The Wolf of Haskell Hall Read online

  A glimmer of hope chased the shadows away from Lil’s heart. “And what have you learned so far?”

  “Very little. I’ve examined my cousin’s evidence from the recent….accident. He was fetched, along with the local physician, and they reached the body before the authorities, so he made detailed notes before the burial. According to his measurements, the fang marks look like those of a wolf, though an unusually large one. The claw marks, too, were consistent with lupine tendencies, though again, abnormally large.”

  “But if a werewolf is half man, half beast, he’d leave different markings, wouldn’t he?” Lil asked hopefully.

  “There are so many silly tales intermingled with the scant amount of science I have been able to decipher that these beasts could range from two legged to four legged to anything in between. Again, if they really exist.”

  “But the moon….is only five days away from being full.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you plan to do any….observation?” Lil’s heart pounded in her throat as she tried to imagine traipsing around those dark, desolate wastes at night, with only a full moon to light the way. But she couldn’t bear to think of Shelly going alone, either.

  “Of course,” Shelly said, as if the question were foolish.

  “I want to go along.”

  “Absolutely not! I choose to put myself in danger, but I am quite capable with guns and so on. Do you even know how to fire a rifle?”

  “No. But I can learn. I shoot a pistol quite well.”

  “A pistol would only anger such a beast. You are the last Haskell heiress. Would you have this tidy little village broken up, these people thrown out of their homes once the greedy male cousins get their hands on the estate?”

  Lil sighed. “I suppose not. But I cannot just wait for the same curse to befall me.”

  Shelly patted Lil’s white-knuckled hand. “Give me more time to investigate. Once I know what we’re dealing with, I am quite sure we can devise a way to stop this creature from striking again. If we have to, we shall kill it. Direct assault on the heart or the brain, or attack with silver implements seem to be the favored ways.”

  Lil had to close her eyes at the imagery, but that only made the blood and fear she saw in her mind’s eye more real. She forced herself to focus on Shelly’s homely face again.

  “Some lycanthropes apparently fear water,” Shelly added. “From all I can discover, the manner of the transformation is the key to reversing it. If a person becomes a werewolf against his or her will, as long as he doesn’t taste of human blood, the curse can be revoked.”

  “How?”

  “It depends upon the means of transformation, how long the curse has lasted, and so on. The ideal thing, of course, would be to come upon the creature as it was changing. It would make the entire messy sequence of events so much easier to work out.”

  The scientific dispassion in Shelly’s voice amazed Lil. “Are you not afraid?”

  “No, not really. I have my rifle, my mistletoe, my cinders and silver tree leaves to take with me. Surely one of these protections should do the trick. I confess I should truly love to be the first unbiased, scientifically oriented witness to prove werewolves exist.”

  Lil stood, turning her back upon the ugly black book still squatting like a huge spider on the table. “Science may be your guide, Shelly, but it is not a magical shield against a strength and power we can scarcely comprehend, much less….” Again, the horrific images almost overcame Lil, and she had to clutch the chair back for support. “You will take Jeremy and two other men with you, or you will not go upon the moors at all for the next several nights.”

  Scowling now, Shelly stood, too. “I find that I move much faster and quieter alone–”

  “So does the creature you seek.” Lil stared cooly back into the taller woman’s eyes. “I will not have your death upon my conscience. Is that clear….Miss Holmes?”

  Stand-off. Slate gray eyes struck sparks off granite green.

  But then Shelly smiled slightly. “You are a redoubtable young woman indeed. We shall try it your way tomorrow night hence. If the men are as incompetent as their sort tends to be, the next night I go alone. Is that clear…Miss Haskell?”

  Since Lil’s only other option was to fire this amazing woman, she could only nod begrudgingly.

  But if Shelly tried to slip out alone two nights hence, she’d have a very small, very determined shadow trailing behind her. And Lil knew the exact reply she’d make if Shelly turned on her in fury. “You wanted me to face my fears, did you not? And you want no men to accompany you?”

