With This Curse: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense

by DeWees, Amanda

  With This Curse

  Copyright © 2014 Amanda DeWees

  Synopsis: In 1873 Cornwall, a marriage of convenience gives seamstress Clara Crofton a second chance at happiness… or peril. Eighteen years ago, the curse on Gravesend Hall killed the man she loved and forced her into a hostile world alone. Now she has the chance to return to Gravesend as the bride of the heir, Atticus Blackwood. But is the curse finished with Clara?

  Prologue

  Cornwall, 1846

  “The house is cursed,” my mother said.

  We stood at the edge of the circular gravel drive that led from the long approach to the house, walled in by beeches and rhododendron bushes, confronting for the first time Gravesend Hall. Stark white, square and unrelenting, with blank staring windows and sharply peaked gables, to my youthful eyes it was a building of grandeur unrelieved by beauty. Our new home.

  “Why must we live here, then?” I demanded. I was nine years old.

  My mother’s lips compressed. She seemed often to have to make an effort to keep her temper with me. She was still pretty, with glossy dark hair smoothed back under a net, and her dark eyes were not yet strained and tired as they would become during our time at Gravesend. The wind plucked at our skirts and wrapped itself coldly around my legs. It was autumn, a clear day of crystalline blue sky and red and gold leaves in the wood that formed a burnished backdrop to the white stone mansion that was to become our home.

  “You know perfectly well why we’ve come to Gravesend,” she said. “With your father dead and my family not acknowledging our existence, we’ve no choice but to make our way in the world as best we can. Being housekeeper at Gravesend is an extraordinary opportunity.” Her voice was emphatic, and I now realize, looking back from the remove of more than two decades, that she was attempting to convince herself of our good fortune as much as me. I have sometimes wondered why she did not secure our future by marrying again, but perhaps my father—whom she rarely spoke of—had been so dear to her that the idea of remarriage was repellent.

  Now she looked down at me and frowned. I must have made an untidy sight, for we had walked the two miles from the railway station, and the brisk autumn breeze had made free with my hair, which was so thick and curly that it needed little encouragement to fly into disorder. She extracted a comb from her valise and set about the oft-repeated task of making me presentable.

  “Why is the house cursed?” I asked.

  I half expected her to tell me to hold my tongue, but perhaps she was not entirely unwilling to delay our arrival long enough to tell the tale. With only a slight hesitation she took up the story.

  “Many years ago,” she said, as she tugged the comb through my hair, “back in the days of Queen Anne it was, the first Lord Telford, who had just been given the barony, decided to build himself a fine new home suitable to his new rank. Lord Telford chose this spot for the house, less than two miles from the sea but with the loveliest gentle parkland surrounding it.”

  My mother’s voice had softened as she settled into the telling of the tale, distracted from worry about the new position, about my being presentable. Too often mother’s voice was stern, and furrows were drawn in her brow. There was little chance for her to rest; I always thought of her on her feet, directing me or other servants. But for the moment she seemed content to tell me the story.

  “What was Lord Telford like?” I asked.

  “Oh—young. Young and full of dreams.” Her voice had sharpened again, I noted sadly. Why did she disapprove of him so, this young man she had never known? “He was but newly married, and he swore to his bride that their new home would be of a magnificence worthy of her. He consulted her on everything—the scheme of the rooms, the fabrics of the hangings, the furnishings to be crafted especially for their fine new hall. Even the color of the very stone itself was chosen with his bride in mind. Lord Telford let it be known that the white limestone was shipped in because it was as fair as his beloved’s skin, and the mahogany of the doors and casements was as dark as her beautiful hair. And look there.” Turning me by the shoulders, she nodded in the direction of the roof. Though she was in circumstances much reduced from those in which she had started life, my mother never forgot herself so far as to commit the solecism of pointing. “Do you see the leaded glass in the gable windows?”

