A Curse Dark as Gold Read online

  “But why does anyone have to stay at all?” she asked. “And why should it be you?”

  “I’m not leaving a stranger alone in the mill all night. This is my responsibility. Besides—you’re a better liar than I am. You’ll think of something to tell Uncle Wheeler.”

  I settled down to a long night of waiting, alone in the mill with…with whatever he was. I closed myself in the office, thinking somehow to protect myself behind doors, but the creaks and thumps of the old building, as familiar as my own skin during the day, struck loud and startling come nightfall. I could tell myself over and again I didn’t really believe it, didn’t truly think a man in the attic could spin gold from straw, but for now we were at his mercy, and I am not ashamed to admit I was frightened.

  Rosie had left me well stocked with lamp oil and a good tinderbox, but it was cold comfort against the darkness, the eldritch power, and the sheer ancient age of the mill. What I found comforting by daylight seemed strange and haunting now. I fancied some force in the mill objected to the presence I had brought into it—objected to the magic worked upstairs by the curious little man who called himself after one of my machines. I huddled into my chair and told myself not to be foolish, but every sound of settlement, every sigh of the wind, each snap or rustle down through the floors, seemed a voice of disapproval. I wanted to bang my fist against the rough stone walls and cry out that whatever I did, it was all for Stirwaters.

  I tried to work, to determine what use I might make of gold thread, but I could not concentrate. At last I pulled volumes of old ledgers and rosters from the shelves and sought references to a Jack Spinner—but of course there were dozens of such entries, and none of them germane. I went through Father’s papers, but his wanderers weren’t well recorded. Nowhere could I find mention of any tradesman quite like the man in my attic.

  I could not stop my eyes from lifting to the hex sign on the wall outside my door. I could not explain what I had seen that afternoon, what was even now taking place on the floor above me…but neither could I discount it. I had watched him spin straw into gold; Mr. Smith had verified its authenticity. It might be a parlor trick, but if so, it was an elaborate one—and for what purpose? No, try as I might to convince myself otherwise, for once it was simply easier to believe it was real.

  Eventually I must have dozed, there at my desk, my cheek against the leather of an old ledger book, my hand still on my pen. How long I slept there I could not say, but my heart nearly gave out when, somewhere past midnight, my door burst open with a sound like musket fire. I jumped straight up in my chair and grabbed for the nearest weapon—the iron ingot from Nathan Smith’s forge—my heart beating frantically against my ribcage.

  “Miss Charlotte?” Against the darkness of the doorframe, Harte stood out like a ghost in his white nightshirt, which apparently had been hastily accompanied by his trousers and boots only moments before.

  “Harte!” My voice came out far shriller than I meant it. I tried it again. “Harte,” I said, in what I hoped were calmer tones.

  He stepped in a few paces, still staring at me in bewilderment. “What are you doing here, ma’am? It’s well past midnight. I saw the light and thought I’d better check on things.”

  How could we have been so careless—to forget that our Harte’s window looked directly into the office, making any light we burned there clearer than a full moon on a cloudless night! Hastily I wracked my brain, trying to remember where the garret window looked; would Harte have seen it, coming from the woolshed?

  “Miss Charlotte?” Harte repeated, coming fully into the room now. “Are you all right?”

  I forced a smile to my frozen lips. “Yes. Yes, thank you, Harte. Just—finishing up some work for the morning. I’ll be going soon. No need to worry—I shan’t forget to douse the lamp.”

  He grunted. “I should think not—you’ll need it to get home by on a night like this. Dark as the devil out there, if you don’t mind, Mistress.”

  “No, not at all. Thank you.” Still a bit breathless, I stared at him, willing him silently to leave, that ridiculous smile still plastered on my face. Harte gave one last glance around the office and, still frowning, left me. I knew we had aroused his suspicions, and doubted very much that he intended to slip meekly back to the woolshed and sleep the rest of the night away.

