Alfreda chuckled. “Which is it you want, to be turned away at the door or married straightaway?”
Brooke sighed again. “I won’t know until I meet him. I wish none of this had happened.”
“Take heart, poppet. This northern lord could be wonderful. The Prince Regent could be doing you a very big favor.”
“Or Robert could have done me the biggest unplanned ill yet. Getting me stuck with a husband who could well repulse me.”
Alfreda tsked. “Then perhaps we shouldn’t speculate?”
“Perhaps not.”
On the third day of their journey, when they stopped for lunch, no one at the inn knew who Dominic Wolfe was. But they found out that the Regent’s emissary was traveling so swiftly that he was probably on his way back to London by now. Apparently, he was traveling dayandnight, merely changing horses when he could, and sleeping in his coach.
That night, they were only a few hours away from Lord Wolfe’s estate, but Alfreda refused to continue on in the dark. She wanted Brooke to be refreshed and looking her best when she faced the wolf for the first time. They took a room at an inn and Alfreda went down to order a bath for Brooke and to have food delivered to their room. When she returned, she had information about the Wolfe family.
“You aren’t going to like this,” Alfreda said with a dour look. “As if you already don’t have enough worries on your plate, this family you’ve been ordered to join apparently has a curse hanging over their heads, so I think now we need to hope you get turned away at their door.”
“What sort of curse?”
“The nasty sort, centuries old, a curse that has killed all the firstborns in each generation in their twenty-fifth year—unless illness or accident takes them sooner.”
Round-eyed with amazement, Brooke said, “You’re joking, right?”
“No, just repeating what the barmaid, then the cook, and then one of his own villagers who is visiting a relative near here had to say about Lord Wolfe’s family.”
“But we—I mean, I don’t believe in curses. D’you?”
“Not really. The thing is, poppet, many people do, including those who are supposedly cursed. If you are told you are going to die by a certain age, you might be more reckless with your life so the harm invoked by the curse ends up happening anyway. But I doubt the Wolfe heirs just dropped dead for no reason. Ask yours to explain when you feel comfortable with him.”
“I will. There’s obviously some simple explanation that the family just doesn’t bother to share, thus the rumor never got quashed as it should have.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And maybe they like having such a rumor floating around—for some reason.”
“You don’t need to convince me, poppet. But it’s the ‘centuries-old’ part that worries me. That means this rumor has been around for alongtime and has been kept alive because firstbornshavedied, and at least a few of them in their twenty-fifth year. That’s a lot of bad luck for one family to have if it is only bad luck.”
Brooke was scowling but she wanted to know what else Alfreda had heard about the Wolfes. “Was anything said about Dominic in particular?”
“He’s young. No one gave an age, but obviously he’s not twenty-five yet.”
Brooke rolled her eyes and accused, “Youdobelieve in curses!”
“No, just a little levity on my part that obviously failed abysmally.”
“Robert mentioned that Lord Wolfe had a sister who died. The wolf might not even be the firstborn of his generation.”
“Which might be good news if we believed in curses, but a death is never good news. He could have other siblings your brother doesn’t know about.”
“Or be the last of his line and determined to get himself killed in a duel. Iwishwe knew more about him.”
“Well, there is another rumor, one even more absurd. They say he prowls the moors as a real wolf and his howls are the proof of it.”
Brooke’s mouth dropped open before she demanded, “Tell me that’s more levity?”
Alfreda grinned. “No, but you know how rumors get embellished every time they are passed along. They end up being so far from the truth that they are no more than wives’ tales.”
“Well,thatrumor is obviously superstitious nonsense. A wolf man? Maybe they have an ogre living in a tower, too.”
