Read If He's Wild for Free Online

parlor. They had not even commented on the nearly rude way he had dismissed Madame Claudette, a woman he was supposed to be seducing for the sake of king and country. He also knew they would continue to play the game by his rules for a while longer, confident that he would eventually explain everything. Hartley was just not sure he could explain, that his friends would even understand if he tried, or that the Vaughns would clarify much when they did arrive.
    He took a deep drink of his brandy to still his agitation but was not completely successful. Everything he had overheard in the garden churned in his mind despite his attempts to dismiss all but one thing—they knew about Claudette. He had considered himself a man of logic and fact, blissfully clean of superstitions, but the things the Vaughns had said had roused a few from wherever he had buried them. Worse, he had found himself listening as if they were not talking utter nonsense.
    “As I have told you,” said Aldus, “the Vaughns are known to be honorable and true to their word. They carry a wide variety of titles, starting with the patriarch of the clan, the Duke of Elderwood. The family seat, Chantiloup Castle, is in Cheshire, but one step from Wales. The current duke is a young man named Modred, if you can believe that. Poor sod. Do not know anyone who has met the man. Sons, cousins, nephews, and the like all seem to stumble into titles of their own, from insignificant ones to quite impressive ones. Some come from the crown for services rendered, but many come through marriages, especially from women of titled families who lack sons to inherit everything. Not all titles pass only through the sons, and a little bribery can get many a will or entail changed. There is wealth there, too, enough to make such changes. If they were not so reclusive and rumored to be odd, that family could probably wield a great deal of power. So could the other branch of the family, the Wherlockes.”
    “But why are they reclusive and deemed odd?” demanded Hartley.
    “Well, ’tis said they can do and see things we mere mortals cannot. Such things as what got several of their ancestors tried and executed as witches, and had them all heavily persecuted for a time. That might be the cause of this lingering tendency to hide away from the world. Both sides of the family have a sad history of wives and husbands walking away never to return. The last one to do so was Lady Henrietta Vaughn, who was, I believe, Lady Alethea’s mother. She left her husband and four children about fourteen or fifteen years ago. Retired to a small estate in Sussex with an aging spinster aunt and refused to speak of her marriage.”
    “She did occasionally let slip the opinion that her husband was in league with the devil,” said Gifford. “I recall her telling my aunt once that all the Vaughns are cursed, that that curse had stained her children with the devil’s mark so that she had to flee to save her own soul. My aunt said the woman was frighteningly pious. Still visits the woman from time to time when she goes to Sussex to visit her son, but claims the woman gets worse every year. Actually spoke of her children last spring, but my aunt Lily said it was all nonsense and she thinks the woman is losing her mind.”
    “Did she tell you what that nonsense was?” asked Hartley.
    “Some of it,” replied Gifford, “though Aunt Lily thinks it all delusions born of guilt over deserting her own children. The woman told my aunt that her daughter could foresee death, that at only six years of age the little girl had accurately described their closest neighbor’s death two full days before it happened. Aunt Lily said she might have believed that, but that then the woman told her that her eldest son could hurl things about without lifting a finger.”
    “Nothing about seeing ghosts?”
    “Er, no, although she has said a few things about her husband and spirits. Again, all this is according to Aunt Lily.”