Chapter 339: The other Isabelle_Part 2
Though as much as the vampire looked calm, the couple could see what he was capable of. After all, his kind were known as savages, let alone one who had killed his own parents and spent years in the madhouse.
"So what if we favored one over the other? If you were in our shoes, you would do exactly what we did," Lady Louisiana sneered, angry that because of Belle and this vampire, her reputation would crumble down to dust if it got out that the girl they had all put their hope in had done the opposite.
"I don’t want to be in your shoes because they won’t fit me, my lady. But even if some magic happened and they did fit, I doubt I would be senseless like you," Rohan said with a grin as the woman glared at him, gaped, but said nothing. "Enlighten me more." He waved his hand for her to continue.
"Isabelle is a cursed name to the Dawsons, that’s what happened, and for some reason, we ended up giving her that name and the curse fell on her!" Lady Louisiana exclaimed in agitation.
Rohan linked his fingers together, propped his elbows on the desk, and rested his chin on his linked fingers as he narrowed his eyes at the woman. "How come? Did you have another Isabelle in the family?" He already knew there was, but he wanted to hear everything there was about the girl in his wife’s dreams.
"Yes," it was the duke who answered, since it was his side of the family. "Ninety years ago, my grandaunt. She was the first Isabelle and after her death, the name was forbidden in our family, but I don’t know what came over me to make me give my daughter that name," he said grimly.
"I have heard bits and pieces about my grandaunt, and everything about her was dreadful and awful, only her history would make one despise her very existence. Knowing all that, I don’t think it was normal that I would name my daughter after a woman like that. Something must have possessed me to do it, and now that I have, our Isabelle started to look exactly like her after the..." The duke hesitated, but the look in the vampire’s eyes made him continue. "My wife saw her die years ago and then suddenly she was back again. After that, we started to notice the similar looks with my grandaunt that were in the old painting."
This was the part Rohan was more curious about. "You saw her die? How is that?" He turned to the duchess beside him, who had been glaring at him.
"Yes, I saw it. Our carriage was knocked off by those savages and I passed out when I hit my head, but by the time I opened my eyes, I heard screams and grunts of the creatures who were all but tearing her apart... I saw..." Lady Louisiana’s eyes genuinely turned distressed as she put her hand around her throat. "I saw her head fall off and the rest of her was dragged away. She couldn’t have survived that. I pulled Eve to my chest to cover her cries as the savages rushed past the fallen carriage as if they didn’t notice me there, and took her body away.
"When I found the next village to look for help, by the time the people came back for my daughter’s remains, they found nothing, not the blood nor the head that fell off her." Lady Louisiana shuddered at the thought of it, as if the memories brought her chills and made her shiver.
The memory had hunted her many nights after it happened.
Rohan, who was listening to her heartbeat, could tell she wasn’t lying. It was either she had misseen something that day and believed it to be the truth, or she was really traumatized. Because he had been there, and no such thing happened. Isa had been taken away by him into the forest. Something wasn’t adding up here.
"After that incident, I could no longer see my little girl in her, she was an imposter. All I saw was that crazy Isabelle whose painting I had looked into in the Dawson’s history books. They looked so much alike, and sometimes I saw the evilness in those hazel eyes when she looked at me. Sometimes I feared she would burn us all down like that madwoman had in the past," Lady Louisiana said with an angry sob.
If it hadn’t been for their desire to keep their reputation clean of scandal, they would have thrown the girl away since then. But because rumors had spread that they had all survived the rogue’s attack, they had been forced to bring her back home and let her live under their roof. A ghost of the past, that was exactly what Lady Louisiana thought of her, an evil soul from another time. Her own daughter had been killed...
"I lost my poor daughter and got stuck with her..." Lady Louisiana sobbed into her handkerchief.
"What happened to the first Isabelle? Your grandaunt." Rohan asked the duke, turning away from the emotional woman to her composed husband.
