The Believing- Chapter 1

Chapter 1 - The Journey into Darkness Begins.

February 12th, 1878.

My life has been inexplicably bound up with unexplained events which are seldom involving people I have any interest or affection with.

For truth be known I have no close friends or family, just my congregation, a fact that I am forever grateful for (the former, not the later).

You see I do not form personal attachment easily, seeing them as being far too frail a thing to ever be of lasting value. Instead I just form temporary relationships, one's that are fleeting and serve just an immediate need or purpose.

It might simply be the desire for a lover for the night, to satisfy a primitive lust that passes as quickly as it came or seeking the company of that of a fellow scholar to maybe help with a tricky notion that will not be satisfied by solitary thought alone.

And that is why on this stormy night I find myself in the Hallway of Standfield Manor seeking the truth to a question I wish I had never should of asked myself.

Stanfield Manor was a myriad of cluttered architecture hiding it simple Jacobean roots. It had over the years been transformed into a Gothic monstrosity of gigantic proportions, corrupted by too much money by one with too little imagination.

As I entered on that stormy night, I looked up at the giant portrait that hung so predominantly above the grand staircase. My gaze so intense, my eyes did not even flinch when a particular loud thunderous boom rattled the lead lined windows as lightning stuck near by with a loud rumble that was infused with a sharp pitch.

The portrait draw me in and mesmerised me. I knew of the woman in the picture well, even though she had been dead for over 70 years now. It was Elrine de Kauffman, the young and beautiful daughter of Dutch colonists who had braved the new world of the dark Continent and fought it bravely and lost, in her particular case having succumbed to Jungle fever just before her twenty-first birthday.

He was momentarily captured by her striking feminine beauty; her delicately corseted waist, her chestnut coloured flowing hair and her sweet eyes full of innocence.

What a promising life this sweet girl could have had ahead of her, but fate had robbed her cruelly of all this or had it? Might the dark veil of death offer her new possibilities? And that was why he was here at this forsaken place on a night when the wind howled just a touch too much to be natural and the rain lashed against the windows with a force that was driven more by an unseen rage, than by the weather itself.

"Please your worship," his thoughts were brought back from a dark, brooding place by the appearance of a elderly man servant. "My Master will see you now......."

He was led into a dimly lit study where the candles caused the shadows to dance in a macabre manner along the many bookcases that made up a vast library that encased the room in a cluttered literary shell.

Stood next to a oak desk at the far end of the room was a woman of the most striking beauty, her skin was smooth like silk and ash white in color, made the more so by her contrasting scarlet lips.

Even when normally the candle light might unflattering etch shadows into one's face, with this lady there were none, for this was Countess Marina de Kauffman, wife of the late Lord Chancellor of the Saxony provinces and the woman he had come to arrest.....