The Darkness Within

By Jude Knight

Folks, just letting you know that this one is dark. In some places, very dark. If you read nothing else in this blurb, read the trigger warning at the end.

To save her, he must lose her

Ever since he escaped the hell of his youth, Max has killed for a living -- first as a sniper and assassin in the war against Napoleon, and later ridding the world of those whose power on those around them allowed them to commit evil without fear of punishment.

The dead burden what is left of his soul, and he wants to retire, and kill no more. When a search for a missing comrade takes him into a religious community, he feels as if he has found a home for the first time in his life.

But there are cracks in the innocent surface the village shows its visitors. Max discovers hints at what lies beneath even as he falls for Serenity, who has recently been appointed Goddess-Elect, the designated virgin to take her place as three-month wife of her community's leader, the Incarnate One.

The secrets of the community are worse than the secrets that burden Max’s soul. They put Serenity and others in dreadful danger. To save her, he must lose her, for if he draws on his hard-won skills, she will recoil from the darkness of his soul.

Warning: This book is largely set within a cult, and is nothing like a typical Regency. If you have been in a cult or love someone who is, or who has been, in a cult, you might want to approach this book with caution. It might be triggering. It might be satisfying to see the bad sorts get their comeuppance. Your call.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jude Knight
• Release date: Dec 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781991199683

Jude Knight

Have you ever wanted something so much you were afraid to even try? That was Jude ten years ago.For as long as she can remember, she's wanted to be a novelist. She even started dozens of stories, over the years.But life kept getting in the way. A seriously ill child who required years of therapy; a rising mortgage that led to a full-time job; six children, her own chronic illness... the writing took a back seat.As the years passed, the fear grew. If she didn't put her stories out there in the market, she wouldn't risk making a fool of herself. She could keep the dream alive if she never put it to the test.Then her mother died. That great lady had waited her whole life to read a novel of Jude's, and now it would never happen.So Jude faced her fear and changed it--told everyone she knew she was writing a novel. Now she'd make a fool of herself for certain if she didn't finish.Her first book came out to excellent reviews in December 2014, and the rest is history. Many books, lots of positive reviews, and a few awards later, she feels foolish for not starting earlier.Jude write historical fiction with a large helping of romance, a splash of Regency, and a twist of suspense. She then tries to figure out how to slot the story into a genre category. She’s mad keen on history, enjoys what happens to people in the crucible of a passionate relationship, and loves to use a good mystery and some real danger as mechanisms to torture her characters.Dip your toe into her world with one of her lunch-time reads collections or a novella, or dive into a novel. And let her know what you think.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

London, May 1817

Max paused in front of the elegant townhouse. He would always come when the Earl of Ruthford called, but he did not want to be here.

The earl was his former colonel. Max owed him loyalty, but he was never comfortable in the stately halls of the wealthy and wellborn.

Besides, he was retired. If the earl wanted him for his old skills, he would have to disappoint the man.

He set his jaw, and climbed the short flight of steps to rap the knocker. A year ago, he would have found his way inside unnoticed—did, on several occasions. The earl had asked him to train the servants to see those skilled at remaining hidden, and they had proved apt pupils.

The butler who opened the door wasn’t Blythe, who was in some sort a former colleague, as the earl’s soldier servant during the war. This one was the sort of superior creature he’d enjoy tweaking in a more cheerful mood, but today he just wanted to get the meeting over with.

Soon, he was facing Lion.

Chameleon! Welcome. Thank you for coming.

Max shook the extended hand. I am always happy to see you, Colonel.

I’m not in the army any more. Lion will do fine, the earl insisted, as he always did. Come on through to my library. Would you like a brandy? He led the way, still talking. How have you been keeping, Chameleon?

The library was a spacious room lined with book shelves, and with a large desk in the bay window where the light was best. Max. I prefer Max. Short for Maximum Force, which was his purpose, or at least the purpose for which the army recruited him. In the workhouse, he had had a number. On the streets, a nickname. Each further major change in his life had been marked by a new name. Perhaps he needed to rename himself again?

