Indicator of a Curse

by Lesley A Meldrum

  The girls should have been dealt with discreetly, behind closed doors. The public was too quick to judge. They had failed to acknowledge his girls were under duress. It was the strange sickness that brought on their bad behaviour. They were being manipulated against their will. Antonia and Freya had no recollection they had done such things.

  Mr Bennet hated how his well-educated girls of high birth were now perceived as filthy little whores. He had foolishly exhibited their improprieties to the whole of England. Their disgrace would follow them wherever they went. No doubt the stories would stretch, becoming more perverted and exaggerated.

  He couldn’t bear to think about it.

  It was too late to remedy his mistake and undoubtedly it would take an eternity to amend their reputations. He hoped to God he hadn’t completely ruined their prospects, praying they would still be accepted by the elite. It was quite fortunate that there had only been a few aristocratic spectators. They preferred not to rub elbows with the lower classes.

  Antonia and Freya belonged to nobility. Their high-class lifestyle was their birthright going back twelve generations. Losing their respectable seats would be a real blow for them. If the aristocracy kept hearing about their less-than-classy exploits, Mr Bennet’s daughters may never again earn their places in society.

  It was a good thing he had turned the public away. With any luck, after the hype died off, his daughters would have their dignity back.

  He hoped they would forgive him for putting them in such a predicament. They would find out the hard way their father was not infallible. Gradually, they would come to accept him for the real man he was: imperfect and as defective as any other human. Despite his judgement, he loved them dearly. He had always had the best intentions in mind.

  No one was more disappointed in him than he was. His children had once believed their papa would save them; he’d let them down. Now he would do anything to regain their trust.

  He hoped he had redeemed himself enough by banishing the crowds from their house the day Freya broke her arm, offering his girls a more stable home.

  Their home was nowadays a quieter place and much more accommodating to their already overstimulated senses. As for restoring their dignity, he vowed never to put them on display again.

  It was a starting point at least, and one that he intended to add to every day until his dying days.

  Lady Bennet seemed to approve of his more responsible choices. Due to her positive reaction, he felt he had recovered some leverage as a responsible father. He felt there was hope after all.

  Looking back, Mr Bennet was disgusted with how everything had gotten out of hand. He considered himself to be level-headed and decisive; he had certainly not been himself during the whole undertaking. He had lost the boundary between his devotion to fatherhood and his commitment to science.

  Mr Bennet felt they had all crossed their boundaries. His nieces made money out of the whole spectacle, the crowds were uncharitable, and even his girls were taken with the whole affair at the start of it all. The attention had gone to their head. In the early stages they had craved the spotlight, feeling powerful and untouchable. They were ecstatic that the crowds were in awe of their great feats and inhumane strength. They liked having powers no one else did. They thought their fame was monumental.

  Now, they were just as relieved when he brought the social experiment to a halt as he was.

  They didn’t mind when they were levitating or showing tremendous strength, but then as time went on they heard feedback about their lewd acts. Not only were they embarrassed by their own provocativeness, they didn’t fancy the thought of the audience watching while they convulsed and drooled like imbeciles. Nor did they fancy the thought of the audience watching while they contorted into weird shapes and sizes. What young girl would want to be hideously disfigured?

  Each time their father told them what they had done they cringed. Often, he informed them that in their stupor they ripped at their clothes or displayed themselves inappropriately, offering themselves to anyone who would have them. To the crowds’ embarrassment, the girls had exposed many of the hidden secrets that went on behind their closed doors.

  Antonia and Freya were brought up to be good girls. They couldn’t believe the filth that had come out of their own mouths, the gestures they had made, or the names they were called.

  How soon the crowds had turned. In no time, Antonia and Freya’s awe-inspiring popularity went the other way. No one had anything good to say anymore. Those same people, who once put the girls up on their high pedestals and worshiped them like Gods, now spoke with distasteful sentiments.

  Before the crowd turned, news had travelled all the way to the king. He in turn had some of his good men go and see what the commotion was about. He wasn’t too pleased about others stealing away the attention. Nonetheless, he was curious. When the crowds had become opposed to the girls’ grandiosity, the king lost interest, which Mr Bennet considered a good thing.

  By allowing community involvement, there were now always whispers of bewitchment hanging about, which concerned the Squire. He was not yet prepared to rule witchcraft as the likelihood of his girls’ illness, but he was running out of options fast. As much as he hated to admit it, all the evidence was starting to appear in favour of witchcraft.

  Still, he wanted to leave nothing to probability. There were lives at stake. He didn’t want to see Beatty hanging from a rope if his girls perished anyway because they hadn’t found the real cause.

  Of course, his daughters were his priority in this entire stake. Yet, as the lord over all the lands and people, he had everyone’s liberty at heart, including Beatty’s. For everyone’s sake, he would stop at nothing. He would search high and low for a definite cause.

  Mr Bennet despaired over how many months had passed. Time was of the essence; Beatty’s chances were narrowing and the girls were fading into oblivion. Furthermore, the girls were losing their identities to the sickness. Of late, they had rarely been out of their stupor.

