Curse of the Gypsy Read Online Free

the falls to meet a lover, and accidentally fell. The only alternative was that someone else had pushed her to her death. He folded Anne’s letter and tucked it inside his shirt, close to his heart.
    The marchioness finally managed to dismiss the housekeeper and shoo away the other maidservant, as well as banishing even Osei, though that fellow knew as much as the marquess. “Tony, tell me what is going on,” his mother demanded, sitting bolt upright on the divan.
    “Julius is alive, Mother,” he said. Now that her swoon was over, she had resumed her habitual stoic habit. He sat back in his chair, watching her face.
    “Alive!” Tears welled up in her eyes and she looked old beyond her years, suddenly gray and tired, when in her passionate anger she had appeared vividly younger. Her mouth tightened, showing wrinkles around the lips. Her voice trembled as she said, “Will you deign to tell me why you both saw fit to deprive me of a son for almost two years? Are my feelings not to be considered in any of this? Am I not trusted?” Her voice broke on the last word, an unusual sign of vulnerability.
    “I didn’t lie to you … at least, not at first. When we were told Julius died in Upper Canada, I was as deceived as you. I thought him dead, my twin, my other half.” Darkefell stared toward a tall, graceful window, the midday sun gleaming beyond it. He moodily kicked his feet out, then crossed his booted ankles. “And yet, if I had just trusted myself, my deepest sense, I knew he was alive. But what could I say to you?” he asked, turning to stare at his mother. “When every report had him dead and buried in the wild, what could I say?” he asked. One hand over his heart, he continued, “Was I to say, ‘ I know Julius is not dead, for that part within me wherein he dwells is still alive ’? It made no sense. I don’t believe in such superstitious trash, even though I felt it.” He shook his head and looked back toward the window, grimly repeating, “I felt it. I can’t explain that.”
    “When did you learn differently?” Lady Darkefell said, her tone frigid. “When did you know he was alive?”
    Darkefell told her then, about how several months before, as the wild tales of werewolf sightings began on Darkefell estate, he saw from a distance a wild dog roaming the hills. He went to the hermit, Eddy Carter’s hut, thinking that the man’s indigent and occasionally unlawful son Neddy was back, with his mastiff, Bull. But his son was not the man Eddy was concealing, it was Julius.
    It was a joyful moment he would never forget, face-to-face with his brother, his twin, back from the dead. As angry as he was that Julius hadn’t come to him immediately, he understood, and would have done the same thing. Under suspicion of murder, Julius didn’t want to drag his brother into it, as much as he longed for home and his family. The magnetic lure of Darkefell had pulled him home, but Julius still could not bring himself to endanger his loved ones by entering the castle or Ivy Lodge, his mother’s home on the estate.
    They finally decided they would tell Lady Darkefell that Julius was alive and back, but then Miss Fanny Allengate died, again up at Staungill Falls. Another unexplained death; it seemed they were cursed by awful occurrences, doomed to be plagued by increasingly dark rumors and the deaths of innocent females.
    If Julius had been acknowledged to be home, with his pet, the wolf-dog mixed breed he called Atim, then Fanny’s demise would surely have been blamed on him, as would the supposed werewolf sightings. He would be hanged before anything could be said to the contrary, and how could Darkefell do aught to protect him, when his brother’s timing was so spectacularly bad and his behavior so suspicious?
    “I would not let him be taken, Mother,” Darkefell said, glaring over at her from under his thick brows. “That is why I told no one, no one but Osei, anyway, and John, that he was here.”
    Her