The ghost, p.1
The Ghost, page 1
CONTENTS
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Newsletter and Social Media Links
About the Author
Other books by Carole Mortimer
Copyright © 2024 Carole Mortimer
Cover Design Copyright © Glass Slipper WebDesign
Formatter: Glass Slipper WebDesign
ISBN: 978-1-914336-140
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved.
DEDICATION
My Family,
As always.
PROLOGUE
His prison was both dark and damp.
Because, he had quickly surmised after using what light he had to search the room, there was only one window, and it was set high in the wall above him.
Which told him the large and empty space was below ground for the most part, which accounted for both the dark and the damp.
A cellar, then.
One which he had walked the length and breadth of several thousand times during his weeks, months—years?—of captivity. He no longer knew how long he had been imprisoned here.
Only the thin light of day or night filtered through the dirty window above.
He had tried, at first, to keep track of the ascent and descent of that light, but it soon became impossible to tell if it was daylight or moonlight. They very quickly melded into being both and neither.
Another consequence of being held prisoner so deep beneath the ground was that it gave him no view of the outside. Consequently, he had no point of familiarity with which to know where the house was with this large cellar beneath it.
Nor did he have any idea why, how, or who could have wanted to incarcerate him here.
There might be other people living in the house above him, but he had only ever seen a single jailer. An obese and balding man he knew he had never set eyes on before he woke in this damp and dark cellar so long ago. At the time, he had been dressed in his shirt and pantaloons, with only socks upon his feet. It felt as if the dampness and cold had managed to seep into his very bones.
Demanding to be told why he had been brought here was every time met with a blank expression from his jailer.
Which meant the other man was either deaf, uninterested, or did not have the intelligence to answer the question. Spencer had a feeling it was the latter, because several times, the other man had talked to himself after he had opened the door to place the food inside. Amongst those mutterings, he had heard the name Jacob, along with “nag, nag, nag.” As the man was talking to himself, it seemed accurate to conclude that his jailer’s name was Jacob.
Either way, the result was always an unhelpful silence whenever he asked for answers to his questions.
He knew who he was and where he had been previously, but not how he came to be in this dismal place.
When he checked his body for where he recalled being run through with the sword, it was to see recently healed-over flesh rather than a gaping or infected wound. He knew then he must have been somewhere else prior to being locked in this cellar and attended to by a doctor because such a terrible injury would never have healed so well or so cleanly if it had been left to heal by itself.
He had been here so long now that the scar had faded to a thin silver line, and his life, such as it was, had fallen into a haphazard routine. His memories of the privileged life he had led before this one proved too painful to dwell upon.
His jailer brought down a single slab of dry bread and a jug of water once a day. If he remembered.
If he did not, his prisoner went hungry.
The bread had to be eaten immediately, no matter how dry or maggot-infested it was, or the rats would come out and take it, and he would go hungry anyway.
The rats had tried to eat him a few times at the beginning of his imprisonment, but each time they attacked, he had managed to fight them off.
Eventually, he believed he had been rendered so disgusting, his hair and beard both long and unkempt and no doubt infested with lice, his clothes as ragged and odorous as he was, that even the rats no longer had any interest in him.
Perhaps they were also repulsed, as he was, by the stench coming from the bucket he kept in the farthest corner from where he slept on a bed of filthy straw with only a thin blanket to pull over himself. A bucket his jailer emptied only when he thought of it. Which was usually when the smell became so disgusting, it was strong enough to make their eyes water.
The window above was possibly ten inches square, far too small for him to break the glass and then climb out of, even if he could have climbed the sheer wall within which it was set. This was in spite of the fact he was now reduced to no more than skin and bone. He knew from the attempts he had made that this wall could not be scaled when there were no foot or handholds to aid him.
Every minute, every hour, every day, week, month was filled with interminable sameness.
He had wondered, as time passed, if this depravation would make him ill and eventually kill him. Which was possibly the intent of whoever had made him their prisoner. But it seemed his physical body was so robust, it refused to give in to such weakness.
He was not so confident of his mental faculties.
He would not be surprised if he had gone mad from a lack of mental stimulation of any kind. That, lost in that madness, he no longer had the grasp of enough of his own intelligence to realize how insane he now was.
The fear of that being the case was what spurred him on to find a way to escape.
When he was first brought here, his jailer had taken every precaution to avert that happening. Primarily by standing outside in the hallway and issuing the order for the prisoner to move to the back of the large room before the other man would unlock the door and open it only wide enough to push the bread and water inside. He would then hastily close and lock it again.
