A Curse Dark as Gold

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  Late that afternoon I was haggling over a fleece with the fat ewe still wearing it, deep in negotiation at shearpoint. Not the craftiest of creatures, sheep nonetheless have instincts that tell them who they must and needn’t mind. Old Bossie had taken my measure straightaway and, judging me a novice, was little inclined to cooperate. She struggled in my grip—I swear she would have bitten me if I’d let go her jaw even for a moment. Smeared with lanolin from knees to bosom, I at last managed to pin her beneath one leg and was just starting to drive the shears through the clotted wool on her belly when the Pinchfields man sauntered up to me and gave a big look around the room.

  “Such a quaint place you have here, Miss Miller,” he said. “It’s all just so charmingly old-fashioned.”

  Blood flooding my cheeks, I bent my head low over the sheep to hide my flushed face. “We’re very proud of Stirwaters’s long history,” I mumbled.

  At that moment, the great stupid ewe heaved free of my grip, yanking the shears from my hand. They clattered against the floor as Bossie sprung away to the safety of the feed pen, dragging her half-shorn fleece behind her on the ground.

  The man from Pinchfields laughed, a small, ugly sound like the grating of rusty metal. “Oh, very proud, I’m sure. Well, if you’re ever in Harrowgate, I do hope you’ll return the honor and come to Pinchfields. I’ve no doubt you’ll be impressed. Everything’s new. But, well—” here he paused and drew something from his waistcoat pocket. “We just don’t have the prestige of an old, distinguished label like Stirwaters on our cloth.” He held out a scrap of muslin wrapping, revealing the stamped Stirwaters coat of arms on the fabric.

  For a moment I didn’t understand. Then something echoed in my mind: like flies to a carcass. I rose to my feet, heedless of my tangled skirts. “And you won’t,” I said. “Stirwaters is not for sale.”

  “Are you sure about that? In my experience there’s a price on everything. What would you say to, oh, two hundred pounds?” He fished in his waistcoat for his book, which was fairly bursting with banknotes. “You’d keep your home, of course; we wouldn’t have any interest in keeping the mill running.”

  I stood straighter, but my cheeks were red from outrage now, not from shame. “Sir, I’m afraid you misunderstood me. Stirwaters isn’t for sale, at any price.”

  “Oh, come now—five hundred. That’s more money than you’d see out of this place in your lifetime. You’re a fool not to take it.”

  “This is a wool market, sir, not a mill market. I suggest you take your offer somewhere else.”

  The man from Pinchfields leaned his narrow frame over me. “Look here, you stupid girl, this is the last time you’ll see an offer this good. Eight hundred. Take it.”

  His thin face was close enough for me to see the tobacco stains on his teeth, cringe from his sour breath. I shook my head.

  “Curse you Millers for stubborn fools! I guarantee you—six months from now, a year—you’ll be wishing you’d sold.”

  I hadn’t noticed that a crowd had gathered, watching us, until Jack Townley stepped forward. A sizeable man, he stood quiet and calm beside me. “I believe the lady said no, sir,” he said in an easy voice. The man from Pinchfields looked around. Besides the wool-buying crowd, we were surrounded now by the bulk of my Stirwaters family, who make a formidable presence when they put their minds to it. George Harte and Eben Fuller ambled up behind Jack, followed shortly by Janet Lamb, casually brandishing a baling hook.

  The Pinchfields wool buyer eased back and smoothed his jacket with his wiry hands. “Is that how it is, then?” He tucked his book and the money back into his coat and gave another glance round the woolshed. “That’s a shame, Miss Miller. I know I’d hate to see that infamous Stirwaters curse get the better of you.”

  I drew in my breath. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  He smiled thinly. “I mean, Miss Miller, that if I were you I’d reconsider our offer—before your name and label are all you have left to sell.”

  Chapter Two

  Two weeks later, Tom and Abby Weaver left us. The millhands had been loyal and supportive immediately following my father’s death, but as the strain of uncertainty began to wear on everyone, workers deserted us like rats fleeing a burning hayrick. We lost good people in those days—a skilled carder, weavers, a finisher, a man-of-all-work. I watched them go with a mixture of grief and resignation. Who could blame them? They were Harrowgate-bound, or Burlingham, or Stowemouth…to seek their fortunes somewhere fortunes may be made.