Lion knew what he preferred to be called. What was the man up to? Lion waved him to a chair by the fireplace; unlit on this warm day in May. Next to the matching chair, a small table held a book and half a glass of brandy. Lion poured another glass from a decanter, and brought it over before reoccupying that seat.

Not Zebediah, or Zeb? he asked.

Max raised a brow. The name by which the army had enrolled him. Curiouser and curiouser. Max.

As you wish, Max. Lion took a sip from his glass. How have you been keeping? he asked again.

Social chit chat? Even if Lion really wanted to know, did Max want to tell him? He gave a non-committal answer and returned the conversational serve by asking after Lion’s wife and children. The earl’s eyes lit up but he answered briefly.

Both well, but Dorrie prefers not to bring the baby up to town in this heat.

Clearly, Lion was still as besotted with his countess as he’d been the previous year, when Max’s path had last crossed his. I daresay you are missing them, he ventured, inviting Lion to stay on that topic rather than Max’s own activities.

Not that he had anything to hide. Indeed, since he’d given up his profession, he’d not found anything to occupy himself. He’d toyed with buying an estate, but he knew nothing about farming and the idea of living in the country made him shudder. His only experiences with country living had been in Spain, Portugal, and France, where the landscape often hid snipers or troops of enemies in ambush.

He’d investigated various business interests to buy, and even invested in a couple—a canal they were building in Wales, a company to produce gas to light the streets of York. Investing his ill-gotten wealth was fun of a sort, but it wasn’t enough to fill his days.

He listened to Lion talk about his family, offering a remark or a question whenever needed to keep the conversation going. He could manage his part with just a small fraction of his mind, while another part catalogued the contents of the room, the available exits, the likely obstacles on each route out of the house.

The rest wondered if he would spend the remainder of his life living on the edge of a hair, ready for battle and calculating the odds. Even here, in the private home of a man he loved like a brother and for whom he would cheerfully give his life, he could not relax.

Of course, you are battle-ready, said that inner part of him that spoke with Sebastian’s voice. Sebastian was twelve years dead, and his voice only a memory, but sparring with that memory had become a comfort in all the years alone, skulking behind enemy lines, as uncomfortable with the army he served as with the one he hunted.

You were at war with the rest of the world when I found you, Sebastian jeered, and you were then no more than ten, as best we could figure it. One of the many life-lessons I taught you was that letting your guard down exacts a terrible price. You’ll never trust anyone fully, ever again.

Enough about me, Lion said, silencing the old ghost as the rest of Max’s mind came to attention. You don’t want to talk about you, so let me explain why I asked you to visit. Remember Squirrel?

Lieutenant Reuben Stedham had been dubbed Squirrel for his ability to scavenge whatever was needed by the motley band of exploring officers who served under Colonel O’Toole, as the Earl of Ruthford was in those days. With their commander already known as Lion, plus a Fox, a Bull, and a Bear in the line-up, they all soon gained animal nicknames. Lion’s Pride, one wag dubbed them, but another claimed they were more Zoo than Pride, and the name stuck.

I remember Squirrel, Max admitted. Young, eager, and with an optimistic outlook that even five years of brutal war could not suppress.

He has gone missing. He has not written to his sister for more than five months, and her most recent letters to him have been returned as undeliverable.

Max lifted his brows. You want me to find him?

If you are not too busy. It is not like him, Max.

That was true. Max could see the boy in his mind’s eye, sitting close to the flickering light of yet another campfire in yet another godforsaken hollow of yet another bleak mountain, penning yet another letter to the much older sister who had raised him. He didn’t bother to protest that hunting men was no longer his job, and England not his hunting ground. He would do this for Lion. He would do it for Squirrel, whose cheerful outlook had intrigued as much as annoyed him. Above all, he would do it because a hunt might stave off boredom for the few days or weeks it took, and it was unlikely to involve killing someone. Max didn’t do that anymore.

"What can you tell me, Lion? Where do I start?

Serenity Witness would be Chosen in the next ballot. This was not a matter of faith, it was an inevitable fact, since she was the last bride of her year—of her year and the one that followed. Hers would be the only lot in the golden chalice used at the ceremony.

