The Lady in the Next Room

A Regency Sapphic Historical Romance
by Evelyn Ashcombe

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The Lady in the Next Room book cover by Evelyn Ashcombe

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone
Tropes: Landlady/Lodger, Forced Proximity, Thin Walls, Neighbors to Lovers, Strangers to Lovers, Secret Writer, Runaway Gentlewoman, Hidden Identity, Mutual Pining, Touch Starved, Sexual Awakening, Dirty Talk, Light Bondage, Overheard Sex, Class Difference, Found Family

A widow with a locked drawer. A runaway with a borrowed name. And a door with two bolts between them.

Bath, 1818. Frances Bellamy has nine pounds in a tin box, seventeen due at Christmas, two empty rooms, a publisher who will not pay her, and a locked drawer of filthy pages she writes in bed and has never shown a living soul. Every woman in them is taken by surprise. Nobody on the page is ever asked.

Then at nine o’clock on a wet October night, a stranger knocks: dark blond hair plastered by the rain, a hem wet to the knee, a pawnshop wedding ring a size too large, and a name, Mrs. Grey, that will not bear leaning on. Arabella Wren has sold her mother’s pearls a dozen at a time to escape a marriage arranged to pay her cousin’s debts. All she wants is a door that locks.

The room Frances lets her has two. The door between their bedrooms opens only when both bolts are drawn. Either woman may shut the other out. Neither can let herself in.

But the walls of No. 6 Quiet Street are thin. Arabella can hear a pen running at two in the morning. Frances can hear the ropes of a bed. And when the lodger she has hired to copy her novel finds a leaf of the drawer tucked inside volume two, a stranger with rain in her hair, kneeling, she knows exactly whose hem was wet to the knee.

One bolt is already drawn.

The other is Frances’s affair.

The Lady in the Next Room is a standalone sapphic Regency historical romance with a widowed landlady-novelist, a runaway gentlewoman with a borrowed name, a connecting door with two bolts, consent asked for out loud, explicit on-page heat, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual POV. Approx. 98,000 words.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A connecting door with two bolts that opens only when both are drawn
✅ Thin walls, a pen at two in the morning, and a lodger who has learned to listen
✅ A widow who writes filthy pages in bed and has never once let anyone in them ask
✅ “May I kiss you?” “No. I should like to be the one who does it.”
✅ A copyist, a secret manuscript, and one page that ends up in exactly the wrong hands
✅ A hip bath by the kitchen range, a velvet ribbon, and one word: Stay
✅ A sharp-eyed spinster lodger, a housekeeper who never asks, and a circulating library with a locked back room
✅ Sapphic Regency romance, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, no cheating, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including oral sex, manual sex, mutual masturbation through a closed door, overheard sex, sex in a kitchen hip bath, light bondage with a velvet ribbon, sex against a door and in a library back room, a leather dildo, and a strap-on tied with stay-laces; all on-page sex is consensual, with “colder” honoured on the page), references to a joyless past marriage with dutiful marital sex (off-page), family pressure toward an arranged marriage to settle a debt, blackmail with a private manuscript, financial precarity and the threatened loss of a livelihood, the burning of a manuscript, a painful separation, period attitudes toward women, class and same-sex love, and strong language. No sexual violence, no dub-con, no cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Frances

The house at No. 6 Quiet Street would owe seventeen pounds ten shillings on Christmas Day, and Frances Bellamy had nine pounds, four shillings and sixpence in a japanned tin box with which to pay it.

She wrote the two sums one above the other in the account book and regarded them. They did not improve on acquaintance. Rain streamed down the one window of the alcove behind the dining room, where a desk, a chair and a shelf of ledgers had been wedged into a space the builder had plainly meant for china, and the gutter over the area steps was overflowing with a sound like a man clearing his throat before bad news.

Ten weeks to quarter-day. She dipped her pen and did what she had done every morning since Michaelmas, which was to stand the same figures in a different order and hope they came out braver.

Miss Pike, second-floor front, eighteen shillings a week, paid each Saturday before breakfast with the coins stacked by size. Nine pounds by Christmas, of which coals, candles, butcher’s meat and Mrs. Hale’s wages would swallow the better part. The first-floor back had stood empty since Mrs. Ormerod went to a married daughter in Clifton. The second-floor back had stood empty since August. An unlet room cost sixteen shillings a week merely by existing, and she had two of them, sitting overhead like a pair of idle relations.

Then there was the letter.

