A Curse Dark as Gold

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  Even my new dressing gown could not warm me against the chill seeping through the glass, and I found myself longing to slip back beside Randall, under the crewelwork hangings, and warm myself against him as he slept. The peace of that sleep was what I wanted more than anything, the ease with which he threw off the worries of the day with his boots and his waistcoat and, snoring softly, banished the troubles of the night.

  “Charlotte.” Randall’s voice was a warm thread of air across the room, and his arms were around me before I could turn round. Softly, I let him drape the blanket around my shoulders, and laid my head against his chest.

  “I looked everywhere for you,” Randall said gently.

  “Liar,” I breathed. “You did not.”

  He brushed his lips against my neck. “No,” he agreed. “I knew you’d be here.” Here where the windows looked down on my mill, my sister, my home…what had been my life up to now.

  “Randall,” I said, wrenching up the subject from where I knew—even then—it should lie buried. Especially then.

  “Hmmm?” His voice came slowly; I think perhaps he had already begun to fall asleep again, there against me, wrapped together in the blanket I had made for him—my Miller wedding gift.

  “I gave the watch to—to be pawned.”

  I felt him stiffen. The soft liquid flow of his body had gone; his arms around me tightened. “I wondered,” he said quietly.

  I blinked back tears. He had noticed, after all, and I had waited too long, probably, to mention it. I turned, and the blanket fell away from my shoulders.

  He looked so vulnerable, my strong Randall, barefoot in his nightshirt, his hair all tousled, wrapped tightly in the green plaid blanket. But his eyes were dark and alert, and I did not know what to make of him.

  “To buy more cloth from other mills,” I added quickly. “If there’s still time, before—”

  He shook his head, cutting me off. “No,” he said. “I understand.”

  I had never heard his voice so curt. I took a step toward him, reaching out, trying to explain the inexplicable. “My uncle knows a pawnbroker, and—”

  “Your uncle?” His voice rang out, sharp and disbelieving. “Oh. I see.”

  “I had to, there was—”

  Randall put up a hand, silencing me. In the darkness I couldn’t see the look on his face. I did not want to. After a dreadful pause, he turned on his heel and pulled the blanket tight about his shoulders as he strode out of the dining room. “Come to bed now, Charlotte; it’s freezing.”

  I didn’t follow him. I sat, still and frozen, staring down at Stirwaters until dawn.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By the time I got back to Stirwaters, the mill was full of cloth. Like the gold thread before it, it was fine work—preternaturally fine. From tissue-thin fabrics light as air, to thick warm blanket cloth, it was all here, and ready; it required no fulling, no finishing, no sentence on the tenterhooks. It was simply done. Yet somehow, within Spinner’s handiwork, I could still see our cloth. I could flip back a corner of black yardage, and see the flash of mazareen blue satinette it had been, in another lifetime.

  “No one is going to believe this,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Rosie had concocted an alibi for all this cloth: It had come to us downriver, from mills in Burlingham and Springmill (I’d apparently spent the past several days writing frantic pleas for assistance), arriving late in the night on a much-delayed barge.

  “Don’t worry,” she insisted. “No one will question it.”

  “But that’s crazy. And where did we supposedly get the money to pay for this? You know the watch wasn’t worth anywhere near this much.” I put my fingers to my collar, where the timepiece had hung so briefly.

  Rosie looked at me, all innocence. “I don’t know that. Do you know that?”

  I gave it up.

  We packed up the cloth, waited for Porter & Byrd to collect it, and said no more about it. Captain Worthy arrived on schedule, in his sunset-painted barge, and I stood on the dock and prayed nothing would give me away.

  He greeted me warmly, picking through the packs with undisguised pleasure. “I say, your cloth’s even finer than I remember it. Well done, lass. Mr. Byrd will be well pleased, indeed.”

  I felt myself color under my hat brim; hopefully he took it for feminine modesty. Selling the gold thread to Parmenter’s was one thing, but this—this felt counterfeit. I was almost more relieved to see Porter & Byrd’s barge depart with the cloth than I was to hand their cheque over to my banker.

