Chapter Three
W hen the Godwin family collectively put their mind to something, there wasn’t a force in the world that could prevent them from pursuing that goal like a tidal wave rushing ashore.
Unfortunately for Dunstan, that boundless energy and irresistible force was now directed at him.
“The answer to the dilemma of how to break the Curse of Godwin Castle must be in the library somewhere,” Lawrence said, taking Lady Minerva’s hand and rushing straight across the large, drafty room to a bank of bookshelves at the far end. “I trust in our Godwin ancestors to have sprinkled clues and hints all throughout their diaries over the past several hundred years.”
“Diaries?” Lady Minerva said, letting go of Lawrence’s hand and darting ahead of him to the shelf of desperately old books. “The library is filled with diaries ?”
“Our family has always kept diaries,” Cedric commented as he assisted Lady Muriel to one of the dusty chairs near the fireplace.
Dunstan was glad someone had been keeping a fire lit in the library so that the cavernous space was not icy with December chill. Then again, with so many members of the family visiting for the holidays, the room had been kept habitable so that various couples could enjoy some relatively quiet time together.
“Ooh! These books look like diaries,” Lady Bernadette said, veering off to the line of bookshelves that faced the tall windows. “Quite old ones as well.”
“I remember these books from when I was a boy,” Alden said, standing beside his wife and resting a hand on the small of her back. “Some bits are quite scandalous.”
Lady Bernadette giggled, and Alden beamed, laughing with her.
Dunstan’s heart pulled at the empty space in his chest where his lack of love resided. He was glad to see his brother and his cousins so happily settled. He was not jealous of them, not truly. But that hollow spot in him felt somehow wider and more hollow with everyone in the family gathered around and so happily settled.
Dunstan found himself glancing toward the fireplace, where Carys had continued on with Uncle Gerald and was now settling him comfortably so that he could watch the activity. She glanced up at him as she tucked a wool blanket over Uncle Gerald’s lap and grinned mischievously.
For the briefest of moments, Dunstan had difficulty breathing. It must have been the dust that the family was already dislodging from the shelves and previously untouched surfaces.
“Good lord,” Lady Kat said, thumbing through a very old and brittle-looking tome she’d taken from a shelf along the wall where Alden and Lady Bernadette were scanning titles. “The first entry in this diary is dated fifteen eighty-nine!”
“Be very careful with that, my dear,” Waldorf said, rushing to her side and glancing over her shoulder at the words the diary contained. “It’s over two hundred years old.”
“Yes, my love, I can do arithmetic,” Lady Kat said in a flat tone. Her eyes shone with affection all the same as she peeked at Waldorf.
“Blast! Could somebody assist me,” Lord Arnold called out from a different bookshelf, which looked as though one of the shelves was about to collapse. He had his arms braced against the line of very old books, like he was the only thing holding the shelf up.
“I’ll help,” Dunstan answered.
He sent a final glance to Carys before rushing across the room to sort the collapsing shelf with Lord Arnold.
It was a delicate matter, as something had dislodged at the back of the shelf, threatening to push the entire thing forward and spill its brittle, precious contents across the floor. Dunstan was able to work with Lord Arnold to move armfuls of dusty, crumbling books, some of which were diaries, some printed books, and some handwritten manuscripts on vellum, so that the shelf itself could be adjusted and stabilized. It was filthy, suffocating work, and Dunstan found himself coughing far more than he wanted to.
“Are you certain a little inappropriate dalliance isn’t what you need to reverse your fortunes?” Lord Arnold asked as the two of them brushed arms while shifting books. Arnold wiggled his eyebrows at Dunstan invitingly.
“No,” Dunstan laughed. “But I am grateful for the offer.”
Arnold laughed with him, his feelings remaining unhurt.
Dunstan glanced across the room to Carys, wondering if she’d seen the exchange and if she was as amused by it as he was. He spotted her following frantically after Lady Minerva, who was removing books from the shelves, checking the titles, and handing them aside to her with lightning speed.
Carys looked up at him, her eyes wide with wariness as Lady Minerva handed her another book.
The scene descended into complete chaos within minutes. Dust filled the air, swirling in the sunlight that poured in through the tall windows with their view of the English Channel beyond. Dunstan was shocked by the speed with which his kinsmen had pulled so many books from their homes for the last hundred years and scattered them around the library.