It lay beside the ledger in Mr. Henry Ames’s handsome, sloping, evasive hand, the third of its kind since June. She could have recited it.

Madam, I beg you will believe the delay is as painful to this house as it can be inconvenient to yourself. The present state of the trade obliges us to ask a little further indulgence. Meanwhile, may I say with what eagerness we await the new work from the Author of Mrs. Lorimer’s Lodgers, whose pen has never yet disappointed us.

Her pen had not disappointed him. His purse had disappointed her to the amount of twenty-five pounds, the second half of the price of The Silent Wing, three volumes, sold outright. Mr. Ames did not dispute that he owed it. He simply declined to send it, with exquisite regret, and let her pay ninepence at the door for the pleasure of reading his reasons.

With it she could meet the Christmas quarter and buy the winter’s coals by the load instead of the sack. Without it she would meet the quarter regardless, because she always had, and the manner of the meeting would be mutton twice a week, tallow in every candlestick, and her own bedroom fire let out by nine.

That was the whole of her situation, and Frances had long since resolved to describe it accurately. It was not ruin. It was arithmetic. Thomas had left her the lease, the furniture, and a bookshop whose stock had exactly covered what the bookshop owed. A widow of three and thirty with eleven years of that lease to run, one reliable lodger, one unreliable publisher and one secret was not a tragic figure. She was a tired one, with ink on the first two fingers of her right hand that no lemon had ever shifted.

Betsy Hale put her head round the dining-room door. She was fifteen, and announced every caller as if reporting a fire.

“There’s a gentleman come about the card in the window, ma’am. A military gentleman.”

“Is he wet?”

“Not very. He come in a chair.”

A man who took a sedan chair across Bath to ask after a sixteen-shilling room was either rich or bad at sums. Frances blotted the page, unpinned her sleeves and went to learn which.

Captain Tolland was fifty, florid, and standing on her sitting-room hearthrug as though he had already paid for it.

He had been over both empty rooms with his hands clasped behind him, prodded the mattress of the second-floor back with his cane and pronounced it capital. He liked to be high up, he said. He liked to be out of the way.

“A guinea a week. I don’t haggle, madam, never have. Board, fire, and my boots done.”

It was five shillings more than she would have dared ask. The figure went through Frances like brandy on an empty stomach.

“That is handsome, Captain.”

“And a latchkey. I play a rubber most nights at the York House, and I can’t be knocking up a household at two in the morning like a schoolboy home late.”

“The street door is locked at ten. I lock it myself and I keep the key.”

“Then you’ll have a second one cut, and I’ll stand the expense.” He beamed at his own generosity. “And my niece will be calling of an evening. Devoted girl. Reads to me. You needn’t trouble yourself over her, she’ll let herself up and down.”

“Your niece.”

“My late sister’s child.”

“How fortunate you are in her. Does she read to you often?”

“Tuesdays and Fridays,” said the captain, and then, perceiving that he had been more exact than a fond uncle ought, turned the color of a boiled ham.

Frances considered him. A guinea a week was fifty-four pounds twelve shillings a year. It was more than three quarters of her rent, planted on her hearthrug with its legs apart. It was the coals in one load, and a wax candle to write by, and Mr. Ames’s regrets read with perfect indifference.

It was also a key to her street door in another person’s pocket, and a girl who was nobody’s niece going up and down her stairs at midnight past Miss Pike’s door. Within the month every tradesman from here to Milsom Street would know what sort of house Mrs. Bellamy kept. She had spent four years making it the sort nobody troubled to describe.

“I’m sorry, Captain. The room won’t suit.”

“Won’t suit? I’ve just told you it suits.”

“It won’t suit me.”

He stared. He had the look of a man whose horse has addressed him in French. “I had not taken you for a prude, madam.”

“I’m not a prude. I’m a leaseholder. I have no opinion whatever on how a gentleman spends his Tuesdays and Fridays, provided he spends them under a roof I’m not answerable for. I’m sure she is a devoted girl. I hope she finds you very comfortably settled in somebody else’s house.”

He told her she would not get a guinea for that room from any other man in Bath. She agreed. He told her that a woman in her position could not afford to be so nice.

“I can’t,” said Frances. “I find I do it anyway. Betsy will call you a chair.”

“A guinea,” said Mrs. Hale.

“A guinea.”

“And a niece.”

“Tuesdays and Fridays.”

Mrs. Hale brought the cleaver down through a neck of mutton with a force that settled the captain’s character more thoroughly than any remark. She was five and fifty, built like a linen press, and had cooked in that basement kitchen since before the master died. “Then you did right,” she said. “And he may keep his guinea where he keeps his niece.”

