Heir of Wolcott Manor
Copyright© 2025 by Carlos Santiago
Chapter 2: The Reading of the Will
Horror Sex Story: Chapter 2: The Reading of the Will - After his father's passing in 1822, Silas Wolcott returns home to discover he has inherited a fortune beyond necessity. However, soon, he must uncover the secrets of his House and bloodline. With the help of his stalwart butler, a seductive vampire, and his own intellect, Silas must navigate a power FAR greater than any of mortal comprehension.
Caution: This Horror Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Heterosexual Historical Alternate History Paranormal Vampires Cream Pie Halloween Royalty Violence
“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
— Attributed to Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE), Athenian statesman and general during the Golden Age of Athens. Commonly quoted from secondary historical sources and modern paraphrasing; not found verbatim in surviving ancient texts. Public domain.
The study had a sharp, freezy quality about its confines while paired with a soundlessness that did not bring comfort to the young Wolcott when he entered the room. Two tapers lit the center of the room. While there were shelves filled with books, the desk had been made remarkably clean, which was unlike his father in every way imaginable.
Silas walked to the hearth and placed one hand upon the mantelpiece. Thomas came in behind him while the Wolcott clenched his other hand in the pocket of his frock coat.
The fire had not been lit in days, but the butler made every effort to bring the flames to life. Grief stole away Silas’s care whether he was cold or not. Comfort was not meant for him. He needed to be doing something productive. However, given his father was dead, and he could make no plans to bury him without knowing his father’s last wishes, the only efficient use of his time was to do nothing but listen.
Josiah Huntington cleared his throat and adjusted his spectacles with a meticulousness befitting a man of his station as well as the gravity of the moment. He removed from his leather satchel a bundle of parchment. Even the bindings for the papers were of the highest qualities as befit the family of such wealth. Though bound in twine and sealed with red wax, Silas could not help but look at the strange crest on the candle wax. It was a seven pointed crown.
His family had long since abandoned any ties to the royalty or aristocracy. To see it in his father’s final words to him seemed off putting for the young man.
His concentration was broken when the lawyer spoke.
“In accordance with the last testament of Richard Wolcott, Esquire,” Josiah began.
Despite the cold autumn weather, his voice was even, sonorous, and grossly unaffected by the chill.
“I shall now read the final will and declaration of the deceased.”
Silas gave a sigh of audible annoyance; though, it was not Huntington at whom his ire was directed. This formality was principally unnecessary, so for a young man, such as Silas, the vexation slipped out as it did.
“Must we? This is a fatuous farce,” Silas remarked candidly. “I know the sum of the wealth. My father raised me well and was not a man to conceal much when matters came to the family. Our holdings, after the loan, must be worth—what? About a quarter of a million? The family’s standings are obscene already. What more is there to say?”
Josiah smiled faintly as a tutor might smile at a pupil who believes himself learned, yet has not glimpsed the breadth of the lesson. Silas loathed those sorts of bright looks especially having witnessed them too many times in college.
“I believe you misunderstand your holdings, Mr. Wolcott.”
“Go on, then,” Silas waved. “Educate me.”
The lawyer untied the parchment. As the seal cracked, the scent of pipe smoke spread faintly in the air. It was as though Silas’ father was present and joined Josiah in the joke.
“Your father writes:
‘To my only son, Silas Everard Wolcott—
By the time this is read, I shall have departed this world and returned to the dust from whence all men come. I have no regrets in this life with the exception that I did not have more time with your mother, but the time has come that I must burden you with the immensity of this estate.
“I pray your shoulders are broad enough to bear it, as mine were once. Though I do not give you a crown, I know that no king may ever call himself your better.”
Without a doubt, those were Richard Wolcott’s words; to Silas, there was an uncomfortable familiarity to the utterance. Not only because they belonged to his father but to hear them from Josiah’s mouth was disagreeably unpleasant.
Josiah continued despite Silas’s discomfort.
“The first item of business: the United States government, in the year of our Lord 1815, sought funds for the reconstruction of the President’s House after its ruin in the Second War for Independence.”
Some had called the conflict ‘Madison’s War’ but who was Silas to correct his lawyer?
“Your father advanced to the Treasury a sum of five hundred thousand dollars at a compounded interest rate of eighteen percent.”
Silas raised his head at the absurdity of that sentence. A private citizen helping the federal government was a nonsensical novelty. That those in power would allow for a single person to take advantage of a union of multiple states was unheard of. Someone, somewhere would have complained.
“Eighteen percent? Compounded? That’s not...” Silas stammered. “That can’t have been legal. You cannot do that to the government!”
Josiah smiled and nodded in response to his client’s incredulity. The curved smirk was a mark of knowing superiority. Men like him relished having the upper hand to their counterparts, Silas knew.
“It was not customary,” he agreed. “However, in desperate times, rules are bent; an agreement was signed privately, sealed by a Supreme Court Justice, and unchallenged by any member of Congress.”
The insight struck Silas like a stiff blow on a cold winter’s day while Huntington went on elaborating.
“The government was desperately impatient to reconstruct the White House,” lectured Josiah. “There was no time to formally allocate funds. The country was in a disgraced state from what our mother nation did to us, so when your father presented an immediate solution, President Madison accepted the conditions of his circumstance without protest.”