  Although Randall never mentioned the watch again, I could tell it was not forgotten. Indeed, I could scarcely look at him these days without a pang of guilt that overshadowed any relief I might feel over securing Stirwaters’s safety. As he prepared to return to Harrowgate, I sat on the edge of the grand bed and watched him stuff his suit coats and breeches into a battered portmanteau.

  “Look, I’ll be back as soon as I can—two weeks, maybe three. Are you sure you’ll be all right here by yourself?”

  I nodded, suddenly not sure at all, and my fingers tightened on the bedpost.

  Randall leaned over me and brushed my hair with his lips. “That’s my girl. Now, don’t fret about things. You’ve made your payment, and you’ve got me and the bank off your back for a few months, right? Try not to dwell on what happened—it’s just a little bad luck, is all.”

  I scowled. “I warned you.”

  “Well, we’ll take out an insurance policy straightaway—and don’t argue: I’m going to make it a condition of your loan, in fact. And then you won’t have to fear a little bad luck anymore.” He turned back to his packing. “I wish you’d get Rosie up to stay with you. I’d feel a lot better about going.”

  I shook my head. “She won’t. She doesn’t want to leave Uncle Wheeler alone in the Millhouse.”

  Randall gave the straps on the portmanteau a sharp tug. “Uncle Wheeler. Of course not.” He turned to me, his lips drawn tight. “Charlotte—”

  “What?”

  He shrugged and shouldered his bag. “Never mind.” He stepped closer and held out his arms. I slipped off the bed into his embrace, but there was a stiffness there that may well have been more than the weight of the portmanteau on his back. Watching him drive out of the village, flicking the reins against Blithe and Bonny’s rumps, I could not decide if the feeling in the pit of my stomach was loneliness or relief.

  Though we had weathered the immediate crisis with the cloth, the matter of the millwheel remained unresolved. Weeks after the accident, the old wheel rested, still as a gravestone, against the race-side wall of the mill. Harte and four of the strongest hands had taken it down and left it there, and I could hardly bear to look at it. The wounded paddles looked like a mouthful of broken teeth, and I found myself running my tongue behind my lips whenever I passed by.

  It stood between Rosie and me like a wall we could not reach across. Stubborn as we both were, we had rarely quarrelled up till now. I could always count on her fire dying down as fast as it had flared up, and within minutes or hours she would be wiling me out of my own anger. But that was before my marriage, before I moved out of our home. I could not count on her to have cooled off by dinner, if I was not there to share that dinner with her.

  I tried to talk to her, but she would only shrug and say it didn’t matter. She had something like her old Rosie cheer when she said it—but now I had begun to doubt my ability to judge her moods. It troubled me, and I drew away, so I would not have to notice.

  Finally, when it became futile to wait for a thaw between the Miller sisters, Harte decided for all of us that it was time to rebuild the wheel. He had returned to Shearing, ready to work, and found Stirwaters idle still. So he’d grabbed his tools and marched off toward the race. I felt a sigh go through me, as though the mill itself had been holding its breath for weeks. Following him out into the yard, I nursed some concern for his plans. He had worked so closely with Rosie on her scheme for the new wheel; should I
have to talk him down to Earth as well? I needn’t have worried: I found him crouched down beside the old wheel, carefully taking its measure on a scrap of old wood.

  It became a spectacle. Millhands flowed out and took up their cheery, ale-warmed positions as Harte gauged and scribbled. Bent across the gudgeon, his head down at his knees, he let out a long whistle.

  “Mistress, come and have a look. What do you make of that?”

  I swept over, bundled tight in my cloak, and peered in closer. Upside-down now, under the grime of age, was the maker’s mark for Stirwaters’s first millwheel. I could barely make out the letters, until a rare shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and shone right on the nameplate:

  WHEELER & SONS, LTD. HAYMARKET

  I reached out to touch it, expecting to feel a spark, a jolt…I knew I was seeing something important, but its meaning would not reach back out to me. I pressed my hand against the brass, willing it to give up its secrets, but all I got for my trouble were dirty fingers.

