Cursed Once More: The Sequel to With This Curse, Page 3

  “What about the curse on Gravesend?” he asked. “Aren’t you afraid of exposing children to that?”

  From the long-ago day that my mother and I had arrived at Gravesend I had known of the curse attached to the place and the family that lived there: the house, so the tale went, would take from its residents whatever they held most dear.

  After I had been cast out of the house and had lost Richard, I had blamed the curse. But now, looking back, I knew that my younger self had merely sought in her unhappiness for a scapegoat. Especially now that I was so happy and anticipating such a fulfilling future, the curse seemed nothing more than a superstition. And I saw from a glance at my husband that he was not troubled by the legend either.

  “Gravesend has seen its share of sorrow and tragedy,” he said. “Perhaps more than other houses; perhaps not. But it has also seen much joy.” The way he gazed smilingly into my eyes told me what role I played in that joy. “What do you think, Clara?”

  Gravesend deserved a new beginning, I decided, one unhindered by the fears of the past. I said firmly, “The best possible future for the place is for a crowd of children to fill it with their energy and innocence—and chase all the old shadows and superstitions away.”

  Even now I do not believe that I brought bad luck down upon Atticus and me with those words. A few years before, I might have feared that I was tempting the gods by proclaiming the curse to be a mere superstition, but now that I am older and wiser I know that my scoffing at such a thing did not truly affect what was to come. I do not blame myself—not for that, at least.

  Still, if I had known of what short duration my happiness would be, would I have changed anything about that evening? Disclosed my news to Atticus instead of waiting? Drawn out the pleasure of our family gathering, wringing every bright drop of conviviality and contentment to be had?

  It is impossible to say. All I know is that this charmed interlude would be the last flowering of our harmonious life before circumstances altered it utterly.

  The next day Atticus and I drove into the village after luncheon. He wished to deliver some documents to George Bertram at his office, and I accompanied him so that I might purchase some sewing thread that my maid, Henriette, needed.

  If I had known who we would encounter on this errand, I would have done anything within my power to prevent my husband from leaving Gravesend.

  As it was, we nearly escaped unscathed. Our visit to Bertram’s office was without incident, and the two of us soon proceeded to the dry-goods store. It was only after I had completed my purchase and as we were stepping out the door that the voice hailed us—or rather my husband.

  “Why, it’s Mr. Blackwood, isn’t it? No—Lord Telford now!”

  From the street a woman in a tartan dress and a tall, thin man were regarding Atticus with interest.

  My husband started ever so slightly. He summoned a smile and doffed his hat as they approached, but a certain stiffness in his bearing betrayed his feelings to someone who knew him as well as I. He was not pleased to see this woman.

  He was far too polite to betray the fact, of course. “Miss Norton,” he said, briefly clasping the hand she extended in greeting. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

  “Indeed, yes. But it’s Mrs. Munro now. This is my husband, Cecil Munro.” Her eyes darted to me, and Atticus introduced me while Mrs. Munro sized me up, as women of Atticus’s lofty circle tended to do. I permitted myself an equally candid scrutiny of her. She was attractive, no older than I, and beneath her fashionable plumed bonnet showed curly hair still brown without a trace of gray. Her tartan walking dress was beautifully tailored, and I was absurdly glad that I was wearing my violet faille polonaise with matching velvet ribbon trim, which was particularly becoming to me.

  I could see her bright hazel eyes darting looks at my husband, assessing and approving. Next to Atticus, her own husband could not help but suffer by comparison. In contrast to Atticus with his broad shoulders and air of quiet confidence, Mr. Munro, though tall, was stoop-shouldered and weedy. Perhaps to compensate for his thinning hair, he possessed a moustache so abundant that it obscured his upper lip entirely.

  “Cecil darling,” she was saying, with a smile that might have been called saucy twenty years ago, “Lord Telford is an old beau of mine.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Munro’s expression was guarded as he shook hands with Atticus.

  “Yes, indeed. Lord Telford owns Gravesend Hall—you remember?”

  In the very act of shaking hands, Mr. Munro seemed to pause. In an instant he had recovered, and his manner instantly relaxed. It was as if he had placed Atticus in his memory and realized… what? That he posed no threat to his wife’s affection?

  “Mind you, that was a long time ago.” She gave a breathy chuckle, as if her stays were too tight. “My Cecil and I have five children now! But you’ve not been married very long, have you, Lady Telford?”

  “Less than a year,” I confirmed.

  “Dear me, quite a new bride still! Lord Telford certainly took his time about marrying, although I have to say he was quite attentive to me at one time. There was even talk of us making a match of it.” With an air of coquetry, she asked Atticus, “Do you remember?”

  “I do remember there was talk,” Atticus said, and although his voice was pleasant, something in the words made her smile falter, and she turned back to me.

  “My dear, you must tell me all about how you met. And who sews for you? That cashmere paletot is simply cunning. In fact, I should love to ask your opinion on this shawl here in the shop window…”

  I listened with half my mind and answered absently as she drew me toward the window display. Atticus and Mr. Munro seemed to have found some topic to discuss, for when I looked back I saw that they were now absorbed in discussion of their own.

