CHAPTER 26
ALEX
Of course the call was a disaster. Alex had known what Gabe would say long before she actually tried to tell them what was going on. Not that she told them everything.
They definitely didn’t need to know about the incident in the study for one thing. Or about anything resembling orgies. The sounds could be explained…somehow.
‘We’ll come over!’ Gabe told her, eyes shining. ‘We can sort out flights and be there before you know it. I’ll make the calls?—’
‘No,’ she told him as firmly as possible. ‘Besides, you have contracts in place. You can’t afford to piss off the network, Gabe, and you know it.’
He gave her that plaintive puppy look. Once upon a time it might have even worked.
‘But Alex, it’s a breakout opportunity. They’ll understand, hell, they’ll love it, and besides?—’
‘There is no besides. I’m here. I’m on site. And I don’t want you all here. If the stories about this place are true, it’s too risky anyway.’
Daphne sucked in a breath which almost sounded delighted and Alex frowned at her. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Believe what?’
‘You. You’re starting to come around at last.’
‘No, I am not. I’m talking about practicality. Parts of the Hall are unsafe. I can’t have you lot tramping around wherever and getting hurt. I don’t even think there are enough bedrooms in a fit state to be used.’ That was her excuse and she was going to stick to it.
‘It’s acastle, Alex,’ Gabe chided.
‘You have a vastly inflated opinion of what that means around here. This isn’t a fairy tale. There’s, like, six habitable rooms. You’re not coming over and that’s that.’
‘Besides,’ said Daphne with a wicked grin which boded nothing good, ‘she wants to keep the Sasquatch to herself.’
Alex suppressed a growl. ‘Don’t call him that. Leave Nick alone.’
‘Oh?’ Daphne purred the sound with one of those shit-eating grins. She was a born matchmaker that one. Not always successfully. She’d fixed Alex and Gabe up after all.
Gabe’s tone was a lot more suspicious. ‘And what exactly do you know about this Nick guy, other than your brother gave him a free ride?’
Alex wasn’t about to let him start in on that. ‘Enough,’ she growled. ‘Or I’ll end this call and just sort it out myself.’
It was like wrangling small children. Maeve was better behaved than these lot. Alex took a deep breath, trying to centre herself.
‘I did turn up some more information,’ Arnold said in that soft voice. He always waited for a lull to chime in.
‘What?’ asked Gabe.
Arnold cleared his throat as if in preparation to deliver a lecture. ‘Okay, so, Blaise Chambers, the Master of the Revels, was killed by Richard de Wilde, the sixteenth baron. That’s Hugh’s son, right? The report says in late August 1826 he lay in wait in the kitchen and shot Chambers through the heart as hecame out of the cellar. He was the only one of his immediate family left alive and blamed Chambers for their deaths.’ She heard him clicking on his keyboard, looking for a reference in his notes. ‘That’s possibly where the whole curse of the de Wildes story starts. Difficult to say because the records before this are patchy and a lot of it’s just hearsay. The curse was meant to be hardest on their daughters.Marry young, one of them wrote to her sisters,whoever will have you, leave as soon as you can. Never look back.’
‘And there you are back again,’ said Gabe. ‘You don’t listen, do you?’
Alex glared at the screen and he just shrugged. Water off a duck’s back.
‘So if the house is cursed,’ Eduardo asked, ‘why not just burn it down and walk away? It sounds like they wanted to, your ancestors.’
‘Well first of all, arson,’ she told him. ‘Pretty sure that’s illegal.’
Ed grinned back. ‘Only if you claim on the insurance.’
‘People have tried,’ Arnold went on before Alex could come up with another smart answer. ‘During the 1920s, there was a campaign to drive out the local aristocracy by burning the houses, part of the war of independence, and the civil war that followed. When it came to Wildewood Hall, a Republican brigade arrived. Alex’s great-grandfather faced them down apparently, but so too did the people of Kilfayne, standing side by side with him. His wife was one of them, you know. The brigade fell back to the woods and…only one of them made it out alive. He’d lost his mind. He said the house is a prison and the trees are the guardians. That they’d taken the lives of those who wanted to destroy it because if anyone destroyed the Hall, a monstrous spirit trapped there would have escaped.’