Having delivered this judgment, she wiped her hands, crossed to the dresser, took down the candle box and counted its contents aloud, twice, in the voice of a woman who meant nothing by it.

“I can hear you, Edith.”

“I’m only counting, ma’am. Nine of the good and two dozen dips. A body’s allowed to count.”

At four o’clock Miss Judith Pike came down to that same mutton in a gray silk older than Betsy, unfolded her napkin and said, “I saw your military gentleman on the stairs. He breathes through his mouth.”

“He has gone to breathe elsewhere.”

“So Mrs. Hale informed me. She also informed me of the price, at some length, while pretending to look for the pepper.” Miss Pike was six and forty, narrow, upright and unsurprised. She had been nineteen years companion to a baronet’s widow and now lived on what that lady had seen fit to leave her, which was not much, and which she paid over every Saturday without comment. “Don’t regret him. A house is known by what it turns away.”

“It is also known by its coal bill.”

“Certainly. But the coal merchant won’t say so in the Pump Room.” She helped herself to capers. “I have the second volume of The Silent Wing from Finch’s. Have you looked into it?”

Frances cut her mutton very small. “A little.”

“The author has a great deal of sense and no nerve whatever. Her heroine has been standing outside the same door for forty pages.”

“Perhaps she has her reasons.”

“I don’t doubt it. I should like just one of them to be interesting.”

There were few sensations to compare with being reviewed across one’s own table by a woman who did not know it. Or who did. In three years Frances had never been able to decide, and Miss Pike’s face gave away nothing but a mild interest in the capers.

“I’ll be sure to tell her, should we ever meet.”

“Do,” said Miss Pike.

Mrs. Hale and Betsy went at six, and the house drew in, as it did every evening, to two women and the sound of weather.

Frances made the tea herself at seven. She turned a sheet sides to middle while Miss Pike read by the sitting-room fire, and at half past eight Miss Pike took her candle up to the second floor and Frances went her round: the shutters, the area door, the kitchen fire banked under its ash. A respectable woman closing a respectable house. Anyone looking in would have seen exactly what she meant them to see, which was nothing worth a second glance.

Then she went back to the alcove, drew out the key she wore on a tape inside her stays, where it had lain warm against her skin all day, and unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk.

The other book had no title. It had no binding either. It was some sixty loose leaves in a hand faster and blacker than the one she kept for Mr. Ames, and it had nothing to say about vicars’ wives or unreliable guardians. It had never been meant for a circulating library, or for any eye at all.

She had been nineteen when she understood what she was. It had happened at a card party in Bristol, watching a curate’s wife draw off her gloves one finger at a time, and Frances had gone home and written it down, because writing was what she did with anything too large to carry. She had burned those first pages the week before she married Thomas. These were the ones that had come afterward, a leaf at a time, on the nights she could not help it. Thomas, who had been kind, and who had never once in eight years asked what she liked, had slept through the making of half of them.

By daylight she wrote for money, and wrote carefully: three volumes at a time of women who looked at locked doors and thought better of it. This was what she wrote when nobody was paying. It was a good deal less careful. It used words that would have made Mr. Ames’s compositors drop their sticks, and it used them without apology, because a page that no one would ever read had no one’s blushes to spare.

She turned up a page from August and read it by one tallow candle with the rain coming down.

She did not hear the door. She knew only that the candle had moved, and that a hand was at the back of her gown, undoing it as if the hooks had been waiting. No one spoke. Her shift was drawn up to her waist and she was turned to the wall, and the hand that came between her thighs found her already wet and was not surprised. Two fingers went into her cunt slowly, as far as they would go, and stayed. She put her forehead to the paper-hangings and spread her legs wider. She was fucked standing, by a woman whose face she never turned to see, and she spent on that patient hand with her mouth open against the wall, and no word was said to her before or after.

Frances read it to the end and felt what she always felt: the slow, stupid, private heat of it gathering low in her belly, her nipples drawing tight against the linen of her shift, her thighs pressing together under two petticoats and a decent brown gown. She was wet. She noted it as she would have noted a leak in the scullery, a fact about the house that nobody else need be told. She did not put her hand under her skirts. She had rules, even for this, and one of them was never at the desk.

She noted the other thing as well, the thing she had been noting for years and doing nothing to mend.