  My uninvited companion must have observed this as well, for her voice suddenly dropped into an entirely different tone: confidential, serious. “You’re very brave, my dear,” she said.

  “Brave?” I repeated, startled.

  “To marry the baron, knowing of his—his condition.” She glanced over at the two men where they stood talking together and shook her head.

  This was why she had drawn me aside—to fish for confidences about our marriage? “My husband is the best of men in all the ways that matter,” I said coolly. “I’m proud to be his wife.”

  She looked at me as if trying to gauge whether I was telling the truth. “Then you don’t find it repugnant? His deformed limb?”

  In my disgust and anger, I had to fight to keep my voice from rising. “On the contrary, I feel myself the most fortunate of women,” I said, biting the words out with icy precision. “Just because you yourself cannot see beyond his affliction does not mean that my husband is in any way deficient.”

  Her eyes narrowed on my face. “My dear,” she said, and her voice was cooler, no longer ingratiating, “it would be foolish of you to pretend that your husband is a normal man.”

  Was this what most people thought when they looked at him? Dear heaven, what he must have endured. “He is far from normal, as you call it,” I snapped. “He is superior to every other man of my acquaintance.”

  “Your loyalty is most becoming in a wife, of course, but you must give some consideration to what affliction any child of your union might suffer.” She actually shuddered, the contemptible woman. “The very thought of wedding a man whose children might be deformed makes my blood run cold. Are you not afraid of what your children might be?”

  As if she had the right to speculate about such a thing. Where my voice had been cold before, it was now glacial, and my hands had tightened into fists with the effort to keep control. “I’ll thank you to mind your own business, Mrs. Munro,” I said in almost a hiss. “I think we have said all we have to say to each other.”

  Without giving her time to reply, I strode back to the men and slipped my arm through my husband’s, and when he broke off what he was saying to smile a welcome to me, I sa
id sweetly, “My love, we mustn’t detain the Munros any longer. Lovely to have met you both, but we shouldn’t dream of keeping you from your shopping.”

  Having thus forced him to draw the encounter to a close, after hasty farewells on both sides I led Atticus at a brisk pace to our waiting carriage. I wanted to leave that woman and her odious words far behind and as quickly as possible.

  “I gather you didn’t take to Mrs. Munro,” he said mildly, once we were on our way back home.

  “Not one jot. Has she greatly changed from when you knew her?”

  “In some ways, I suppose.” He was silent for a moment, and then said with gravity, “Her face and form have matured since last we met; I hoped that her mind had followed suit.”

  “I fear not. She said some things that were outrageous and offensive.”

  His smile was as weary as if it were a century old. “I think I can guess what they were. She was probably astonished that any woman would take the risk of marrying me.”

  Sitting across from me in the carriage with his hands folded over his stick, he suddenly seemed remote. I leaned forward and placed a hand over his. “Tell me,” I said.

  He took a breath and released it in a long sigh. His eyes, always so quick to reflect mirth, were equally prone to be pensive. In a man of his sensitivity, the pain that he had endured in his youth could not help but leave its mark. One hears of eyes being called soulful, and my husband’s possessed this quality more than any I had seen. At this moment I was glimpsing the vulnerability that he must have felt as a younger man, which the dreadful Munro woman had awakened in his memory.

  “When I found you in Miss Ingram’s troupe and proposed to you,” he began, “I said that I had wooed women in my own set but had learned that they wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “I wondered if that story might have been fabricated in an effort to sway me,” I admitted.

  Again that heartbreakingly exhausted smile. “I confess that I exaggerated the number. Miss Mathilde Norton was the only young lady I courted. It was years after you had left Gravesend, taking my heart with you, and she was the first woman I had met who seemed to me to possess something of your vivacity and spirit… the first woman besides you whom I could envision sharing my life with.”

  I had never heard him speak like this, and I sat silent at this new insight into the man I loved.

  He shifted on the cushioned seat as we jounced over ruts in the roadway, and his thoughts seemed to shift as well. “I was lonely, I admit it. Mathilde appeared to be pleased enough with my company, with my attentions. She had a merry disposition and seemed as if she would be an agreeable companion. I had nearly made up my mind to propose to her when I found out, quite by accident, what she truly thought of me.”

  A pit of sympathetic dread formed in my stomach, but I did not interrupt.

  “At a house party at her family’s home, I became an unintentional eavesdropper one night. I was in an out-of-the-way alcove in the library when Mathilde and a crowd of her friends burst into the room and settled in for conversation. Before I could make my presence known and excuse myself, I heard my name mentioned… and in terms that would have made it too humiliating for all concerned were I to reveal my presence.”

  He paused for so long that I feared he might not continue. He had dropped his eyes, so I could no longer read them.

  “It was my club foot, chiefly, which will not surprise you,” he said at length. “To that point I had believed that by dint of the medical treatments and long and arduous practice my affliction was not noticeable in my gait or my dancing, but evidently I had flattered myself. And my condition was hardly a secret. It was rather a shock, however, to learn just how repugnant Mathilde considered it.”

