Accursed Abbey: A Steamy Regency Gothic Romance (Nobles & Necromancy Book 1)

by Tessa Candle

  Canterbourne disembarked immediately, as though he expected Miss Whitely to be standing outside. He was disappointed, but looked around. Mr. and Mrs. Whitely were out working in their indifferent vines.

  Further up the road was a small stone house with odd little coloured windows. It was charming, he decided, even though its outer walls were cluttered with sacks and buckets and various indeterminate implements.

  Was this where she lived? Was she, even now, inside those walls? She was not among the vines with her aunt and uncle, nor should she be, he decided.

  He sighed. “I suppose I should go greet them, as I am here.”

  Barozzi tilted his head and uttered, “Ehaio.” This was a configuration of vowel sounds melted into a sigh, which Canterbourne was beginning to recognize as a local peculiarity. It communicated, he had come to understand, a sort of doubt which one was too polite to express directly.

  “Do you think I might dispense with formalities and leave them to their vine work, Mr. Barozzi?”

  “I think you will make them happier if you do not wade into their vineyard, milord. I was raised among the vines, and wine is in my blood, but these two do not allow me to wander among their grapes unnecessarily. But especially they will not let in what they call the uninitiated. They even watch the workers with a close eye.”

  “Is that so?” He did not object to the exclusion, for he really only entertained the idea of visiting them as a pro forma necessity. But he was struck again by the impression that the two had made on the local people who knew them. “Do you think I might call at the house, then? For I should like to visit their niece.”

  “They will not notice if you do, milord, I assure you.” The man smiled sadly. “We brought Mrs. Grissoni with us. She does some work for them at the house, and she jumped off back there.” Barozzi jerked a thumb toward the dwelling. “She speaks a little English. I am sure she will let you in.”

  Mrs. Grissoni detected his arrival and came to greet Lord Canterbourne outside the front door. The limited view he had of the inside of the house gave him some hint as to why she might prefer to receive him on the front stoop.

  “Is Miss Whitely home?” he asked.

  “I no know where she is.” The servant looked a little puzzled. “I have no met the Miss, yet.”

  Canterbourne's brows drew together. It was odd that she should not be around. It was not as though she had an acquaintance to call on. He could not suppress a feeling of unease.

  He felt better when the servant added, with a chuckle, “but she left me this,” and held up a list of chores. “So I guess she no run away from the Master and Missus, yet.”

  It was an impudent thing for the servant to say, but it was said with good nature and something like a fond sparkle in her eye. He thought that Mrs. Grissoni must be looking forward to having Miss Whitely there, and so he could not take the servant's cheekiness amiss.

  In fact, he felt more confident of Miss Whitely's safety with such a woman around. His uneasiness subsided. And after all, Miss Whitely was probably just exploring the grounds, for she had a little dog who needed walking.

  He wished he could wander about the property and find her. It was a much more enticing prospect than proceeding on to the estate down the road, where Orefados lived.

  He took his leave from Mrs. Grissoni, reminding himself that he would feel better when he had discharged his testamentary duty. The silk bag with its unseen contents weighed upon him in such a strange way. It almost seemed to afflict his mind, and every day with it in his care felt like a day of lost life.

  Chapter 10

  Elizabeth was barefoot as she fished. She dangled a toe in the water, but decided it was too cold for wading.

  She was not even certain that there were any fish in the murky stream, but it did not matter. Her back felt good propped against a twisted little tree. The scent of flowers was around her. And it was a wonderful freedom to have her bare toes exposed to the summer air.

  Silverloo, who was chasing butterflies nearby, stopped suddenly and growled in a low voice.

  “What is it, Silverloo?” She smiled at him, assuming he had caught sight of some bigger prey.

  But her mirth evaporated as a man stepped suddenly out of the shadows. Or, it was more that he materialized from them, for he surely could not have been there before. The shade of the tree was not so dark as that, was it? And yet there he stood, a cold, indistinct mark against the summer landscape.