  I nodded. Even from this distance, I could see that there were colored panes in the high narrow windows. “It’s blue,” I said.

  “The blue of forget-me-nots, and the very color of young Lady Telford’s eyes, it is said.” For a moment she was silent, and I shifted my weight restlessly. This story was not as interesting as I had expected it to be. I dug the toe of one scuffed shoe into the gravel, and the noise brought her to herself. “Be still, Clara,” she said. “Those shoes must last you another winter at least.”

  “What about the curse?” I pressed her.

  For a moment sadness flitted across her eyes. “The young baron died,” she said. “Quite suddenly, and without having made any provision at all for his bride. The title, the lands, the hall itself all passed to his younger brother. And this brother did not care for the pretty young widow, indeed he did not. He made it plain that he did not trust her—even went so far as to suggest that she had taken a hand in her husband’s death. And so instead of settling any portion of the estate on her, he bade her leave Gravesend Hall before another moon had turned.”

  “But it was her home,” I said, stricken at the injustice of it.

  My mother’s nod was grim. “What is more, it was her husband’s token of his love for her. She protested that every stick and stone of the hall spoke of her bond to her husband, and that it would be sacrilege for anyone to oust her from it. It’s said that she pleaded on her knees to be permitted to stay in the home that was all she had left of her husband. ‘Grant me but one wing of the house,’ she begged. ‘One room. I shall not disturb you further; only let me live out my life here in the home built by my husband’s love. It would be a noble gesture.’

  “They say the new Lord Telford laughed in her face. ‘’Twould be a foolhardiness, more like,’ he told her. ‘I’d not sleep sound in my bed knowing you were about, scheming to make an end to me as you did my brother. Begone, beldame, and let me not see your face more.’”

  “I hope she refused to leave,” I exclaimed. “I hope she spat in his face and—and—” But confronted with my mother’s grave, steady gaze, I contained my indignation. No such satisfying ending to the story would fit with what she had told me already. “The curse,” I said slowly. “It was the widow’s doing?”

  “It was indeed. And such a curse! ‘For a house you have ruined me,’ she told the heir, ‘and the house shall be your ruin in turn. Live here you may, but you shall never know a day of peace within these walls. You, your kin, and your heirs are doomed to know the same fate that you have meted me: you shall lose what you love the most.”

  I shivered and drew the thin fabric of my cloak more closely around my shoulders, even though the clear autumn sunshine lay warm upon my back. “And did they?”

  “Oh, yes. The new master of Gravesend was restless in his magnificent new home. He was certain that the widow knew of secret ways of creeping into the house and that she shadowed him, always watching him, always wishing his doom upon him. Even after the lady made an end of herself—”

  “What!”

  A gentle sigh. “Yes, the poor creature committed that worst sin. One day she contrived to make her way into the house that should have been hers; bribed a servant, it is said, so that she might have one last look at the rooms that had been crafted with her deligh
t as their purpose. When word reached the baron of this, he had her flushed from the house and pursued. She fled toward the wood and into the folly—”

  “What is that?”

  “A false ruin, another of the first baron’s caprices. We cannot see it from here. If you wish me to continue, Clara, you mustn’t interrupt.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly, afraid she would stop. “What happened to the lady?”

  “The new baron’s servants chased her to the folly, and she climbed all the way to the top of the tower. When the baron arrived to remonstrate with her, she said nothing—but flung herself from the tower.”

  Aghast, I stared with new dread at the house. I could imagine the widow, her beauty blighted by despair, her once dark hair streaked with white and tossed by the wind as she stepped up to the edge of the tower and leapt to her death.

  “But even so, the new Lord Telford did not know peace,” my mother continued. “He was convinced that, even though he had watched the lady die, she nonetheless roamed the manor, seeking to destroy him. He walked the halls every night, and his health began to fail. Finally his eccentricities grew so pronounced that his relatives had him removed from Gravesend to a quiet place of seclusion where his ravings would disturb no one.”