  Somewhat comforted, in fact, by his watchful presence, my fear gradually gave way to curiosity and then impatience. Morning, he had said. I did not know by what rules such magic was bound; I could not risk disrupting the spell too early. Finally, when I could make out the color of tree branches outside, I rose and patted smooth my skirts and hair. Taking a deep breath to steady myself against the slightly sickish feeling of staying awake all night, I went upstairs.

  I did not knock; the door was mine, after all. I put a somewhat shaky hand to the worn wood and pushed it open.

  He was gone. Somewhere in the night, after finishing his work, Jack Spinner had disappeared. I was in no state to work that out—he could not have come downstairs without passing my office. Using whatever powers had brought him to us to begin with, he seemed to have vanished back into that fey realm without sound or sign.

  But it didn’t matter. In that moment I thought wildly that nothing would ever matter again: Everything we would ever need was laid out before me. Gleaming reels of thread were stacked chest-high all along one wall, like rows of corncobs. They glittered with the sheen of gold, casting their own beautiful light all through the room. I took a few steps into the room, but my feet failed me and I sank to the floor. It couldn’t be real. I put out a hand to touch the nearest spool, but my fingers paused a few inches from the gold. I couldn’t bear to break the spell just yet. I merely sat there, speechless and stunned, staring at the hill of riches before me.

  After a moment I felt my heart begin to beat again, quick and steady and very loud. Still hesitant to touch the spools, I began to count them. Not believing my first result, I went back and started again. Three more times I made their measure, each with the same number at the end.

  Oh, mercy—what had we stumbled into? Frantically, I unwound one bobbin…then another, tearing at the thread to uncover the deception. Five or six more, deep into the stacks, sure there must be ordinary thread beneath the gold. I pulled the entire length from one spool, counting the times it made the span of my arms. At last I sat in the heap, my head spinning with exhaustion and disbelief and the sheer impossibility of the numbers, and for the first time in more months than I could remember, I did nothing.

  Rosie found me, not much later, before anyone else could chance upon me. Her little shriek aroused me, and in her excitement she grabbed my arm and yanked me standing. She squealed and whirled about the little empty space in the garret, laughing with a mad delight. I resisted being drawn into her dance of ecstasy, until at last she wound down and, breathless, gave me her crooked grin.

  “Oh, you are no fun at all, Charlotte! You do see the gold here, right? I’m not imagining it?”

  “I see it,” I said, keeping calm from shock alone. I leaned back against the doorframe, pulling closed the door.

  “Well?” Rosie demanded. “How much is there?”

  I felt the laugh bubble across my lips, even as I tried to suppress it. “Nine hundred and eighty-one spools.”

  Rosie’s mouth fell open, but no sound came out. I threw my arms around her. “It’s enough to pay Mr. Woodstone.”

  For a glorious, shining moment, I thought I heard music—great, swelling hymns soaring to Stirwaters’s rafters. But it must have been the water crashing off the wheel.

  Chapter Nine

  That glorious, soaring feeling lasted a few hours, but reality finally did me in. The truth was, the utterly fantastic situation we’d found ourselves in left me with a new problem: how to divest ourselves of these riches, and convert them into the cold cash we needed for the bank. I could hardly deliver a barrel of gold thread to Mr. Woodstone’s doorstep and call our debt paid. In the night I’d had
the ghost of an idea, no more, and now set myself the task of putting flesh on its slight bones.

  “What are you looking for?” Rosie inquired, as I rifled furiously through a stack of old copies of The Merchant Draper journal. Father hadn’t kept up the subscription in years, but these old almanacks had been my childhood storybooks. At last, triumphant, I found the page I was looking for. It was twelve years old and faded nearly invisible, but I flashed it open to Rosie.

  “This.”

  Rosie peered in, curious. “A recipe for lace starch?”

  “No, you ninny. This.” I spread the pages open on the desk. A half-page advert, decorated with a curious little illustration of a cherub, announced:

  The House of Parmenter PASSEMENTIER

  Dealers in fine Goods, Lacework, and Trims

  Gold & silver Threads for Needlework or Decoration

  For sale to the Trade or Publick

  Spring Street, Harrowgate

  Rosie studied it a long time. “That’s good,” she said finally. “That’s very good.” She flipped the journal to the cover and pointed out the date. “How do you know they’re still operating?”