  Goose flesh crawled over her.

  “Sir, you startled me.” Her voice cracked.

  “I suppose I might have done.” He spoke perfect English in a severe voice. His face was unreadable and seemed to move about, contorting in the tree's shadow and not entirely fixed into a material form. “Poachers prefer to operate in solitude, do they not, now?”

  Elizabeth stood up and squinted at him, doubting her own eyes. “I am not poaching. This is my family's property.”

  “That is funny,” he bellowed, his voice like a great warning blast from a horn.

  She winced.

  Then his words compressed into a mutter as he added, “I do not recall disposing of my lands to anyone. It must have slipped my mind.”

  Elizabeth swallowed. She needed to get away from this man. She began to draw in her line, feeling him glaring at her as she pulled.

  She gathered her strength and willed herself to speak. “I am sorry, sir, if I have intruded upon your lands. It was an honest mistake. And, as you see, I have not caught any fish.” She made to pull the last lengths of line up, but a feeling of resistance made her heart sink.

  “Oh really?” His voice was now shrill.

  In a brief moment of madness, she felt that both his voice and form were moving, undefined, within some ethereal entryway, not yet delivered to the material world and so twisting about amorphously, unable to decide upon their character.

  “Then what are these?” He gestured at the line with an indistinct hand, just as her hook emerged from the water, bearing the impossible burden of six fish.

  “I—” She sputtered for a moment. “I do not know. I do not see how they can be there.”

  “I will tell you, then. They are fish. And they can be there because you have poached them from my stream.”

  She detached the fish wordlessly and laid them at his feet before frantically working to put on her boots. Silverloo moved to her side, continuing his low growl.

  “Do you know what the penalty for poaching is?!” the man shrieked as she gathered her rod and little sack and fled.

  Silverloo followed after her, but Elizabeth did not stop to see that he did. She ran in terror from the ghastly man.

  Was he behind her? Did he follow closely? Would he shoot her in the back? The bushes tore at her arms and skirt and she inhaled insects from their sluggish clouds as she ran through them, coughing and sputtering, but not daring to stop.

  Finally she was blinded by eyes full of gnats and tripped upon a root, falling into the thorny brush before her.

  Chapter 11

  When Lord Canterbourne arrived at Abbazia Pallida, as the locals called Lord Orefados' estate, he was struck by its sheer size. Even the larger houses in the village tended to be one floor, or perhaps two. But this building looked massive and ancient, built into the mountainside behind it and sprawling upward as if slowly stretching to escape its rocky purgatory.

  He clutched the sealed silk bag and walked to the door. The massive ring of the door knocker was coated with centuries’ worth of verdigris. A large grape leaf embellished the middle and clusters of grapes and corkscrew vines crawled about the sides.

  Feeling disinclined to touch the knocker, Canterbourne extended the silver head of his cane and rapped the heavy wooden door. The walking stick almost bounced off of the wood, making an unimpressive tapping noise. The knock was far too polite and English and modern to be understood by this continental behemoth of an entryway.

  He waited a few minutes. Unsurprisingly, his tapping did not rouse anyon
e within. He set his cane against the wall and tucked the silk bag into his pocket, then lifted the door knocker with both hands and dropped it.

  A sonorous thump like a low-pitched gong reverberated through the dense wood of the massive portal. It seemed a summons of much greater momentousness than the mere knocking on a door to pay call.

  After a few moments the door was answered by an odd-looking fellow in a purple jacket and gold knee breaches, with a hint of white lace peeking out at his cuffs. His hair was not in a powdered wig, as one might expect would go with the antiquated attire. It was white at the temples, coiffed into rows of salt-and-pepper curls on top and gathered into a cue at the nape of his neck, fastened with a deep green ribbon.

  The colourful eccentricity of this servant's appearance would normally have been diverting, but under the circumstances, it only disturbed Canterbourne. It was as though he had somehow stepped out of reality. He shook his head. Surely this was not unlike the feeling that many travellers experienced when they encountered a new culture.

