A Curse Dark as Gold

A Curse Dark as Gold

Elizabeth C. Bunce

Acknowledgments

Weaving this tale was by no means a solitary endeavor. For their help and support along the way, I must thank my own Friendly Society: Barb Stuber, Christine Taylor-Butler, Diane Bailey, Judith Hyde, C. R. Cook, and the other amazing women of Juvenile Writers of Kansas City. Thanks to my parents, for never once uttering the phrase "fallback career," and to my first critique partner, my brother, Scott. Special thanks to Cheryl Klein and the team at Scholastic (especially for bearing with my affected period spelling). Extra-special thanks to Erin Murphy. And lastly, to my husband, Christopher, for always being there. If I wrote you into a story, no one would believe you were real.

Chapter One

When
my father died, I thought the world would come to an end. Standing in the churchyard in my borrowed mourning black, I was dimly aware of my sister Rosie beside me, the other mourners huddled round the grave. Great dark clouds gathered over the river, and I knew them for what they were: The End, poised to unleash some terrible wrath and sweep us all right out of the Valley. I let go my hold on Rosie's arm, for I was ready to be swept away.

Yet, somehow, I found myself still standing at the end of the service. I stooped and cast a handful of earth atop the casket, accepted a lily from the vicar, and joined the train of black-clad figures trailing back to the Millhouse -- all the while wondering what had gone wrong. Surely at least the mill would mourn his passing, and I would find the old wheel splintered and cracked, riven from its axle, ground to a standstill in the wheelpit.

In the millyard, the old building stood as ever, casting its vast shadow over the house and grounds. Far above where the stones met the roofline, an old sign, so faded and weather-beaten as to be near illegible, spelled out stirwaters woollen mill: miller & sons, shearing . There was no Miller now, and there had never been any sons -- just two half-grown orphaned daughters, a crumbling ruin of a water-mill, and the mountain of debt it was built upon.

"Charlotte." The voice at my shoulder was gentle but insistent, and I turned to see Abby Weaver, big with child, standing beside me. The black gown I wore, twenty years out of fashion and so tight I could scarcely breathe in it, had been her mother's. Abby squeezed my arm and steered me into the Millhouse.

The entire village had crowded into our parlor -- Father's workers and all our neighbors -- toasting the dead with ale from Drover's and feasting him with food brought by the Friendly Society. Plump, stolid Janet Lamb was carving a ham by the fireplace, while Jack Townley poured out ale from a vast oaken cask balanced on a bench I didn't recognize. I stood in the doorway and removed my bonnet with great dignity. Once it was free from my head, however, I lingered there, crushing its black beribboned brim with trembling fingers, utterly uncertain what to do next.

"Charlotte?" I turned toward the voice; it was Rachel Baker. Her normally unflappably cheerful face was lined with concern.

"Have you seen Rosie?" I said in a faint voice that did not sound like my own. "I've lost her --"

"You haven't lost her," Rachel said firmly. "She's in the kitchen with the Lamb boys and Tansy. Eating. Like you should be."

I almost managed a smile. "You Bakers think food is the answer to everything."

"Well," she said reasonably, "it's a start."

I made to head for the kitchen, but as I moved through my home, I was surrounded from all sides -- swept into a dozen sympathetic embraces, a plate of ham and biscuit pressed into my hands, tea fairly lifted to my lips.

"Thank you," I murmured -- or I meant to; I am not at all certain anything came out. "Thank you all. My father ..." I faltered, staring at their faces, a mixture of concern and ale-flush, and spoke the plain truth. "My father would have loved this."

"Ah, miss, he were a good man, and will be rightly missed." Eben Fuller clasped my hands in his. I swallowed hard and tried to answer back, but my words were lost in a wave of condolences I did not wish to receive and remembrances I could not bear to hear. I was propped up between Rachel on one side, Mrs. Hopewell on the other, as the villagers exchanged touching stories of Father's kindness, or amusing ones of his misadventures in the wool trade.

