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

  Accursed Abbey

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

  Tessa Candle

  Accursed Abbey

  Book 1 in the Nobles & Necromancy series

  EPUB Edition

  Published by

  Copyright © 2017 by Tessa Candle. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, now known or hereafter invented, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a critical article or book review.

  Accursed Abbey is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. With the exception of well-known historical figures and places, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-77265-018-1

  Accursed Abbey

  is dedicated to you, my true reader. You enjoy a good steamy romp with some naughty nobles and a witty heroine. You don’t mind an occasional an occasional bit of off-coloured language, and you don’t mind waiting for the characters to earn their sex scenes, so long as they are sexy. Perhaps most importantly, you are an early supporter of the Nobles & Necromancy series.

  I hope you enjoy the mysterious Gothic love story of Elizabeth and Lord Canterbourne. Thank you for being my true reader. You are the person I write for.

  Contents

  Also by Tessa Candle

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Afterword

  Sample Chapter 1

  Sample Chapter 2

  Sample Chapter 3

  Sample Chapter 4

  Sample Chapter 5

  Also by Tessa Candle

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Glossary

  Also by Tessa Candle

  Three Abductions and an Earl, Book 1 in the Parvenues & Paramours series. Get links to buy it on all your favourite retailers here.

  Mistress of Two Fortunes and a Duke, Book 2 in the Parvenues & Paramours series. Get links to buy it on all your favourite retailers here.

  Three Abductions and an Earl, audio book, as read by the author—coming soon! Sign up for updates.

  Chapter 1

  Elizabeth Whitely stood shivering with her little dog, Silverloo. The alpine wind chilled her back as she waited, tired and anxious, for coachmen to change the horses and resume the journey to Friuli.

  Mrs. Holden approached her, handing her a clay mug of some herbal infusion, sweetened with honey. “Here, this will warm you and settle your stomach. Many people feel unwell at these altitudes.”

  Elizabeth smiled as she accepted the cup from the kindly middle-aged woman. She was the most recent in a series of married ladies and widows that had met Elizabeth upon her long journey from England, and had compassionately offered her their protection.

  But this was Mrs. Holden’s last stop. As Elizabeth stared down the mountainside at the orange-bricked villages that sprouted up here and there like little mushrooms along the spindly road, she wished her journey, too, ended here. She longed for a proper bed and a life without wheels beneath her.

  But Elizabeth would travel on her own, further and further from the only home she had known, toward the place that was to be her new home, at what seemed like the edge of the world.

  “That is my husband, now.” Mrs. Holden waved at a gentleman in a beaver hat, then turned back to Elizabeth. “I wish you were not travelling without a companion.” The woman's face looked genuinely worried, which only agitated Elizabeth's own fears.

  She embraced Mrs. Holden. “Thank you for your kindness.”

  When the lady tore herself away, Elizabeth felt utterly alone, and the light-headedness that afflicted her made her wish to curl up in a ball and sleep.

  But instead, she finished her herbal tea, wrapped her shawl more tightly about her, and took Silverloo for a walk around the posting house. There was a little time until the coach departed.

  As the little dog relieved himself on some scrubby bushes behind the stables, she listened idly to the many different languages spoken by the people passing around her. There were languages she recognized, and then there were others that were a mystery. They sounded like German, Italian or French, but were not.

  It was disorienting, at once exotic and unnerving, to be in such a mixed cauldron of words. Back home in England, she had never heard so much as a smattering of French. But here, for all she knew, revolutions might be being plotted, or incantations recited, and she would be none the wiser.

  The coach was brought around, and as Elizabeth walked toward it, she was struck still by a sight of beauty. A young maiden stood ready to enter the same carriage. She was perhaps sixteen—or at any reckoning, she was certainly no older than Elizabeth’s nineteen years, and neatly, but modestly dressed in a dove grey travelling habit.

  Her straw bonnet was tied with a length of dull ribbon, and no jewellery or lace ornamented her. But the face that peeked out from underneath that bonnet was ornament enough.

  The girl had features and skin that angels might envy, as though her face were delicately carved from unblemished ivory and framed in perfect golden curls. The pale, icy blue of her eyes gave her an otherworldly look, which was startling next to the air of innocence that pervaded her entire person.

