Persephone "Persey" Foyle, the Dowager Marchioness of Holbrooke, leads a happy, busy existence, tending her garden, overseeing her charitable missions, feuding with her stepson's wife and vetting potential suitors for her stepdaughter. As far as this lively widow is concerned, her life lacks nothing.
But when a young, famously-talented designer is hired to "improve" the grounds of Holbrooke estate—a task she has managed for eight years—Persey's comfortable world is threatened. It doesn't help that he's hired by her nemesis, the new marchioness, or that his talents are all the mode among England's Georgian aristocracy. He has no chance of impressing Persey. No chance at all.
Josias Radcliffe has worked hard for his success, and although he's been warned about the dowager, no "meddlesome old crone" will stand in the way of his latest triumph. Until he runs into a pretty maid on his first day and talks her into showing him through the Holbrooke maze. Soon his course is altered, his plans changed forever.
Because the dowager has secrets and Joss is the one person who could expose her as a fraud. He knew her when she was Long-Legged Meg—a scullery maid who spun tall tales, and, so it is rumored, used her knowledge of herbs and plants to dispatch her enemies. Folk say she used those long legs to carry her away from the gallows.
Have they carried her far enough?
The Peculiar Folly of Long Legged Meg
Jayne Fresina
Twisted E Publishing, LLC
www.twistedepublishing.com
A TWISTED E- PUBLISHING BOOK
The Peculiar Folly of Long Legged Meg
Copyright © 2017 by Jayne Fresina
Edited by Marie Medina
First E-book Publication: June 2017, SMASHWORDS EDITION
Cover design by K Designs
All cover art and logo copyright © 2017, Twisted Erotica Publishing.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
All characters engaged in sexual situations are over the age of 18.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Also By Jayne Fresina
About the Author
"Secrets are a woman's stock in trade. A wise lady should no more confess her age at any particular moment in time, than she would tell what she has spent on shoes, what she is truly thinking, or where the bodies are buried." ~ the Dowager Marchioness of Holbrooke.
Prologue
1810
"Grandpapa, look! Is this the place where the angel fell to earth?"
Disregarding all warnings, the little boy ran through the forest glade, stumbling and tripping in such a disorderly manner that it was a miracle he stayed upright and kept his bones intact. The bluebells under his boots released their soft fragrance into the cool air, following his trampled path.
"Grandpapa! Is this the place?" He stopped as if he ran into an invisible wall, feet apart, arms out, face turned expectantly upward into a shaft of light that split the shadows like the blade of a sword.
Amazingly the child had found his way to it.
The man walking after him came to a gentler halt on that rumpled carpet of blue.
"Aye. Here is the spot." It was still unchanged, unspoiled. "See there?" He pointed and the little boy looked up again, craning his neck, glittering lines of soft verdant shade and ethereal silver painting his eager face.
"What is it, grandpapa?" he demanded, breathless with excitement.
There among the trees stood a tall, narrow, crooked stone tower, a structure that seemed to grow out of the roots of the forest and, to somebody suddenly stumbling upon it, might have been there since the beginning of time. Except it had not, of course. Reaching up into the flickering canopy of filtered sunlight, the curved stone sought the sky, waiting for the rain that, since this was an English summer, had not long fallen and was bound soon to fall again.
In fanciful moments, he liked to think that if he'd built it a few more yards higher they could have touched the clouds. But it was left unfinished, like an unanswered question, because she liked it that way. She liked to make people wonder.
"They call it a folly," he told his grandson. "I built it, many years ago."
"What's it for then?"
"It has no practical purpose. It's an ornament."
"I can see steps. Can I go up inside?"
"Not today. It'll be slippery from the rain."
"Is she there still? The angel? You made it for her, didn't you? So she could live here and be safe. So nobody else would find her while she healed her broken wing." The boy had a wild imagination that never ceased to make him smile.
He did so now. "A part of her might still be here." One hand laid to the stone, he closed his eyes to let the memories dash through his mind, brilliant splashes of color, fresh and vibrant as if he was back there again, a young man charging ahead, with no idea of what lay around the next corner. "Wherever we go in life, we leave a part of ourselves behind."
He had put his heart and soul into this folly, his monument to the woman he loved. Soppy, daft lad, she would say. He could hear her, clear as day.
Thick, twisty vines had grown entangled with the stone now, and a heavy scent lured him to where pendulous, waxy flowers nodded among the greenery. It was rare for him to find a plant he couldn't name, but this one was unknown, sprouting merrily and defiantly in the drifting, dappled shade. "How did this get here?" he mused out loud.
