Beastly Lords Collection
Books 1–3
Sydney Jane Baily
Copyright © 2018, 2019 by Sydney Jane Baily
Kindle Edition
Published by Dragonblade Publishing, an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Table of Contents
Lord Despair
Lord Anguish
Lord Vile
Excerpt from Lord Darkness (Book 4)
About the Author
Lord Despair
Beastly Lords
Book One
Sydney Jane Baily
Dedication
To PTPR
Until I get to you, I’m too far away!
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Violetta Rand for her superb copyediting and to Dar Albert for an extraordinary cover. And, as always, thanks to my mom simply for being there.
Prologue
1847, Belton Manor, Sheffield, England
Simon gazed into the darkness and felt a sense of satisfaction. Not a speck of light could he see. That was how he liked it. Day or night made no difference. Nor should it. The agony in his head didn’t care about such things as the rising or setting sun. Only his servants entering with a tray of food or, more kindly, French brandy disturbed his routine. A sliver of light would slice into the infinite blackness as ever so gently they pushed open his door and brought in their offering, placing it almost noiselessly onto the table by his chair.
Occasionally, the infernal doctor arrived, if he really was one, with his nonsense about fresh air and walking and taking drops of laudanum to soothe his disposition. Infuriatingly, the man would leave the door open wide in order to better see his ‘patient,’ as he called Simon, who felt
not the least bit sick.
The quack’s latest suggestion of some newfangled treatment involving hypnosis had earned him Simon’s roar of rage.
“Get out!”
The man had rightly fled. Perhaps he would be smart and never return. Thankfully, someone had closed the door, and Simon’s world had been plunged once more into coal-blackness.
Sometimes, if he couldn’t keep his mind focused on the game of seeing through the dark and past it, then his thoughts strayed to Toby. Dear cousin Tobias. He’d been chopped up and fed to the birds in front of Simon’s very eyes.
Not in a torturous way. No, Toby was dead when the slicing began, having bled out in the cell before they dragged his body into the filthy yard and hacked it to pieces. It was not to punish his cousin but to warn the rest of them—Simon and two other hapless prisoners—about their dire fate should they step out of line as Toby had done. He had asked for another sip of water, as Simon recalled. The guard had taken offense and run him through with a saber.
It had shaken Simon to his core. He and his cousin had been through so much together. Grown up as close as brothers, and when Toby announced his intent to fight for queen and country, Simon had felt it his duty to go, too. Though he thought the whole thing was more for the teak wood trade and profit than anything patriotic. Still, he knew victory was essential to keep the French from making any inroads into Victoria’s imperial holdings.
Weathering dozens of battles, both of them in charge of Indian troops, they’d ended up as prisoners in the same godforsaken Burmese cell. Having had each other’s backs for so long, it was unthinkable that the man Simon had known all his life, who was intelligent, kind, and fierce as hell when necessary, was gone. It was all senseless.
There’d been no reason for anything anymore. No point to life. No point to caring. No reason to give a damn. Just wait for death, which was what Simon had done until miraculously—or perhaps wretchedly—his cell door had opened one day.
Rescue, freedom, eternal damnation!
How was he expected to return to this life of luxury and gentleness? How was he supposed to drink tea and sit at a table with civilized people when he knew how uncivilized they could be?
How could Simon stop seeing Toby’s glassy eyes?
How could he ever close his eyes and sleep?
That was something Simon could not do, at least not willingly. He fought sleep every night. Fought and lost occasionally. He sat in darkness and didn’t let his body or mind know if it was time for wakefulness or for slumber.
Yet against his will, sometimes, he drifted off for a few moments, and all hell broke loose. Battles and viciousness and Toby’s eyes plagued his sleep. And that rat-infested cell. Always the cell.
Was he even now in the small space in which he couldn’t even stand up, dreaming of this house in Sheffield, this room in his family’s home? Was he only imagining this life that felt completely unreal and of which he knew he could never again be a part?
Simon Devere, seventh Earl of Lindsey, simply didn’t know. However, as long as he kept his eyes open and kept his surroundings dark so he could not look too closely at the details of the room, then he was here in England in Belton Manor.
Chapter One
“I don’t think I can toil another day for that man.” The unexpected remark came from a young woman of marrying age with caramel-colored hair, who wore an unhappy expression upon her lovely face.
Maggie was home.
Jenny was made aware of her sister’s arrival by the slamming of the front door and, thus, was well prepared to watch her flounce into the room, toss her gloves onto the desk, and sit on the other side of it.
Trying to keep the exasperation from her voice, Jenny reminded her, “You do not toil for any man of whom I’m aware, so what on earth are you talking about?”
Maggie frowned, picking up a few papers lying before her, glancing at them as if they were in a foreign language instead of being merely payroll for their small cottage and land, and then tossed them back onto the burnished walnut surface.
“You know whom I mean. Lord Despair.”
Jenny sighed. “That is unkind. Besides, you are not in his employ. You help that poor woman who is near out of her mind with grief over her husband’s death. Show some sympathy, Mags.”
