CHAPTER 1 – Of Curses, Carriages, and Questionable Cliff Design
The carriage pitched violently to the left, wheels screaming against gravel as if the very road beneath had developed a personal vendetta against horizontal stability. Rain lashed the windows in rhythmic torrents, each droplet sounding like tiny accusations against the glass. Inside, Duke Gideon Ashworth’s nostrils flared at the musty scent of aged parchment as he clutched the worn document in his gloved hands. His jawline clenched so fiercely the muscle jumped beneath his skin, threatening structural damage to nearby walnuts. His fingertips traced the ancient words—written in what appeared to be blood but wafted the unmistakable aroma of fermented beets.
“Amare est perdere,” he muttered, the Latin vibrating through his chest and emerging as a funeral dirge performed by a drunken choir. “‘To love is to lose.’ How tediously accurate.”
Thunder crashed outside with such melodramatic timing that Gideon’s eyebrow shot upward of its own accord, his gaze piercing the carriage roof as if the heavens themselves required scolding for theatrical excesses. The carriage lurched again with a splintering groan, sending his massive frame sliding across the butter-soft leather seat. His shoulders strained against his coat’s expensive seams, each button clinging to duty with patriotic fervor. At six-foot-three, carved from brooding muscle and aristocratic angst, he folded into the ducal conveyance like a greatcoat stuffed into a pillowbox.
His valet had refused to accompany him on this journey, the man’s face blanching to the shade of old porridge that morning. “Not with them omens about, Your Grace,” Higgins had declared, his trembling finger stabbing toward the garden where a goose stood eerily motionless, its obsidian eyes fixed on the east wing. “That bird’s been there three days. Watching. Waiting. And yesterday it wrote something in the mud with its beak.”
“Geese can’t write, Higgins,” Gideon replied, the words clipped with aristocratic certainty.
“This one can, Your Grace.” Higgins’ voice dropped to a whisper that scratched against Gideon’s ear like moth wings. “And it weren’t in English. Had curves and loops, like them old monastery books.”
Gideon had dismissed the man’s concerns with a flick of his wrist, the gesture cutting through the air with such magnetic authority that a nearby paperweight trembled and tumbled from the desk, shattering against the floor with a musical crash. Servants and their tedious superstitions. As if the Ashworth Curse required avian ambassadors to herald its work.
The coach jolted again, the wooden frame groaning in protest. A leather-bound volume launched itself from the opposite seat, spinning through the stale carriage air before slapping into Gideon’s lap with undignified eagerness—Lady Willoughby’s most recent correspondence. Her handwriting slashed across the cream parchment like an overenthusiastic fencer discovering the sport for the first time, each loop and curl more dramatic than the last.
My dearest, most brooding Duke,
I simply cannot wait to become your Duchess and redecorate that dreadful mausoleum you call home. The east wing would benefit tremendously from fewer ancestral portraits (such gloomy expressions!) and more pastels. I’ve taken the liberty of having your family crypt measured for curtains. Periwinkle silk would brighten the tombstones considerably.
Your soon-to-be-devoted,
Lady Ambrosia Willoughby
P.S. I’ve hired an exorcist for your library. The man comes highly recommended by my third cousin twice removed. No need to thank me.
The paper crumpled beneath Gideon’s fingers, the sound sharp as bones breaking in the confined space. His reflection in the carriage window darkened like a storm cloud that had taken personal offense to sunshine. This journey to Dover rushed ahead of him like the culmination of a prophecy—inevitable and dire. He would end this betrothal even if it meant scandalizing all of London society, even if every drawing room from Mayfair to Chelsea erupted in collective apoplexy. Even if it meant surrendering to solitude forever. Even if it meant—
“YOUR GRACE!” The driver’s voice sliced through Gideon’s brooding like a machete through particularly melancholy custard. “THERE’S A GOOSE IN THE ROAD!”
Gideon thrust his head out the window, raindrops immediately assaulting his face with the enthusiasm of drunken marksmen. The wind attacked his raven hair, transforming each carefully arranged strand into a windswept weapon. His eyes narrowed against the onslaught, scanning the muddy road ahead where—indeed—a large white goose stood directly in their path, its wings spread like a demonic angel guarding the gates of hell. “Then drive around it, man!”