  He lamented the times when they were conscious; they were normal little girls who needed their mama to do everything for them.

  Lady Bennet had been the only level-headed soul throughout the whole experiment. She had humbly stayed in the background, always in the waiting, ready to give her children a soft landing to fall on.

  In the eyes of the onlookers, Lady Bennet appeared uncaring about the children’s welfare. According to their observations, she always distanced herself from the experiment and acted indifferent. Think what they may, her maternal instincts were strong. Her taking a back seat was solely in aid of finding the cure for her children. By not hindering her husband’s plans, she did not block his progress. Standing back and letting the show go on was, she hoped, the quickest path to finding a breakthrough.

  When the crowds were gone, she was always there to settle her children and was never short of motherly affection, which went unseen.

  Lady Bennet knew her husband was a smart man. Clearly, there was some method to his madness. He was usually a level-headed person, but the choices he made during this experiment were beyond her. The dilemma had taken him to places he had never been before, places he would never usually consider.

  Lady Bennet could see he too was desperate to free his girls and, in addition, was Beatty’s only chance of escaping the rope. Mr Bennet was a just man. He felt obliged to compensate Beatty for what his girls had been putting her through. Above all, he believed she was innocent of the claims regarding her involvement in his daughters’ illness.

  Though of late, he wondered.

  So far, he had discovered nothing that would make his girls so sick and delirious, nor could he explain the strange activities that went on under his roof. Were the strange activities and his children’s strange illness connected? He knew not.

  He was slowly slipping into the dark abyss of defeatism. He couldn’t stand that Antonia and Freya were wasting away before his eyes. He could see his wife was losing hope too, thoug
h she would never admit to it.

  If it wasn’t for the scientist in him who always believed the answer was around the corner, he would have given up long ago, but being an explorer of science, his curious mind had to make discoveries. His driven inquisitiveness moved him forward with the experiment, telling him he was close to finding the solution.

  At present, he had only the one daughter at home to make observations on, but he believed it would be advantageous to include Freya’s stay in London as an extension of the experiment. It would be a true testament to whether it was the abbey making her sick. He wanted to see if she would heal while in another environment.

  Going by Tessa’s last letter, Freya was improving, which was indeed good news. If that was the case, he was best to move his family from the area of the abbey.

  Another enigma puzzled Mr Bennet. He had grown up in Quarrendon and had hardly ever been sick as a boy. He caught nothing serious, bar the common cold or flu, and had endured only a few scrapes here and there. After all, boys did play rough.

  The only difference he could fathom was he had grown up in the hall, which was miles from the town centre. The abbey at that time was run by an abbot. But King Henry had put a stop to that three years ago. The abbot was executed for heresy and the sanction closed down. Rather than demolish the church, Franklin’s father requested he use the building as a dwelling. The king had agreed to his request.

  Franklin’s parents moved into the abbey right before his mother passed away. Their stay was rather short. His mother had become critically ill and, as soon as she realised she was dying, wanted to live her last days back at Bennet Hall. Mr Bennet’s parents had returned to the old manor and not too long after she had breathed her last breath.

  Recollections of his mother’s passing had him seriously thinking. He had to admit his mother’s illness while living at the abbey paralleled the ailments his daughters were enduring now. His father had detailed everything in his letters to him while he was living in London. He was sorry he didn’t keep the letters.

  The similarity was too coincidental to ignore. His mother’s fate had been death. Now, he feared his children were succumbing to the same horrible fate.

  The faint memory caused him to take stock of his findings. He thought only children were susceptible to the illness. Until now, he had forgotten about his mother. The epiphany led him to fear for his wife’s health as well as his children’s.

  However, he couldn’t understand why something was choosing to target only the children at this point. Maybe at the time his mother passed, it was because there were no children in the household so she was the next best thing—his kind, sweet, sensitive mother.

  Mr Bennet wondered if perhaps the adults were being targeted too in different ways. While the children were falling ill, perhaps the adults were being manipulated. Their minds were ill. Something was messing with their heads and they were all making bad decisions. When he thought hard about it, even he was a victim to poor judgement as of late.

  Mr Bennet decided he was moving his family on, while they were still intact. There was no denying it now. The abbey was the cause of everything wrong, he was sure of it. His father had been right all along. He recalled Beatty forwarding on the warning from his deceased father the day his family moved into the abbey.

  In retrospection, he had been rather sceptical about her claim. Yet she had confirmed his father’s ghost was there by saying he was playfully pulling at Little George’s ear, something he used to do when he was alive. Mr Bennet had not given her the benefit of the doubt. He had assumed she may have picked up on some titbits around town. Then there was the message on his pillow. How could he dismiss that so easily?

  Mr Bennet tried to remember the message Beatty relayed from his father’s ghost—something about the abbey and bad energy. His father had wanted him to knock down the abbey and cleanse the land. The old Squire pleaded with him to live at Bennet Hall, where it was safe from the clutches of evil.

