House of Angels Read Free

down. How one day her mother had been happy and laughing and filled with her characteristic energy to work hard in order to get her daughter out of this place, and then within a few short months, be dead and buried.
    All that stuff she’d told her at the end about who Mercy’s real father was. Not some common sailor after all, but a man of consequence, a man of class and position. And this gentleman, so-called, had cruelly deserted Florrie and her child. Having set her up in some pretty little cottage in town, no doubt only to assuage his guilt, he’d soon grown bored and abandoned her to cope aloneas best she might. Probably found himself some other pretty maid who’d caught his eye, and forgot all about poor Florrie. A sad but familiar tale which made Mercy burn with shame and embarrassment on her mother’s behalf. Within months, Josiah Angel had forgotten his lover sufficiently to stop sending her money, or even paying the rent on their one-time love nest. Was it any wonder her mother had ended up living a life of penury, hard graft and near starvation?
    Even then she couldn’t escape him entirely, but was compelled to pay the man an inflated rent for the privilege of living in this rat-ridden hole.
    Now her poor mother was dead, and her daughter left to fend for herself.
    Mercy was filled with a bitter resentment. Not for one moment did she imagine Josiah Angel treating his own precious family with such callous disregard. No doubt his three daughters were coddled, spoilt young misses possessing all they could ever desire. Mercy hated each and every one of them with a venom that burnt to her very soul.

Chapter Two
    The sound of the strap singing through the air was the last thing she remembered, that and the hot searing pain before darkness enfolded her. How long she lay unconscious Livia had no way of knowing, but it couldn’t have been more than a second or two as she became aware of her father’s craggy face leering over her, the rancid smell of his cigar-tainted breath suffocating her, and his icy fingers pinching the soft flesh of her cheeks. He hated it when his victims were not sufficiently alert to savour his torture.
    ‘I’ll teach you who is master here if it’s the last thing I do.’
    Josiah Angel grabbed his eldest daughter by the wrists and began to drag her across the floor. Livia let out a scream, knowing what awaited her, but even as the sound echoed around the dusty emptiness of this claustrophobic little room, she knew no one would come to her aid. Certainly not her mother, who had taken to her bed more than ten years ago as the only means available to evade abrutal husband, and quietly gone into a terminal decline, making as little fuss by her departure in death as she had done in life. The servants knew better than to interfere in family business, as well as which parts of the house were barred to them. This tower room, or torture chamber, as Livia and her sisters caustically referred to it, was the place they feared the most.
    The House of Angels was what the locals called this fine Victorian mansion situated on Brigsteer Road, high above Kendal. With its crenulated towers, gothic arches and tall slender windows beneath frowning eaves it resembled a fortress more than a home.
    But only the Angel sisters who lived within its dark walls knew that it was ruled by a devil.
    Josiah Angel was a great bull of a man, his face as hard and unforgiving as the crags that formed the landscape of his birth, high cheekbones protruding sharply beneath folds of skin grown slack with age. His temper was as dark and brooding as the thick cloud that blanketed the tops of the distant mountains that dominated the skyline in this part of Westmorland. But then he was a man who demanded attention as did Great Gable or Scafell. He might attempt to soften his appearance with the silk cravats and silver cufflinks of the country gent going about his business, but beneath the fine worsted cloth of his expensively