A Curse Dark as Gold

  “My God!” Randall pulled back on the reins to steer round a fallen limb. As we skirted the Stowe, we saw a sight that had me half out of my seat: ice on the river. Ice on the river, above my millwheel. The Stowe was frozen solid. It was all I could do not to tear the reins away from Randall and hie the horses through the village at breakneck speed.

  Randall led us straight to Stirwaters. I should have understood what it meant that he did that, then, but at the time it seemed only natural. Of course we should want to stop at the mill first; where else? The moment we pulled into the shale drive, I alit from the carriage without a look back. I broke into a run but slipped hard on the icy ground, barely noticing that Randall was there to lift me up again. With a bit more care, I made my way around the Millhouse to the mill, past the frozen pond, and stopped dead when I came within sight of the wheelhouse.

  A crowd had gathered, all frantic gestures and bewilderment—Rosie, Harte, Uncle Wheeler, a handful of villagers. I saw Robbie Lawson and the Hales with Janet Lamb, stout and billowing in her winter wear. They parted some when I came among them, but no one spoke to me. To a man, they all stared at the massive oak millwheel, the frozen water that held it fast, and the deadly, splintering crack through the beams that held the wheel in place. The great old wheel, locked into the ice below, had wrenched free from its axle and now hung bent and crooked, one side treacherously lower than the other.

  Rosie stood deep in low, frantic conversation with Harte, up near the base of the wheelhouse. They fell silent as I reached them, and Harte shook his head.

  “The drive shaft snapped,” he said. “It’s a hard freeze. I wouldn’t have believed it, but there you have it.” He waved a helpless arm toward the tangle of wood and stone. Dear old Harte—how exactly like him to take it personally.

  Rosie said, “I suppose we’re just lucky it hasn’t happened before, but Shearing hasn’t seen a freeze like this…”

  “Ever,” I finished.

  “But that’s impossible,” Randall said. “It’s only been snowing for a day or two—how could the river have frozen solid in that time?”

  A shiver overtook me that was more than just the icy morning. The river changed course, a plague that killed half the sheep, floods…a broken millwheel. Hard-luck Millers, indeed. I reached up to touch the crack in the wood, and was somehow surprised that the mill did not flinch under my hand as I probed its wound. I certainly felt the pain from that ghastly break—coarse and raw and searing, so fierce it blinded me.

  “Can we recover?”

  “From this? Oh, aye,” Harte said, but his voice was grimmer than usual. He was studying the wheel, his hand up, fingers spread, taking quick measurement. “In spring, when this thaws and we can drain the pit to make repairs. Until then…”

  “We have no power.”

  “That’s about the size of it, Mistress.”

  It was the worst possible note on which to start the new year. Although we had our cloth promised to Porter & Byrd, which would cover our next mortgage payment, after that—what? Without the millwheel, we could power none of the machines—not the carding engines, not the spinning jacks, the plying frames, the fulling stocks. We were crippled.

  And it was a curious thing, to stand in Stirwaters with the mill silent and still, no gears rattling overhead, no water rushing by underfoot. The mill felt strange and empty. Dead. I wondered if it felt itself gone still, its great heart torn from its chest, its limbs sundered from their brain. The thought gave me an eerie sort of chill, and I shoved it aside, but firmly. Rosie took it badly, as if her own heart were wrenched from her. She haunted the silent wheelhouse, heedless of the icy wind whipping through the ruined walls, and looked at me, stricken, when I’d call her name. It was going to be a long winter.

  My homecoming as a married woman was thus a subdued one. As I lingered at Stirwaters that first awful afternoon, conferring with Harte and Rosie, Randall slipped off to the Grange to unpack us, and when at last I dragged myself out of the mill and into the evening, Rosie had to stop me climbing the stoop into the Millhouse.

  “Go home,” she said, a trace of weary irritation in her voice. “Your husband is waiting.”

  Confused for a moment, I hesitated, and then forced a laugh. Helplessly, I held out my arms, and my sister almost fell into them. “What are we going to do?”