  Despite being a sceptic, who didn’t believe in ghosts or those with the power to see them, he berated himself for not taking Beatty’s second sight more seriously.

  Maude had approached him yesterday with the same conclusion: they should move to the hall. He said he would have to think about it first. He was never one to jump quickly into things.

  As Mr Bennet sat alone in his study, he found himself pondering more and more about his girls. He was worried sick about them. No matter where his thoughts travelled, every thought process found its way back to Antonia and Freya. Like all roads that led to Rome, all his thoughts led to his girls.

  He was bombarded with ‘should haves’. As a sensible man, he knew he was wasting his time. The past could not be changed, but in a strange way it did help him piece together the big picture, putting things into perspective.

  Disturbed by his new revelations, he opened his journal and reached for his quill. As quick as he could, he emptied every thought from his head.

  His recollections brought him new revelations. The evil in this place was capable of affecting adults and children alike. For some reason, it was choosing to target the children and, as proof would have it, it was playing with the minds of the adults. They may not have fallen sick like the children, but often they were not themselves.

  He recollected all the times he and his household were out of character. Even he seemed to be possessed with obsession and far too curious with the experiment. Fancy letting people in to watch his girls like they were carnival creatures.

  He summarised they were all being played.

  Mr Bennet ended the diary session with his mother’s outcome, death, to remind him of the possibility of his girls’ fate.

  He let the ink dry before closing his book. While he sat in his chair, a vague memory came to mind of Beatty and her mother doing some kind of prayer or ritual at their table, as if they were holding a private coven. There were candles and a blackened mirror. They stared into it as if seeing something.

  He had spied them through their window by chance. One of his girls had taken a turn and he was fetching Beatty to calm the situation. He would often send a servant to fetch her, but when the fits were tremendous he would go in person to ensure she would not refuse his request.

  He already knew what Cordelia and Beatty did for a living: tarot reading, palm reading, tea leaves reading, and such. He had no problem with it, for that hopeless man in their life was not bringing in money and they had to make ends meet somehow. He thought their practices weren’t real, but if people were willing to pay for their future forecasts then so be it.

  Now, he wondered if there was really anything to it. With everything he’d seen of late, he was questioning his own beliefs.

  On their way to the abbey, he had asked Beatty what had been taking place. She told him they had been praying, explaining that was how they enhanced their prayers when they were seriously seeking answers. She assured him she was a Christian and to her and her mother this personal method was highly effective.

  He had taken her for her word, putting the incident behind him. He had never found any evil intent in the girl and had no reason to doubt her. Right from the start, he had believed her innocence.

  Yet after a long period of observation, her innocence was proving to be otherwise. Beatty did have certain abilities the public linked to witchcraft.

  All his life, Mr Bennet had been part of the minority who believed witchcraft and magic were nonsense, but, after clear evidence, he was considering the possibilities.

  He had seen enough to agree bewitchment was fact rather than fiction. He had studied and read countless texts on the subject and, in the last couple of months, broadened his horizons and opened his mind to all things possible.

  Mr Bennet reopened his book, compelled to write more. This time Beatty was the subject of his curiosity. He recounted the memories of Beatty and her mother’s strange ritual. He listed all the other unusual events relating to Beatty he had witnessed and all the strange oddities other
people had mentioned. He revised all the accusations made against her, including the ones from his daughters.

  The evidence was damning.

  He contemplated pulling out of the investigation early but had promised Beatty he would see things through to the end before he considered turning her over to the sheriff.

  For now, he could at least start moving his family’s possessions to Bennet Hall. He had been renovating the family estate while staying in the abbey. The renovations were almost finished and he considered the estate already immaculate enough to move into.

  However, his word was his word; he was not going to leave Beatty high and dry. If need be, he would send his family ahead of him.

  The butler knocked loudly on the door, barging in without invitation.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘Antonia is having a turn. Shall I fetch the girl? It’s severe, sir.’

  ‘Yes please, Niall,’ Mr Bennet said, rising from his seat. ‘You do that.’

  With Freya’s absence, Mr Bennet had fewer qualms about Niall fetching Beatty. She was coming more willingly. His servants weren’t scurrying back and forth claiming she was resisting their orders.

  When Mr Bennet and the servant filed into the foyer, they took different directions. His butler beelined for the doorway while he made his way to the parlour where Antonia was accompanying her mother. They had assumed Antonia was strong enough to be out of bed.

  Mr Bennet found his wife had cleared the space where Antonia was throwing herself about. George too was in the room, sitting with his mother. Mr Bennet assumed he had been playing with his sister when she took a turn and Maude had removed him from harm’s way.

  Mr Bennet joined his wife’s side where they proceeded to do nothing. All they could do was anxiously await Beatty’s arrival.

  As predicted, Beatty came peacefully, whereby Antonia thence settled. Just to be sure, Beatty stayed a while longer to maintain the equilibrium. The shadows had not yet left and Beatty wanted to guarantee there would be no more mischief. She joined the mistress for a cup of tea. Eventually, she saw the shadows form as one large mass and disappear, the same way she had seen before.