  The servant's dark eyes stared out in appraisal at Canterbourne over the precipice of a tanned, aquiline nose.

  “My lord?” He proffered Canterbourne a silver card tray.

  It was not the local milord, but a proper English style of address. How did the servant know Canterbourne was a lord? But he supposed it was obvious to a domestic experienced with the nobility. It was not magic.

  If there were any little peephole in this fortress, a well-equipped person might have seen the colours on the carriage and ascertained even which lord he was.

  Canterbourne played along with the ceremony and pulled a calling card from his silver case, setting it upon the tray.

  It struck him as amusing that, although only a moment ago he was disoriented by the strange form the servant and environment took, he was now finding the well-known formality of placing a card on a silver platter uncanny, situated, as it was, in the backwards countryside on an obscure patch of the continent.

  He supposed he had become too quickly inured to the easy, informal ways of the local rustics, who were kind and obliging, rather than respectfully constrained by the invisible barrier of their common-ness.

  He had even been a little charmed by the tendency he had detected among them to defer to him, call him milord and such, not out of awe or deference for his rank, but out of a kindly inclination to indulge the eccentricities, however bizarre, of others.

  “If you will be so good as to wait here, my lord.” The servant left.

  When the man returned, he led Canterbourne through long stone hallways ornamented with impossibly minute carving upon every surface, so that it stopped being mere decoration and became a texture of never-ending detail.

  Even the high vaulted ceilings were thus crowded with infinite embellishment. Canterbourne could not help but imagine the unfortunate labourers tasked with the neck-breaking work of carving in this minutia while perched on a tall ladder, staring upward until all the water drained from their eyes, and their bodies groaned with the abandoned hope of ever standing straight again.

  Canterbourne shuddered. He could not be charmed by the cruelly beautiful craft of it and he would not permit himself to look at it directly. He feared that, were he once to begin inspecting the swirling forms and embossed inscriptions, he might be drawn into a hypnotic maze of endless fixation.

  As he followed the servant around several more corners and up a number of staircases, he grew concerned that he was being drawn into a very real maze, from which he had little hope of escaping, if he were not led out again.

  He wished he had thought to bring a skein of crimson wool or a pocketful of breadcrumbs. He supposed that was the problem with finding oneself in—what had Miss Whitely called it? A fairytale. One was never prepared when the weird suddenly imposed its thorny hide upon the comfortably prosaic contours of one's life.

  The servant opened a green door and ushered Canterbourne into another realm entirely. It was a quiet, unassuming English parlour. Or so Canterbourne would have thought, if he did not know that it was burrowed into the side of a mountain in the outskirts of Venetia.

  He reckoned the room to be on the west side of the building, for the sunlight was not yet direct in its course though the white-curtained windows. This subtle half-light illumined to the best advantage the quiet wallpapers, which were a parchment colour and politely embellished with well-spaced rows of tiny, muted burgundy chevrons.

  A maple sitting table and two curvy-legged chairs with plump, fawn-coloured upholstery waited invitingly by the window. Canterbourne wished he did not feel a nagging sense of danger in this quiet scene of domestic normalcy, for he was beginning to think his mind must be disturbed.

  “Lord Orefados says he will join your lordship soon. Shall I have tea brought in, my lord?”

  “Yes. That is what I need, a cup of decent tea.” Canterbourne collapsed into one of the chairs, and waited.

  Chapter 12

  When Elizabeth dragged herself back to the cottage, she was scraped, bleeding and panting for air.

  She ignored the stitch that had formed in her side and forbore from collapsing on the rough grass in the shade of the north wall. Instead she dropped her sack, tackle and rod on the ground, and dragged herself to draw water from the well to clean her scratched skin.

  She knew she looked a fright. Though there was no one there to see her, she set about straightening herself in an effort to feel as though she had safely rejoined civilization, such as it was in these parts.

