Chapter Two
C arys Weatherby considered herself to be one of the luckiest women in the world. Despite the unfortunate family she and so many generations of her family had worked for. Because of them, actually. The Godwin family were some of the nicest, cleverest, and sweetest people a woman in her position could have been employed by. Even crotchety old Lord Gerald.
“You’re in the soup now,” she giggled to Dunstan as the two of them made their way belowstairs, Dunstan carrying the tray of porcelain shards from the shattered cups.
“Me?” Dunstan protested, a light smile on his face and a bit of a spring in his step. “Poor Ruby was the one who shattered the cups.”
Carys laughed aloud. “That is not what I meant at all,” she said.
“I never truly know what you mean,” Dunstan said with a wry, sideways grin for her.
“That’s because I’m cleverer than you,” Carys said, winking as they turned a corner to descend another set of stairs.
“I could not possibly contradict that,” Dunstan said with a half-laugh.
Carys’s heart felt light. Dunstan was sometimes gloomy and defeated around his family, She was aware of the pressures he felt to fulfill their designs for him and Dunstan’s worries that he would be left out entirely. But when it was just the two of them together, completing any of the myriad of tasks that needed doing around the castle or planning for future renovations or entertainments, he was an entirely different man.
Her friend Dunstan was softer and happier than Lord Dunstan Godwin, inheritor of the family curse. Her Dunstan was a handsome man nearing fifty with grey at his temples and smile lines around his eyes. He had an over-fondness for jam tarts and laughed at the ribald jokes Danny and some of the other footmen told. He was as quick to help polish the silver or make the beds in guest rooms as any servant, but Carys had also seen him interact with his noble peers with quiet grace.
Sometimes she wished the family saw the lively, enjoyable man who she counted as her dearest friend instead of only seeing the troubled, downtrodden widower who had been wronged by a woman twenty years previously.
“What I mean is that you are the last man standing,” Carys continued as they reached the servants’ hall and Dunstan carried his load into the pantry where dishes and cups and other things were kept.
“Do not remind me,” Dunstan said with a slightly comical, long-suffering sigh. “But I suppose it makes sense, as I have always been the unluckiest in our cursed family to begin with.”
“Nonsense,” Carys said, slapping his arm playfully as he set his tray down on the blocky table in the center of the room. As she stepped across the hall into the silver room to fetch another tray, she said, “You are the last unmarried Godwin male, that is what I mean.”
“Aside from the matter of being doomed to tragedy and misery, I am quite happy never to marry again,” Dunstan said, doom in his voice as he picked through the larger pieces of broken cups.
An uncomfortable feeling pinched Carys’s heart for a moment, but she ignored it.
“Did you not see the calculating looks in all of their eyes upstairs?” she asked with a smirk as she brought a new tray into the dish room and began to load it with clean cups.
“What looks?” Dunstan asked with a frown. “They were all looking at each other, gazing deeply into their beloveds’ eyes. Well, except Lord Arnold, who I believe was gazing longingly across the room at Torrance.”
Carys hummed. “Yes, well, perhaps we should warn Tor about Lord Arnold’s interest in footmen.”
Dunstan laughed. “You know as well as I do that Tor would love a bit of a tumble with a titled guest and that he would not care which gender that guest happened to be.”
Carys’s face heated, not because of the startling nature of Tor and Lord Arnold’s proclivities—she was enough of a woman of the world to know that far more of the world was bent than most people wanted to acknowledge—but because of the naughtiness of Dunstan’s hint.
“I’m not certain your uncle would approve,” Carys said, smirking as she finished loading the new tray with cups.
“You might be surprised,” Dunstan said. He picked up the tray, then said, “Shall we return to the lion’s den?”
“You go on ahead,” Carys said. “I’ll bring up another pot of tea. The one I brought up earlier is not going to be nearly enough.”
“Right you are,” Dunstan said, then nodded to her as if he were under her command and turned to go.
It was only after Carys listened to Dunstan’s footsteps disappearing up the stairs that she realized she hadn’t fully made her point with him, that the family was clearly about to attempt to make a match for him and marry him off, whether he wanted it or not. She knew the nature of happy families where all of the siblings had recently married too well. Those happy couples always believed their state of bliss should be shared by everyone, and they would not stop at meddling to ensure everyone around them felt the same way.