  Silverloo gambolled over to the girl, looked up at her with his best rakish smile, then rolled over to present his belly. This had the desired effect, and the girl grinned and scratched him.

  Elizabeth laughed as she approached. “You must forgive my little dog. He has rather fast manners.”

  The girl smiled and said, slowly and with a strong accent, “He is a treasure. W
hat is his name?”

  Elizabeth spoke a little German, and the girl spoke a little more English, and so they got on and introduced themselves. Her name was Lenore Berger, and she, too, was destined, for Friuli.

  By the time they rolled away, Silverloo had laid himself out to span both their laps, exposing his belly, and the two young ladies had settled into a proper chat.

  Suddenly Elizabeth drew in a rapid breath, as she felt the carriage lurch into a very steep descent.

  “What is wrong?” asked Lenore, resting a hand gently on Elizabeth’s arm.

  “I,” she gasped as though the wind had been knocked out of her, “only just got accustomed to going upward, altitude sickness and all. And now it feels like we are headed down a cliff.” This was so much worse.

  Lenore stroked her arm sympathetically. Elizabeth gripped the wall of the coach with her other hand and prayed, closing her eyes to the sight of the looming emptiness that gaped between the carriage and the rugged peaks in the distance.

  “You will get used to it.” Lenore’s voice was calm.

  “Does it not bother you at all?”

  “I was raised in the mountains, so I had not given it a thought until now, but I can see how it might be a little frightening.”

  A little frightening. Elizabeth’s right hand ached from grasping whatever purchase her fingers could find. She made the mistake of opening her eyes again. The road was so terrifyingly narrow that it disappeared from view. Straining to see further out the window only persuaded her that they were already suspended in the air, ready to plummet at any moment and dash against the rocky depths below.

  Lenore smiled reassuringly and tucked Silverloo under Elizabeth’s left arm. “Close your eyes. I will tell you when we are at a better place.”

  Elizabeth peeked once, and to her horror, was given a full view down the slope of how tiny and narrow the road became, before it apparently ended in a cliff, requiring of her the very great leap of faith that there was a corner affording a continuation.

  Just then a sudden gust of wind made the coach waver sideways. She squeezed her eyes shut again, waiting to feel the sudden drop that would precede her death.

  It did not come. A plaintive whine brought her around, and she realized that she was clasping her little dog a bit too tightly to her chest. She relaxed her grip and petted him. “Sorry, Silverloo,” she whispered.

  “Just keep your eyes closed.” Lenore spoke soothingly. “Perhaps we should continue talking.”

  “Yes.” Elizabeth kept her eyes shut, but forced herself to make conversation. “Are you going to see family in Friuli?”

  “No.” Lenore’s voice was sad. “I have no family. I am an orphan.”

  Sympathetic pain shot through Elizabeth's heart. “I am also an orphan. I lost my parents this month past.” She could not cry about it anymore, but there was still such an ache.

  A day did not go by that she did not have a sudden realization that they were gone. The shock of the loss seemed to be ever recurring and left her feeling as breathless and without anchor as when the carriage had threatened to plunge over the alpine cliff.

  Elizabeth’s emotions must have registered on her face, for Lenore patted her hand where it rested on the dog. “You have Silverloo.”

  The sweet, kind simplicity of the gesture charmed Elizabeth and she was comforted.

  “I go to my ward...” The girl faltered. “No. My guardian. It was planned long ago in my parents' will. I should stay in a convent school until I reached my sixteenth year, and then I should go to live with my guardian. That is why I have been taught English, for he is an Englishman.”

  “And I am to go and live with my aunt and uncle, whom I have never met, though they were apparently present at my christening.” Elizabeth had recovered from the grave fear that she had felt when she first embarked upon the journey, but as she drew closer to its completion, she could feel a dread of the arrangement’s finality settling into her bones.

  “They own a vineyard somewhere outside of a town called Melonia,” Elizabeth added. “I know not when I shall see England again.”

  Lenore sighed. “My guardian is also somewhere near there, in the countryside. I do not know him at all. I am a little frightened to meet him.”