“What is the oldest volume anyone has yet discovered?” Lady Muriel asked from her seat near the fire. She was now surrounded by books that Cedric had brought to her. They were stacked on the table beside her, at her feet, and tucked into the crevices between her body and the chair. She had three books open and appeared to be scanning between all their pages.
“Kat’s is from fifteen eighty-nine,” Lady Bernadette called out, taking three more books off the shelves. “But I’ve just found a leather-bound journal dated fifteen sixty-four!”
Dunstan abandoned Arnold’s continued efforts to sort the books from the collapsed shelf and dashed across the room to Lady Bernadette.
“Perhaps we should leave the older journals on the shelves and take them down one by one to preserve them,” he suggested as lightly as he could. His hands practically shook with horror at the way everyone in his family was drawing the old tomes down from the shelves as though they were in a new bookseller’s premises in London.
As if to emphasize his point, Waldorf muttered, “Blast,” from a bookshelf against the other wall. He’d taken a leather-bound volume down from a high shelf, and even across the room, Dunstan could see that the pages had crumbled when he’d opened it.
“Have a care,” Dunstan called out, abandoning Lady Bernadette and striding the length of the library to hover by Waldorf’s side. “We are attempting to ascertain if there is a way to break the curse, I believe, not unearthing new ones by destroying old books.”
Waldorf snorted a laugh, as if Dunstan had been joking.
Dunstan most definitely had not been joking.
The chaos continued. Dunstan found himself dashing from one end of the room to the other, frequently crossing paths with Carys, who appeared to be rescuing some of the more delicate books and secreting them in an old repository that the others didn’t seem to have noticed yet beside the fireplace.
“I’m beginning to think whoever constructed the repository knew there would come a day when the family waged war against their ancestors in this way,” Carys whispered to Dunstan as they both settled a few truly ancient diaries in the safety of the wide, stone niche.
Dunstan snickered, but that intake of breath caused him to breathe in dust, which had him sneezing. His first sneeze turned into a sneezing fit. Before he knew it, Carys had rested a hand on his arm and led him away from the dusty corner, offering him her handkerchief as she did.
Dunstan took it with a grateful look and blew his nose. The formerly white handkerchief came away grey around the edges.
“Unbelievable,” Dunstan muttered as Carys laughed at him. “What do they all hope to accomplish by laying waste to the library like this?”
Carys continued to giggle as she took back her handkerchief, then used it to wipe Dunstan’s face. “They are attempting to make you happy,” she said, her eyes glittering with sly affection. “They care about your wellbeing and regret the curse you’ve inherited.”
“Yes, well, I’m beginning to wonder if my family are the curse,” Dunstan said, laughter bubbling up within him. “We were perfectly happy here, together, before they all arrived to cause this fuss.”
For a tiny moment, something unreadable passed through Carys’s expression. It made Dunstan feel warm, but instead of the usual comfort he felt in confiding in his friend, the warmth that hit him fizzed and sparked.
“Oh! Oh! It’s tipping!” Lady Muriel called out a moment later, breaking whatever strange, new feeling had Dunstan so captivated.
He turned to find that the stack of books by Lady Muriel’s chair had been added to, and that entire tower was in serious danger of spilling over.
Dunstan raced across the room to stabilize it, shifting some of the books from the top of the stack to start a second pile by Lady Muriel’s feet.
“These diaries are actually interesting,” Lady Muriel said, once Dunstan was crouched in front of her, his hands brushing over the books to make certain they wouldn’t dissolve to dust. “Your ancestors were quite a lively lot. This chap from the sixteen forties was apparently instrumental in preventing that blackguard, Oliver Cromwell, from uniting Britannia under his puritanical regime.”
“Thank God he was stopped all those years ago,” Lady Kat said from the sofa several feet away, where she was perusing her own stack of books. “I am desperately in favor of uniting Britannia, but had it been done under that oaf’s rule, we ladies would all be wearing black and locked away in our homes, consigned to domestic duties alone.”
“What a horrible life,” Lady Muriel sniffed, turning the page of the diary she was reading. “Only Minnie would be happy wearing black.”
“I no longer wear black,” Lady Minerva commented from the opposite end of the room.