  The water was cool upon her face and limbs. When she was finished washing, she felt restored enough to pull the remaining twigs from her person and straighten her hair and bonnet. She then picked up Silverloo and scampered into the house and all the way through to her room, where she lay down in bed, petting her little dog. He returned the affection by licking her arm, which lulled her.

  Elizabeth awakened from a short nap feeling as though the encounter with the horrible man had perhaps been a dream. She went to gather up the things she had left outside on the grass and discovered that her little sack was heavy.

  She opened it and six fish stared accusingly out at her. Surely that was not possible. She was certain she had left them at the feet of the angry man when she fled from him. How could they be here?

  They were fine silver trout, but Elizabeth could not even think of eating them. Her gorge rose at the mere thought of consuming anything that came from, or was in anyway associated with such a beastly, disturbing person. In fact she felt that her enjoyment of fishing might be utterly ruined. She carried her things into the house and set the fish in a bowl in the larder.

  When she opened the little closet to store the fishing rod and tackle, she started.

  Sitting on a corner shelf inside was a frying pan holding a layer of clean, fresh grease. She threw the tackle into the closet and slammed the door shut.

  How on earth had that got in there? What was wrong with this horrid place that things appeared where they should not?

  She fetched herself a cup of her guardians' unpalatable collio bianco and sat grimacing as she sipped the wine at the kitchen table. Gradually, it had a calming effect.

  Silverloo let out a little yip, and Elizabeth gasped when she heard someone enter the cottage. A slow, deliberate gate clomped its way through the entrance room. Could it be that awful man? Elizabeth's fingers turned white clutching the earthenware cup as the sound of the footfall approached the kitchen door.

  Chapter 13

  Lord Canterbourne had been waiting for a quarter hour in the overwhelmingly calm parlour.

  He soothed the ennui by stroking the contours of the box within the silk bag. More than ever before, a sense of curiosity overtook him. What could possibly be inside?

  And yet, as strong as the impulse to know the box's contents suddenly was, he had little trouble resisting it. He simply reminded himself of his father's last wishes. Canterbourne could never violate what he had come to think of as a sacred trust.
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  He would deliver the box as his father had instructed, without breaking any seals or looking inside. It was his filial duty and he could no more abandon it to indulge an idle curiosity than he could abandon his own family.

  And yet, was that not what his father had done? It was a writhing little maggot of a thought that squirmed about the margins of his conscience, looking for a soft spot to burrow into. Had not his father left both him and his mother alone? Had he not publicly given his own son the cut direct?

  No, he did not owe his father filial piety. The thought came unbidden, but Canterbourne shook his head at its appearance. He had never before been angry at his father for leaving.

  There was a time, when he was a lad in school, just beginning to settle into the resentments and foul tempers that presaged a coming adulthood, that he had been angry with his mother. He was not proud of it, but he had blamed her, thinking that his father must have left because of something she had done.

  It was not true, of course—nor was the later idea that his father left because he was displeased with his son. His father was not the perfect man Canterbourne had once dreamily idealized. He was an imperfect mortal, with mysterious and perhaps very flawed reasons for deserting his family that had nothing to do with any wrongdoing of his wife or child.

  However much Canterbourne might wish that his family history had been different, the obligation he felt to carry out the last wishes of his father was in no way reliant on paternal merits. Canterbourne discharged this duty because of who he was, what he owed to himself as an honourable man, not because of who his father had been.

  The niggling thought departed from him then, and boredom settled in. As Canterbourne's tea was no more, he decided to fill the dull minutes of waiting by examining a little book case in one corner of the room.

  It had several volumes of work, bound in leather, with impressive academic titles, such as The Origins of Elements, Five Essential Numbers, and Portenwahl's Grammar of the Ancient Persian Language, Volume 3. Volumes one and two were nowhere to be found. The shelves also contained both volumes of Debrett's Peerage of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Containing an Account of all the Peers.