  My hand tightened over his, and I wished that I had clawed the Munro woman’s eyes out when I had the chance. I could only imagine how cutting, how callous, how cruel had been the words Atticus had heard spoken of himself, and which he was refraining now from repeating.

  “She and her friends felt that the risk of tainted offspring was one they could not take,” he said quietly. “I cannot blame them for that.”

  Perhaps he could not, but I could—and did.

  “The curse also entered into the discussion,” he added more briskly. “There was some debate over which was a worse affliction to wed oneself to. But the upshot was that all of the young ladies shuddered at the idea of becoming my wife. I realized then that any thought of marrying was out of the question.”

  My heart ached with an echo of the pain that those brainless girls had inflicted upon him. For a loving and gregarious person like Atticus, it must have felt like a sentence of exile to believe that he was barred from marrying. “How thankful I am that something happened to upset that idea,” I said softly. “What was it?”

  “You,” he said unhesitatingly, raising his eyes to mine. “I found you. My father’s failing health meant that I took on more management of the estate and its resources, and thus more control over my own destiny. Before, my efforts to find you had been constrained by my limited funds and connections, and by the need for secrecy. So when I was able to I relaunched my search for you with the firm intention of making you my wife—by any means short of kidnapping.”

  That brought a faint, bittersweet smile to my lips. When Atticus had first approached me, I had been so averse to what he proposed that kidnapping might have been the only way for him to have secured me, had circumstances not left me without the means of supporting myself.

  “That alias of yours threw me off the scent for a good while,” he continued, “as did your travels with Miss Ingram’s troupe, but find you I did. So you see”—and he drew me over to sit beside him—“it is actually very fortunate indeed that all of my other possible brides viewed me with such repugnance. Otherwise I would not have been free to marry you.”

  I threw my arms around him. “That is too frightening a thought to be borne,” I exclaimed. “Don’t let’s ever speak of it again.”

  “You’re happy with me, then?”

  I thought there was the ghost of uncertainty in his voice and cursed the woman who had put it there. “More than I can possibly say,” I told him. “I wish I could show you just how happy you make me.”

  “A moving carriage certainly adds a degree of difficulty to such a demonstration,” he mused.

  I was momentarily taken aback. “Atticus, you don’t—I didn’t—”

  But then the twitching of his lips betrayed him, and I gave his shoulders a little pretend shake. “Wicked rogue,” I exclaimed. “Will you never stop teasing me?”

  He laughed outright and held me closer to him. “No, I never shall. You are so charmingly indignant when you realize it.”

  “Well, you shall not always have the advantage of me. Some day I will find a way to astonish you,” I told him.

  How brilliant were his eyes as he gazed at me. “You already do that every day, my darling,” he said softly.

  So perfect was this moment, so loving this embrace, that I thought I might tell him my news. “That Mathilde and her friends were fools,” I said, placing my hand against his cheek. “Any woman given the chance to bear your children should thank heaven for it.”

  But his face went grave, and all the merriment of a moment ago fled. “On the contrary,” he said quietly. “I understand entirely why she felt as she did. It is natural for a woman to want whole, healthy children.”

  “But Atticus, surely—”

  “The likelihood of having a crippled child is nothing to be taken lightly. Indeed, it is probably better for a man of my condition not to have children at all.”

  That silenced me. Mistaking the reason for my dismay, he took my hand. “It’s just as well that we are of an age when it is unlikely to happen,” he said.

  That I was of an age, he meant—but he was too tactful to say that. “It is still possible,” I ventured.

  “Have no fear, my love. If it were going to happen, it probably would have by now. As it i
s”—and he patted my hand—“everything has worked out for the best.”

  For a time we drove without speaking, the only sounds being the thud of the horses’ hooves and the rumbling, clattering carriage. We still sat side by side, but each lost in our own thoughts.

  Are you not afraid? the Munro woman had asked. And I had dismissed the question.

  But I was afraid now. Not of bearing a child that was less than perfect, and not that Atticus would not love such a child. Afraid, perhaps, that he would blame himself for any physical disadvantage he might pass on. That the remorse and fear would destroy his happiness in being a father.

  That he might even, in his most secret heart, blame me for bringing a child into the world who might suffer for carrying Blackwood blood in his veins.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next day was Atticus’s birthday. If my mood was less than celebratory after our sobering conversation of the day before, it was not improved by the sight of another letter with the Burleigh seal resting by my breakfast plate.

  As soon as I was able, I withdrew to my sitting room with the letter so that I could read it in solitude. The writing was unlike that on the previous letter. The hand was shaky, the ink strokes so delicate that the words seemed to try to vanish into the page. Too nervous to sit, I paced while I read.

  Dear Clara,

  I believe my son has recently invited you to visit what remains of your late mother’s family, here at Thurnley Hall. He probably expressed himself very ill, but I beg that you will consider the invitation as coming from me. My health is very poor indeed, and my physicians tell me that I have scant time left upon this earth. It is my most urgent wish to meet my granddaughter before I pass away. Can you find it in your heart to forgive the wrongs done your dear mother—or at least to set aside your anger, just though it is, long enough to meet me? There are things that you must know, things about the past that may do untold evil if they remain buried. I beg of you, come to me once, before the silence of the tomb closes about me.