  However, as Lil walked back to the mansion, she paused on the gravel drive to look out over the moors. They were flat, and brown, relieved sparingly by unexpected strokes of genius. As if an artist’s brush had missed the sienna pot and dipped into emerald, forest, turquoise and…there, a lovely pink. A tall flower nodded gayly at her.

  “Come, join me,” it seemed to say.

  As she contemplated those vast wastes, for the first time, Lil began to see some of the beauty Ian had painted so skillfully. That moment of insight terrified her most of all. She turned and ran for the house.

  This grim place was proof positive that beauty lurked in unexpected quarters.

  But as the fate of the former owners of Haskell Hall also proved–so did danger. And Lil forgot that dichotomy literally at her own peril.

  As she entered the house, she forced herself to think calmly, as Shelly would think. She knew where to find cinders…but mistletoe?

  The next night, Lil refused to retire until the investigative team had returned. She tried to read, but ended up pacing the salon. She kept glancing up the stairs, longing to investigate Ian’s tower. Just to reassure herself that he had retired long ago, as a hard-working estate manager should. But every time she found her wayward feet approaching the steps, she forced herself to pull back.

  She’d snuck into his rooms once and almost ended up in his bed. If he came upon her again in the intimate, quiet darkness when the moon was almost full….She whirled and returned to the salon, trying to concentrate on her embroidery.

  Finally, well after midnight, she heard a commotion in the foyer and ran to meet the returning party. She stopped short, staring in dismay.

  Shelly Holmes, still carrying her rifle, stormed in first. She was muddy from head to toe, and she stopped short of the carpet, dripping brown sludge on the marble entryway. Gray eyes contrasted all the more sharply with her grimy face when she looked over her shoulder at someone behind her. “You, my good man, should return to sailing. I’d suggest the South China Sea…..no, Easter Island. It’s properly isolated, and you should be quite at home with the natives, dancing in grass skirts with half naked women, communicating in the only way you seem to comprehend–sign language! And civilization will be safe at last!”

  Sighing, Lil moved forward a bit so she could see the stoop.

  Sure enough, Jeremy stood there, even more grimy, if that were possible. His pale blue eyes were hopping mad–appropriately enough, for he hopped from foot to foot as if he could not be still. His hobnailed boots left muddy footprints as he strode on to the hallway carpet to face his tormentor, hands on his scrawny hips.

  “Aye, and so I might, jest so I can escape the airs o’ females like ye.” He spat on the carpet. “Female! Ye don’t even deserve the name. Why, ye could dance bare-bosomed afore me in one o’ them grass skirts and the only use I’d have fer ye would be as a broom, stab me if else.”

  Since Shelly’s eyes narrowed on him as if she were contemplating exactly where to sink the knife, Lil decided she’d better intervene. “I can safely conclude, I suppose, that the hunt was not successful.”

  Aggrieved, Jeremy turned on his mistress. “Might’ve been, if this here high and mighty–”

  “That’s enough, Jeremy!” Lil interrupted sharply. She had a soft spot for the salty sailor, but she knew how trying he could be. “Kindly go to your quarters and compose yourself.”


  Scowling, he started to stomp across the vestibule to the basement stairs, trailing mud as he went.

  “Not that way! Go around the house to the kitchen entrance, and leave your boots at the door.”

  He stomped outside, grumbling something that might have been, “That one needs a man to ride her, aye, and a dig of the spurs into those scrawny flanks jest to remind her she’s the one on bottom.” The door slammed shut.

  In the abrupt quiet, Lil could hear Shelly’s teeth grinding together. Lil took a clean kerchief from her pocket and offered it to her stable manager. Shelly dried off her face.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask, but–what happened?”

  Shelly wadded the muddy kerchief into a ball. “We were hot on the trail of a set of wolf tracks, even heard a howling very close, when that idiot jerked me behind him–off the path, straight into a bog. It took three men to pull me out and, while he was trying to organize things, Jeremy fell in, too. Needless to say, during all the commotion, the wolf disappeared.”