  She hugged me fiercely, pulling back at last. “We’ll be all right,” she said, a furrow creasing her brow, and though I nodded, I wasn’t sure either of us believed her.

  I trudged up the long hill to the Grange to find that Randall had been busy in my absence, turning the stiff, formal dining room into a space nearly as warm and intimate as the Millhouse kitchen. A fire blazed in the hearth, and we ate hand to hand across a corner of the vast oak table, borrowed silverware clinking cheerfully on the hand-me-down plates. We had forgotten to buy our own, and the Bakers had come to our rescue, loaning three or four of everything from the bakeshop, from the chipped coffee mugs to the mismatched bowls, plus their daughter Colly and a roast-hen dinner.

  “It’s a sad state of affairs when the miller and the banker can’t feed themselves without help from a nursemaid.” I laughed.

  Randall smiled and squeezed my hand. “We’ll send for a catalogue from the shops in Harrowgate tomorrow.” He traced a pattern on my palm with his fingers. “Do you want to talk about the wheel?”

  I winced. “Yes,” I said automatically, and then shook my head. “No. I don’t know. How do you talk about something you can’t even bear to think of? But Rosie says she’ll get the wall patched up, temporarily, and if anyone can build a millwheel, it’s Harte…”

  Randall sat there, a look of concern on his straightforward face, stroking my hand. He might have been an ostler soothing a nervous horse, and the firelight and the warmth and the great heavy drapes behind me seemed a palpable barrier between me and the troubles at Stirwaters. Absently, I reached up to touch the timepiece at my breast. This was what Randall did for me—this moment of tranquility, this stalwart defense against the volleys hurled at me daily. But I sensed a fragility in that barrier, and I vowed then that I would let nothing disturb it. Whatever else happened, this was sacred. I think that was the moment when I truly drew Randall close in to me, alongside Rosie and Shearing and Stirwaters. These things were mine, and I would let no harm come to them.

  The ice gave up its grip on Shearing within a day or two, thawing the village into mud and debris. There was not much damage, overall—a few fallen limbs, some loose shingles. Only Stirwaters had received a mortal blow. After the initial cleanup, Harte took advantage of the break in his duties to head home for a spell, and Randall delayed his return to Harrowgate, as though I had gone fragile with the injury to my mill.

  “For heaven’s sake, I shan’t go mad if I sit idle for one minute,” I exclaimed in exasperation once, as Randall expressed concern over my well-being yet again. “Besides, it’s not as if there isn’t work still to be done—cloth doesn’t finish and catalogue itself, you know.”

  Rosie had been to the joiner’s; she knew the cost of the new wheel and shaft, and I had told her to order them, but she dragged her feet. Oh, she had excuses: The joiner had to order the right-sized bolts; the log for the shaft was too green. I took her at her word, until she descended on me one chill morning and beckoned me into the office.

  Rosie spread an armload of papers across the desk: schematic drawings of Stirwaters and its workings, sketched-out maps of our land and the river, pages and pages of calculations. I thought they must be Father’s; the hand was his, and we were forever finding scraps and scribbles he had left behind.

  “Where did you find these?” I asked, sliding one long drawing from beneath its fellows. It depicted a new millwheel—a much larger one—driving the Stirwaters power train.

  “I didn’t find them,” Rosie said. “I’ve been working on them for days. Well, with Harte’s help. He’s not much with pen and ink, but he’s something of a genius when it comes to machines.
”

  “You! But what is it all?”

  “Look—” she indicated the schematic before me. “These are plans for the new millwheel. I think we could increase the horsepower half again if we went with this design. It will take some tinkering, since it reverses the direction of flow—”

  Oh, it was a grand idea, and she had such hopes for it! She talked on for a few more minutes, pointing out the elements she’d put so much time and care into—how Rosellen Miller would put her mark on Stirwaters for still and all. Her eyes were bright, her face flushed.

  “If we just replace the old wheel, how much will that cost?”

  “About fifty pounds.”

