Autumn - 1818
Cornwall, England
The wind howled. The shutters rattled.
Millicent swooned.
The specter rose up, a chilling vision, to loom over her prostrate form . . .
"Drat!" Prudence muttered. Pushing her slipping spectacles back into place, she frowned at the sheet of foolscap before her. Her heroine was swooning far too frequently, and the specter very much resembled the appartition in her last book, The Mysterious Alphonse. Her second effort was simply not going well at all.
What she needed was . . . inspiration. With a sigh of frustration, Prudence gazed out the window at what had always provided her with the necessary stimulus: Wolfinger Abbey.
Of course, Mrs. Radcliffe's novels were what had given her the courage to take up writing herself, but it was the abbey that stirred her creative spirit. It stood high up on the edge of the sea cliff, enshrouded in mist, its dark gray stone stark against the bleak sky, its towers home to the earls of Ravenscar for hundreds of years.
What secrets did it hold?
