VICTORIAN GOTHIC ROMANCE
Kathryn Colvin - Romance Novels
DOCTOR D'ARCO, SORCERER OF LONDON
A dark sorcerer. His widowed apprentice.
A Victorian Gothic Romance for all time.
In the midnight fog of Victorian London, the young widow Elizabeth Buckingham was destitute and alone, sustained only by her vow of revenge against whoever—or whatever—caused her Egyptologist husband’s uncanny demise.
Everything changes when a mysterious encounter at a fortuneteller shop leads Elizabeth to join the Esoteric Order of Magisophists, a secret society and college of magic. But with her new life comes new peril, and even the occultists of the Order dread the infamous Doctor D’Arco: a grim, brooding, demon-summoning professor of sorcery, his imposing presence intensified by his black cloak, steel mask, and the unsettling sensation of darkness that emanates from him like a deep shadow.
Now the sorcerer Doctor D’Arco seeks an apprentice to join him in banishing a ghastly rival—and Elizabeth proves to have precisely the talent he requires.
Inspired in part by vintage Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literature and written in compelling, sensual prose, Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London is a tale of mystery, adventure, supernatural thrills, eerie suspense… and most of all, of a young widow’s secret, longing love for the dark sorcery professor to whom she is apprenticed, her fear of him slowly smoldering into a dangerous desire.
From the pages of
DOCTOR D'ARCO, SORCERER OF LONDON
A power rose in me—like a shadow returning, a black tide gathering back into the midnight sea—and I stopped, and let it pass with my silent tears, because it felt too much like him.
I could not risk summoning his phantom to me now; I could not in a thousand lifetimes allow him the sight of these lamentations of a lunatic. He was my professor, the deathly Doctor D’Arco, and I imperiled even now my vow as his apprentice. But cold logic melted in the fire of my heart and my mind, and when I closed my eyes I saw only him, standing alone on the sea-cliff of a foreign shore, the impossible abyss of an ill-starred fate widening between us like a black chasm, a rift in the earth. If only I could call to him—speak his name thrice—
No. A half-dream. A nightmare. The abyss and the sea-cliff faded, but I could not tell anymore my cold sweat from my tears.
And I knew then, for good or for evil, that I could not go on thus—this thing inside me, haunting me, must now have the dignity of a name.
The night would pass, I knew, and my mind surpass this madness, and my strength return. But while the night endured, before sleep made me forget, I would exhume Truth from her burial within my heart, and breathe into her a part of my soul, and allow her for an hour to live:
Against all the will of the world—
All the will of the world but my own. Beneath the bedclothes in the dark I clutched his water-stained grimoire against the beating of my heart, the warmth of my breasts, and the small, convulsive sobs that racked my body.
Against all the will of the world, I was falling in love with Doctor D’Arco.