  “How very odd,” I murmured, at a loss for what I wanted to say.

  “Ah, not so much, Mistress,” Harte said. “In those days there probably weren’t but one or two places to get such a big wheel built.”

  “Aye,” Ian Lamb added. “Old Man Miller didn’t have the services of Harte and Miss Rosie, did he?”

  “You ought to show that to Squire Wheeler.” Townley grinned. “See how he’d like all that tarnish on his name!”

  Everyone laughed, but I felt the chill go through me then. I looked Rosie’s way, and her eyes met mine at last. She sidled closer for a better look at the nameplate, and as she touched the brass, I reached down and touched it with her. No jolt, no sudden fire of understanding…but I bit my lip, and Rosie looked at me with wide, wide eyes.

  I knew then I wasn’t imagining things. There was some meaning here, an old secret long hidden beneath our very feet, some significance deeper than the mere purchase of a millwheel. Wheelers involved in the building of Stirwaters? What could that mean?

  Building the new wheel took Rosie away from Stirwaters for whole weeks of workdays. She and Harte would be gone most mornings by the time I’d made my own way down the hill. I did pass the joiner’s on that route, where I often saw Rosie and Harte bent over their work together. Mindful of Randall’s suspicions of their budding romance, I did not intrude. I was relieved to see them side by side again, and relieved, too, that the wheel was at last underway; but I could not help but feel Rosie’s absence still more keenly.

  I felt more alone than ever.

  Cloistered in my office for long, idle hours, I made a project of documenting Stirwaters’s history. Mr. Mordant had accused Millers, once, of writing everything down, and it was true. There were records going back to the days of Harlan Miller—memorandum books, schemata, old dye recipes and weaving patterns. There were shelves of the stuff in the office, and boxes more stashed in the attic and cellar. It was all a terrible jumble; it would take weeks to sort out. Long dull weeks I must fill anyway.

  In the cellar, at the bottom of a bin of mouse-shredded receipt books, I discovered bound volumes of personal journals—one for nearly every miller to hold my post. There was no volume for my father, of course; the record of his tenure was sketched out in the atlas he had drawn. What should such a book from my hand document, I wondered. The very last Miller, recording the end of days at Stirwaters?

  I sat back on my heels on the damp floor and stared at the stone foundation walls. A crack big enough to fit my hand in stretched from the ground to the ceiling, with bits of mortar pushed out of place by time or burrowing rodents. All at once Jack Townley’s words sprang back to me: This mill don’t want to be fixed up. Was that it, then? We could patch cracks until Judgement Day, hang new millwheels and put up fresh paint, but all of it could never disguise one cold fact: Rosie and I were the last of the Millers. Stirwaters should only last as long as the Miller line—and when the last Miller passed into history, so would the mill?

  I carried that thought with the journals up into my office. It fit, somehow—like a bolt sliding home, like a key releasing a lock…and one by one all Stirwaters’s secrets should tumble out at my feet. But why? The world did not conform to so neat a pattern; families died out, true, businesses too…but things were not interlinked so securely outside of fairy stories and nursery rhymes.

  And curses.

  I recoiled from the thought. Then, like a farmer poking at a snake to see if it is quite dead, gingerly approached it once again. I laid the word, letter by letter, out in my mind. Curse. A curse on Stirwaters. A curse on the Millers. Which? Both?

  Using the back of one of Rosie’s sketches for the new wheel, I charted a family tree for Stirwaters. Once I had the patriarchs sketched in, I had to dig deeper into the records for their families. I began with Father’s predecessor, Joseph, a distant sort of cousin who had died peacefully at home (so said the obituary from the Haymarket Crier) at the age of eighty-six. His only child had been a son, died in infancy. Among Brandon’s gaggle of nine children, three boys dead of scarlet fever. To Currer’s Hap and Simon—a cart overturned. From our own wee Thomas, back to Harlan’s pride and joy, Josiah, who made it into adolescence, but no further, my chart showed eleven Miller sons who had failed to inherit the mill from their fathers. A black mark drawn over each name painted the grim picture. Not only had these boys died before they could take Stirwaters—they died before they reached adulthood.