"She almost killed all of my family then, because she went crazy in the head. I don’t know much about her, but from what I knew it all started because of some girlish nonsense. She fell in love with the man she was engaged to marry, but that man had some business to do that required him to travel before their wedding. She didn’t want him to go and wanted him to stay with her.
"He couldn’t stay, of course, and promised to be back. But it was said she threatened to make him regret that he went on that journey when she begged him to stay back to shop for their wedding. Isabelle was a beautiful girl with a body said to make men drool. She flaunted that body and had affairs with several men, which resulted in her getting pregnant.
"I don’t know how it happened, but it was said she blamed it on her husband-to-be and hated him for absolutely no reason, even when he was willing to marry her after her shame and was willing to accept the bastard she will birth.
"I used to hear from my father that she began to say things that made absolutely no sense and threatened to kill her husband-to-be. It became disturbing when she almost stabbed him with a knife and hurt her mother in the process. She was locked in the house, where every day and night she screamed and shouted, hitting at the doors and throwing threats at her family.
"Her madness reached a level that she hurt herself and everyone else when she gets the chance to. Then one day, she began to curse everyone and her husband-to-be, promising she would take his life if it was the last thing she did. The next day, she set herself on fire and almost burned everyone in the house along with her. She died in the fire alone, but the Dawsons has never known peace because of it."
Rohan let the words settle slowly into his head, digesting them as it always took him a bit of time to take in too many words spoken fast. The duke had told this without a break as he was afraid of the vampire, and when it settled in his head, he finally asked, "And what happened to the family of the husband-to-be?"
The duke looked thoughtful for a while, as if trying to remember the information that had passed down through time. "I heard the curse she made fell on them. A few years after her death, their house caught fire and they were all said to have died in it. Tongues waggled and people began to point fingers at our family. It took years before everything was forgotten, and the name Isabelle was forbidden until now."
"Can I see the portraits and the family history books you talked about?" Rohan asked, having a feeling that there was more to this than these people knew or bothered to look into. This matter concerned his wife’s life and well-being; he wouldn’t take their one-sided information to be the truth of what had happened to that Isabelle or what connection it had with his woman.
From what Belle had told him about her dreams of the girl’s life, she was an easy-going girl, deeply in love with Deven. He didn’t think she would be the kind to do what they believed she had done. He had once been accused of being mad and knew the feeling all too well.
There must be some connection between her and his wife, and he wanted to know it, even if it meant he would have to look through the Dawson’s history himself.
The duke frowned at the vampire’s words about the portraits. "And why should I keep such things in my house when I am trying to cleanse us from whatever my grandaunt had caused? Everything her hands touched is said to be cursed.
Everything that concerned her lies in our old mansion, the one that was half-burnt by the madwoman herself. If you want anything to do with her, you are free to go there and look for yourself."
The duke, however, did not mention the main truth, that the old mansion was said to still carry the ghost of the madwoman, a spirit that had haunted the entire town for years and drove people away. If the vampire chose to bind himself to such a curse, then he would have only himself to blame.
All he wanted now was for the vampire to leave so he could carry out his plans of going to the king and telling him himself about Belle’s betrayal, so that his other family members wouldn’t be implicated in this mess the girl had brought upon herself. Just like the other Isabelle, this one was no different, a shame to the Dawsons, and he would wash his hands of her as soon as possible.
Only the vampire before them had other plans. He got up from his seat, and smiling, he asked the duke, "Where is your old mansion located?"
The duke told him impatiently, but immediately after he dropped the information, the vampire leaned forward and compelled him to forget the discovery he had made about his wife giving birth and about the information he had shared with him.
When he turned to the duchess, her eyes were wide with terror, seeing her husband compelled before her very eyes. Before she could even process it, he compelled her as well, to forget what she had discovered and to never look too deeply into her elder daughter again, so as to avoid any future discovery about her giving birth or Angel being their son.
Done with what he had come there to do, Rohan left the study with a grim look in his eyes.