  So Lenore, too, had been oddly consigned to the care of a distant stranger. But, unlike Elizabeth, she had no other family. It still puzzled Elizabeth that her own father should have made this estranged aunt and uncle the trustees of her person and her modest inheritance.

  Why had he not made her over to her godparents, or to one of her other relatives who lived in the neighbourhood, instead of these two people, strangers to her, who lived in such a faraway place as a tiny outpost of Venetia?

  She supposed her father's illness must have already been affecting his judgement when he drafted his will.

  Elizabeth sensed her own troubled mood might be alarming Lenore, so she smiled. “We shall not be afraid. We shall look out for each other.”

  It was a fast friendship, but seemed natural, for their similar situations gave them a common bond. Elizabeth relaxed more as they talked.

  Then Lenore finally said, “You can look now.”

  Elizabeth hesitated, but opened her eyes. She drew in a breath at the beauty of the mountain peaks floating about in pools of blue sky, clad in the holy raiment of white gossamer mists here, or in the ominous black robes of thunder clouds, there.

  “It is so beautiful and so terrifying.” Elizabeth laughed and shook her head. “I have never seen anything like it.” Such convulsive geography could never exist anywhere in quiet, civilized England.

  “I adore the mountains. Since I was a child, I have always roamed in the forests, collecting flowers for bouquets, or to press as specimens in my scrapbook.”

  “I love walks in nature, too, but I prefer hunting for mushrooms or fishing.” It was not something Elizabeth would disclose in polite society back home, for it made her look a bit more sport-loving than society generally approved of among young ladies.

  Lenore pulled a little lace cap she was working on from her reticule. “The sisters taught me all kinds of needle work. I like that too.”

  Elizabeth marvelled at the intricate craftsmanship. “I could never do anything so fine. It is beautiful.”

  “Our needles are guided by God,” said the girl with a sweet plainness that Elizabeth had never encountered.

  Where Elizabeth came from, pious proclamations were always for the sake of display, as was needlework. Making lace was not a suitable pastime for English young ladies, but Elizabeth's mother had tried to cultivate her daughter's ability with fancy embroidery.

  And now that excellent woman was gone. Elizabeth thought, with a twist of her heart, that she should have applied herself more earnestly to her needlework, if only to please her mother. She fought to push down the surge of anguish and remembered loss that such thoughts brought back.

  Seeing the troubled look on Elizabeth's face, Lenore led the conversation in another direction. They spoke of their favourite places in the meadows and forests they had known as children. And soon they shared the playful dreams of those happier days.

  “Some day we shall live together as old maids in a cottage in the woods, planted 'round with wild herbs and berries.” Elizabeth treasured the childish fantasy. “And pretty flowers for you.”

  “And I shall make our blankets and our lace caps,” added Lenore, her heavenly blue eyes sparkling. “You will catch fish for our dinner.”

  Elizabeth smiled as she yawned. “Silverloo will patrol our home and chase away uninvited mice. And we will all be perfectly merry.”

  With such pleasant thoughts to seed their dreams, they fell asleep in the carriage, rolling toward their strange, unknown destinies in Melonia, with only the snoring Silverloo to guard them.

  Chapter 2

  It was late when the last carriage of the journey finally stopped at an inn in Melonia. Elizabeth was grateful to get out of the carriage into the coole
r night air, for once out of the mountains the coach had become insufferably hot.

  The inn yard was gloomy, lit by a single torch. This was apparently sufficient light for the workmen to remove the trunks, bags and boxes, and attend to the horses.

  But Elizabeth fumbled about, barely able to see, and when the workmen were done, even the one torch was extinguished, leaving her reliant on the dim glow from the inn window. She felt like she had arrived at the penumbral limit of this earthly existence, as though some final, blind abyss yawned before her in the deeper darkness outside the inn's yard.

  Elizabeth had two trunks, and Lenore only a single small case and the little bag that she carried on her person. The two stood beside these possessions as though they were the only anchors tethering them to an earthly existence. Both cast about for their guardians, but neither knew what face to seek. People milled about, entered the inn, or met their parties and departed, but Elizabeth and Lenore remained unclaimed.