There was no face in it. There never was. Sixty leaves, and the woman who came into the room was a hand, a breath, a weight against the back. She arrived without knocking and left without a name. The lady at the wall never once turned her head, and never said yes, because nobody on the page had ever put the question.

It was safer so. A face would have had to belong to someone.

The knock came down the passage like a dropped tray.

Frances had the leaf in the drawer, the drawer locked and the key down her bodice before the echo died. The Abbey clock was striking nine. Nobody knocked in Quiet Street at nine at night in the rain. It could only be the captain come back with a better offer, or a death.

She took the candle and went to see which.

It was neither. It was a woman.

She stood on the step with the rain running off her bonnet brim in a steady line, and behind her in the road a porter from the White Hart leaned on a barrow with a trunk in it. She wore a traveling pelisse, dark blue, soaked black to the elbows. Good gloves. Shoes that had never been meant for wet pavement.

“Mrs. Bellamy? I’m told you have a room.”

“I’m told so as well. Who told you?”

“This gentleman with the barrow. He says you keep a quiet house in Quiet Street, and I couldn’t make out whether that was a recommendation or a pun. I decided I was too wet to mind.”

It was a low, quick, amused voice, a voice in good repair. The rest of her was less so. Frances lifted the candle.

Eight and twenty, perhaps. Dark blond hair gone darker where the rain had got under the bonnet and pasted a curl to her temple. Gray-green eyes with a week of missed sleep beneath them, holding steady by effort. And a mouth.

Frances had described a number of mouths, in three volumes apiece, and had believed herself reasonably competent at it. This one was wide and mobile and wet with rain, the lower lip caught for an instant between her teeth while she waited to be judged, and it made every one of those descriptions read like the work of a woman who had never seen the article.

“You had better come in out of it,” Frances said, and was relieved to hear that she still sounded like a landlady.

The stranger came into the hall and the weather came with her. Water ran from her hem onto the flags. The muslin under the pelisse was pale, hopeless stuff for October, sodden to the knee and clinging to her shins, and when she pushed back the bonnet a drop ran from her jaw down the side of her throat and in under her collar. Frances watched it go the whole way.

“Your name?”

A pause. Not long. About as long as it takes to choose between two pairs of gloves.

“Mrs. Grey.”

“And Mr. Grey?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry for it.”

“Thank you. So was he, I expect.”

She drew off a glove as she spoke, to get at her purse, and the wedding ring on her left hand slid straight down to the knuckle. She caught it with her thumb and turned it back. It was a size too large and as yellow as a brass button. She wore no black anywhere, not so much as a ribbon, and she had said dead in the tone of someone naming a town she had never visited.

Frances had been a widow four years. She knew what the genuine article looked like. She had met it in her own glass, gray in the face under a crape cap, forgetting halfway up the stairs what it had gone for. This was not that. This was a clever woman with a borrowed name, a pawnshop ring and a great wish to be on the far side of a door.

“The room is sixteen shillings a week. Board and fire. Paid weekly, in advance.”

“I’ll pay eight weeks.” She had the money out before Frances had finished the sentence: a five-pound note, a one, and eight shillings in silver counted into her bare palm. “Six pounds eight. I did the sum in the coach. I had a great deal of leisure for it.”

“You don’t wish to see it first?”

“Has it a door?”

“It has two.”

“Then I’ve seen all I need.”

“Most people ask about the chimney.”

“Does it smoke?”

“No.”

“There. You’ve spared us both the conversation.” Her eyes had dropped to Frances’s right hand, to the two inked fingers round the candlestick, and they stayed there a moment longer than manners allowed. “You write a great deal, Mrs. Bellamy.”

“I keep accounts.”

“They must be very long ones.”

Frances neither answered that nor took the money. “Is anyone likely to come here asking for you, Mrs. Grey?”

The gray-green eyes came up to hers. For a moment the amusement went out of them, and what was left was only tired, and very direct.

“No one who has any right to.”

“That isn’t quite the question I asked.”

“No. It’s the answer I can give you honestly. I thought you might prefer it to a better one.”

That morning Frances had turned a guinea a week out of this same hall for the mere smell of talk. Every argument she had put to the captain applied here, with interest. An unknown woman. A name that would not bear leaning on. Nine o’clock at night. Trouble had its own way of knocking, and she had just heard it.

She held out her hand for the money.

The silver was as cold as the rain. The fingers that tipped it into her palm were colder, and they rested there half a second longer than the transaction required. Or Frances imagined that they did, which came to the same sum.