As if to prove her point, there was a soft knock on the dish room door, and when she turned, she spotted her cousin Edgar hovering in the doorway.
Edgar’s three sisters, Carys’s second cousins on her father’s side, had all finally married and gone off to new homes and lives within the last two years, leaving Edgar to fend for himself in several ways.
“Good morning, Cousin Edgar,” Carys greeted the mousey man with her usual kind smile. “Is there something I can do for you? Does Mr. Hardy need help?”
Edgar was Godwin Castle’s underbutler and Mr. Hardy was the butler. It was something of a bone of contention with Edgar because he was approaching five-and-fifty and Mr. Hardy, like Carys herself, was considered astoundingly young for his position in his thirties. Carys was just past thirty-eight, which was not too young to be housekeeper, but she had taken on that position when she was merely twenty-eight, shocking everyone. But her mother wished to retire, and Godwin Castle always had a Weatherby woman as housekeeper, so….
Edgar cleared his throat and frowned as he stepped into the room. Not for the first time, Carys noted that the man’s serious expression made him look a great deal like Dunstan when he was feeling moody.
“I do not need your assistance at this time, sweet cousin,” Edgar began, making Carys preemptively roll her eyes as she marched past him toward the kitchen. “It is you who, I believe, could use mine.”
Edgar followed her as she headed to the kitchen stove, where Cook perpetually had a kettle on, ready for tea.
“Is this a matter of the household, Edgar, or is this personal?” she asked, one eyebrow raised as she used a thick mitt to lift the kettle and pour it into a teapot that was already waiting.
Dunstan wasn’t the only one whom family members wished to see married off. Only in her case, since his sisters had all moved on, Edgar had mounted a campaign to do the job for her himself.
“You know it is unseemly for you to be so intimate with the family,” Edgar said, opening his latest attempt to convince her to marry him with one of his usual arguments. “You are a servant in their house, not a member of the family.”
Carys glanced up at Edgar as she finished pouring the scalding water. She knew her cousin too well. He was deeply jealous of her connection to the Godwins. He had always adored and admired every member of the Godwin family. There had always been whispers as to how close his connection to a certain long-deceased cousin of Gerald Godwin he might be, but they were whispers only.
“I feel like a member of the family,” she told Edgar bluntly, earning a sly look from Cook and one of the kitchen maids as she did. “You know as well as I do that Lord Gerald treats me like one of his daughters. By the way,” she said, turning to Cook as she set the empty kettle on the side. “Lady Wystan and her family will be arriving Christmas day, not sooner, as we’d thought. They will be visiting Lord Baldrick’s family in Dorset first. And Lady Eleanora and her husband will be here just before New Year’s Eve. The castle truly will be full to the brim with Godwins by the new year.”
“Just the way we like it,” Cook said with a wink.
The small diversion was enough to break the train of Edgar’s scolding. Or whatever it was he was attempting to do. That gave Carys enough time to grasp the teapot, check to make certain the tea leaves had already been added to the waiting pot—they had—and to place the hot pot on another tray so that she could carry it upstairs.
Edgar remembered his purpose just as Carys reached the corridor and followed after her.
“It is unwise for you to maintain any sort of connection resembling friendship with a member of the Godwin family,” Edgar pestered her as she walked to the staircase and started up. “You should be turning your caring attentions to someone who could truly use them, someone who is free to adore you.”
“I adore you, too, Cousin Edgar,” Carys said with a short smile, then facing forward. “But I’ve no wish to marry you. I’ve no wish to marry anyone. I enjoy my position as housekeeper of Godwin Castle too much, and I would have to give it up if I married.”
That was not entirely true, as past members of Carys’s family had held the position while married, including her own mother, but it made for a solid argument against Edgar’s suit.
“But would you not prefer to care for just one man instead of an entire family?” Edgar asked, lowering his voice when they stepped out into the upstairs hallway.