  “That means he didn’t have Gravesend after all,” I said triumphantly. “He lost it, just as the widow said.”

  “So he did.” My mother picked up her valise again and took my hand. “Come, Clara, we mustn’t dawdle here any longer; we shall be seen.”

  Our footsteps crunched over the gravel as we resumed our progress toward our new home, whose chilly white walls looked no less forbidding than before. “The curse should have ended then,” I pointed out.

  “Ah, but curses are not so easily done with,” she told me. “The widow decreed that the baron’s kin and heirs should also suffer. And so it came to pass that each resident of Gravesend sooner or later lost that thing that was dearest to them. The third Lord Telford, a brilliant athlete who was never happier than on horseback, was paralyzed in a terrible accident and never sat a horse again. An heir with a scholarly bent who knew no greater joy than when among his books was blinded one night in a fire that also destroyed his library.” Reciting these horrors, my mother’s voice was still calm, and that, if anything, made them more alarming. Were these such commonplace occurrences in this place we were to call home? She continued, “The beautiful Lady Alys was the toast of three counties until her maid ran mad and attacked her with scissors, leaving her face a scarred ruin.”

  “I don’t want to live here,” I burst out. “What will happen to us?” Then a comforting thought occurred to me. “We are not related to the family, though. We are safe—aren’t we?”

  My mother’s smile was almost too hard and grim to deserve the name. “Gravesend’s curse does not always make such fine distinctions,” she said. “Innocent guests under this roof have been said to meet their doom here as well. You would do well to gather your courage and be on your guard, Clara. This house will take from you what you most treasure.”

  “From me? Are you not frightened, Mother?”

  Suddenly her eyes looked like those of an old, old woman, someone who had seen more sorrow than I could ever guess at. “I am not frightened, no.” Her voice was so low that I had to strain to hear her. “I have grown accustomed to having what I love taken from me.” Then, as if coming to herself, she gave me a very different smile: warm, bright, reassuring. “But you are young, and even curses must sleep. Come, don’t be frightened. Let us show Gravesend that a curse is no match for women of independent spirit.”

  Only later would I reflect that this resolve sorted oddly with what she had said before and realize that my mother was simply trying to assuage her young child’s fears. She had truly meant me to fear Gravesend, to prepare myself for what it might deal to me, so that the doom when it fell would hurt that much the less.

  Neither of us could have predicted what form that doom would take, or when the sword would fall. And it was only when I was tasting a happiness that I had never known before, when my future seemed cast in the golden radiance of hopeful love, that those fateful words came true. This house will take from you what you most treasure. My mother had spoken truly—but she could not have known that this treasure would be no less than a man’s life.

  Chapter One

  London, 1873

  He was not a ghost. I was certain of it.

  Very nearly certain, at least. The clean strong planes of his face were Richard’s, and the arresting pale blue eyes. The fine-boned hand that had swept his high silk hat from his head as soon as I opened the dressing-room door. The cap of bright chestnut hair that gleamed in the light of the gas lamp. And the quick painful bound my heart gave at my first glimpse of the tall, broad-shouldered figure, even before I looked into his face: all of this cried Richard, Richard.

  But he could not be Richard, for Richard was dead.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, and the familiar warm, rich voice was another knife in my vitals. “The doorman—Harris, is it?—told me that this was Miss Ingram’s dressing room.”

  “She’ll not be here for another half hour yet,” I said shortly. I knew him now, and the bitter knowledge that he still lived when Richard did not brought a hot rush of anger to my heart. “You may return then, if you like.”

  Those disconcertingly pale eyes were gazing at me with such intentness that a cowardly impulse urged me to shut the door on him and blot out that scrutiny. Had he recognized me? Or had the more than eighteen years since our last meeting aged me to the point that he did not know me? Eighteen hard years they had been, and perhaps I had indeed changed that dramatically. And for that, too, I resented this visitor’s presence. It was his family that had wrought the destructive change in my life.

