Lured by the Ghost Rake

By Marianna Green

When Elda Elwood goes on a visit to her actor lover Jake Reynolds’ ancestral home, she is drawn by a portrait of his ancestor, eighteenth century rake Lord Lucas Lovegrove.
She learns the tragic story behind the viscount’s marriage to the innocent young heiress Rose Ashworth.
Elda senses that the portrait has strange powers, and that the house is haunted by Lovegrove’s predatory and sexual ghost...
And what is the secret of the sinister pagoda in the grounds?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freya
• Release date: Jan 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005891565

Book preview

One

Elda gazed at the portrait of Lucas Lovegrove, Viscount Lovegrove, drawn in by those laughing blue eyes. Wide set and heavy lidded, they had the trick of seeming to follow you about the room.

Humour played about the corners of his mouth. Alone among the portraits in the gallery, with their stiff formal clothes and poses, there was something lifelike about him. She suspected it was typical of the man that he did not wear one of those wigs fashionable in the 1770s. Instead, his mane of light gold hair was unpowdered and tied carelessly back in a queue.

Jake read out from the catalogue, "‘Painted about the time of Lord Love grove’s marriage to Miss Rose Ashworth in 1775. He notoriously agreed to marry this bride at a gambling table, following on from his winning her guardian’s fortune in a game lasting throughout the night.’"

Elda stared. No kidding. I’m sure as a teenager I read some historical romance with that scene in it. Maybe it was based on fact after all. As she gazed at the picture, her innards stirred disturbingly. Couldn’t she refuse?

As she spoke, she thought the eyes of the figure stirred. Either that painter had been incredibly skilful, or she was staring until it blurred.

I remember hearing the guardian geezer blew his brains out after losing everything to the wicked viscount that night, so she didn’t have much choice. Girls didn’t get much say in who they married then. Nice for the guys, eh?

Is there a portrait of her?

"Over there. ‘Rose, Lady Lovegrove nee Ashworth, wife of Lord Lucas Lovegrove, heir to the Earl of Eastleigh, painted soon after her marriage in 1775.’" Jake pointed to a smaller portrait hanging opposite.

The painting of a very young woman with powdered hair worn in the towering fashion of the era, with a low sky-blue dress, rouged cheeks, and the hint of a smile, told Elda nothing. Stylised and formal, like all the other portraits in the room save those of her wicked husband, it even seemed blurred. That painter had done nothing to capture the spirit of the subject.

Jake seemed to agree. That wouldn’t be a proper likeness. They always painted them with the button mouths and prominent noses they admired then, just like prominent lips and button noses are the thing today.

Elda didn’t admit she’d had her own nose refined. Inherited from her Italian mother, it had been just the sort they would have admired in a former age as ‘aristocratic’. She’d had that done with a loan in the struggling, pub-working, ‘Don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you’ start of her acting career.

That, of course, was long before she secured a role in the series Her as one of a matriarchal queen’s toady sirens. As for her lips, she still had them filled up nearly as often as her petrol tank.

She glanced back to the painting of Lord Lucas Lovegrove, who seemed to return her gaze, eyes almost sparkling with mischief. I wonder how things worked out between them.

"There’s some book on family history that might fill you in on that. Most likely a whitewash, though, just as it is about enclosures of the common lands...Portrait number G35, ‘A later depiction of Lord Lucas Lovegrove’ is missing. Probably that’s the one that druggie tenant attacked when he was high. Good thing the estate got the insurance."

She felt a stir of unease. I can’t get over how the gaze of that painting seems to look at you.

That’s a trick those artists knew. Can’t say I like it myself. Same with that woman over there in the topless dress.

Elda could have sworn that one of the wicked young viscount’s painted lids flickered as she turned towards the painting further down the gallery.

It showed a hard-faced woman dressed as a rustic maiden in a low-cut muslin gown, a garland of flowers in her loose, curling dark hair. A pastoral scene of sheep and a shepherd playing a flute made up the background. The long, dark eyes did seem to be watching them. Who’s that? Elda wondered.

It says Lady Cavendish, 1780. I heard somewhere I’ve forgotten that she was carrying on with this Lovegrove, who was her husband’s cousin. She’s got a come-on look, at that. Lot of entitled sods, eh? Jake walked on.

He set far less value on the aristocratic side of his ancestry than he did on the London costermonger side. He was glad that the title had gone to some old age pensioner in a retirement home in Scotland. ‘Otherwise, I’d have had to get rid of it,’ he’d told Elda.

Elda knew she must find out what she could about Lord Lucas Lovegrove and his wife. Somehow, it all fitted in with how taken she was with the house.

She would never have believed she would be, when Jake had suggested a week’s visit to this house in North Northamptonshire, a hundred miles from London. She’d been reluctant, save for a half ashamed liking for the kudos of living in such a place. Then, the minute she’d stepped inside the gates, she’d felt at home.

Elda frowned as the sound of a car turning in at the main gate broke the peace. That would be either of the tenants living in the east and west wings. Like the former staff cottages, those were rented out, while the last home farm had gone back in the 1960s.

Elda, startled at that stab of resentment she’d felt at the sound of that tenant’s car, saw that she must guard against getting possessive about this place. Anyway, it would be impossible to live here without the rents, unless either Jake or Elda started earning a fortune. Not only that, but they had a ridiculous number of bedrooms, box rooms and attic bedrooms in this central block of the house alone.

Elda knew that surge of possessiveness was even more silly, when she and Jake had only been living together for some months, with no commitments. What was between them was unspoken and unsure.

Still, since arriving, Elda had felt at home here. Less comfortable was the feeling she sometimes had that she must take care that instead of her taking over the house, it might somehow take over her.

They wandered through the rest of the picture gallery and came to the ballroom, their footsteps echoing on the parquet flooring in the empty room.

This was the size you might expect for a ballroom in a mansion, with a drawn back partition wall – obviously a later addition – which could divide it into two big draughty rooms instead. As they admired the massive fireplace, Elda thought that in winter draughts must howl down the chimney.

Shrouded chandeliers hung from the ceiling, while on one wall an old tapestry depicted some classic Greek scene of satyrs abducting hefty women who Elda thought should put up more of a fight.

Standing here with the sunlight streaming through the long windows, lighting up motes of dust floating in the air, Elda found it easy to picture a ball in here.

She could see the crimson velvet drapes drawn against the night outside, with figures in ball dress weaving in and out of the dance rows, the whole lit by earlier chandeliers blazing with candles.

There was Lord Lucas Lovegrove, recognizable at once by his vigour and bright, fair hair. He danced with his young bride, the former Rose Ashworth, who looked no more than nineteen. She was nearly a foot shorter than he, dressed in pastel pink, her hair up in another of those elaborate piled up hairstyles, a thread of pearls woven in it, while another about her throat glowed on her youthful, creamy skin. Her build was high and rounded in the bosom and full in the hip, her face rounded and youthful.

Elda only vaguely took in these details, her attention caught by the girl’s eyes. They were as striking as those of her dastardly groom, yet in the opposite way. Wide and the clearest light blue, they charmed with their lack of guile.

‘I never thought I would have the luck to take a wife I could care for.’ Lucas Lovegrove smiled down on her. ‘A fortune hunter such as myself cannot expect everything. As the old governor had left me dished up – that, my sweet, means desperate for money - the only thing that I expected to delight me about my future bride would be her money coffers.’

‘My unlucky late guardian, through losing all