It was not charity. She knew how charity felt: cool and tidy, like folding linen. This was a pair of bare fingers that shook with cold while the voice above them flatly refused to. This was rain on that mouth. She did not look at it any more closely than that.

“Breakfast is at eight,” she said. “I’ll show you up.”

Frances went up first with the candle. The stairs at No. 6 were narrow and turned twice, and she had climbed them ten thousand times without once considering the back of her own neck. She considered it now, all the way to the landing, with a stranger’s wet skirts whispering on the treads two steps below.

The porter got the trunk to the first floor, was paid from the same thin purse, and went.

The first-floor back was the better of the two empty rooms, and it stood ready only because she had made it ready that morning for a man with a niece. Aired sheets. A laid fire. Frances knelt to the grate with her candle, and behind her came the small wet sounds of a woman getting out of a soaked pelisse, button by button.

When she stood and turned, Mrs. Grey had the thing over her arm and her bonnet in her hand. The rain had found its way down inside her collar. The front of the muslin was damp through and lay against her like a second skin, so that the firelight showed the lace edge of her stays and, above it, the full curve of each breast and the dark, cold-tightened point at its center.

Frances looked. It lasted the length of one breath, and it was a look, not a glance. Then she gave her whole attention to the coal scuttle.

Mrs. Grey had not noticed. She was not attending to the bed, the washstand or the window. She was looking at the door in the side wall. She had found it at once, in the way of a person who has lately learned to count the ways out of a room.

“That goes through to mine,” Frances said. “This was a dressing room when the house was built, and nobody ever troubled to brick it up. The bolt is there, on your side. You’ll see it’s shot. There is one on my side as well. It opens for no one unless both are drawn.”

“Both.”

“Both. Either of us may shut the other out. Neither can let herself in.”

Mrs. Grey crossed to it. She put two fingers to the iron bolt, tried it, found it home. Then she laid her palm flat against the panel and left it there a moment, as if the wood might be warm.

“And yours, Mrs. Bellamy? Is it shot?”

“It has been shot since the day I first let this room.”

“Then we’re perfectly safe from one another.”

“That is the intention.”

Something moved at the corner of that mouth. It was not a smile. It was the place where one would be, given a night’s sleep. “It’s an excellent door,” she said. “I’ve been wanting one for some time.”

There was cold beef in the larder, and bread. Frances offered them and was refused. She offered a hot brick for the bed and was refused that too, with thanks, by a woman who was plainly holding herself upright until she could be alone. So Frances said good night, and Mrs. Grey said it back, and the landing door closed between them with the soft, exact click of a thing done on purpose.

She locked the street door. She took three clean sheets of paper from the alcove, because the other book had never been written at a desk, and carried them up to her own room, where the writing slope lived under the bed and the fire had not been lit.

She undressed in the cold, plaited her hair, and got in under the quilt with the slope on her knees and the candle at her elbow.

The first sound through the wall was the bolt. It was not drawn. It was tried, to be certain of it, and left home.

Then the lid of a trunk. One shoe, and the other. A long pause, in which nothing whatever happened and Frances discovered that she was listening to it. Then the ropes of the bed, taking a weight.

She would be in her shift by now, or out of it. The wet muslin would be over a chair back, and the damp would still be on her skin where it had lain, cooling along her collarbone and down between her breasts. Frances knew a great deal about what a body was like under a gown that had clung to it. She had written it often enough. She had never before had one six feet from her pillow.

She had slept beside that wall through a clergyman’s mother and Mrs. Ormerod, and had never heard either of them as anything but furniture.

Both bolts were shot. She had said so herself.

The heat from the page downstairs had not gone anywhere. It sat between her legs, patient and unhelpful, and for the first time in her life it had somewhere to look.

She uncapped the ink, squared the sheet on the slope and wrote, in the fast black hand:

She heard the door this time.

The pen ran on before she could stop it. She heard it, and she turned round from the wall to look. There was rain on the woman who had come in, and the hem of her gown was wet to the knee.

Frances stopped. She read what the pen had done. Then she dipped it again and gave the woman a mouth.

Sixty leaves in a locked drawer, and not one of them had ever had a face. This one had. It was lying on the other side of a door with two bolts, and it had paid until December.

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The Window Seat — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Bath, March 1820. Arabella’s thirtieth birthday, two thousand pounds in her own name, and the one present she wants: the window-seat leaf, the page with the line she never got back, done properly this time, curtain drawn, and asked for out loud. Then it’s her turn to tie on the stay-laces.

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