“Your mommy is wonderful, isn’t she?” her father would say, hugging her and letting her ride his shoulder. Jane, beaming, agreed. “Almost as wonderful as my little angel,” he would say, stroking her fine platinum hair. “My blue-eyed angel.”
Jane would laugh and pull his hair. Then her mother would appear, impossibly beautiful, radiant in the aftermath of her performance. Jane called out. Sandra, seeing her, instantly softened, and took her from her father’s arms, hugging her fiercely. “Darling! Darling! Mommy is so thrilled! Did you enjoy the show?” And her mother nuzzled her soft cheek.
She was Sandra Barclay, considered one of the finest actresses of her time, renowned throughout London. He was Lord Weston, the Duke of Clarendon’s third son, the Viscount Stanton. To this day Jane had such wonderful, vivid memories of the three of them together, always in one theater or another, until her father died when she was six.
It was a terrible time. Her mother would see no one and Jane did not recognize the pale, gaunt woman who turned away from her. Her uncle, who was not really her uncle but the manager of the troupe, explained carefully to Jane that Daddy had gone to heaven. Jane knew about heaven, so now she demanded, “Tell him to come back!”
“I can’t, Jane,” Robert Gordon said softly. “But he is in heaven with God, and he is happy.”
“Has Daddy died?”
Robert hesitated, surprised, then stroked her hair. “Yes, angel. But don’t be afraid. One day you will see him again.”
Jane clutched his shirt. “I want to see him now!” she cried imperiously. “Tell him to wake up!”
“I can’t,” Robert said, agonized.
“Yes, you can,” she said, sobbing, desperate. “Mommy dies all the time, but she always wakes up to come home!”
At first Robert didn’t understand. Then he realized that she was thinking of her mother’s dramatic performances. “Honey, this time is different. Your mother only plays at going to heaven. Your daddy really has.”
Jane could not understand. She didn’t believe Robert. Her daddy would come back. She tried to tell her mother this, but Sandra only wept. Wept with her daughter in her arms, hugging her fiercely, as if Jane could ease her pain. And then one day Jane knew the truth. He wasn’t coming back—not ever.
Her mother came out of mourning after a year to take her place in the theater again. Her own personal tragedy had made her better than ever, the critics said. Her performances were haunting. No one who saw Sandra Barclay on the stage could ever forget her.
Sandra refused to send Jane away to school, but hired a tutor instead. Jane learned to read and write mostly in her mother’s dressing room, or sitting in the huge, empty auditorium, or, sometimes, from the study of her mother’s London town house in Chelsea. When Jane was ten her mother became very ill, and three months later she passed away. The doctors never had an explanation.
At ten Jane had been too old and too worldly not to understand exactly what had happened. This was no act. Her mother had died and was never coming back. Robert and her mother’s friends—actors, actresses, musicians, stagehands —would not leave her alone to grieve. Their grief was shared, and Jane found comfort from everybody. Robert soon gave her her first role as an actress to distract her. She played a little boy in the production ofThe Physician.She only had five lines, but—stepping out on the stage as someone else, becoming someone else, playing someone else for a thousand people—it was the most exciting event of her life.
And afterward, when she came to take her bow with the rest of the cast, the applause was thunderous. Jane, holding hands with an actress and actor, bowed again and again to the standing ovation. Her face was wreathed in smiles. Her heart was expanding to impossible dimensions.
Someone shouted, “It’s the Angel’s daughter! It’s Sandra’s girl!”
And the actress pushed her forward. “Take your own bow, Jane, they want you,” she cried. Jane found herself alone on the stage, bowing. The crowd went crazy for the little blue-eyed blonde.
“Angel, Angel!” they screamed, applauding wildly. She soon became London’s darling of the stage. They called her “Sandra’s Angel.”
“Jane, stop your daydreaming—we’re here!”
Jane jerked out of her sentimental memories at the sound of Matilda’s intrusive voice. She had tears in her eyes, both from joy and pain, and she brushed them away. She found herself staring at the dark-gray stones of the neo-Gothic manor looming before them. She had expected something dark and gloomy and menacing. She wasn’t disappointed. All that was missing was overgrown ivy—the creeping pink roses and the carefully tended lawns were incongruous to the dark, dismal castle. As her gaze traveled along the immense, turreted outline of Dragmore, she came to the south wing, jagged and blackened and gutted grotesquely from a fire. Apparently it had been left that way for years. An irreverent testimony to the past—or was it some sort of macabre reminder? Jane shivered, her heart lodging in her throat, as they entered the circular drive going round in front of the house. And then she saw him, standing in the ancient stone arch of the barbican, his body partly turned to them, tall and powerful and darkly forbidding. In that moment, as he stared at them, he appeared to be the resurrected ghost of one of his ancestors, an indomitable pagan lord from another time and place.
The Lord of Darkness.
Oh, how the title suited him.
They said he had killed his wife.
3
It had to be she and he wasn’t pleased.
The earl was in the process of entering the manor. He paused at the sound of the carriage approaching, clearly discernible despite the frantic barking of the hounds. Vast irritation filled him, and he abruptly crossed the courtyard and stalked into the house, past the butler. “Show them in,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Which room shall I show them to, my lord?” Thomas asked politely. He was in his fifties, white-haired, balding, his face always bland. The earl thought that he could run around in a loincloth and moccasins with full Comanche warpaint and the old man wouldn’t bat an eye. Nick actually, secretly, liked him.
“How the hell would I know? You can take them to the stables for all I care.” The earl strode across the marbled foyer, oblivious to the fact that he was tracking mud and manure through. He began bounding up the curved mahogany stairs.
“Shall I serve them tea and crumpets?” Thomas called after him politely.
