New York Times Bestselling Author Gaelen Foley presents My Wicked Marquess, the first book in her passionate new series, The Inferno Club…
To London’s aristocracy, the Inferno Club is a scandalous society no proper young lady would acknowledge. But though they are publicly notorious for pursuing all manner of debauchery, in private they are warriors who would do anything to protect king and country.
The Marquess of Rotherstone has decided it’s time to restore the family’s good name. But as a member of the Inferno Club, he knows there is only one way to redeem himself in Society’s eyes: marry a lady of impeccable beauty and breeding, whose reputation is, above all, spotless.
Someone quite unlike Daphne Starling. True, she’s temptingly lovely, but a jilted suitor has nearly ruined her reputation. Still, Max cannot resist her allure—or the challenge of proving London’s gossips wrong. He would do anything to win her hand...and show that even a wicked marquess can make a perfect husband.
Author's Note
Though this is back-story and subplot, all kind of in the background behind the main plot of my new book, which is of course the romance, the world-building for the Inferno Club series was one of the things I enjoyed the most about writing this book.
My first challenge was to line up all the working parts concerning the good guys and the bad guys. First off, it’s not giving you any real spoilers to say that the Inferno Club itself—this scandalous gentlemen’s club in London—is actually a front for a secret chivalric order that dates back to medieval times. Its true identity is the Order of St. Michael the Archangel, and though it has some ties to the Crown, few in the government even know it exists.
Highborn boys are recruited for the Order based on their personal qualities like courage and integrity, but they are taken from the ranks of the aristocracy because they’ll need access to the highest circles of European society, which is where their battles will take them. Once a boy is chosen for the Order, as our hero Max was at the age of thirteen, he is taken away from his family and brought to a remote castle in Scotland where he undergoes brutal training to turn him into a warrior and a spy—and of course into a very smooth gentleman like our devastatingly sexy hero, Lord Rotherstone!
Now, the enemy the knights of the Order fight is no ordinary spy agency. It’s way more fun than that. The villains, called the Promethean Council, are an evil secret society with tentacles in every court in Europe. (If you are familiar with the spooky and fascinating conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and their One World Order, that’s basically the inspiration for the Promethean Council.) The Prometheans are obsessed with gaining control over humanity, and every time they are defeated at some point in history, they eventually manage to regroup and rise again “in some new ruthless incarnation,” as it says in the book.
That is what has happened at the time of the story. The Prometheans have infiltrated Napoleon’s empire and seek to slowly take over from within in order to wield more power than they have in ages. After all, Napoleon gained more territory throughout Europe than any leader since Charlemagne. Napoleon is not in on it, mind you—the opportunistic Prometheans just want to take and twist and use what he built for their own evil purposes.
The roots of the Promethean Council stem back to the Crusades when a scouting party of knights under King Richard the Lionheart were sent out into the desert to confirm the enemy, Saladin’s, position. They knights get caught in a sandstorm and take shelter in a cave, where they find these ancient clay jars containing mysterious scrolls full of occult knowledge and promising supernatural power. The knights are instantly divided about the nature of the scrolls: some of these medieval men think they are the work of the Devil and should be burned. Others see the scrolls’ dark secrets as the perfect weapon to use against Saladin, who is winning the war.
The evil nature of the scrolls becomes apparent when the argument turns violent; the knights who want to use the scrolls’ knowledge as a weapon of war end up murdering their comrades who are trying to stop them and trying to make them burn it or at least put it back where they found it.
After killing their brother knights in cold blood, they can’t go back to King Richard or they’ll be punished, probably executed. So they take the scrolls and return to Europe, where they begin working in secret with the occult knowledge the writings contain. They become increasingly corrupted by the scrolls’ evil influence.
The secret cult that they establish is passed down over the generations with the ultimate goal of ruling over the entire world. Since the Prometheans consider most human beings to be useless barbarians, and believe that only they have the true illumination within their secret cult, they have no qualms about enslaving humanity.
(Note: there’s no paranormal in this book. It’s just got some tinges of that spooky, slightly gothic, occult vibe to it where the villains are concerned.)
My fictional Order of St. Michael was founded when King Richard finally hears from a young page what happened at that cave. The page was the servant of one of the knights who was killed. The lad was there at the caves, but he escaped. King Richard gathers a band of faithful knights who then take a blood oath to hunt down the Prometheans, root out their evil wherever they lurk, and put an end to their plans.
The weird thing is that once I had set up all this back story material, I came across a tidbit in Regency history where “Prinny,” in 1818, instituted “The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George” to commemorate the placing of the Ionian Islands under British protection (see Her Every Pleasure). The Order is conferred on people for important service in foreign affairs or the diplomatic service. So it actually could be said to work for spies. In fact, it was good enough for Ian Fleming, who as it turns out had James Bond eventually awarded with a Knight Commander of the Order, an honorific that is abbreviated, CMG. These initials are humorously referred to as standing for “Call Me God” due to the fact of how powerful the people are who generally belong to the Order. I didn’t even plan this, in fact, I had no idea about any of it until after I had decided on my Inferno Club setup and started checking out the research aspects to see if it would work. It’s just another one of those weird synchronicity things that happen constantly in my writing, and which I’ve learned to take as a little thumbs-up from the universe that I’m on the right track. But it still makes me fall off my chair when that happens.
Anyway, it was great fun to weave all this neat stuff through in the story and also to explore how such a strange upbringing and adult life have impacted Max emotionally. Having played a particular role for so long dedicated to eradicating the Promethean villains, he has no close relationships other than his buddies in the Order; he exists in a state of emotional isolation, and I really loved having Daphne, the heroine, slowly pull and lure him out of it. I hope you like it, too!
I am already working on the next book in the series, as yet untitled. You’ll get to meet Hero #2 in (I think it’s Ch. 5 of) My Wicked Marquess. I’ll leave you to guess which agent of the Order is next!
