“If I might advise you, Miss Carstairs-Browne, I don’t think you should be alone in Carstairs Manor. I mean, a great rambling place with not even a servant left.”
“I know Mr.Roberts,” I said, smiling, “and I know the story that is told about the curse, but you see, I don’t believe in old curses.”
I was talking to Mr.Roberts, the agent who managed Carstairs Manor and land. It had fallen to me to inherit the crumbling old house and the few remaining acres of what had once been a huge estate.
I was the last of the Carstairs, my parents having failed to produce any more children. The “Browne” came from my mother who before her marriage to my father was Amanda Browne, and being an independent woman, insisted on her name being linked to the Carstairs name.
My parents were dead, and there was no one else to take on the old ruin. I had dragged myself away from the novel I was writing, to come to Carstairs le Moor, as the village is called, to try to sort out the situation. My intention was, to sell the place for whatever I could get for it.
The story I referred to goes, in brief, something like this: One night in eighteen hundred and five, Sir Lucas Carstairs was carousing with a group of his cronies in the Great Hall.
A young maid was serving them their wine, and at one point, Sir Lucas pulled her on to his lap. The girl started to struggle, begging to be released. This aroused Sir Lucas, and in his drunken state he decided to show the girl who was master.
With the aid of his intoxicated companions, the girl, a virgin, was stripped naked, and being held down by four of the men, Sir Lucas raped her.
When he had finished, he invited his companions to enjoy the girl. She was subjected to multiple rapes, and her screams were heard in the servant’s hall. One of the servants, a footman, was the girl’s brother. Hearing his sister’s screams he made to go to her rescue, but was restrained by the other servants who feared the power of Sir Lucas.
The young footman managed to break loose and raced into the Great Hall. Seeing one of the men in the act of raping his sister, he tore the man from her. He was seized and while being held was forced to watch the remainder of the men take his sister.
When they had all taken their turn, Sir Lucas turned on the young footman and struck him across the face saying, “You’ve just seen what serving wenches are good for.”
Then young man, now insane with what he had witnessed, broke free and struck Sir Lucas. One of the rapists took a knife from the table and drove it into the footman’s back, inflicting a mortal wound.
As he lay dying on the floor, the footman pronounced a curse on the Carstairs family that went like this; “May all Carstairs women be defiled as my sister has been defiled, until the day a Carstairs women surrenders her body to a footman.”
Sir Lucas drove the toe of his boot into the dying man’s side saying, “Carstairs women do not give themselves to menial scum.” The young man died.
The raped girl, deranged though her experience and seeing her bother murdered, staggered from the Great Hall, and climbing the stairs to the east wing, she flung her self to her death from one of the windows.
Sir Lucas was the local magistrate, and such inquiry as there was, found the murderer of the footman had acted in self-defense, and the girl had committed suicide in a fit of madness. No one was ever punished for the crimes.
No one was punished, unless, if you believe the tales that are told, the Carstairs women.
In the succeeding generations of Carstairs, wives and daughters of the Carstairs men are said to have had strange things happen to them. Some committed suicide, others went insane and on three occasions, the women appear to have born children that could not possibly have been the offspring of their husbands, and claimed a ghost had raped them. Indeed, one had no husband, being an unmarried daughter.
Apart from being Carstairs women, they all had one thing in common. They all told stories of being raped in the night by an unseen assailant. Investigation of these claims found nothing, and since the three pregnancies took place before the time when satisfactory tests for paternity were available, nothing was ever proved.
The male line of Carstairs, apart from the problems they had with their womenfolk, were never assailed in any way. My parents had never lived in Carstairs Manor, so my mother was never “defiled.”
I did not believed these tales, and as I entered maturity, I took a rather cynical view of the women’s stories of being raped by someone unseen. “One way of accounting for bit on the side,” I commented to my father when he spoke of the matter.
Whether he fully believed the stories I do not know, but he did say, “Ushas, don’t ever go near that house.”
Mr.Roberts was speaking again. “If you insist on going to the Manor, Miss Carstairs-Browne, I’m afraid you will find it unprepared. I didn’t expect you so soon or I’d have got the place ready for you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve brought some food with me, and presumably there’s somewhere I can cook?”
“Oh yes, the electrical power is still on, and by the way, you’ll find sheets and blankets in a cupboard on the first landing. I’ll send young Gresham along in the morning, and you can go over the inventory with him.”
“I want to get rid of it as soon as possible, Mr.Roberts.”
“Hmm. Not a particularly good time to sell a property like that, but, we are at your service.”
I rose. “Thank you, Mr.Roberts. I’ll be on my way then. I’ll be in touch.”
We shook hands and he saw me to my car. I was about to get in when he said, “Oh, I forgot to mention it. The telephone isn’t connected.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t think of any particular reason why I should need it for the short time I intended staying.
I drove the couple of miles out of the village along the road to Carstairs Manor wondering what I should find. I had only ever visited the place once, and that was with my father to see my grandfather. I never knew my grandmother. She was one of those who, about five months after giving birth to my father, had committed suicide.
Grandfather had never married again, and he had disapproved of my father marrying my mother. “Not a gel of our class,” he is alleged to have said. We did not stay overnight, so if there were any ghosts wandering around, I wasn’t there to see them.
I came to some rickety gates with a sign that read, “Carstairs Manor.” The gates must have been imposing once, flanked as they were by stone pillars surmounted by lions sitting on their haunches holding the Carstairs coat of arms. The gates themselves were stained with rust and a couple of the iron bars were missing.
After a struggle I managed to open the heavy gates and continued up the weed festooned drive to the house, which came into view round a bend.
In its finest hour, the place must have been truly imposing. Three stories high, and with dormer windows set in the roof (“Servant’s quarters I’ll bet,” I thought), it must have had at least sixty bedrooms. Now it showed all the marks of unpainted neglect.
I pulled up in front of the main entrance and got out. The place was strangely silent. No bird sang. No tree or bush rustled. Out on the road as I opened the gates, I had felt a slight breeze. Here, there was nothing.
I went up the steps to the door, and taking from my bag the huge key Mr.Roberts had given me, I pushed it into the formidable looking lock. I turned the key, and much to my surprise, it moved easily.
“Well, something around here works,” I thought.
Stepping into the large entrance hall, I found it in reasonable order. The servants had left over week before, so I supposed they must have given the place a last thorough tidy and clean up.
I tried a light switch, and a massive chandelier sprang into life. “Something else that works,” I congratulated myself.
Picking up the hall telephone, I discovered Mr.Roberts was right, it was dead.