For a flash of an instant, Carys imagined herself in a tiny cottage somewhere, keeping house for Dunstan alone. The two of them would make such a cozy old couple, enjoying their books and long, rambling walks along the shore, identifying sea birds and collecting shells.
She shook those thoughts out of her head and continued down the hallway. “I am entirely content with my life just as it is now,” she said in answer to both herself and Edgar.
She reached the entrance to the great hall, and fortunately, Edgar did not follow her in. Her cousin had a bit of fear mixed in with his admiration of the Godwin family, as if they might banish him forever, should he, like Carys, dare to get too close.
“…must be a way for you to be happy as well,” Lord Cedric was in the middle of telling Dunstan as Carys brought the fresh tea over to the circle of the family.
“Or at the very least, there must be a way to avoid the curse,” Lady Muriel added. She sat sprawled in an entirely unladylike way on the sofa, her hands resting on her huge belly. The sight of the woman was enough to make Carys wonder if they would have a Christmas baby in the Godwin family.
“There is no way to avoid the inevitable,” Dunstan said from the seat he looked like he’d been forced into between Lady Katherine and Lady Bernadette.
“There must be a way to fight against the curse,” Lady Katherine said. “Curses are not inevitable.”
“What exactly are the parameters of this curse?” Lord Arnold asked. “As one of the few non-Godwins in the room, I am unfamiliar with the lore.”
“Carys?” Minnie, who had also become a good friend to Carys in the last month or so, turned to her. “You tell the story of the curse so well. Will you regale us with it again?”
Carys moved to set the tray with the new teapot on the table. Dunstan immediately leapt up and took it to pour.
“Certainly,” Carys said, stepping back a bit, folding her hands in front of her, and clearing her throat like she had just been thrust onto a stage for a performance. She noticed both Lord Gerald and Dunstan’s proud and encouraging smiles.
“As you all know, your original Godwin ancestor was one Aethelbore the Swift,” she began. “Aethelbore, had promised to marry a local woman, Morgana Whitney. The two were young, and very much in love. Aethelbore had been given an amulet by King Eadred as reward for valor in battle. Aethelbore had that amulet divided into two parts. He gave Morgana half of it as a token of his undying love.
“Except, as it happened, his love was not undying. The moment King Eadred offered Aethelbore the Duke of Amesbury title and estates to match, including the earlier version of this castle, he forsook Morgana and married the king’s daughter for his own gain.”
“Just like a man,” Lady Katherine tsked , shaking her head.
“Might I remind you, my dear, that if he had not married the other woman, I would not be here now,” Lord Waldorf teased her.
“I have yet to decide if that would be better or worse,” Lady Kat said, petting her cat with pretend imperiousness, her chin tilted up.
Several of the others laughed.
“Go on with the story, then,” Lord Gerald said.
Carys continued. “Morgana was so enraged, seeing as Aethelbore had already gotten her with child, that she put a curse on the castle. Until the two halves of the amulet were rejoined and a Godwin married a Whitney, death and disaster would befall any members of the Godwin family who possessed the castle.”
“There you have it, then,” Minnie said, nodding. “All you have to do is find one of these Whitneys and marry them, and the curse will be broken.”
“The Whitney family died out within a few generations of Morgana,” Lord Gerald told her. “Believe me. Family members going back hundreds of years have thought of that possibility and given up in vain.”
“Oh, bother,” Minnie said, flopping back against the sofa and snuggling beside Lord Lawrence. “But I suppose you are correct in saying that the family would have considered that possibility umpteen generations ago.”
“What happened, then?” Lady Bernadette asked. “What happened to Aethelbore and Morgana and her child?”
Carys shrugged. “Like Lord Gerald said, Morgana and the baby vanished from history, though one could reasonably assume that they lived out their lives nearby, as travel was more difficult in those days and one did not generally move away from one’s village. If there were ever any records of that child and what became of them, they are long gone. And as for Aethelbore, well, at first he laughed off the curse. But then his firstborn son fell from the battlements to his death. When his second son took possession of the castle, that man’s firstborn son was killed in battle before the age of twenty. And then next firstborn after him.”
“All of them had tragedy befall them?” Lady Bernadette asked.