"Perhaps the angel put the flowers here to thank you, grandpapa. Before she flew back to heaven with her wing mended."
Perhaps. He looked up as a stronger breeze rattled the branches and ruffled the leaves, trickling down to him. It touched his face like a kiss. Made his eyes smart.
Yes, there was still a part of them both in this place and here they would stay forever as they once were.
Again she interrupted his thoughts. An angel with a broken wing? Is that the best story you can come up with?
She would, no doubt, prefer something considerably more macabre.
Chapter One
1760
"Don't believe a word of it," said the spit-boy, his jaw thrust forward defiantly. "Yon lass is ever makin' up yarns. She's a liar, that's what she is. She's got a tongue as long as 'er legs and just as swift at getting out o' trouble."
The subject of his scorn remained serene, holding a candle in both hands, the flame tall and unwavering until she spoke again, resuming her story as if he never spoke. "But they found the dead man's bones fifty years later, when the hidden door were discovered by accident." Now her breath disturbed the flame's poise, rippling its edges, melting that golden blade and forging it anew, for each observer, into whatever their imagination saw.
She cast her eyes upward toward the low, crooked ceiling above their heads. "There he were... just as his servant left him all those years ago...tucked away in that secret cupboard, bent up in a chair...waiting...and waiting...and waiting... for his supper what never come."
Clustered around the storyteller and her candle, the other young people were silent, captivated by the tragic tale. Only the spit-boy still fidgeted and scoffed, but he did so under his breath, rubbing his meaty, callused hands on his knees. "You're making it up, wench. Never 'appened."
Her gaze curved downward from a thoughtful perusal of the stout beams and found his round, freckled face again through the fluttering ochre wing of that solitary flame.
"Never 'appened," he said again, but those eyes, big and round beneath bushy red brows, revealed less confidence in this conviction.
"Have you never heard the thumping then, young lad?"
"What thumpin'?" he sneered.
"At night, mostly, although it happens in the daylight too, so 'tis said."
"Well, I never 'eard the like."
Once more she raised her somber scrutiny to the air above them, her gaze traversing the pattern of cracks in the plaster. "Listen!" she urged in a fraught whisper. "His lordship still thumps for his servant, wondering where he is and why he do not come. But he cannot call out. He cannot make too much noise, or else the soldiers will find where he is hid. And after a while, he en't no more strength to speak in any case." She sighed, making the flame weave and bob again. "Slowly all his candles burn down and putter out. He is wracked by the madness of solitude, the dark and the quiet. He hears his own heart weakening, rats scratching in the walls, and the muffled sounds of life elsewhere in the building, but 'tis weeks since he used his own voice, and now that the madness sets in, all he knows how to do is thump his wooden stump against the floor and hope that the only servant who knows where he is, has not forgot that he waits."
"Why don't he let 'imself out then?" the doubter demanded.
Without moving her head, she directed her narrowed gaze to his round, stubborn face. "Because he hides from the soldiers, as I told you already." Then she closed her eyelids and paused a moment, as if receiving a message from voices heard only by her. "And the door can only be opened from the outside."
"Well, that's daft. The man were a ruddy fool to go into such a place."
Her eyes flew open again, and she pierced him with her fiercest glare. "I daresay, John Jenkins, if you were running from somebody of a mind to thrust a pole-axe between the downy pillows of your backside, you'd be grateful for any cupboard into which you might squeeze it."
At that moment there was a noise within the beams above, a lengthy creak, produced perhaps by the building shifting and the ancient wood expanding or contracting, as was often the case in the old tavern. But none of her audience were dangerous intellectuals with minds that might, in any way, be described as scientific or logical, and since she had put the supernatural idea into their not-very-busy heads, his long dead lordship's stump-foot was the first and most reasonable source they set upon. Two of the girls, clutching each other for comfort, mewled in a mixture of excitement and terror.
She held her candle higher and waved it slowly in an arc, as if to chase away any menacing spirit hovering there. "His lordship never knew, of course, that the faithful manservant had dropped dead so suddenly, unable to tell anybody else about his nobleman secreted in these walls. Thus his lordship must die a slow and wretched death. Alone. In the thick, silent darkness of his tomb."
There was scarce a sound in the room now, only her voice quietly listing off the horrors that trapped man must have suffered. "Pemphigus, blooming across his body, like raindrops falling in the river." She made a soft popping sound to demonstrate how those watery blisters might have appeared. "Sanquineous crust forming in great yellow patches, before his skin peeled off altogether. Like sands through an hourglass the liquids of his body seeped out and mortification of the limbs set in. I suppose he developed trench mouth and then came a softening of the brain matter, followed by his eyeballs oozing out of their sockets," she closed her eyes and whispered, "plopping, one by one, to the boards beside his useless...thumping...wooden...stump."