  Every single one.

  “Oh, mercy,” I breathed, and a breeze shuddered through the mill.

  I wanted to weep for them all, all those lost boys of Stirwaters. How many, like Thomas, were poor babes whose names never even made the record? Thomas was only there because I was here to remember him. Each name on that chart—and how many more?—represented sisters who’d lost brothers.

  Mothers who’d lost sons.

  I shoved the records across the desk and kicked back my chair, leaving my pen to pool ink on the family tree. I did not care. I had to get out of there, away from the mill and whatever darkness was even now reaching its tainted hands into my family.

  I had told no one. I’d been ill for a few days in February, dizzy and weary, with a poor appetite; and Randall, home from Harrowgate for a bank holiday, insisted I stay abed for two entire days before he would release me. As my symptoms lingered I began to suspect that something besides a touch of winter illness caused them.

  When I was certain, and I had made up my mind against my will, I took the longer path by the roadway and called on my neighbor, Biddy Tom. Standing on her shadowed doorstep, I wished I had brought Rosie with me, but until my own suspicions were confirmed I didn’t want to get her hopes up.

  Mrs. Tom’s cottage sat in a shady grove overgrown with oak and mountain ash, and an angry-looking vine, winter-naked, sprawled crazily up the wall and across a window shuttered tight behind it. I could barely make out specks of once-blue paint through gaps in the vine. The same blue decked the frames of the other windows, the lintel, and glowed like a great blue eye on the arched door. A “friendship door,” we called it—split top and bottom, each half swinging independently. Today both halves were tightly closed. A painted hex circle in reds and yellow—not quite flowers, not really birds—hung where a window should have been, and a faded garland of fall leaves, battered some by the rough winter, curved above my head.

  I dropped the hammer of the knocker against the door, my heart jolting once in echo. A moment passed, in which I contemplated my escape, before the upper door creaked inward, and Mrs. Tom’s calm face peered out at me.

  “Charlotte Miller. I wondered when you’d be coming down to see me. An August babe, if I’m not mistaken. Well, don’t stand there gawping in the cold—come inside, child.”

  The upper door swung back, and I heard a snap as Mrs. Tom refastened the bolts that held the door together, and then the whole blue arrangement receded inward once more. Pursing my lips, I stepped inside Biddy Tom’s house.

 
And was immediately surprised. What had I expected? Something queer and dark, haunted by shadows and nameless things? The cottage was bright and airy, sunlight streaming in through lace curtains and casting the tidy parlor in cheery light. A whitewashed floor and faded rag rug, polished furniture, the sparkle of pewter and glass on the mantelpiece—there was nothing eldritch here. Nothing stranger than a massive spinning wheel by the fireplace—as long as the hearth and probably as high as my shoulder—and a large panel painting of five serious-looking men above the settle.

  “My boys,” Mrs. Tom said, “my Tom, and Small Tom, Henry, Peter, and Stephen.”

  “What—what happened to them?” I asked, wondering faintly which one of the strapping fellows in the picture was “Small” Tom.

  Mrs. Tom burst out laughing, a hearty sound, and warm, like the lowing of cattle. “Nothing happened to them, girl. Small Tom and Henry took to sea and took wives on the coast. Peter is a joiner, and Stephen runs a public house in Trawney. Of course, my Tom died years ago.” She gave a wave of her hand, as if the loss of a husband were something to shrug away as casually as a gnat or a fly. “Now, let’s get a look at you.”

  After she had declared me in perfect health, and given me what must be a standard litany of new-mother reassurances, Mrs. Tom asked me to tea. I could scarcely refuse; Gold Valley neighbors do not decline one another’s hospitality. And though I confess a strong urge to depart as soon as possible, it was quelled by a mixture of curiosity and absolute dead ordinariness. The midwife’s cottage was like every other home in Shearing; what had I to fear?