The younger girls in the bride house were all tremendously excited about the ballot ceremony tomorrow, but mostly because, in three months, their lots would be added to the chalice, and one of them would be chosen as Autumn bride. They assumed Serenity was even more enthusiastic, and she did nothing to dissuade them.

She should be delighted, of course. She was way past the age when most Witness girls entered adulthood.

The Powers had passed her by when she was just sixteen, and every season for the next seven ballots. She was chosen in the third year, just before her eighteenth birthday. However, between the ballot and the wedding, she contracted smallpox and nearly died.

By the time she recovered, another had taken her place, for the vitality of the community depended on the Chosen bride, and the position could not be left vacant.

Her smallpox scars did not matter, wisewoman Charity assured her. The Powers saw beyond the surface, to the beautiful soul within. Charity should know, for many years ago, when the Powers first became incarnate in the man who was still known as the Incarnate One, they had chosen Charity to be his first bride; the first Goddess Incarnate.

Whatever Charity said, the choice passed Serenity by in ballot after ballot for nearly two more years, until here she was, nearly twenty years of age and still a maiden bride.

Sitting all alone in the temple, she faced the Powers and confessed what they, who knew all, must already see within her. I am afraid.

At sixteen, she would have been thrilled. Even at eighteen, had she not contracted the smallpox, she would have been nervous about being the centre of attention, concerned about failing in her duties, but deeply content to step over the threshold that marked her transition from girl to woman.

I am afraid, she repeated. I doubt, even though I know I should not. Take away my doubts, dear Powers. All the adults said that to be Chosen was the greatest of all privileges, and the three months the Chosen spent as Goddess Incarnate filled her with a joy that would last the remainder of her life. However, since one of her friends was tempted from the path by an applicant, Serenity had been unable to keep the questions from her mind.

The applicant had left the community a few days before her friend became Goddess Incarnate and she had served her appointed term, but Serenity had seen sadness in her eyes when she stepped down from beside the One after the Goddess moved to the next Chosen. A few weeks later, she had died suddenly—an accident with a knife, the community was told.

Serenity hoped history would not repeat itself. The current Goddess Incarnate had once been Harmony and would be again, when her term was ended. She had also been closer to an applicant than was seemly for a maiden, an Outsider called Reuben. Reuben had left the community without notice and never returned.

This and other disappearances bothered Serenity. The Powers took them, Charity and the One would say. But once Serenity began to doubt, the doubts multiplied. Especially as she noticed other signs of secret distress among the wives, which increased around the time of the three-monthly Festival of Change.

Doubt was dangerous. Those who doubted died or disappeared.

Take away my doubts, she prayed, but the calm certainty she sought evaded her.

S tedham was looking for a home; a purpose, Max told the ghost voice in his head. The lieutenant had tried being a steward on an estate, and moved on. He had worked for a while in a lawyer’s office, and a few months more as secretary to a Member of Parliament. The last address his sister had for him was a vicarage, and the last contact a cryptic note from the vicar. Max was heading there now.

Reuben hasn’t been able to settle since he returned from the wars, the sister had told Max.

Her husband’s estimation had been harsher. He cannot stick to anything. Some of those ex-military men are like that. They need the adventure, the thrills, and they’re no use in ordinary life. He should join up again.

Max didn’t agree. Stedham was a good soldier, but he wasn’t made for that life. Not really, he had told the man, but he might as well have talked to the wall.

You don’t know him like we do, the brother-in-law had said.

That man wants his wife to himself, Sebastian replied as Max thought back to the conversation with Stedham’s sister and her husband. I know jealousy when I see it.

Max thought the ghost might be right. Sebastian usually was right about the darker emotions. Stedham needs a place to belong, but his sister’s home wasn’t it. Stedham could hardly have missed the lack of welcome. Was that why he stopped writing to his sister? But he’d only stayed with the pair for the first two months after arriving home from France in 1814. He’d continued to write faithfully, week after week, until a few months ago.

No one belongs, Sebastian argued. Belonging is an illusion, and the ones you love most are the ones who most hurt you.

