Page 62 of Black and Silver

“Look what your arrogance has done?” Lawrence boomed at Owen. “Will you feel self-satisfied and proud of your actions when you are moldering in a gaol, sir?”

“I…I didn’t…he cannot be dying,” Owen said, staring at Lord Gerald as blood streamed down his face and onto his neckcloth and jacket from his nose, which was now perched at an odd angle. “I did not do this. I am not a murderer.”

Minnie was so close to the edge of tears. She wanted to leap to her feet and finish the job Lord Waldorf had begun in ending Owen’s life. She could not bear the thought of losing Lord Gerald so soon after meeting him.

Hugging her mother’s limp form tightly, Minnie glanced across to Lord Gerald as he moaned in Carys’s arms. She was so close to tears that her eyes and throat ached.

And then Carys winked at her.

More than that, Lord Gerald opened one eye halfway, and when he spotted Minnie watching him in horror, his mouth pulled into the smallest of smiles.

And then Lord Gerald huffed out a breath and went completely motionless in Carys’s arms.

Minnie gasped, but not because the specter of death had touched the house. She gasped because she knew exactly what she needed to do.

“Murderer!” Minnie shouted, her heart pounding and her lungs squeezing with the desperate need to either laugh or cough. She jerked her head up and fixed Owen with a horrified look. “You’ve murdered him! Lord Gerald is dead because of you!”

“He isn’t…no!” Owen shouted, reeling back.

The moment and setting were too perfect for Minnie to resist shouting, “I curse you! By the power of the Curse of Godwin Castle, I curse you!”

She set her mother aside gently as she came out of her swoon, then stood. Lord Owen and his parson both flinched back as she surged toward them.

“I curse you, Owen Spurloch,” she continued, wishing she still wore her black gown and had her hair down and flowing wildly to boot. She remembered how Mary from the village church had assumed she was a witch, and in that moment, she had never embraced that image more. “I curse you to a lifetime of tragedy, you toad! You have sought to imprison a sorceress, and now you have killed a good man! May your days be filled with darkness and may treachery await you around every corner!”

“No! No, this isn’t real. You’re not a…a witch?” Owen stumbled back, his face a mask of fright and disbelief.

The parson started muttering prayers and crossing himself, backing farther away from Minnie, his face white.

“I have returned from the dead once, and I will do it again simply to spite you if you do not leave this place at once!” Minnie shouted. Her face was a mask of rage, but inwardly, she rolled with laughter. Owen was an utter fool for believing a single thing he was seeing. “Be gone with you!”

“Help! Help!” Owen shrieked, turning and bolting for the door, the parson following him. “Get me out of this place at once!”

“Caren! We are leaving!” Minnie’s father shouted.

“But…” Minnie’s mother glanced between her and her husband.

“Now!” Minnie’s father bellowed, already running for the door.

“Mother, you do not have to leave with them,” Minnie appealed to her mother, though perhaps without as much enthusiasm as she should have. Her mother was complicit in what would have been her fate for failing to stand up against it, after all.

After a few more moments of hesitation, Minnie’s mother pinched her face in misery, burst into sobbing, and ran after her father. The two of them, Owen, and the parson bolted from the room.

“Go after them,” Lawrence charged the maids as Waldorf and Kat joined Carys and Lord Dunstan crouching beside Lord Gerald. “Make certain that they leave here, and make it clear to them that if they ever return or pursue Lady Minerva again, everything they have done today will be exposed to thetonand used against them.”

“Yes, my lord,” the maids all said in turn, bobbing curtsies, then looking like Furies who had been sent after the villains of a Greek myth to hound them.

When that was done, Lawrence turned to join the others crowded around Lord Gerald. It was clear to Minnie by the genuine fear in his eyes and his pale face that he believed his father to be in dire straits, but she caught him, keeping him from falling to his knees in front of his father.

“All is well,” she attempted to reassure him. “Your father is—”

“I must go to him,” Lawrence said, trying to break away from Minnie.

As if sensing the turn things might take, Lord Gerald drew in a deep breath and groaned again, showing that he was alive. He continued to huddle in Carys’s lap, however, and to behave as though he might die again at any moment.

“Father!” Lawrence cried out plaintively.

Minnie was uncertain what role Lord Gerald wished her to play in the drama they were apparently continuing, but she held fast to Lawrence.

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