  But it was not all losses. George Harte, having had his arm twisted by Rosie to look at the millworks, stepped one foot inside Stirwaters and could not seem to pull himself away again. With the blessings of his uncle and his black collie, Pilot, he traded his shepherd’s crook for a spanner and installed himself in the spare rooms at the woolshed. I was more grateful than I could say—an act of faith like that was precisely what I needed just then. The presence of Pilot, patrolling the millyard by night with her sharp eyes and even sharper bark, was likewise a comfort. We had never been scared at Stirwaters, but we had never been alone, either.

  One afternoon I sat in the office, frowning over our ledger books. Somewhere between my dismay over our oil bill and the amount still owed to the undertaker, Rosie came flinging into the office, bearing the post. With a sigh, I sorted through the letters she cast onto the desk. Past-due notice, bill, another bill—probably a notice that we were about to become past due…Maybe we could get by without eating this spring.

  “Charlotte, look at this! Who do you think it’s from?”

  “Not another one from Pinchfields, I hope,” I said, distracted by the incomprehensible handwriting of our teasel supplier. Since Market Days, we had received two more offers from the Harrowgate factory, each more elaborately generous than the last.

  “Not unless they’ve started putting perfume in their offers.”

  I looked up sharply. “What did you say?”

  Rosie broke the seal on her letter, and now I could smell a faint flowery scent from the paper. “It’s written in purple ink,” she said.

  I peered in closer. “Are you sure that’s for us? It sounds like somebody’s love letter.”

  Rosie turned it over to look at the address. “It has both our names on it. And I don’t see why it couldn’t be a love letter,” she added indignantly. “I can’t tell who it’s from—the ink is all smeared here.” She unfolded the note. Her eyes grew wide, and she held the letter up for me to read.

  “Does that say ‘Wheeler’?” I asked.

  She was starting to smile. “It does indeed.”

  Mam’s brother? I took the letter from her hand.

  My dearest girls,

  Please forgive the tardiness of my condolences; I have been travelling abroad and only just heard of your father’s death. What a dreadful shock; how tragic that you two are all alone now. It brings back the sadness of your dear mother’s death all those years ago, and I wept when I heard the news.

  I hope this note finds you both well, but I shudder to think what you have been going through. Be assured that you will not be alone for long now; I am making haste to come to Shearing immediately.

  Yours affectionately,

  your uncle,

  Ellison H. Wheeler, Esquire

  We had never met our mother’s brother, but I could almost remember her speaking of him fondly, if I tried. Some years her junior, he would have been a child when she left home. I read the letter over and over, trying to bring up a picture of the man, as if doing so could conjure my mother, too—and Father with her. I forced back a sudden sadness and squeezed Rosie’s hand. She smiled at me, but her eyes were very bright.

  We spent the next several days preparing for our uncle’s visit, waiting and watching anxiously for his arrival. I pictured a masculine version of Mam, with her same round face and reddish hair, a sturdy man in workaday clothes who would embrace us roughly, tousle our hair, and speak in low, thoughtful tones. Rosie had him shor
ter, with a paunch and a pipe and a big jolly grin beneath a receding hairline.

  We could not have shot farther from the mark.

  One sunny morning late in the week, I stood outside Stirwaters, watching the churning wheel send mist into the glittering air. The pretty scene concealed a grim truth. Built of limestone and slate, the building should have withstood the elements for centuries, but time and neglect had taken their toll, and the mill looked much older than its scarce hundred years. I studied the old building, the moss and lichen spreading up the stones, the crumbling mortar, the broken windows that let wind and rain spray through the workrooms. Inside, things were just as bad—cracks in the floors so wide you could drop a hammer through them; plaster falling off in chunks. Here and there a half-hearted attempt at patching or repair had been made over the years, but it always seemed as if ruin had the upper hand.

  “What are you looking at?” Rosie asked, coming round my shoulder and peering up at the mill.