Sure enough, she was currently dressed in a blue and yellow gown of Scandinavian design. Dunstan understood that was something of a private jest between her and Lawrence.
The flurry of activity continued. The one blessing was that one by one, the family members left pulling books from the shelves and moved to various chairs and sofas to read them. That merely meant that Dunstan and Carys had an opportunity to flit about the room, rescuing discarded books that looked as though they belonged in a museum. Carys even produced a feather duster from somewhere and had a go at cleaning some of the shelves that had been emptied.
“Ever the housekeeper,” Dunstan teased her as he returned books to one of the shelves she’d just cleaned.
“Someone has to do the work,” she commented, shrugging one shoulder carelessly, almost coquettishly.
Then again, Carys was far more agreeable and entertaining than any of the coquettes Dunstan had danced with at social events involving the ton .
“Whatever my uncle is paying you, that amount should be doubled,” Dunstan laughed as he arranged the books he’d returned to the shelf.
“He does not pay me,” Carys said, her expression growing more serious.
“What?” Dunstan stopped his work and turned to her.
As Carys paused her work, Dunstan noted Edgar Pearce slink his way into the room, wringing his hands in front of him, like he wasn’t certain he should be in the room with the family. He peeked at everyone with their noses in books, then dashed across to Uncle Gerald’s chair.
“Lord Gerald does not pay me,” Carys went on. She noted Edgar, but paid him no mind as he leaned in to whisper in Uncle Gerald’s ear.
“That is outlandish,” Dunstan said, immediately irate on her behalf.
Carys laughed at him. “He does not pay me a wage,” she clarified, “but he allows me to live in the castle free of charge, and he provides me with an allowance to purchase whatever I might need.”
Dunstan blinked. “Is that not a wage?”
“I do not see it as such,” Carys said, shrugging and returning to her work. “You are aware, are you not, that the Godwin family has supported the Weatherby family for as long as anyone can remember.”
Dunstan frowned slightly, going back to returning books to the shelves. “I knew that Weatherby family has always served at Godwin Castle,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”
“Yes, everyone does,” Carys said in a teasing tone before stepping down to the next, half-empty shelf along the row and dusting there.
Dunstan grinned at her. “There you are, then,” he said. “You are as much a party to the curse as I am, as witnessed by the speed and ferocity with which my family has destroyed a centuries-old library.”
Carys laughed loudly enough to draw attention. Indeed, when Dunstan checked, Uncle Gerald and Edgar were watching them.
Although the way the hair stood up on the back of Dunstan’s neck made him feel like the two men had been staring at them from before Carys laughed.
“I only hope we discover something about the curse because of all this mess,” Dunstan sighed.
His sigh caused him to breathe in more dust, which caused him to cough yet again.
Coughing interrupted his work, as he had to move to borrow a handkerchief from Cedric, since Carys’s had been ruined.
As he did that, Carys finished dusting as much as she could and left the room for a moment to find a maid to fetch tea for them. Once she departed, Edgar finished whatever he’d been saying to Uncle Gerald and left as well.
Dunstan thought nothing of it all and would have continued his work, but Uncle Gerald caught his attention and gestured for him to attend him.
“Is there something I can fetch for you, Uncle Gerald?” Dunstan asked, smiling at the fantasy of being a servant in his own castle instead of its someday-master.
Uncle Gerald seemed to catch on to Dunstan’s play and barked a laugh. “Sit down,” he ordered, pointing to the only empty, sittable surface nearby, a footstool in front of his chair.
Dunstan sat with a broad grin, remembering times when he had been a child asked to sit for some conversation with his uncle.
“I’m not about to be scolded, am I?” he asked, visceral feelings of inadequacy from those long, long ago days creeping back on him.
“No, no, not at all,” Uncle Gerald said, then contradicted himself immediately by saying, “Edgar Pearce thinks you’ve become too familiar with Carys.”
The last traces of Dunstan’s nostalgic smile vanished. “What right does the man have to an opinion about my friendship with Carys? Er, that is, Mrs. Weatherby.”
Uncle Gerald narrowed his eyes a bit, tilting his head to give the appearance of studying Dunstan from a great height. He hummed, but took his time before speaking.
“I am exceedingly fond of Carys, as you well know,” he said.