"'Twas a queer sort, but a good man for all that," old Tory Weaver was saying. "I remember when he came here, full o' grand plans for the old place, and not a notion in his head how to run a woollen mill."

Janet Lamb eased through the crowd with a mug of ale, to sit beside the old jackspinner. "Tory, do you remember teaching the master to shear sheep?" She laughed. "Thought he'd never get the hang of it! Must have lost half a crown's worth of wool from that first ewe alone, then, eh?"

"Aye -- that weren't nowt compared with the time he rigged up some fool machine to mechanize the shearing," Jack Townley put in. "Near scared the poor sheep to death, he did!"

"Ah, he did all right in the end," Mercy Fuller said gently. "Haven't we survived this long, then?"
A heavy hush fell over the crowd as all eyes none too subtly turned my way. I bit my lip and tried to think what to say, what words to utter to keep the conversation flowing -- but I was tapped out, empty. Suddenly it was all too much. This house, always so quiet with Father here, was filled with too much noise, too many people, too much black ... and too many unspoken questions I did not know how to answer.

I stood up abruptly, and something clattered to the floor as my knee knocked against a little table someone had dragged into the center of the room.

"Please excuse me." I think I said it, but it didn't matter. Somehow grief gives you license to be rude. Without another word to anyone, I shoved through the crowd of mourners toward the back door and fresh air.

"Those poor girls." I heard the voice behind me as I passed, the cluck of sympathy, the sighed replies: "Aye, and after the debts are paid off, they'll be left with nothing. It's a sorry business, all round. You know what the master was like -- a goodly soul, but no head at all for money."

"When word gets out that Stirwaters has no miller, folk'll be swarming around like flies to a carcass, waiting to see 'em fall. Mark my words -- we'll be lookin' for new work by month's end."

I wrapped my arms around myself, as if I could somehow hold my world together, and fled up into the mill.

Inside, my steps sounded big and hollow banging up the stairs. I came out into the spinning room on the second floor, all its long, still machines waiting for someone to come and direct them. I knelt there in the shadows under the rough brown rafters, listening to the gears shudder overhead. From a distance I heard the water rush over the wheel, swift and cold and fueled by snowmelt upstream -- the vast, steady heartbeat of the mill. I traced my finger over the split floorboards, the rivets driven into patches where the wood had grown too thin. I knew the path of every uneven board in these floors, the very spiderweb of cracks in the walls; the leather belts and iron gears and moss-covered wheel said
home
in every sigh and rustle.

Stirwaters had witnessed the birth of this town, had watched generations of Shearing-folk pass through its doors, pace these floors under their rhythmic labor, pass into memory again. Our little mill was not merely the center of our world, it was also the heart of Shearing. We had grown up knowing that the village was built up around the mill, and ran still to the rhythm of the waterwheel. Every other business in the village -- the inn, the bakehouse, the blacksmith and joiner -- was here to serve Stirwaters and its workers. If the mill went, there would be no reason for anyone to stay, and the sweet sympathetic cluster of townspeople banded together in my home would be cast to the four winds like dust.

My father's voice seemed to echo in the room:
We don't own this mill, girls; we are merely stewards here.

Rosie found me, minutes or hours later. She floated into the spinning room with nothing at all like her usual pell-mell gait, settled herself beside me, and put her chin on my shoulder. After a long moment, she said, "Do we close the mill?"

I turned and looked at my sister for the first time in days. She looked miserable and pale, bright hair pulled tight under her veil, blue eyes ringed with red. Black did not become her, and suddenly I knew I could not stand to see her in it another day. I gathered my sister into my arms and held fast to her, under the gentle murmur of the gears.

"Is it Sunday?" I asked, and when she shook her head, I gave my answer: "Then we do not close."