With the passing of time and only that meager fare to sustain him, the prisoner had become thinner, weaker, and less of a physical threat.
As a consequence, his jailer had grown less vigilant in those precautions. To the extent the other man no longer bothered ordering him to remain at the back of the room, and he now opened the door wide enough to step fully inside before placing the bread and water on the filthy floor.
For the past week, he had been fostering his jailor’s relaxed attitude by not stirring from beneath his thin blanket when the other man brought his bread and water. Yesterday and the day before that, he had forced himself not to eat the bread. Not an easy feat when he believed he was slowly starving to death.
But he needed to fool his jailer into believing he was now so weak, he could no longer walk across the room to claim and eat the bread, let alone attempt to escape.
He had been leaning for some time against the wall behind where the door would open. He had to, with no way of gauging time or when his jailer would stir himself to see to his prisoner.
He sincerely hoped that the bulking up of the filthy straw beneath the thin blanket looked enough like a body to his jailor for the other man to enter with even less caution than he usually did.
The bucket, which was the only item in the room that could be used as a weapon, had been emptied of its contents—an occurrence that had caused him to gag and then heave up the meager contents of his stomach, mainly an acidic bile—and he now awaited the arrival of the jailer.
He prayed he did not succumb to the dizzy weakness before that happened. Or that this would be one of the days when the jailer forgot to feed him at all.
His heart leapt, his hands clenching about the bucket, the moment he heard the other man’s lumbering steps as he made his way down a staircase, and then the scuffing of his shoes along the length of the hallway to the locked wooden door.
This, he knew, would be his only chance.
If he didn’t make good his escape today, he knew he would not have the energy to try again and would, in all probability, be left here to die.
His heart faltered as the door began to swing open, the hinges creaking in protest.
Wider.
Then wider still.
“Wake up yer lazy arse,” the jailer scorned as he set down the bread and water before straightening. “I don’t have all day ter waste—” His complaint was cut short as the metal bucket landed forcefully against the side of his head, and he fell heavily to the ground, unconscious.
For a second or two, the prisoner didn’t move, couldn’t move. The single action of swinging the bucket hard enough to render the jailer unconscious had taken all of his strength.
It was the urgency to leave the oppression of his prison, along with the fact he had no idea if there was someone in the house above waiting for his jailer to return, which finally spurred him into grabbing up the jug of water and slab of bread.
He drank the former before his teeth hungrily ripped into the bread, not stopping until all the water and food had been consumed. It was nowhere near enough to restore the strength he had lost, but hopefully, it woul d be enough for him to withstand the assault of any other inhabitants of the house.
But before he did that, after first removing the other man’s boots, he pushed his jailer the rest of the way inside the cellar and closed and locked the door behind him. The door was so thick, he doubted that if the jailer recovered consciousness, anyone would hear the other man’s cries for help in time to alert his associates to the escape of their prisoner.
Even with the help of the lit candle the jailer had left outside, obviously to light his way down and then back along the dark hallway, it took longer than the prisoner would have wished to reach the stairs.
He carried the appropriated boots beneath his other arm, intending to wait until he was outside the house before pulling them on. If he managed to get that far, he wished for his escape to be as silent as possible.
When he reached the top of the stairs, there was another closed door.
Most cellars had entry and egress through the kitchen. More often than not, they were used to store wine, giving the butler easy access to whichever wine his employer wished to accompany his dinner on any particular evening.
Logically, that would mean when the door was opened, he would step directly into the kitchen and therefore be within eyesight of anyone working there. He doubted his jailer had been living on bread and water for all this time.
Thankfully, the hinges of this door did not creak as he opened it an inch before bending his head to look through that gap and, at the same time, listen to the noises of the room behind the door.
There was no banging of pots to indicate the preparation of a meal.
No chatter to allow him to gauge how many people there were in the room.
There was, however, the sound of snoring.
Deep and sonorous snoring.
After pushing the door open another inch and accustoming his eyes to the sudden brightness of light after being in darkness for so long, he was able to look farther into the room beyond.
An old crone sat in a rocking chair set beside the fire, her eyes closed, her mouth hanging open to create that loud snore. Her mobcap was tilted askew over escaping tendrils of gray hair. She looked to be of a similar age to his jailer and might possibly be his wife.
There was a jug sitting on the table beside her and an empty mug beside that.
No doubt they had both once contained a cheap ale of some kind, but the deepness of the woman’s sleep implied that was no longer the case. Hopefully, her deep sleep would continue long enough for her not to become aware of her husband’s prolonged absence.