The spit-boy made a tight, exasperated curse and tried to take the candle from her. "You talk nonsense. There were no lord with a wooden stump for a foot hid away in these walls. I never heard of it. How would you know of such a thing when you weren't alive back then?"
She opened her eyes and pierced his gaze with their cool, somber blade. "Perhaps I were alive."
"You're younger than me!"
"The number assigned to a body in years signifies naught in the matter of the soul."
"'Tis claptrap you do talk."
"There is much in this life, and beyond it, that you cannot comprehend with your corked brain." The good thing about being abandoned as a babe— and yes, she had a talent for finding some good in any sad event, because she had a lot of practice at it— was that her imagination could make up a number of tales about how she came into the world. It must be very dull, she thought, for folk like the spit-boy, who knew where he had come from and exactly who was responsible.
"Where's this secret cupboard then?" he demanded. "If you know so much."
"They plastered over it, of course, so that nobody would ever get shut away like that again. But they left his lordship's bones there, for 'tis said they become like fossils, stuck to the chair and the floor in that cursed place."
It was likely nobody but the storyteller knew what a fossil was in any case, but the spit- boy was not about to admit that. "'Tis all a wicked great fib. Ought to have your tongue pulled out."
When he singed his fingers on the flame of her candle and yelped as if it were her doing— despite the fact that he should surely have been accustomed to the sensation— she gave a superior sniff and continued primly, "It were St. Ulfrid's day in the year of our lord, sixteen hundred and forty-nine, just before they chopped off King Charlie's head, when his lordship climbed into that cupboard to hide from the Roundheads. He knew they were coming for him, you see, and would serve him the same as they did his king. So his lordship's beloved, trusted servant had the idea of putting him in the priest hole that still existed from the time of Good Queen Bess. His lordship were safe there a while, with his servant sneaking him food and wine from these very kitchens, until that faithful retainer suffered a sudden and fatal incidence of cramp colic. He died instantly, leaving his master abandoned to that grim fate, as I just described it." She paused, her face dour. "It is all quite true, horrible though it might be to contemplate that such a tragic event could have happened in this very place. I would not give you such an account of it, if it not be so."
Another elongated whine from above, sent all their gazes to the ceiling again and stilled their breaths as efficiently as a pillow across their faces.
"Aye. His lordship waits there still. After all...parts of his body, and the vibrations of his agony, linger in the floorboards, absorbed there since the worn, decaying leather that was once his skin, burst like an overfilled wine sack."
One of the girls moaned, clasping a hand to her mouth. Another put hands to her ears and screwed up her eyes.
"Shhh," the storyteller whispered, a finger to her lips. "I hear him thumping now. He must know we are down here — he heard John Jenkin's loud mooing, no doubt—and he wants his supper."
Sure enough there was a heavy clump from the floor above. Or, at least, the audience imagined that was where the sound originated, for that was where she looked, where she directed the solitary candle flame and their attention. A single, harmonious gasp rose up from the small group around the candle. Even the spit-boy said nothing now that he'd been accused of rousing the spirit. His gaze roved wildly back and forth, before it stilled upon the spot just above his head.
Thump.
Thump.
Thu—
The candle went out.
Somebody screamed and to
ppled over in a faint; another was sick. The others flew about the store cupboard, knocking over stools, and bruising their knees on barrels and crates. There was much hollering and shouting, until the door flew open and the tavern cook, lantern in hand, demanded to know, "What in the name of Satan goes on 'ere, then?"
By then Meg of the Long Legs had made her swift escape through the delivery hatch, while her audience still ran about in fits, shrieking and yelling as if a hornet's nest had ruptured among them and they were covered in treacle.
She laughed as she climbed the trellis all the way to her attic chamber under the thatched roof and slipped through the open shutters to her bed.
There were few things more satisfying than a well-told ghost story, she thought, as she kicked her clogs aside and pulled up the threadbare coverlet. As Master Cosgrove, the local schoolmaster, used to say, the human imagination is a terrible beast when forced to stir. All a good narrator need do was scatter a few crumbs outside its lair, and then watch the hungry, awoken monster creep after them, following the trail to the trap she'd laid for it. The capture of imaginations had been Meg's favorite pastime for as many years as she could talk.
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