Then a dull smack.
Georgina flung herself at the door and pushed. A chain rattled on the other side. Locked. “Agnes!”
The voices lowered. Whispers almost, then a second thud.
“Agnes, it is me. Georgina.” She pounded with fisted gloves. “Please, let me in.”
“Go away.”
“I am not leaving you. Open the door.”
“Please!” Half scream, half sob. “Georgina, I beg of you…leave me now. I shall never go back with you. You must know I cannot. Whatever sentiment you still carry for me in your heart is not, nor ever will be, returned.”
“I want to see you. Do not deny me that.”
“Get her out of here,” said a man.
“Georgina, leave! I shall speak to you another time. I shall tell you everything you wish to know, but I cannot—Lucan, no!”
The chain clattered, the door flung open, and a muscled blond man stood in the doorway with bare feet, gaping shirtsleeves, and filthy trousers. He wrenched Agnes’ arm behind her back. “You want her so bad, you can bloody have her.”
“Lucan, no.” Weeping. “Please—”
He slung Agnes to the floor and slammed himself back inside, but she groped for the knob anyway. “Lucan, let me in.” She threw her hands into the wood, until the crack whined and the chain clanged and the cursing on the other side grew louder. “Please, please, please let me in. Do not do this to me. Please.”
“Agnes.” Georgina knelt next to her, tried to peel her back.
Her hair was down and tangled. Her dress unfastened and sliding down her shoulders. Her cheek red, as if she’d been slapped more times than she’d begged him to let her in again.
“You must come home with me. You are not yourself, Agnes—”
“Leave me alone!” Her cousin clutched a gold pendant about her neck, hunkered her head. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Let me alone. Leave me. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
Georgina’s mind cried against the words. She didn’t know what to do, nor how long she should stay, nor if this wailing creature she pulled close was even the same girl from all her memories.
But when she glanced up through aching eyes, someone was hurrying down the hall. Not with a stagger and a white beard, but with steps that were strong, capable, and knowing.
“Let go of her.” Simon’s voice. He pried Agnes away from Georgina’s arms, swung her up into his own, and instructed Georgina to take his arm.
She did not have to think. She need not know anything or understand anything, because Simon did. She walked with him back down the rotting stairway, into the night, then inside a carriage that was warm and scented of a smell so unique to Sowerby House.
When the wheels rolled into motion, she glanced at his face. She could not fathom what look she might have given him, if he saw her tears or didn’t, if he comprehended all the things that cried within her.
But in the faint and swaying carriage lamplight, he nodded his head at her.
As if to say everything in the world would be all right.
“She is asleep.”
Simon nodded. The Whitmore parlor appeared different this time of night. All the trivial objects—the yellow curtains, the dull books, the dusty globe—were but shadows outlined in a faint glow of candlelight.
Georgina sat next to him on the cream-velvet settee. She was different too. He was not certain how, only that the rigid aloofness, that bashful and unreachable cheerfulness, was as absent as trees in the first months of winter, stripped of all their leaves.
“She is asleep,” she whispered again, without looking at him. “I do not know what I shall do come morning.”
“You have done enough.”
“She shall ruin herself.”