By God's grace or sheer chance, the world did
not
stop turning, and Stirwaters's millwheel kept right on turning with it. I spent the next days tucked away in Father's office, answering letters and counting out pay slips, and not looking up to see his empty chair, or the cloak rack by the door that held no ragged gray topcoat. Rosie took over the mill-works, a jumbled affair of ancient machines and spare parts cobbled together until Stirwaters resembled nothing in the known milling world. She had been Father's shadow these last few years; she knew the mill as well as anyone.

The millhands, for their part, had seen too many millers come and go to pay much mind to James Miller's passing. The loss of the miller was a minor upset, at worst, a hiccough in production, to be smoothed over by experienced hands until some long-lost cousin or nephew arrived to take up the reins. But Rosie and I were the last of the line; no one was coming to pick up what Father had let drop. Stirwaters was
our
responsibility; it was our duty to ensure that the old mill did not slip out of Miller hands after five generations.

Thus I began my career as the miller of Shearing village. And if there is any reason the world did not stop in its procession and toss us all into the void, it can only be because I was too stubborn to let go. Though we were whittled down to nothing, scoured and battered and stripped clean, we rallied together through the end of winter and the first uncertain days of spring, and before we knew it -- long before we were ready for it -- the turning of the days brought us round to woolmarket, and the official start of my first season as Stirwaters's miller.

It was a cool, damp morning in early March, and I stood in the kitchen at the Millhouse, watching the first flocks of sheep toddle toward Stirwaters's woolshed. Like a shifting grey-white sea, they bumped and nudged one another as they flowed into the yard, while a mist drifted up from the river and cloaked everything in a silver shroud.

"I can't go out there," I said, still gripping my mug of long-cold coffee.

"What?" Rosie turned to stare at me. She was half into her cloak already, and half out the door. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm not ready --" I said. "It's too soon --"

"You'd better
get
ready, missie, because the wool is here. The men are here. And they're waiting for you, Mistress Miller. Unless you expect Jack Townley to buy our wool for us."

That
would
have been a disaster, and any other time the very thought of it would have made me smile. I had to get hold of myself. There were dealers from all over the Gold Valley waiting in the woolshed, ready to supply Stirwaters with the wool we needed for the year's run. And unless I was there to buy it, there would be no run, and the determination I had professed these last weeks would be no more than empty bravado. But to step forward, to face the world and say, "I am the miller now" -- to be the
final
word on whether we turned left or right, went ahead or held fast -- no, no. I wasn't ready.
Rosie prized the mug from my hand, dumped my cloak over my shoulders, and thrust my bonnet into my hands.

"I can't do this," I protested again, as my sister shoved me out the door.

"Don't be an idiot," she said. "You were born to do this."

Rosie herded me toward the woolshed like a recalcitrant ewe, but once in the shadow of the old building, I felt a strange sense of calm. Our woolshed is beautiful in the morning, with sunlight pouring in the high windows, the wood floors polished to gleaming by generations of oily fleeces. With the barn doors swung wide, it was as bright inside as out, and the crisp spring air smelled of wool and the lavender tucked in among the fleeces to chase away moths. I breathed in the odd but lovely fragrance, and prepared to step across the threshold.

"Aye, mistress, make way!"

I jumped aside to let George Harte, a young upcountry shepherd, pass by with a donkey train, their broad backs heaped high with burlap-wrapped fleeces. One of the donkeys dropped a donkey-mess right where I'd been standing. Rosie choked back a laugh and gave my shoulder a friendly push. The Stirwaters workday had begun.

"Right." I smoothed my skirts, straightened my bonnet, and marched inside. "Mr. Woolsey," I called to the squat, sturdy farmer baling fleeces a few yards away. "Have you brought me any of those hogget ewes you promised last fall? I'll give you sixteen for the lot, if they're as fine as you said they'd be."

This had been my game, every year, and I was good at it. Not as good as Mam had been -- but Father was a disaster, and we were under strict orders not to let him near the woolshed on Market Days. I liked the rhythm of the bargaining, the give and take of offer and counteroffer, the nudge and tap and gentle tug to see how far I could get.