  With great effort, Lil managed not to smile. “Well, you must admit it was commendable of him to worry so about your safety. He doesn’t have much use for the female of our species, but he was still raised to be protective of our, ah, frailties.”

  “Oh, I know exactly the only use he has for the female of our species. Grass skirts indeed!”

  “He’s no different there, is he, than any peer in the House of Lords?”

  The brown streaks on Shelly’s face cracked into a grimace that might have been a smile. Indeed, her white teeth gleamed through the mud. “You leave me speechless, defenseless of so much as a retort.”

  “Since I have a feeling that affliction shan’t last long, I’ll take advantage of your condition.” Laughing, Lil helped Shelly unlace her boots, linked her arm with her estate manager’s and walked her upstairs. “Come, I know just what you need. A long, hot soak in my copper tub will help you forget Jeremy. I’ll have a guest room made up for you. After a long night’s sleep, we shall discuss our plan for tomorrow night.”

  Halfway up the stairs, Shelly stopped abruptly. “What plan?”

  “Why, our adventure together. I promised you, as I recall, that if the men in your hunting party proved incompetent that you didn’t have to take them again.”

  “But I said I’d go alone–”

  “No, you assumed I’d let you go alone. You wanted me to face my fears, did you not?”

  “Now see here, Miss Haskell–”

  “I am seeing. Very clearly. Whatever danger lurks outside these walls will not go away if I cower inside and let others put themselves in peril to protect me. Besides….I have to know.”

  Lil looked away from Shelly’s arrested gaze and silently led the way up the rest of the stairs. Shelly hadn’t asked her what she had to know because she obviously read the truth in Lil’s face.

  When she met the Wolf of Haskell Hall, would its eyes be amber, its fur lush black, and its scent one her olfactory facilities would recognize before her conscious mind could?

  After she’d led Shelly to the guest room and returned to her own room, it was almost two in the morning. Lil sought out her own bed, but she tossed and turned for another hour. Finally, she went to the heavy draperies and moved them aside to stare out at the clear night.

  The moon was more than three quarters full. Odd how it never seemed so beguiling over the towering Rockies. Colorado was so scenic: mountains clawing their way to the very sky, aspen trees shimmering in the clean wind, sheer drop offs displaying lush valleys below. There, the moon was afterthought. A knickknack God aligned just so to decorate his abode.

  Here, the moon ruled supreme. Over the flat moors, it was huge, serene, the focal point of the dark, sere landscape stretching for eons below. This winsome moon was a siren. It seemed to beckon, to pull the very soul upward. And she finally understood why Cornwall was littered with so many stone altars and monolithic remnants of Druid days.

  This moon required homage.

  Lil felt it pulling at her mind and will, those very anchors of her being, until she felt a strange floating sensation, as if she had indeed parted the veil between life and death, reality and dream. With the moon shining so brightly, mayhap she saw. Mayhap she dreamed. Mayhap she only empathized because she, too, was in the ruthless grip of the same sexual obsession.

  But as clear as if she stood in silent witness, she saw her, dressed in the heavy, full clothes, upswept, elaborate coiffure and cuffed sleeves of Georgian England. The voluminous skirt could still not disguise the gypsy girl’s huge stomach. In the distance, the Druid stones, a few more upright than now, glistened with a purity the girl obviously had lost.

  Her lovely black eyes glittered under a sheen of tears as she stared up at her handsome, titled lover. Haskell was even more finely dressed, and perhaps it was the very luxury of his appearance that made the weakness about his mouth so apparent. His eyes shifted away, as if he could not sustain her gaze.

  Her husky voice was cultured. “If I am good enough to lie with, why am I not good enough to wed?”

  Haskell tried to turn away–and came face to face with a stocky man with graying hair who ducked out of his listening place behind a tree. He carried a shotgun and a grudge with equal ease. “Ye ruddy bastard! I’ve worked me fingers to the nub for ye lo these many years, and this is how ye repay me and mine?” Mr. Griffith nudged his employer in the belly with the gun. “Ye’ll get a special licence, and get it now, or so help me God–”

  “God?” Haskell sneered. “What do you and your adopted daughter of Satan know of God? She tempted me, she came to my bed willingly.”

