Page 97 of Ladies in Hating
“Oh—yes.” Ambrose looked chagrined. “I’d forgotten it isn’t common knowledge yet. Fawkes owns Renwick now. He inherited it along with everything else when his father died.”
Shock seized Georgiana, stiffening her spine and stealing herbreath. And, even more than shock, the scorching flare of her suspicion.
“Renwick House,” she breathed. Her fingers tightened on Cat’s. “Yorke. Yorke has orchestrated all of this.”
Ambrose’s brows drew together in puzzlement. “Your solicitor? What do you—”
But Georgiana had already turned to clutch at Cat’s knee. “Yorke knew of Jem’s inheritance, his relation to Fawkes—and now this connection to Renwick House too.”
Cat’s face was a study in agonized indecision. “I can’t wrap my mind around it. Why would he keep this from us? What could he possibly hope to gain from such a secret?”
“He sent us both to Renwick, Cat, where we might have beenmurdered—”
“I beg your pardon?” said Ambrose.
“—and even when he told us about Fawkes, he never mentioned Renwick.” Georgiana gritted her teeth in the face of Cat’s obvious reluctance toward suspicion. “He’s been hiding things all along. You must see that.”
“There must be someexplanation,” Cat said stubbornly. “I trust him, Georgie.”
“What’s that about murder?” Ambrose interjected, rather more loudly.
Georgiana spun back to face her brother. “Call the carriage.”
“Where are—”
“Renwick House,” she said. “We have to go back to Renwick. I’m certain that’s where Jem has gone.”
Ambrose’s hand had made its way to his cravat, and he straightened it unnecessarily before he spoke. “Oh hell. All right, Georgie. There had better not be any murder. I have a child to meet before I die.”
Georgiana stared at him blankly for a moment before his words finally registered in her mind.
Oh. He meant to—oh.
Her heart squeezed as she looked at him: so long missed, familiar and new at once. “Ambrose. You do not have to go with us.”
“The hell I don’t. I just got you back.” He coughed, and the sound almost covered the roughness in his voice. “I’m not prepared to let you go quite yet.”
Chapter 31
I have received four inquiries as to your whereabouts today, including one from Laventille, who asks if you and Lady Darling have slain each other. I told him, “Not that kind of death.”
—from Selina to Georgiana, directed hopefully to Woodcote Hall
The light was low already by the time they made it to Renwick House. The oaks and blackthorns were just as Cat remembered them—huge and dark, their leafless branches grasping at the edges of the Alverthorpe carriage.
She’d been so hopeful the last time she’d come up this drive.
Now terror churned cold in her belly. Had Yorke sent Jem here, just as he’d sent Cat and Georgiana?
What sort of danger might Jem be in, here in the enormous ruined house? And could she get to him fast enough to keep him safe?
When they reached the front door, they found it chained and padlocked.
“Bollocks,” Percy said, then lifted his voice. “Fawkes! Fawkes, you rotter, are you in there?”
They made a motley rescue crew. The countesses Alverthorpe had elected to remain at Woodcote, though Cat suspected that the younger countess might have come along if the trip had not involved ten miles of bouncing carriage and the possibility of firearms at the end. But Percy and Ambrose had insisted upon accompanying them, as had a very pathetic and clinging Bacon.
There was no answer to Percy’s shout.
