Murder at Newstead Abbey Read Free

and had consumed a great deal of wine, and before long, he was snoring the snore of the just.
    It was Prance, lying peacefully in Coffen’s room, who was awake until dawn. He was no longer frightened. Of course it had been that soughing branch that awoke him, but it had been worth the moments of sheer terror, for he had been struck with inspiration. He would write a gothic novel! His Round Table Rondeaux, a tedious, long poem in blank verse about the Arthurian legend, copiously footnoted, had been a disaster. Too abstruse and literary for the hoi polloi. It was sensation they craved, and he would give it to them. Not the squeamish stuff of Mrs. Radcliffe and her black curtains and locked rooms, but real spine-tingling terror such as he had felt last night. Something along the line of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, which had caused such a ruckus in the last century.
    What better place to set his opus than this haunted wreck of an abbey? Of course he wouldn’t use the name Newstead in his book, but tout le monde would know where and when the story was composed. That, alone, would generate interest. He would give them phantom choirs and singing monks and real ghosts that menaced with more than misty clouds. And he’d throw in a few female ghosts, to please the kipper-crunching crowd as well, as they had all railed at him for leaving Lady Guinevere out of his Rondeaux.
    His fevered brain began concocting a story, and as dawn lightened the shadows from black to violet, he had some semblance of a plot formed. It would be Lady Lorraine, a French comtesse, who inherited the abbey and was bedeviled by its spirits for the sins of her ancestors. His intimes would recognize this as a tribute to his lost love, Lady Chamaude, who had been murdered before he could marry her. She would be aided in her fight to free the abbey of its unsettled spirits by some as yet unnamed hero. The only major point to be settled was whether she would marry her hero or die in a tragic fall from the crenelated tower of St. Justin’s Abbey.
    He had a fondness for tragedy, but was uncertain whether the public was ready to accept it in a love story. How public taste had deteriorated from the days when William could give them Romeo and Juliet! Prance was on a first name basis with all the literary greats. He would discuss the ending with Coffen Pattle. If Pattle had nothing else, he certainly had the common touch.
    Prance’s valet, Villier, was astonished to find his master up when he quietly peeked into his room at eight o’clock.
    “Villier, the new Weston today, I think.” Many of his possessions had names. His jackets were “Westons”, from London’s premier tailor. His hats were “Baxters” and his boots were “Hobys”. “But first a shave.”
    Prance’s toilette could take upwards of an hour, but that day he was so eager to be about his research that he left his room in half that time. As he strolled down the stairs, he heard raised voices coming from Byron’s study.
    “We’ll not put up with it. This is a decent parish, or was, until you brought your debauched friends here. You’re as bad as murdering Mad Jack, and so I tell you,” an angry voice shouted. It was followed by some soothing words from Byron. The door opened, and Prance scuttled along the hall to pretend he hadn’t been eavesdropping.
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Chapter 2
    Prance was astonished that anyone would have the gall to treat a lord so harshly, and in his own home. His mind immediately darted to what Byron was best known for, other than his poetry; namely, womanizing. Was it an outraged husband? The father of some innocent maiden Byron had got in the family way? Did those conciliating murmurs from Byron mean he was going to marry some nobody? Surely not! He had often called himself a romantic agnostic, unfit to wage domesticity.
    Prance’s astonishment rose a notch when he learned the shouting gentleman was a mere vicar. A hireling, in other words.
    “Pay no heed to old Ruttle,”