the haunted kingdom by Charles E.J. Moulton (best detective novels of all time .TXT) 📖

On the 2nd of July 1108, Greater Nocturania was born, Prosperania completely defeated. For ten years, this young man lived under the care of Simon’s former housemaid Carina, who was said to have been a bastard daughter of one of John’s executed generals. John being very prone to carelessness, he rarely saw what was happening. Carina gave the young man food and kept him alive for ten years and no one knew why this only survivor was guarded so poorly. It often happened that she spent the night there and the guards spent the entire night with their ears to the door.
In 1118, on a dark summer night, the two escaped, having planned an escape for two years. Their plan was to flee to Olandus, a peaceful country up north, where they would build a family. But the couple was discovered at the border and taken to a secret hiding place, a castle in the outskirts that John originally built as a personal brothel, which was guarded day and night with its lonely prisoners. They kept planning further escapes. The good thing was that they now were together. They were unable to leave, but their love was official. John even permitted them to marry each other. A year later the young couple bore a child named Joseph who spent his first eight years at this mansion, which was more of a gilded cage for them than anything else. Carina was forced to act as child bearer for John and his generals and all in all gave birth to ten bastard sons. 19 years after the death of his father, in 1127, George finally managed to escape the country with Carina and his son Joseph and managed to cross the border and settle in Olandus. He swore never to return. He built a career for himself as a farmer of well means in the country of Olandus up north. He had lost all interest in regaining his father's land. It was after his father's death in 1149 that Joseph, thirty years old and a young recruit in the A.N.C., the Army of the Northern Countries, swore revenge. Carina, on her deathbed, told him to go ahead and avenge her husband and he made her a promise to regain his father’s country. Joseph, as a Lieutenant of the Olandus Army, had received the King of Olandus’ interest in storming the country. Ten years of work brought him the success he had hoped for. He was 40 when he was appointed General of the entire Army and 41 when he marched into Prosperania with the jointed effort of ten nations. An act that set Medatlantia into a raging war. The bastard sons that Carina had given birth to, all members of the royal consulate were lynched by angry mobs during the last months of the war. On the last day of the war, John’s bastard son Zeltar escaped Clurafar after battling Joseph on the town wall. He stole a horse and no one knew where he had gone. Some people said he had settled in North Africa and joined the Gfuhre Riders, an infamous pirate organization. In 1168 A.D., on the 6th of May after a massive war, Prosperania was reformed and the enemies were defeated, giving them a piece of land west of the large restructured empire of Prosperania, a land named Nocturania ruled by John’s ancestors, the Johnathans. Since that day, the two opposite countries, founded by brothers in heaven as on earth, fought to gain ground and again win territory of each other’s existence. During the 12th century’s last decade, the king of Olandus claimed that neutrality again was a very vital subject and withdrew from all negotiations about joining treaties. For no apparent reason, they crawled back into the hole that they had been in for years. Since that time, no one in the rest of Medatlantia bothered with doing anything more than exchange trade with the shy northerners. Not until the 1420’s, that is. The bright light became a part of darkness. It was the duty of the brighter lights still in Heaven to battle his efforts. And so, in the light of that effort our story begins, reincarnated into one part oblivion and one part bliss. That spring, the king was returning home and with his return a mysterious rider came back to terrorize the royals inside the haunted kingdom.

Our tale begins.