  “Because,” I said, “Mrs. Parmenter sent those lovely lilies for Father’s funeral.”

  Rosie was grinning broadly. She smacked her hand down on the desk. “See? See, I told you you’d think of something!” She sobered. “Look, you’d better get home. I don’t know what time Uncle Wheeler came in last night, but—”

  I nodded and pulled myself up from the desk. With a weary sigh, I remembered something. “Harte was here.”

  “What? You mean last night?”

  I nodded. “I don’t think he saw anything, but he was certainly suspicious. We’ll have to be more careful in future.”

  Rosie barked out a little laugh. “In the future? Are you planning on making a habit of this, Mistress Miller?”

  “You know what I mean,” I snapped; but in honesty, even I wasn’t entirely sure. What had I meant? My thoughts ran to the strange scene yesterday at the forge, and I suppressed a shiver.

  I set off for the Millhouse and breakfast, but Rosie lingered, determined to protect the cache of thread from prying eyes (“and Eagans,” she added darkly) by covering the garret window with canvas and fetching a hefty padlock from Mr. Smith’s.

  “What’ll you tell Uncle Wheeler?” she asked as I slipped down the stairs.

  “What? Oh, I shouldn’t worry. I’ll just mention that we had a fairy man in overnight who spun us several hundred pounds worth of gold thread, and all our problems are over.”

  True to Rosie’s prediction, my uncle was in the parlor when I finally got home, basking in the glow from the long windows, serene and polished in robin’s egg blue. There was no way to get past him without comment. It took a great effort not to touch a hand to my hair or flutter my fingers down my skirts. What must I look like—did I have any stray golden strands clinging to me anywhere? It was too late to check.

  Uncle Wheeler lowered his newspaper and beckoned me in with one long finger. I hesitated, but thinking of no good excuse, found myself drawn into the room. I sat beside him on the faded sofa and tried to arrange my skirts to hide their wrinkled hems.

  “Now my dear,” my uncle began, “I’m afraid I have been quite lax in my duties toward you girls these last weeks, and for that I must express my regrets.”

  “Oh, no, Uncle—”

  He silenced me with a lift of one manicured hand (where was he getting those manicures?). “This is my fault, of course, for not being firm enough with you. Running about at all hours, unchaperoned…do you realize that you’d be cut from every circle of society if word got out?” He paused. “But we are not here to discuss that at the moment.”

  I lifted a hand to my mouth to suppress an unladylike yawn. “Do please continue, Uncle.”

  “Now, I’m sure it’s disappointing to have your little pastime come to an end, of course, and I know how attached you were to the mill—”

  “I beg your pardon—what?”

  My uncle looked mildly taken aback. “I was speaking of this matter of the Wool Guild, of course. You can’t mean to simply go on as if nothing has happened. Please don’t think I’m doing this to be cruel—of course I’m not. But you must see reason. Let me propose something to you—don’t be hasty, now; just listen for a moment before you say anything.”

  “And what is that, sir?”

  “Well, I believe you’d told me that you’d received an offer of sale on the mill. From—who was it again? A Perch—Pinchfields, was it?”

  I nodded, suddenly wary.

  “Now, I’ve made a few inquiries, and—”

  I had been sinking into a fog of weariness, but at this I snapped back. “You’ve what? How could you? I told you I would handle it!”

  Uncle Wheeler’s tongue flicked over his lips. “Yes, well. Evidently that was an error in judgement on my part. Charlotte, as your guardian, I feel obligated to do what is in your best interest, and as I believed initially, that is selling the mill.”

  I could not believe it. After all we’d gone through! I was so tired I could do little more than sputter angrily, but Uncle Wheeler ignored me, forging ahead.

  “…to speak with them. I believe that I’ve settled on the most advantageous arrangement, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you’ve had the opportunity to compose yourself and look at this with reason.” At this, Uncle Wheeler rose and smoothed down his jacket. “And now, I do believe Baker has been holding our breakfast.”