  “Why haven’t those missing slates on the roof been replaced? And this decking—” I kicked at the rotted boards. “It’s falling apart; someone is bound to put a foot through that and break an ankle.”

  “Someone?” Rosie said, eyebrow cocked.

  “Very well. I don’t want the first impression Mam’s brother has of us to be that we’re an utter ruin. She’d be ashamed of what’s become of Stirwaters.”

  Rosie was smiling. “I think it’s a fine idea. Let’s round up the troops.”

  As the millhands drifted in, we tried to recruit help patching holes, sealing cracks, scrubbing moss and lichen, whitewashing, limewashing, and painting. My suggestions met a mixture of sullen, earthward gazes and the odd snicker.

  “What is it?” I demanded. “If it’s about the extra work, I’ll pay overtime.”

  Amid the feet-shuffling and muttering, Jack Townley spoke up. “Mistress, do you really think you’re the first one to try to fix the old place up?” He shook his head. “It’s always the same, then, ain’t it? New miller comes in and puts a few patches on, tidies up the workrooms, buys a new machine. But it don’t take. Why do you think your da’ turned into such a tinker? Because this mill don’t want to be fixed up.”

  “The mill doesn’t want to be fixed? You can’t be serious.” But the faces of my workers, grim and set, told a different story.

  “Nay, Mistress. We all know you don’t want to hear it, and aye, we’ll do our best by you and put paint or nails where you like ‘em, but you wait—in the end, it won’t make a spit of difference.”

  “What nonsense. Harte—” I turned to him.

  “Ma’am, all I know is I can’t get that number three jack to work. If it’s not rust, and it’s not mechanical…” He shrugged. “Ask Rosie what she thinks.”

  Rosie shook her kerchiefed head. “I’ve seen repairs take as often as not in this old place. You just have to appreciate its…spirit.”

  I nodded, satisfied, and glanced over my assembled workers again, but missed a face in my count. “Where’s Bill Penny?”

  Somebody snickered. “Mayhap he’s been taken by fairies.”

  “You mean spirits? Dead drunk at Mrs. Drover’s, I’ll wager.” I shook my head. Why hadn’t I listened to my father? He never would hire a Penny, called the lot of them lazy drunk and unreliable. “If anyone sees Mr. Penny, be certain to mention that I will dock him a day’s pay for every hour he misses this week.” Not that I would—but just then I was sore tempted.

  “Nay, Mistress—” I looked over. Young Paddy Eagan, a serious lad who’d quietly worked his way up from runner boy to apprentice spinner, was shaking his head, dark eyes wide and urgent. “Annie Penny—they’re our neighbors, the Pennys—says she hasn’t seen her da’ in three days. Took off into the hills one day and just disappeared.”

  “Well, he wasn’t taken by fairies,” I said. “That’s absurd.”

  “It’s spring, though, ma’am—April first, it was, and a Friday at that—that’s when they’re like to snatch you.”

  “April first? All Fools’ Day? God help us.” More likely Bill Penny had “took off” into the hills to escape the woolwashing, or the roof-thatching—or Mrs. Penny. But it did little good to say as much. For all our practicality, Gold Valley folk are stubbornly superstitious, happy to blame the least little oddity on the Fair Folk or the Old Ones. Everyone has their corn dollies, their kitchen imps, their blue doorsteps and windowsills. Any outsider driving through the village would think it quaint country fashion—all that blue at the front of houses—but in truth it’s a warding: meant to keep fairies and spirits where they belong, up in the hills and away from decent folk. I had never paid any of it much mind.

  I tipped my hat back and regarded everyone. “Is there anything else we need to blame on spooks and goblins? Good. If we’re quite finished, I believe we all have work to do. And if you put so much as a speck of blue paint on those doors, Jack Townley, I swear to God I will sack you so fast you’ll be in Trawney before you realize you’re out of a job!”

  I went to bed that night weary but satisfied from a hard day spent scraping moss from limestone. Repairs progressed slowly—Stirwaters folk might drag their feet and grumble, but their work was loyal and true. I felt sure we would at least look a little more sound when our uncle arrived.