  I cringed, though we should manage to save back nearly that much from our dealings with Captain Worthy. “And this larger one? And everything to fit it into place?”

  “Perhaps three times that.”

  “You know we don’t have that kind of money!” I hadn’t meant to burst out like that.

  Rosie sat stiffly in her chair. “I thought maybe Randall might advance us some funding.”

  “You can’t be serious! How can you suggest such a thing, after what we’ve gone through to get out of debt to him!”

  “Yes, well—things are different now, aren’t they?” She was glaring at me, her jaw thrust out stubbornly.

  “And that is precisely the reason we will not even entertain the notion. I’ll not take advantage of Randall’s wealth!”

  “Well,” Rosie said slowly, “that’s why you married him, isn’t it?”

  I slapped her. I don’t recall meaning to do it—somehow my hand shot out and struck her across the face, leaving a bright pale mark on her red cheek.

  Her own hand flew up to the spot, her eyes wide as gearwheels. I stared back in horror, but an apology would not form itself on my lips. After the briefest moment, Rosie shoved back her chair and swept all her papers carelessly together. I saw she was fighting back tears.

  “You’re just like Mam, you know that?”

  “It’s too big a risk,” I said, but my voice was very small.

  “It’s always too big a risk,” she said. “Father would have understood!”

  It was my turn to feel the sting of a blow. Blinking against the burn in my eyes, I mumbled, “Dreams, Rosie—that’s all Father’s ideas ever were. That’s all this is.”

  But she was already gone.

  With the unbearable silence of Stirwaters pressing against me like the air of a tomb, I wandered back up to the Grange. The wind was like a whip of ice in my face, and I was numb and breathless by the time I crested the wooded hill. One curiosity of living at the Grange was that our nearest neighbor was Biddy Tom. She occupied the old gatehouse on the property, a sturdy lime-washed cottage nestled in a tangle of spruce and heather. It was not actually all that near—a few minutes’ struggle through the wood, or a longer walk by the roadway—and since her plot of land was not part of our lease, I seldom saw her. Perhaps when Spring opened up the world we would turn neighborly, but the very thought of it gave me a chill not part of the winter afternoon.

  I found Randall hard at work outside, wrapped in his frock coat and hat, hacking viciously at a black thicket with a rather large set of hedge shears. An axe lay buried in the remains of a tree struck down by the ice storm. His pale cheeks—chapped red with cold—broke into a wide smile, and he lifted a gloved hand in a big wave.

  “What are you doing?” I said, coming closer. We stood in the shadow of the dining room window, the stone eaves arched gloomily overhead, traced with the skeletons of last year’s ivy.

  “Well, once I got the last of the storm debris cleared, I thought I’d get a head start on spring.”

  “You cleared away all those damaged trees?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Who did you think had done it? Little Colly? Well, she helped some.” He bent over the hedge and brushed his frozen lips against mine. “Mercy! We’d best be careful—we’ll stick together in weather like this. Why don’t you head inside and get warm? There’s water boiling in the hearth. I’ll be in as soon as I get this demon hawthorn beaten into submission.”

  “I think it’s winning,” I said, just as he yanked his hand back from the hedge with a hiss. “Those thorns will stick through anything.”

  Holding the shears at a rakish angle, Randall surveyed the property. “It’s a grand old park, or it will be, once I convince the woods to give it back.” As he moved around the hedge, he elaborated on his plans for the garden and the yard. He showed me the strip of verge where he planned a bulb garden, the run-down carriage house (“Imagine having the horses and trap right here at home!”), the brick terraces overlooking a “vista” of the Valley floor. Every corner of the property would have Randall’s touch—fresh stonework, new plantings, a glass-paned summerhouse to enjoy the mature roses.

  I listened with growing unease. How could he make such plans? This was not our house, not our land to dig up and repot as we chose. And to look ahead—five, ten years for some of these ideas. It was dizzying.

  “My father made plans like that.” I said it without thinking, and Randall took it for response to some comment I had not even heard.

  He squeezed my hand. “Then that’s what I’ll do first.”

