Wylder's Hand

In a claustrophobic English country house, two families have warred for generations. The solution they've devised: marry Mark Wylder to Dorkas Brenden, and let love, or at least alliance, conquer all. But neither bride nor groom consents to this arrangement. Before the wedding can unite their reluctant hands, Mark vanishes into thin air. Now the house holds its breath. Whispers multiply in the corridors. Is Mark dead? Has he fled? Or does something far darker explain his absence? The people left behind, Dorkas, her family, the servants, begin to circle, each harboring secrets, each suspecting the other. What begins as a disrupted wedding becomes a study in suspicion, inherited hatred, and the slow poison of lives arranged by others. Le Fanu, the master of Victorian gothic dread, weaves a tale where the real horror lies not in supernatural specters but in the domestic trap itself.