawn. It was a peculiar time to visit a library, to be sure.
Beside her, Iris’s teeth had begun to chatter. “Are you entirely certain this is n-necessary?”
Georgiana quashed another flare of guilt. “I’m not certain at all. I told you when you first asked that I could handle this situation alone. You do not need to be here.”
“N-not my accompaniment, you ninny. I should certainly like to witness the great unmasking. I meant all this sneaking about in the shadows. Could you not send her a note? Or have your publisher send her a note?”
“No,” Georgiana said again. “I don’t need…”
She hesitated. It would sound foolish, she knew, how ferociously she clung to her independence.
But she could not reason her way out of her feelings. She had brought others into her secrets before and had hurt them through her cowardice. She would not do so again.
“I have to do it myself,” she said finally. “I want to speak to her directly. I—”
There was a hint of movement in the shadows at the end of the alley, and Georgiana’s whole body came to attention in an instant.
“Shh,” she whispered. “There she is.”
She pulled Iris back to the relative seclusion of a relocated potted shrub—a small piece of assistance from the obliging gardener—and waited as the cloaked figure crept cautiously down the alley toward them. In the gray suggestion of dawn, Georgiana could discern very little about the person, whose hood was pulled down low. It did seem to be a woman, based on the generous shape of her figure beneath her cloak. But her face was utterly obscured.
As they watched, the woman came to the back door of Belvoir’s and knocked softly, a little one-two-one pattern. The door came open immediately.