  We had shuffled our bedrooms in anticipation of his visit, and I was now in Father’s room (neither Rosie nor I had been ready to have a stranger—even an uncle—sleeping in his bed). Half undressed, I sank onto the edge of the old iron bedstead and looked round me. This room, with its worn counterpane and faded red paper on the walls, had always seemed warm and comforting when Father was alive. Without him, it was merely dark and shabby. Low bookshelves sat into the walls by the fireplace, their books untouched, unread, coated with a layer of soot and shadows.

  I bent low and retrieved one, blowing the dust from its spine as I heaved it up onto the bed. In the flickering candlelight, the drawings inside seemed to come alive. Before he inherited Stirwaters, my father had trained to become a mapmaker, and over the years he’d compiled an atlas of maps and drawings he’d made of the Gold Valley. How I had loved this book as a child! I had spent hours folding out the long pages across my lap, tracing the lines of rivers or the curving ornamental script. Here was a map of Shearing, showing Stirwaters at center, with the bakehouse next door and the smithy across the road, our names marked out in tiny precise letters that bore little resemblance to my father’s usual untidy hand. Here a view of Stirwaters, the building cut open to reveal the movement of gears inside. One of my favorites was a map of the land surrounding Haymarket, where Mam and our uncle had grown up. The land, heavily wooded according to the dark swirls etched onto the page, spread out into the hills before smoothing out to green farmland. Lakes like blots of ink dotted the hillside, each with a haunting, beautiful name. I had wondered over each strange site in turn, trying to picture the occasions that had given rise to Gallowstock, Simple Cross, or Bone Weir.

  I looked at it now, following the twisting roadway from Haymarket west toward Shearing, imagining the path that had brought Mam and Father together, and the road that now led our uncle here. Back again to Shearing, where Rosie and I were held fast—tonight the cutaway Stirwaters seemed oddly foretelling: block after block chipped out of the mill, leaving only a windblown ruin clinging to its foundation.

  A scratch at my door pulled me from my musings. The door creaked open, and there was Rosie in her nightdress, candle stub held aloft. “I’m too tired to sleep,” she said, cupping her hand to puff out the flame. “I’m sure I won’t be able to walk tomorrow, after being up and down that ladder all day. Is that Father’s old atlas?”

  Her hand reached out to touch the inky crosshatch of Stirwaters’s millwheel. We climbed into bed together, as we had more and more often these last weeks, and Rosie took the album, turning to a pen-and-ink rendering of a spinning jack, each belt, gear, and spindle given the same meticulous detail, all the way down the long carriage.
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br />   As she turned the pages, something fluttered to the counterpane. I picked it up—a dried sprig of some herb or tree; hemlock, perhaps. I twisted it before my lips, breathing in its dusty perfume. On one page, Father had done a study of all the old local superstitions: sketches of the charms and symbols used to bring luck or ward off evil, notes on various customs still observed. There was a list of things one mustn’t do on Friday—frightfully comprehensive, from getting haircuts to getting married; a hex symbol like a mystical compass rose, rubbed in with a smear of purple; one of the twisted straw effigies known as corn dollies. That was just like Father. He had spent one entire summer trying to learn the knack to tying the straw, only to abandon it when another passion seized him in the fall.

  One entire summer during which he’d let the millworks fall into disrepair, the weavers fend for themselves, and the bills all go unpaid.

  Not native to Shearing, Father had been fascinated with the traditions of the Gold Valley. When Mam was alive, she had scorned them, but gently, with humor; after her death, it was almost a mania with him. He became convinced that all the mill’s troubles—from sheep that gave poor fleeces to workers who showed up late—were to blame on the legendary Stirwaters Curse.

  The Stirwaters Curse. I had grown up hearing those words every time something went the least bit awry. True, we Millers did tend to more than our share of bad luck—from the very first Miller of Shearing, old Harlan, who had built Stirwaters and this house. But down through the years of market collapses and roof collapses—which could happen to anybody—one dark thread bound the Millers apart from ordinary ill luck: No Miller had ever raised a son who lived to inherit Stirwaters. The mill had been handed down along a crazy zigzag path from brother to cousin to nephew…to daughter. Stirwaters could only be inherited by Millers, and Rosie and I were the only ones left.