  Not just the family, whispered the cold voice of memory. The curse.

  But he was speaking again. “In point of fact, it isn’t Miss Ingram I came to see.” He seemed to hesitate. “Am I correct in thinking that you’re Mrs. Graves?”

  “You are,” I said. After so many years of owning to it, the alias was almost natural, but under that bright gaze I felt ashamed of the pretext, necessity though it was. But what could he want of me—the me that was masquerading as Mrs. Graves? “How can I help you?” I asked.

  The lack of warmth or welcome in my voice did not deter him. “I’m Atticus Blackwood,” he said unnecessarily. “My father is Edgar Blackwood, Baron Telford. Perhaps I might come in and tell you my business?”

  Grudgingly I moved aside, permitting him to enter. I noticed the pale blue eyes taking in the dressing room, and for a moment I saw it as he must have seen it: the walls and furnishings of a soft salmon pink, the graceful feminine touches of pastel-hued prints and cushioned divan, the skirted dressing table with enormous gilt-edged mirror—all selected to create a setting that would frame its exquisite tenant as perfectly as the great seashell did Botticelli’s Venus. But I was not the resident goddess, merely a functionary, and the feminine elegance of the room was at odds with my stark and stern appearance. My own domain could be glimpsed through the door opposite, which stood open just enough to offer a glimpse of the sewing machine.

  A glance in the dressing-table mirror reassured me that I was tidy enough. My springy hair was subdued in a netted chignon, and my black bombazine dress, though unfashionable and severe in its cut, was free of the clinging stray threads and scraps that I seemed always to trail after me. Not that I felt any desire to impress my visitor, but I would have hated for him to see me at a disadvantage. His family had not robbed me of my dignity, whatever else they had taken.

  At a nod from me, he took a seat on the divan, resting one hand on an ebony walking stick as he did so, and my eyes automatically went to his right foot. Possibly a stranger might not have recognized at once the deformity, so skillfully did he disguise it with a specially constructed boot, and his gait had seemed scarcely affected at all when he entered the room, but I r
emembered the brace he had worn in the earliest years I had known him, and how grotesquely he had lurched after Richard, unable to keep up.

  He noted the direction of my gaze, and I quickly averted my eyes. It was not merely rude but quite improper for me to eye a man’s limbs. When I had known him before I was a bold, reckless girl who thought little of such proprieties—but time had taught me the danger of that. “What business brings you to me, Mr. Blackwood?” I inquired. “Are you perhaps seeking a modiste for your wife?” If he had not recognized me, I would not help him to do so.

  A faint, wry smile touched his mouth. It was a handsomely modeled mouth, I observed with some surprise. But of course—it was Richard’s mouth. Strange, though, that every feature that had been handsome and distinctive on Richard had always seemed drab and homely on his twin brother. Identical though the two might have been in most ways, Richard had always been the one who took one’s breath away, dazzling and reckless and athletic; Atticus had been the wan figure in the background. To realize now that the difference had never been in their physical appearance but in their personalities was something of a shock.

  “My wife,” he said, “is indeed the reason for my calling on you, but not in the way you suggest. I believe that you were once in my family’s employ, were you not, under the name Crofton?” I nodded shortly. “I gather you’ve been married and widowed since that time.”

  “Neither,” I said, more shortly still. “When I took employment with Miss Ingram and began traveling with her troupe, I found that it wasn’t prudent to be known as an unmarried female. Becoming a widow has afforded some protection.”

  The intent scrutiny relaxed. “Ah, yes, I see. Some men will refrain from making unwanted advances if the object of their interest is cloaked in the solemnity of bereavement. It’s unfortunate that you were forced into such a deception, but I salute the wisdom of it.” The smile again, more relaxed and cordial now. “I must admit, though, that your alias substantially delayed my discovering your whereabouts. I’ve been searching for you for quite some time now.”