Max ignored the oblique reference to Sebastian’s death. That’s the village. From this elevation, it and the surrounding fields were spread below like a patchwork made by a thrifty housewife from a hundred different scraps. The church, its steeple foreshortened by the angle from which he viewed it, sat at one end of the cluster of houses, the last building on the village street. At the other end was an inn, strategically placed on the junction with the road he was travelling. He could see glimpses of the road’s curves, snaking down the hill before it straightened, leapt a river, and ran past the junction with the village street and on into the distance.

The inn must catch a little of the carriage trade, for it had a tolerable stable where he was able to put up his horse. He booked a room for the night, then set off through the village. If the vicar was at home and could give him some answers, he might have time for more travelling before dark, but the room at the inn had a comfortable bed and the odours from the kitchen promised a more than adequate meal. It wouldn’t hurt to finish early for the day.

No one answered his knock at the vicarage, so he tried the church next door. It was unlocked, and he stepped inside. It was just a plain little country church; a simple porch, double doors through to the nave, a door to the right of the altar that probably let onto the vestry.

Built of stone, and as high as it was wide, it offered a cool refuge from the unseasonably hot day. It was a plain building. No ornate stained-glass windows, no statues such as those he’d seen in Spain, not even the carved detailing and wonderful paintings of the fashionable London churches he had occasionally drifted into in his recent wanderings. Just a few battered wooden pews, polished to a gleaming shine, a larger space behind the pews where people could stand, and up the front, an altar invisible under a pristine white cloth, with nothing on it but two brass candlesticks. What the church had in full measure was the sense of peace and welcome he’d come to associate with a place where people had prayed, rejoiced, grieved, and worshipped for so long that their emotions had become part of the fabric of the building.

No sign of the vicar. He checked the door off the sacristy, which led into a small shabby vestry as clean as the church and as empty.

Emptiness was key. During a church service, the atmosphere of harmony was dulled and even smothered by the hum of other people, the pressure of their thoughts and emotions. Max took a seat in one of the pews and relaxed, allowing his mind to calm, to bask in the accumulated peace.

He’d found his first empty church not long after running away from the workhouse. It had been abandoned and boarded up. He was small, even for a seven-year-old, if that is what he was. A gap between two boards was just large enough for him to wriggle inside. He found a corner where the roof was still intact and slept better than ever before in his short and miserable life.

Empty churches weren’t easy for ragged urchins to get into. Max developed some of the skills he’d later use at war to slip past vergers, vicars, elderly widows, and others who thought a boy in a church could only be there for mischief or mayhem. In any other place, they would have been right, but Max came for sanctuary, and an escape from a world with no room for him.

Why was he thinking about that little street rat now? He’d been an ignorant boy, trained in lying to avoid a beating, taking a beating when lies didn’t work, and knowing nothing else, aware of nothing outside of the mean streets in which he hid and dodged, always on the edge of starvation, stealing and begging just enough to keep his breath in his body.

Sebastian changed all that. No. He would not think of Sebastian. The man had no place in a church: not in life, and not in death.

After a while, the peace seeped into his bones, and he stopped thinking about anything at all. Even so, the part of him that never stopped watching was aware when someone else entered the building—aware, but calm. The intruder was not a threat. Whoever it was stopped in the aisle, level with the pew in which Max sat.

Max waited for a question or a comment, but the person moved on, coming into Max’s field of vision as he walked up to the altar and through to the vestry. In the next few minutes, he moved in and out of view, bringing things from the vestry to put on the altar.

Satisfied, he turned and saw Max watching him.

Good afternoon, sir. He was an older man, but how old was anyone’s guess. His grey hair and neatly clipped beard suggested an age of at least sixty, and his slim face was lined enough to support that assumption. His wiry frame moved with an ease that suggested a much younger man. The pale blue eyes that met Max’s were filled with a vast compassion that spoke of many, many years of life experience and the practice of charity.

I think you might be the man I am looking for, Max told him. Are you vicar here, sir?

The vicar came towards him, his hand held out. "Matthew Viney, at your service. Speaking of which, we have perhaps fifteen minutes before my service. Maddie