“We are all fond of her,” Dunstan said. The back of his neck prickled as he grew suspicious about where the audience was going. In an attempt to quell any thoughts of inappropriate behavior, he rushed on to say, “Carys might as well be a Godwin. She is like family to us all, is she not?”
“She is, she is,” Uncle Gerald said, stroking his chin. “Very much like family.”
He glanced out over the room filled with reading, buzzing family members, then smiled.
Dunstan twisted slightly to look at his family as well. They certainly seemed happy, now that they had a grand endeavor to pursue. He hadn’t seen his brother and cousins so silent or so attentive on women in all his life.
“Good Lord,” Lady Minerva exclaimed, glancing up from the old diary she’d been reading. “Did you all know that a certain Lady Gladys Godwin was sent to Mercia in the sixteenth century as a lady-in-waiting to the great Mercian queen Elizabeth?”
“We knew,” Cedric answered her with a slight roll of his eyes. “Wystan went through a spell where she was determined to follow in Lady Gladys’s footsteps.”
“Why did she not travel to Mercia to serve Queen Matilda, then?” Lady Kat asked.
“Because she met Lord Maximillian Farley, that’s why,” Waldorf answered, snorting.
Dunstan grinned at the memory of his sister’s ill-fated fascination with the East Anglian lord who had spent a season with the family before heading off to the American colonies to begin a new life. Poor Wystan had eaten her heart out with sadness for a full year after Lord Maximillian had turned down her pleas to marry her and take her with him. It would have been a miserable match for Wystan, and Uncle Gerald had been quite correct to deny her.
As those thoughts struck Dunstan, Carys returned to the library with a tea tray, two of the maids following her with additional trays. All thoughts of his cousin’s ill-fated almost- romance fled Dunstan’s head, and for a moment, he just sat there and watched Carys as she set her tray down on one of the few clear spots on the library’s large table, then directed the maids to move books and do the same.
She truly was a blessing and an asset to the family. Dunstan could no more imagine Godwin Castle without her than he could imagine the sea without fish. The idea of being saddled with a cursed castle did not bother him half as much as it should, knowing that his friend was as committed to the legacy of the castle as he was.
A slight cough from Uncle Gerald snagged Dunstan’s attention, and he turned back to the man.
He found Uncle Gerald watching him with a deeply calculating look. That look was a bit too close to the one his uncle had always worn while contemplating the fate of his family and hatching plans to steer them toward the outcome he wanted for him.
Dunstan had the feeling he knew precisely what that look was about. His uncle completely misunderstood the nature of his and Carys’s friendship, though, so he chose to ignore the implications.
“Would you care for some tea, Uncle?” he asked, rising from the footstool. “It looks as though there are cakes as well.”
“Tea and cakes?” Uncle Gerald asked, snorting a little. “Is that all you see when you glance in that direction?”
“No,” Dunstan said with a weary sigh. “I see my good friend and Godwin Castle’s housekeeper,” he added in a tone meant to scold his uncle into nipping whatever matchmaking thoughts he was having in the bud.
Uncle Gerald merely sighed.
“These diaries and other journals are fascinating,” Lady Kat said, closing the book she’d been reading and taking up another beside her as Napoleon chased a bit of fluff floating near her feet, “but they are more about the everyday management of the Godwin properties than curses and family lore.”
“Yes, it is rather disappointing that my ancestors did not devote their every waking hour to curses and stories of thwarted love,” Waldorf said with a straight face.
“Are you purposely vexing me to the point of violence?” Lady Kat asked him, fire in her eyes as she attempted not to smile.
“Perhaps,” Waldorf answered in a painfully sultry tone.
Lady Kat shifted the books off her lap and stood, grabbing Waldorf’s hand and yanking him up with her. “If you will excuse us,” she said in an airy voice. “All this activity has made me sleepy. We are going to take a nap.”
“Oh, a nap, yes, Of course,” Lady Minerva said, giving her friend the side-eye.
Dunstan found himself grinning across at Carys, who smiled at him as well. Dunstan shook his head and rolled his eyes, as if to say his family was ridiculous. Carys answered with a silent laugh, then went back to preparing tea.
Beside Dunstan, Uncle Gerald hummed, rubbing his chin. When Dunstan glanced to him, the expression in the man’s eyes sent a shiver down his spine.
Uncle Gerald was plotting, and when Gerald Godwin plotted, the world had better be on notice.