Page 2 of Lord of the Darkness

Chapter One

1817

“I do not wish to marry, Father. The only man I ever loved is beyond my reach – you forbade our love, as you have forbidden most things that I desire. I would choose to stay a spinster, rather than marry a man I have seen but twice, in passing.”

Lady Ariana Torryngton sniffed, angrily dashing the tears from her cheeks. She knew that her protests would be in vain, if her father had made up his mind. It wasn’t that the Earl of Hazelworth did not care for his daughter, or that he was by nature cruel – it was simply that he would be dead within a few months and his mind was burdened with weightier matters than whether or not his daughter approved of the husband he had selected for her.

The Earl was a rather old school disciplinarian, and expected absolute obedience from his wife and daughter – that she might not do as he wished never occurred to him.

He looked at her as if she had gone mad, and repeated his earlier statements, in a tone full of irritation.

“Ariana, you will be married. Next week. You should be grateful – you will wed the Duke of Darkmire – you will be a Duchess, which is far better than the status you might have arranged for yourself, left to your own devices. Better than that Baron you were foolishly taken with, or that annoying Lord Jasper you allowed to treat you with too much familiarity. You are twenty – it is past time that you married, and I will see it before I die. I would know that you are well set up, and that this estate – which will devolve to you when all of my other properties go to Cousin Harold – will be in the care of a decent man, who won’t eject your mother from the Dower House either.”

“But Father….”

“Enough, Ariana. You will do as I’ve said. The special license has been arranged, the vicar has been told to prepare, and I’ve signed the contracts with Darkmire.”

“But Father…. the Duke of Darkmire… his reputation… the family history….”

“All faradiddle and fustian, perpetuated by the gossips who have nothing better to do. You will ignore it, and do your duty.”

Ariana swallowed, more tears slipping down her cheeks. She would be given no choice, she knew. Without another word, she turned and ran from the room, hearing her father’s annoyed muttering behind her.

***

Benedict Blackshaw, the Duke of Darkmire, regarded himself in the mirror as his valet tweaked the last fold of his cravat into place. He looked, he thought, rather alarmingly like his father, as he remembered his father being when Benedict had been a small child. It was not, entirely, the appearance he wished to present, but there was no avoiding it. The lines of his face were near identical to his father’s.

The room behind him only added to the resemblance, for though these chambers had been his for more than three years now, before that they had been his father’s for decades.

He turned away from the mirror with a slight shiver.

What would she think of the place, when he brought her here? Would the darkness and the history of the place frighten her?

Was he making a mistake?

He didn’t know – sometimes even he felt as if his mother’s ghost haunted Darkmire Abbey – no doubt keeping company with ghosts from centuries past, if all of the old tales held even a grain of truth.

Truth.

That was something which he had come to realise had rarely been connected with Darkmire Abbey, although he did cling to the – possibly foolish – belief that his father had told him the truth of the things which had happened when Benedict was too young to really understand.

He had resolved to change things where he could, to lift the darkness from the place somehow. It was a resolution in which he had, in his three years as Duke so far, singularly failed.

If anything, rumour had painted it darker in that time.

And now, he was going to marry, to bring an innocent young woman into the darkness.

He needed a wife. Had longed for a wife to lighten his days, but had near given up hope of marrying – the long shadow of the reputation of Darkmire Abbey had frightened off all but the most painfully undesirable young women of the ton. Then Hazelworth had written to him, and Benedict had rather precipitately agreed to what the man proposed.

Hazelworth was a neighbour, although a relatively distant one, and had been one of his father’s few friends. Benedict had almost forgotten that the man had a daughter, until last year, when she had been visible in London for precisely a month, before fleeing back to the country in the face of the disdain of the ton.

There had been rumours about her being ill mannered, and directly rebuffing the approaches of any and all gentlemen, but he had considered those with the same degree of dubiousness as he regarded the rumours about himself. Surely, she could not be that bad, he had told himself.

She was certainly visibly attractive enough, and Hazelworth’s promise that Hazelworth Hall would go to her made her appealing in more ways than the physical. Last week, when he had gone to Hazelworth Hall to spend some time with Lady Ariana, he had been a little shocked, for she had looked sullen and puffy-eyed, as if she had just been crying. The air had crackled with tension and Benedict had felt the odd sensation that a fight had just taken place.

But she had been polite, if distant, and simply agreed with everything he said, as if she did not care at all, about anything. He had pushed his uncertainty aside – the marriage contracts were signed, and he would do as he had agreed to do.

Hazelworth, it seemed, was dying – his racking cough and pale complexion had been evidence enough that he was ailing, and although Lady Hazelworth had not said anything, Benedict had been aware of her watching her husband carefully. That imminence of his own mortality had apparently driven the man to arrange a match for his daughter.