  The gypsy girl’s burnished skin lost all color. The vibrant sparkle in her eyes dulled as Mr. Griffith looked from her back to Haskell.

  Staring unseeingly at the desolate moors, but caught in the terrible grip of a vision she needed but did not want, Lil clenched her hands until blood dotted the crescent marks in her palms. If she’d been there, she would have been tempted to use the gun on her own ancestor, possibly putting a period to her own existence, so acute was her fury.

  But it was nothing to Mr. Griffith’s fury. With a strangled cry, he leveled the shotgun and tightened his finger on the trigger. Haskell reached out to snatch the gun away, but the gypsy girl was faster. She slammed up the weapon. Both barrels exploded harmlessly toward a tree. Leaves rained down upon them, and then the desecration of life the detritus presaged ended where it began.

  At the Druid stones. They watched with a peace none of the combatants felt. Lil felt it least of all, but still she watched with a terrible fascination.

  Mr. Griffith cast aside the spent weapon and shoved Haskell against the tree, his hands squeezing the taller man’s throat.

  “Papa, don’t!”

  The girl pulled at his arms, but she was knocked to the ground when Haskell brought up his knee into Mr. Griffith’s loins, forcing him back.

  They didn’t see her roll down a slight slope and come to a dazed stop, her legs and arms obscenely limp and askew, like a rag doll’s. Her face twisting with pain, she curled into a ball and cradled her stomach.

  The two men had battled their way toward the ruins, neither of them aware of the water breaking between the girl’s legs. She struggled to her feet, fluid leaking down her ankles into her shoes, but it didn’t show beneath the heavy skirt. She tried to go to the grunting, fighting men, but she could only manage two steps before she stopped, bent and cradled her enormous stomach. “Stop it, you fools!” Lil cried. “Help her!” But the same fate that brought her here made her watch. Watch and know, for the first time in her privileged, indomitable life, what it meant to be truly helpless.

  Then Haskell slammed his forearms up to knock Mr. Griffith’s hands aside. Griffith stumbled away. His foot caught a rock, and he fell backward. The sickening thunk as his head hit the altar made Lil wince.

  Blood gushed from his wound into the ground, and Lil realized he was dead before he hit the ground. His eyes stared
sightlessly up at the uncaring moon.

  Haskell knelt and felt Griffith’s pulse. His strong face twisted with what might have been guilt, but when the girl’s scream rent the night and she flew at him, nails curved into claws, her emotional agony now greater than her physical pain, Haskell reflexively lifted his hands to ward her off.

  She fell again, landing on her side. Lil saw her white teeth tear into her full mouth, and she forced herself to her feet. Under the surreal glow that was so uncaringly lovely, they stared at one another. Her face was so expressive that Lil saw the exact moment when love turned to hatred. She looked between her lover’s face and her father.

  Haskell looked at the remains of the man who’d served him so well and so long. Then the girl staggered over to fall to her knees beside her father. Haskell was left with two choices: comfort her or flee. He did what was most appropriate to his nature.

  He ran.

  The girl looked over her shoulder in dull resignation at the sound of his retreating footsteps. Her eyes saw him for what he was, and their sick comprehension made Lil clutch her own stomach in sympathy.

  The gypsy girl rocked back and forth on her knees, clutching her stomach. She began a sing song chant in Romany that seemed one with the moon, and the bleak landscape, and the Druid stones.

  It was an ancient chant, born of an ancient pain.

  Lil’s eyes watered as she felt the girl’s agony made worse by betrayal. She reached out as if to touch her and comfort her, and the sight of her own hand, shaking against the backdrop of that same ancient moon brought her back to reality. She blinked. The room came in focus.

  She ran for the water pot, nauseous at the full import of what the lass had endured. In that moment, she hated the Haskell blood running in her veins, hated this huge, decaying house that sheltered such shame. As she leaned over the watering pot and vomited, the girl’s keening cries seemed to vibrate between the shadow world and Lil’s reality.