  Inadvertently, I shivered.

  “Darling, you’re freezing. Let’s get you inside and start on that tea.” He put his arm round my shoulders and steered me back to the front of the house. We paused briefly to peek at our bedroom oriel, its paned window sparkling in the waning light. A twisted, black-trunked tree reached its stunted branches toward the glass.

  “What’s this?” I asked, fingering the gnarled wood.

  “Lilacs. There’s this one, and a whole copse of them by the morning room terrace.”

  I recoiled, snatching my hand back. “Cut it down,” I said. “Cut them all down.”

  A few nights later, Randall and I called at the Millhouse for dinner. I had seen little of my uncle since my wedding, and though I confess I did not experience quite the proper regret, I supposed it a duty I should not dismiss so lightly. Thus my new husband and I, gaily bedecked, arrived at the Millhouse like company, and were ushered in across the parlor threshold by Rachel as if we were strangers. Truly, I almost felt like one, under the brief gaze Rosie rewarded me with.

  I stood in the parlor and looked at the home that was no longer my own. My new shoes felt odd and awkward on the Millhouse floor; I could not feel the smooth uneven boards, and found myself seeking, with my toe, for the loose one near the fireplace. I saw my unfamiliar reflection in the old smoked mirror, and remembered looking at the room this way, all those months ago when Uncle Wheeler had first come. I put a hand up to touch the china lamp, turned now so the crack was at the back, and stilled my fingers in the air.

  “Rosie,” I murmured, half from curiosity, and half to fill the silence that had risen up between us, “what’s happened to the prize cup?” The silver plate trophy, won generations ago by some unnamed Miller in some Wool Guild competition, had stood so long on the Millhouse mantel that it had made a permanent ring for itself on the painted wood.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said curiously. “Uncle Wheeler must have decided it was too low, and had Rachel move it. He’s been doing that for weeks now.” She drew me closer to the fireplace, and in a hushed voice said, “Charlotte, he’s been acting strangely ever since you left. The trophy, then Mam’s candlesticks…and then last week he came home in the middle of the night, half undressed—in his shirtsleeves; no jacket, no waistcoat. In the snow.”

  A picture I had never quite been able to banish rose in my mind: of my uncle, bent over a ring drawn out in the sand, blood marring his blouse. I shook my head and tried to think what to tell her, when Randall strode up and gave her a companionable punch to the shoulder.

  “Rosie, you’re looking well. Won’t you come see us at the Grange?” She brightened like a candle flame and gave him a very sisterly hug. Randall, smiling, squeezed her back. Uncle Wheeler fi
nally joined us, and I must say he did not look so different after a few weeks’ distance. I felt a curious sensation of distaste when I beheld the embroidery on his waistcoat, but bit my lip and quelled it. I should never be able to look at gold thread, it seemed, without thoughts of Jack Spinner. He drew me forward for a fluttering embrace, still scented very strongly of lilacs.

  After dinner, Randall eased himself into the armchair facing the fireplace. “What are your plans these days, Wheeler?”

  “My plans, my dear boy? What can you mean?”

  Randall crossed one long leg over the other. “Well, you must feel as though your duties here are coming to an end, with Charlotte married and everything getting settled so nicely. You must be anxious to get back to your life in the city.”

  “Why, Woodstone, I wouldn’t dream of it! With Charlotte gone, looking after Rosie has become my full occupation.”

  Rosie made a muffled sort of sound, and then coughed politely into her sleeve.

  “Well, that must be tiresome for a man like you. No doubt you’ve had plans set awry by this…arrangement? Schemes, plots, irons in the fire?” Randall spoke easily, almost carelessly, the way men of society must be accustomed to conversing. “Your niece can’t need that much looking after; why, she’s in the mill half the time anyway! You don’t want to be saddled with a ward, not when there’s a perfectly felicitous alternative.”

  Uncle Wheeler had a singularly peculiar expression on his face. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, my good sir, that I—with Charlotte’s blessing, of course—would be more than happy to, as it were, take Rosie off your hands.”