What a Hero Dares. Kasey Michaels
in the Hanovers now (erroneously, obviously) occupying the English throne.
Charles did not like sharing what he perceived as his power, but realized he did need a few reasonably intelligent aides, inferiors who would obey his every command and help secure those goals (no matter their own petty motives).
And thus the Society, a most unique hellfire club, was born.
Charles handpicked his inner circle, the Devil’s Thirteen as they were then dubbed, offering them, if not the sun and the moon, a secret world of more earthly delights, along with wealth and power such as they’d never dreamed could be theirs. Once he had his chosen ones, like-minded traitors all, they sought out their minions, as all the best courts had minions, sycophants, useful, loyal, yet expendable.
He outfitted a hidden pleasure palace on Saltwood land geared to satisfying every desire, indulging every carnal pleasure, encouraging every vice, from women (always a grand draw, Charles knew), to heady opium pipes. There was also the promise of intellectual discourse in there somewhere, and the lofty goal of a more justly ruled England, but mostly the more minor members were there for the silly costumes and the diddling.
It was only after their desires were met, even exceeded, and the first demands were voiced that they truly realized this particular hellfire club, this Society, now owned them—them and their reputations, with Charles’s every wish suddenly their command.
Charles knew he needed one thing more: an army. For that he turned to France, and struck yet another devil’s bargain, truly believing he was about to embark on the path that would lead him to the throne.
Instead, Charles turned up quite dead one morning (a plate of bad fish, so sad), before the French army could be launched, its destination the welcoming shores of Redgrave Manor. The Devil’s Thirteen and the minions melted back into a more humdrum society, hopeful the masks they’d worn during ceremonies, the code names they’d used, would protect their identities.
Whispers of debauchery and perhaps sedition to one side, the Society might have been forgotten, if not for one thing. Charles had decreed every member keep a journal. Those journals were yearly turned over to the Keeper to update the bible, the key to everything about the Society.
When the time was considered ripe, the Keeper had dutifully turned over the journals and bible to Charles’s only son. Barry Redgrave, as hoped, had oohed and aahed in sincere appreciation, and apparently decided his late sire had been nothing less than a bloody genius. Along with an almost eerie resemblance, Barry had inherited an attraction to the more perverse delights life had to offer. Although Barry believed himself to be more handsome than his father, and most definitely smarter.
And that plate of bad fish? The Keeper had another tale to tell about that!
Even before he reached his majority, Barry had clearly taken over the running of Redgrave Manor, cajoling his doting yet oddly nervous mother, winning her over with his smiles, his outward affection, while operating quite secretly behind her back. The morning he turned one-and-twenty, after a long night of revelry with his chums in Town, he flung his unsteady, drunken self into his mother’s chambers in the family’s Cavendish Square mansion, to rouse the woman with a cruel slap followed by a boozy, punishing kiss on her mouth.
He was followed by a trail of maids and footmen prepared to “Pack you up, you murdering whore,” and denied her an allowance unless she limited her visits to the Manor to one month out of each year.
He then paid a covert visit to Grosvenor Square. He politely thanked the aging Keeper and mentor in the ways of the Society for all he’d done, and told him to say hello to Charles a moment before tossing the old fool down the marble stairs.
Two weeks later, he purchased that same Grosvenor Square mansion, leaving his father’s outrageous monstrosity in Cavendish Square for his mama’s use. Let her live with the ghosts there.
And let the games begin!
While his still young and beautiful mother traveled on the Continent or partied in Mayfair, he appointed his very best friend, Turner Collier, to act as the group’s Keeper, guardian of the bible. They then went about gathering up any of the original Devil’s Thirteen and minions still aboveground, and the Society was soon back in business. He met and married a barely royal Spanish beauty he deemed a suitable broodmare, put a child in her as often as he could, enlarged both the Manor house and its lands. And plotted. And schemed. And added more and more like thinkers and helpful minions to his Society.
All within the confines of his first and truly only love, Redgrave Manor.
For nearly ten years of planning and conniving and bribing, all seemed to go quite swimmingly. His negotiations with the French king would soon come to fruition. Until the fall of the Bastille dealt the first crushing blow to Barry’s ambitions. That was closely followed by his drunken decision to stand up in a duel against his wife’s French lover, only to fall on his handsome face when a weapon fired from the trees put a bullet hole in his back and a period to his existence. The new widow, smoking pistol supposedly still in her hand, promptly deserted her four young children and ran off to France with her lover.
What followed was open conjecture throughout the ton concerning some sort of salacious hellfire club, and even speculation that Barry Redgrave had been whoring out his wife to his devil-worshipping friends, and that was really why she shot him. There were whispers of sedition and treason as people remembered his father and those rumors, dragging them out for another airing. But, mostly, it was the titillating scandal of the murder, the reason behind it, and the insult to those who deemed the Redgraves immoral, unsuited to retain the earldom (or the Manor, or all that lovely money).
It was as if Barry was more of a danger dead than he’d been while alive. The Redgraves were about to lose everything...including control of their secrets.
Enter the determined Beatrix, Dowager Countess of Saltwood, and fiercely protective grandmother to Barry’s four good-as-orphaned children. The by now deliciously notorious Trixie, who had spent her entire widowhood playing May games with society, most especially the men—those she loathed, those she admired, and those she might someday be able to use.
She’d learned a lot from Charles....
Perhaps because she had more brass than a chamber pot, but most probably because she knew more than most men would like the world (and especially their wives) to know, she managed to make it through the scandal. She spent decades tenaciously (and perhaps more cleverly than legally), holding on to the earldom for her eldest grandson, Gideon, who had been only nine when his father was hastily interred in the family mausoleum.
Her husband’s Society, her son’s intention to follow in his father’s footsteps—these were never mentioned within earshot of the grandchildren. Trixie would rather die a thousand deaths than reveal what had gone on within the Society, the part Charles had forced her to play those long years ago. Her grandchildren knew of the scandal caused by their parents’ actions, yes—that would be impossible to hide from them as they matured and traveled to London, but with the Society long since gone, there was no reason for them to know anything else.
In truth, they seemed to delight in being those scandalous Redgraves. Welcomed everywhere, because to deny them would be folly. Quick, intelligent, dangerous, no door was shut to them. Who’d dare?
But now, suddenly, the Society was back for a third go-round, even using Redgrave land as its headquarters. Its methods the same, its partner this time none but the upstart new French emperor himself, Napoleon Bonaparte. For years, he had longed to add England to his long list of conquered countries. The Society would be more than eager to assist him in that endeavor in exchange for—God, what did they want? Certainly not the Crown; that silly Stuart business could only be gained through the Redgraves, and they certainly had no part in this new incarnation of the Society.
No, the methods might be the same, but the aims were different. Still, at the end of the day, if the Crown got so much as a whiff of what was going on, the Redgraves would pay the price, and this time no amount of Trixie’s machinations would save them.
Gideon, already suspicious that something odd was going