Autumn 1818
Cornwall, England
The wind howled. The shutters rattled.
Millicent swooned.
The specter rose up, a chilling vision, to loom over her
prostrate form…
“Drat!” Prudence muttered. Pushing her slipping spectacles back into place, she frowned at the sheet of foolscap before her. Her heroine was swooning far too frequently, and the specter very much resembled the apparition in her last book, The Mysterious Alphonse. Her second effort simply was not going well at all.
What she needed was… a stimulus. With a sigh, Prudence gazed out the window at what had always provided her with the necessary inspiration: Wolfinger Abbey.
Of course, Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels were what had given her the courage to take up writing herself, but it was the abbey that stirred her creative spirit. It stood high up on the edge of the sea cliff, enshrouded in mist, the dark gray stone stark against the bleak sky, its towers home to the earls of Ravenscar for hundreds of years.
What secrets did it hold? Prudence had always pondered them, and even as a child she’d woven tales of death and destruction, passion and murder, for the area’s most famous structure. Rumors spoke of a vast network of tunnels that lay beneath it, used by wreckers and smugglers not so long ago, but, to her great disappointment, Prudence had never found a single shaft.
When she was a young girl, she and the village children had dared each other to pass the gloomy gates or creep into the cemetery where the monks who’d once walked its halls were buried. But the others always had fled, shrieking in terror when they got close, leaving Prudence to be turned away by the aged caretaker.
Ever since, Prudence had been frustrated in her efforts to gain entry, because the abbey stood empty for the most part. The earldom had passed to a distant relation who was more interested in the dissipations of London than in a lonely seaside residence.
Life went on, bypassing Wolfinger. But it remained, a Gothic sentinel, ancient and awe-inspiring. Like a standing stone, it kept its barrow of mysteries closely guarded—and waited for new blood.
A few locals claimed it was haunted by the ghosts of the sailors who had died on the rocks below, by fair means or foul. Others said it was cursed by the bad blood of the Ravenscars who had dwelled there. To the fainthearted, it was macabre; to the more prosaic, an eyesore.
To Prudence, it was perfect.
She loved Wolfinger Abbey with a fierce devotion that no one else, certainly none whom she knew, could comprehend. To her, the eerie edifice was the epitome of romance, adventure, excitement—all the things that were lacking in her own placid existence.
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