“My own brother and his wife were killed in a boating accident when Alden, Dunstan, and their sisters were small children,” Lord Gerald said sadly. “Ross was younger than me, but there is little joy in being a surviving eldest son when such a beloved brother was taken too soon.”
Carys’s heart went out to Lord Gerald. She had never known Lord Ross, but she had grown up admiring Lord Gerald almost as much as Edgar had.
“What about the amulet?” Minnie asked, shaking everyone out of their sad thoughts. “You told me once that the curse said the two halves of the amulet had to be rejoined for the curse to break. What of that?”
Carys shrugged. “It is as I told you,” she said. “Part of the curse Morgana laid on the castle involved reuniting the two halves of the amulet. Legend has it that Aethelbore’s half still exists and is held in a vault somewhere in the castle, along with the rest of the family’s treasures.”
Something of a buzz stirred among the new Godwin brides.
“We should have it fetched so we can study it,” Lady Muriel said.
“Yes,” Minnie agreed. “I do not know why I did not think of that before. Can it be fetched?”
Lord Gerald laughed. “Have you ever seen the state of the family vault, my dear?” He answered his own question by saying, “Of course not. It’s an utter mess. It contains hundreds of years of junk that no one has bothered to comb through. Last I heard, it had flooded more than a few times, as it’s below ground level.”
He paused and tilted his head to the side.
“No, no, that isn’t right,” he went on. “It used to be below ground level, but after a flood in sixteen ninety-three, the original vault was cleaned out and anything of any value was removed to one of the attics.”
“Are you certain?” Lord Cedric asked with a frown. “I always believed the contents of the vault were moved to a storage room in the old part of the castle.”
“No, it was an attic,” Lord Waldorf said. “I am certain of it.”
“I think the so-called vault is a myth,” Lord Alden said. “I’ve certainly never heard of it and I grew up at Godwin Castle.”
“Then we should search all the attics and storerooms,” Lady Bernadette said, sitting forward a bit. “Are there many?”
“There are several,” Carys said, already feeling the situation getting out of hand. “And I believe the vault still exists as well and is on the other side of the wall from the wine cellar.”
“Can it be reached another way or will we have to break through the wall of the wine cellar to reach it?” Lord Cedric asked.
“No one is breaking through the wall of the wine cellar,” Lord Waldorf said, holding up his hands. “Unless we drink all the wine first.”
That comment earned him a hearty laugh.
“Please do not go tearing down walls in a castle I am about to inherit,” Dunstan said, moving to stand by Carys after he’d finished pouring tea and handing around cups.
“Surely there is some sort of inventory or guide to the valuables contained in this castle,” Lady Katherine said as the cat in her lap yawned like the conversation of the humans was an utter bore. “Would those sorts of records be kept in the study or the library?”
“Only recent records are kept in Father’s study,” Lord Cedric answered. “Everything from my grandfather’s day and earlier is stored in the library.”
“Then we should go to the library,” Lady Muriel said, starting to scoot to the edge of the sofa and rocking as she prepared to stand.
Lord Cedric stood before her and hauled her to her feet. That sent the entire family into a flurry of movement as everyone got up.
“Are we retiring to the library to look for evidence for the whereabouts of Aethelbore Godwin’s half of the amulet?” Lady Bernadette asked as she stood.
“We might as well search for other ways to thwart the Curse of Godwin Castle as well,” Minnie said, smiling at Lord Lawrence as though they’d discovered the most delightful diversion possible.
“I beg you all to reconsider,” Dunstan said, holding out his hands. “You cannot all descend on the library and tear it apart searching for clues to an old family legend. The castle might just be cursed with no recourse for ending the curse. We should accept that possibility, too.”
It was too late. The bulk of the Godwin family had already begun to move toward the great hall’s door, abandoning the tea that Carys and Dunstan had gone to lengths to set out.
“This will be a lark,” Lord Gerald said as Carys hurried to help him out of his chair.
Dunstan shifted to his uncle’s other side and helped Carys bring the man to his feet. “This will be a disaster,” he said, sending Carys a wary look.
Carys was inclined to believe him.