Maggie sat up straighter. “Oh, I do. I do. I sit with those young ones as they try to conjugate French verbs and speak as fluently as their mother. If Lady Devere comes into the room with her pale face and red-rimmed eyes, I always ask her how she’s feeling. Yet it’s been nearly two months, hasn’t it, since Lord Despair came home and brought news of his cousin’s demise? Not to mention, in reality, her husband’s been dead for about two years. Still, the lady cries as if she only saw him yesterday and then placed him in his eternity box today.”
“Tobias Devere was a good man, by all reports,” Jenny offered.
Maggie nodded. “The children sometimes cry, too, even though I doubt they remember him. Nonetheless, it has sunk in that their father is not returning. Not ever.”
Jenny heard Maggie’s voice catch and knew her sister was not unaffected by the Devere family’s tragedy, reminiscent of their own loss of their beloved yet irresponsible Blackwood patriarch.
“I don’t belong there,” her sister insisted. “I don’t want to be in the middle of their grief. I have my own to deal with,” she added. “What’s more, I certainly don’t want to be a French tutor. Why must I do it? Why can’t I stay home and help you with these figures you’re adding all day?” She gestured at the ledgers and papers on the desk.
Jenny shrugged. “We are all doing what we can to help Mummy. You know that. And you are as unsuited to arithmetic as I am to French.”
“What about Eleanor?”
Jenny smiled at the idea of their younger sister employed at anything gainful.
“If I can figure out a way to put a monetary value on daydreaming and occasionally sketching roses, then I’ll find some work for her, too.”
Reaching across the table, Jenny laid her hand upon her sister’s. “Please, stick with it. I know the compensation is a pittance compared to what you’re worth, but because of your being a baron’s daughter, they pay you more than they would a real tutor or a governess.”
Maggie’s nostrils flared. “That we should be discussing wages, like … merchants!” Standing, she went to the sideboard and began fiddling with the empty brandy decanter.
At eighteen, Jenny’s middle sister, stuck in the country and with no beau on the horizon, was keenly aware of her precarious position. Particularly with no dowry, and with Maggie having sadly had her one and only season cut short earlier in the year by the untimely death of their father.
And then the debt collectors had come calling. Jenny’s marital prospects had fallen through immediately when her own seemingly upstanding viscount, who had wooed and won her during her second season, abruptly withdrew his offer. If her father had been alive, he would have challenged the breaking of the verbal contract. Of course, if her father had been alive, the viscount wouldn’t have broken it.
On Jenny’s part, she certainly would have married as her duty and been grateful for the opportunity to help run Lord Alder’s estate and raise any children with which she and the viscount were blessed. Yet, she’d felt only a mild interest in the man or in becoming his wife.
At Baron Lucien Blackwood’s death, their mother had been ill-equipped to handle anything more than gathering up her household, including her three daughters and as many servants as she could continue to employ, and head for the family’s country cottage in Sheffield. Here, they already had many good memories of hot summers and crisp autumns, the seasons when they were not in London.
And for many years when Jenny was younger, the Blackwoods had come from Town to spend the winter holidays. If the Deveres were in residence, they would hold one of their legendary Christmas parties. Jenny recalled going to Belton Park and meeting both the titled Deveres who lived in the grand manor h
ouse and their lesser relations at Jonling Hall. Of which Sir Tobias Devere, used to be the happy lord.
The Burmese War had ended all that. Tobias had left three years ago to do his duty with his cousin Simon, the viscount and heir to the earldom. By the time Jenny and her family had arrived from London, both men were already feared dead. Tobias Devere’s family had moved from the hall into Belton Manor.
Jenny hoped their relocation had been made to put the widow and her children under the protection of the earl. She feared, however, it was due to financial strain that was plaguing many of the grand families who were finding maintaining land and actually paying servants was no easy task.
“Even when we are having a passing-fair afternoon,” Maggie bemoaned, “suddenly, we will hear Lord Despair—”
“Please,” Jenny interrupted, “stop calling him that.”
About the same time her family arrived back in Sheffield, Simon Devere had returned in a terrible mental state, or so said the rife and quick rumors of the village residents. What’s more, he’d confirmed the worst for Lady Devere, his cousin’s French-born wife. Sir Tobias was dead, and Simon, whose father had passed away whilst he was in Burma, was no longer a viscount but now the new earl.
An earl whom no one had seen outside of Belton Manor since his return.
“He is Lord Devere and the highest-ranking nobleman in this county,” she reminded her sister.
Jenny vaguely remembered the few times her family had gone to the manor for a Christmas party or a late summer fete. The earl had kind eyes and was quite striking. He was older than her, maybe by seven or eight years, thus she’d never shared more than a passing greeting with him. However, she’d been left with an impression of him being courteous.
“Actually, I suppose now his father has passed, Lord Devere has become Lord Lindsey.”
“Fine,” Maggie yielded. “All at once, while I’m reading them a story, enunciating clearly so they pick up the new words, we will hear Lord Lindsey cry out or thump about in his room like a wounded boar. The gloom that falls over the children and poor Lady Devere is practically palpable. They would have been better off staying at the hall.”