CHAPTER ONE:
THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION
Once upon a time there was a prosperous kingdom; one so burgeoning that it influenced an entire continent. Prosperania lay within an alternate reality, a reality alternate to our own and to others. This was the world as it would have been in other dimensions had the infrastructure, hygiene and philosophy of the Antiquity not died after Rome’s fall. Running water and good roads were as regular here as open marketplace and democracy, senators, free speech, Godly as well as angelic belief and medical evolvement based purely on homeopathic science.
This land was created by St. Michael in the dawn of time.
Into this world Princess Belinda Winsletenna was born in the year of our Lord 1401.
Belinda was the daughter of King Alexander III of Prosperania and the castle in which she was born in June lay outside of the capital Clurafar. Her father was a kind man with a booming voice, tall as a tree and gentle as a willow. For hours on end the king would sit by the crib, even in his ermine and satin robe, singing lullabies to his baby girl.
In years past, the king had cried silent tears over having lost friends to eternity and seen family wither away. He had seen a sister curse his kingdom and another kingdom become a curse. For the first time in a long, long while the troubled man who just happened to be king could feel hope in his heart once more. Queen Sieglinde said, “The baby healed the earnest scars of his majesty’s times of yore”.
The king and his daughter soon found a certain rapore, a sort of understanding that went beyond the visible. Their hearts were one, their souls unified. Soon enough from all over this known world kings and queens came to greet the youngling. They brought guilded coaches and precious diamonds, peacocks, feathers and hens, stallions, toys, lutes and literature from henceforth-famous dominions. The only one not bringing a gift was the king’s long exiled sister, Aunt Lucinda Iuvinhurmya Winsletenna.
They had always been adversaries, the two siblings, and never in her life had Lucinda accepted her own family or the truth that Alexander was her master, both in terms of politics and in her life. The once young girl, a recluse and a rebel by nature, had slowly turned into a lunatic upon royal grounds. In 1392, she turned perilous and burned down one of the guesthouses on the royal grounds. She killed almost all of her own family and left her parents with broken hearts. Consequently, Alexander threw her into a carriage and sent her off to the neighbouring realm of Nocturania, known as the dark land, to rot.
Before she left, she promised one day to return. “In thirty years a magic spell shall arouse the demon hounds of hell,” she whispered to her brother as the carriage door slammed shut.
Nocturania had always been Prosperania’s Achille’s heel and therefore a fitting new home for the exiled sister. Founded by two brothers, Simon the Great and John the Strong, the empires had fought wars, with and without weapons, for centuries. Ever since Simon’s ancestors won back Prosperania on the 6th of May 1168, the Johnathans, John’s ancestors, had been ruling the dark neighbour.
This country was Lucifer creative outburst.
There were two siblings, creators: the fallen angel and his brother, who had already travelled far, when in the year of our Lord 1411, Princess Belinda heard the name of her adversary for the first time. The creations: the offspring of good, Belinda’s father King Alexander of Prosperania, the reincarnation of Joseph, the original man of Earth. His sister, Lucinda, was a daughter of evil, the reincarnation of Rebecca, the original woman and a mistress of the Nocturanian king Adnicul. The last battle of Eden was to be fought on Earth within the haunted kingdom as a result of this family bond. The two created siblings met again in 1411 after having been apart for 19 years. This was an archangelic bloodfeud.
The two angels Michael and Lucifer were conducting a cat and mouse game through the alternate reality. Michael begat Alexander who battled Lucinda. Lucinda was Lucifer’s prime disciple.


The way it all began

Lucinda had been experimenting with black magic in her room down the hall since age nine.
At the commencement of puberty she had started inviting boys into her room against her family’s will. She became somewhat of a frivolous girl with a rounded figure and a dashing smile, a grin that would surprise a lover with a knife in the back, if only figuratively speaking.
Alexander had always had a problem with the girl that kept on teasing his three other younger siblings. Peter, two years younger, had never recovered from the fact that Lucinda accused him of being impotent after at an early age catching him trying to fall alseep during a storm in his mother’s bed. She had kept on calling him a virgin prince until he decided to study theology and forget marriage. He had fallen and hurt himself a week later and appearantly it had to do with the young Lucinda, who had stood around a corner with a rabbit’s tail and a lizard’s forked tongue. On the other hand it might just have been insecurity on Peter’s part.
The twins Barbara and Laura kept out of Lucinda’s way and it had never been a secret that the two always found Lucinda appalling. But as for Alexander, he never tried to avoid her. He spoke to her like he thought she should be spoken to: with discipline. Anytime she attacked the twins, his rage knew very few bounds. Anytime Peter was attacked Alex found no end to his fury. Gertrude and Bertrand were unhappy that the fifth child they never had wanted came anyway. It was a shame, but both parents had not wanted the child. The parents had only experienced hardship with the youngster, even as early as pregnancy, even as early as conception was concerned.
The night of conception had been one of many a debate. The facts about it were these: the lightning storm a few weeks before commencement had almost killed the entire cattle herd on the field and the stables had burnt down during it, leaving the stable boys desperate and the horses in panic. Moreover, the gentle King Bertrand had turned into a beast during lovemaking that night, surprising Queen Gertrude and leaving her not speaking with him for over a moon. The labour was as difficult as the birth itself was cataclysmic. The physician had come late due to an accident and when the young girl had been born, she had drooled and spat.
The caul over her face had to be removed with a heavy cloth.
If the birth proved hard then Lucinda’s childhood proved surprising.
She was a stunning beauty with her black hair and black eyes. Her slightly tanned features made everyone wonder why she was the only one so dark in the family.
Lucinda was very popular in her teens. Popular just as the ladies of the night seemed to be at Madam Zonga’s, the most infamous brothel in the capital where Patrick had been found sleeping in a pool of his own oral excrements during his youth. By fifteen Lucinda had already broken five hearts. She would sneak out at night, disappear into Clurafar and drink the locals under