The delicious smell of food cooking came from a large pot hanging over the flames of the fire. At a guess, it was a stew of some kind.
His stomach gurgled so loudly upon breathing in the tempting smell, he froze in place in the doorway to the cellar, fearing it might wake the old woman from her drunken stupor.
She remained unconscious, allowing him to place the candle on the table before making his way silently to the back door.
On his way across the room, he spotted a block of wood in which an assortment of knives were kept. Choosing one of middle size, he wrapped it in a scrap of cloth and pushed it into the waistband of his ragged pantaloons. It would either help him defend himself or provide a way of killing and preparing any small game he came across so that he might eat and regain the strength he was so sorely lacking.
He breathed a sigh of relief when the back door opened without a sound. He turned to cast one last cautious glance about the kitchen before slipping outside.
As he drew in his first breath of fresh air in far too long, he vowed that whoever had done this to him would pay, and pay dearly.
Possibly with their life.
CHAPTER ONE
Early Winter, 1816
Lincoln House, London
“Care to tell us what this meeting is about, Lincoln, so that I can return as soon as possible to the warm embrace of my beautiful wife?” Gideon Harrington, the Duke of Oxford, drawled as he entered the study where the other four remaining Ruthless Dukes were already gathered.
“I second that,” Grayson Vaughn, the Duke of Flint, muttered from where he sat in the chair beside the window. “But to my own wife’s warm embrace, of course.”
“Third it.” Alaric Montrose, the Duke of Melborne nodded his agreement with the sentiment as he leaned against the wall beside the lit fireplace.
“Fourth it.” The Duke of Bristol’s nostrils flared impatiently as he flung himself down into the vacant chair in front of the desk.
“I ain’t got a wife, and I would still rather not be here,” Robert Granger muttered. He was now the heir to the title of the Duke of Plymouth.
Their host, Hunter St. John, the Duke of Lincoln, scowled at them all darkly from where he sat behind that imposing desk. “If any of you think for a single moment I would not rather be in the company of my own wife, engaged in far more pleasurable pursuits, then you are all sadly mistaken.”
“Then why have you brought us here?” Oxford demanded to know.
Flint nodded. “I thought we had agreed last week when we returned from the Continent after spending two months there, unsuccessful in our endeavors to discover what had become of Plymouth’s body, that we would not meet again for several weeks?”
“That is because we had all grown heartily sick of each other’s company.” Robert Granger grimaced.
“Speak for yourself, young man.” Bristol looked down the haughty length of his nose at him.
But they all knew, to a man, that Robert Granger was correct in his statement.
They had all been so despondent at their lack of success in locating the body of their dear friend, the previous Duke of Plymouth, that in the end, even to look at each other had become a stark reminder of that failure.
Having learned several months ago that the body in the Plymouth family crypt was not, as they had thought, their close friend and the sixth Ruthless Duke, Spencer Granger, the previous Duke of Plymouth, the five of them, accompanied by their wives and Robert Granger, had traveled to Waterloo to question the local people.
All in an effort to try to ascertain what had become of Plymouth after his body was seen being loaded aboard a cart and driven away to God knows where.
The answers to their inquiries had proven to be less than helpful. No one, it seemed, had seen a cart going into or out of the woods that day. Nor did they have any idea where it might have gone after it left the woods, carrying Plymouth along with it.
As a consequence, upon their return to London, the five remaining Ruthless Dukes and Robert Granger had decided they would not meet again for several weeks in the hope this would allow them all time and distance from each other to recover from their disappointment.
Indeed, they had agreed they would meet again before that time only if fresh evidence were presented for them to investigate. Or if one of them had come up with an idea of how to approach the problem of locating Plymouth’s body in a manner that would prove successful this time.
It was obvious from all their comments just now that none of them had any new evidence, nor did any of them appear to have formed a new plan in which they might continue their inquiries.
Indeed, the look of despondency on each of their faces implied they were all still downhearted regarding their friend’s death and the subsequent disappearance of his corpse.
Lincoln narrowed his gaze on each of them before stating firmly, “I did not call this meeting.”
“I received a letter from you this morning requesting my presence here this evening,” Bristol insisted.
“As did I,” Oxford stated.
Melborne nodded. “And I.”
Robert Granger also nodded. “The same.”
Flint pursed his lips before speaking. “Admittedly, the letter was not written in your own hand, Lincoln,” he mused. “But I had assumed you must have taken on a secretary to carry out the more tedious of your ducal duties now that you are otherwise…occupied in spending time with your wife.”