  I was escorted, then, to a meal I was in no state to consume. I wished to tell him that it was no longer necessary to consider selling, that I had the means for saving Stirwaters at hand—but nothing on Earth would compel me to mention Jack Spinner. Uncle Wheeler ate steadily and fastidiously, one finger crooked away from the corners of teacups and toast points. He frowned when Rosie bounced in, flushed and breathless. She took a moment to compose herself, smiled sweetly to Uncle Wheeler, and slid into place beside me. I stared at the food on my plate but could see only the face of the Pinchfields wool buyer, sneering at me.

  A sudden sharp pain in my ankle turned my focus to Rosie, who had kicked me beneath the table. She was chatting away cheerfully with Uncle Wheeler. I took a deep gulp of scalding tea and sat straighter, forcing myself to attend to them.

  “I think that sounds like quite a sensible plan, Uncle. Certainly you must take advantage of the felicitous timing, as you say.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked carefully.

  Rosie grinned at me. “Your meeting with Pinchfields in Harrowgate, of course. Uncle Wheeler has everything arranged. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him?” She jabbed at a slice of nectarine with a tiny fork. “Uncle, did you try these? They’re divine.”

  I stared at her in horror, but the pieces slowly began to fall into place. As my sluggish thoughts finally caught up with my sister’s, I nodded.

  After breakfast I cornered Rosie in the kitchen. “Are you witless? What am I going to say to Pinchfields?”

  “I think you ought to concentrate on what you plan to say to Mr. Parmenter.”

  A smile crept about her lips, and I couldn’t help myself. I hugged her.

  I spent the next days satisfying myself that I could leave the mill in safe hands for seventy-two hours, checking and rechecking the wool in the shed and the strongbox in the office, and cautioning Rosie beyond her endurance.

  “Enough!” she cried at last as I was quizzing her about the key to the great lock on the garret room. “I won’t let anyone up there; I won’t burn down the dyeshed; I won’t let Bill Penny run the carding engine. Mercy, Charlotte—anyone would think you didn’t trust me!” And with that she stormed off.

  I gave the locked mill doors one last tug and stepped out into the yard to see Biddy Tom across the road, stooped over the verge, gathering greens from the edge of the fence. All at once, she stood up straight and looked right at me.

  “Charlotte Miller,” she said with a nod
; and though her voice was no louder than common, it carried like a shout across the road. I found myself crossing the lane to meet her.

  “Good day, Mrs. Tom.”

  She nodded again and bent for a handful of yellow blossoms. “Keyflower,” she said. “Good for headache and insomnia. Wood sorrel”—here she indicated spindly weeds trailing through the fence—“for fever. By the way, your place smells a bit funny, like. Come by and I’ll get you some sage to burn, clear your air a little.”

  “It always smells funny,” I said. “It’s the dyeworks.”

  She smiled then, reedy and wiry as her herbs. “That weren’t what I meant, and you know as much. Odd air hereabouts.”

  The gall of it! If we had “odd air,” she was half to blame for it! All at once, the events of the last days became too much, and everything spilled over. “Did you sell Rosie those—things? Potions, and—and mandrake root?”

  Biddy Tom eased herself upright and eyed me levelly. “Sell them? You know better than that, Charlotte Miller. I never sell anything to anyone. Did your sister come to me for aid? That’s her business.”

  “You leave her alone! She’s just a girl—she doesn’t know any better—”

  “Are ye her mam, then, or her sister?” She reached for my shoulder, and I wasn’t quite quick enough to flinch away. “Miss Rosie’s plenty old enough to know what she’s about. It’s hard to watch your sister in pain—”

  “Rosie’s not in pain!”

  Mrs. Tom’s lips twisted slightly. “I meant ye, lassie. You think it’s easy for Rosie, all you’ve been through? She only wants to help, and you haven’t left her many ways of doing that, with your managin’ this and takin’ care of that.”