All Silas could do was look at the legal expert in a bewilderment born of an ignorance of the world around him. When it was clear that Silas would offer no commentary or rebuttal, Josiah turned the page.
“Due to the six-year delay in repayment, coupled with the compounding clause, the final sum returned to your family had nearly tripled the initial load at one million, three hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars and some change.”
Silas blinked in astonished stupefaction at that final computation. Mister Wolcott believed the wealthiest man alive was someone named John Jacob Astor, whose personal wealth was around ten million U.S. dollars. While meeting such a man was not an activity that Silas had taken part in, he knew of the man’s reputation for earnest hard work and trading to his benefit.
That Silas’ family made a single investment that amounted to a tenth of that man’s wealth was insanity itself, and so the Wolcott heir voiced such sentiments.
“That’s ... That’s lunacy,” Silas choked out.
“Ah ... It is only a matter of simple arithmetic, sir,” said Josiah, without mirth.
The advocate shuffled the papers to be sure of their order of importance by his estimation before proceeding. The show did little to impress the Wolcott man. He had been well educated in the finest schools and finished his learning at a College that ensured young men understood when important men were bloated and when they were genuine.
“That is only the beginning,” Huntington went on with a sly smirk.
When it came to the counsel’s arrogance, Silas believed that a strong blow to the face might cure him of his deficiency. However, that was not the sort of man that Silas wished to be. He was made of sterner stuff, and judging other was for those with little to no time on their hands, and after all, it is when one is not busy that the devil finds his foothold.
“There remains the ancestral lands (from tracts of forest, riverbanks, and township property from here to East Haddam). Your family holds a silent partnership in the Bank of New York, comprising eight percent of its present shares. There’s a tavern in Middletown and another nearby in New Haven that has your family’s name on the deed. A local hospital, likewise, is in your family’s name. And then there is the matter of the Connecticut River itself.”
“The river?” Silas murmured.
He blinked in astonishment in preparation to release his next objection. After all, the incredulity of such a revelation was astonishing.
“You can’t own a river.”
Josiah tilted his head in confusion at such a sentence.
“Yet your family has since 1691. There is documentation; my firm renews any legality issues every year or so. Tolls are collected privately, but the income steadily flows in.”
Josiah let out a small laugh at his river joke. When he saw that Silas did not join him, he decided to cover his jovial demeanor with a cough and continued.
“Then there is the private portfolio, managed under my firm these last twenty-two years. I am pleased to report consistent and generous returns.”
Josiah paused. He had expected exaltations. What he saw was a man blinking in the distance. There was not a single thought in his mind other than what he was hearing was absurdly unbelievable.
“In all,” Josiah continued, believing that the best course for them both was to move forward. “Mr. Wolcott, the estate’s wealth, as of this quarter, is conservatively estimated at five million dollars.”
Silas staggered back a step, as if struck.
“That’s impossible. No one man owns...”
He paused as his mind went back to the New York merchant of John Jacob Astor. There were families with wealth. He was the only child between his parents, and he knew that some of them would be reaching out to him. He was without a doubt the most affluent member of the Wolcotts, and that was what his father had meant when he had said, ‘no king may ever call himself your better.’
Nevertheless, such flourishing prosperity seemed to affront his natural senses, so he went on with his feelings.
“We should not own that much.”
Josiah, for the first time, looked amused.
“Mr. Wolcott. Your family is an institution that holds more wealth than any vault on the Eastern Seaboard.”
Silas made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a curse. He struggled to even so much as befoul the air with profanity. After all, his father had raised him with Protestant sensibilities, and to let out a curse or slur was unbecoming of a New English Gentleman.
“Surely, the Treasury would never allow it. I mean, the taxes alone—”
“Waived,” said Josiah coolly. “After the loan to President Madison, the federal government enacted a silent understanding. Your assets and properties shall not be subject to federal taxation or even scrutiny until the year nineteen hundred.”
Silas opened his mouth, then shut it. He had no power here. The decision to have money was made for him long before he was born. While others would not see it as a curse, what he was being handed was painfully unbecoming. There was money and there was gracelessly inappropriate amounts of money. He knew what five million dollars in 1822 was.
The flickering candlelight, coupled with the fire in the hearth, cast a foreboding shadow across the old lawyer’s brow. For the briefest of moments, he wondered if his father had spoken to Josiah about all of this beforehand.
“Your father was aware of that fact when he did this favor for the President,” Josiah added, packing away the documents. “There would be an expectation for the federal government to look the other way, which benefits yourself and your family’s holdings for nearly a century.”
Silas sank into a chair in the study. His father may have been distant, but he had been brought up on a mix of New English Catholicism and American Protestantism to know that the love of money and acquisition of personal wealth was the root of all evil.
“There is one final matter,” said Josiah, reaching into the lining of his coat. “Your father left a personal letter for you. It was to be given from my hands to yours, but only after the will had been read.”
Silas blinked and looked to the lawyer.
“When could my father possibly have done this?”
“When the illness appeared more severe than most, he wrote the letter and gave the note to me when the will was in line with your father’s intentions.”
Josiah handed over the thick, yellowed envelope sealed in a similar red wax as the will. The emblem of the seven pointed crown was on the seal. There was a Latin phrase Silas did not immediately recognize on the opposite side.
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