“IT WON’T MOVE!” The driver’s voice cracked with panic, his words nearly lost in a thunderclap that shook the very air. “AND I THINK IT’S… SMILING AT ME!”
“Geese don’t smile, you incompetent fool!” Gideon bellowed back, rain dripping from his aristocratic nose. “They lack the facial musculature for—”
The carriage hit something—definitely not a goose—with a sickening crunch that resonated through Gideon’s bones. The vehicle lurched sideways with such violence that he slammed against the carriage door, the wood splintering beneath his shoulder. The door flew open like it had been waiting its entire wooden existence for this moment of rebellion, hinges shrieking their freedom song.
Time stretched like taffy in the hands of an overzealous child. In that suspended moment between the carriage and the abyss, hanging in rain-soaked air above what his straining eyes now recognized as a very significant cliff, Gideon experienced three distinct thoughts:
First, that perhaps wearing his finest waistcoat—the midnight blue one with silver embroidery that had cost the equivalent of a tenant farmer’s yearly income—to break off a betrothal was excessive even for a man of his standing.
Second, that no one had fed his prize stallion that morning, and Hades would undoubtedly bite the stable boy in retaliation.
And third, that he should have read the smaller text beneath the family curse, the part that faded into the parchment’s edge like a coward retreating from battle.
Then gravity remembered its job description and yanked him toward the earth with vengeful enthusiasm.
The carriage tumbled through space with the grace of a drunken elephant attempting ballet. Wood splintered, metal screamed, and leather burst in a symphony of destruction. Gideon’s body was ejected like an unwanted thought, his limbs pinwheeling against the twilight sky as rain pelted his face. His shirt, sensing a dramatic opportunity, tore itself from his torso with such violence that several buttons achieved escape velocity, pinging against rocks as they soared into the abyss.
“Predictable,” he managed to mutter before a boulder introduced itself to his skull with excessive force and a distinct lack of social grace.
The impact sent him sprawling through underbrush and wild herbs, his bare chest collecting scratches like a morbid accountant tallies debts. His skin burned with each new laceration, earth and plant matter embedding themselves in his flesh with proprietary enthusiasm. Somewhere in the distance, he could have sworn he heard his valet’s voice echoing: “YOU WERE WARNED!”
How very like Higgins to gloat from the safety of Bleakhollow Manor, miles away.
The storm-tossed sky whirled above him—a nauseating palette of purples and grays, bruise colors that matched the ones blooming across his ribs. Lightning forked across the darkening canvas, illuminating his humiliating position for any passing deity to mock. He tasted copper and dirt, the metallic tang of blood mixing with soil and the sharp bite of crushed herbs. A man of his standing shouldn’t die in a ditch, half-naked and surrounded by what his nose identified as wild sage, rosemary, and something peppery that made his sinuses burn. The plants brushed against his skin, as if nature itself was attempting to season him for the afterlife.
“Curse,” he whispered to no one, blood trickling in a warm rivulet from his temple down the sharp angle of his jaw, “you win again.”
The darkness swarmed his vision like particularly motivated bees, each one stinging clarity from his thoughts. As consciousness fled, Gideon wondered if Lady Willoughby would insist on pastels for his funeral. The thought was so horrifying that he surrendered to unconsciousness with almost grateful haste, the scent of crushed herbs following him into the void.
He awoke to pain and the distinct sensation that several important memories had packed their bags and departed his mind without leaving a forwarding address.
Wet grass pressed against his back, each blade a tiny, cold finger prodding at his dignity. Night had fallen completely, wrapping the world in darkness so thick it seemed to have texture—velvet and wool and despair all woven together. Gideon blinked upward at stars that wheeled overhead with a mocking brightness, pinpricks of silver laughing at his predicament.
Who was he?
The question floated in his mind like a dead fish in a decorative pond—unwelcome and increasingly problematic with each passing moment. He probed his thoughts and found them slippery, elusive, darting away like minnows from his mental grasp.
His hand moved to his throbbing head, fingers encountering a knot the size of a small principality. Pain lanced through his skull, a white-hot needle of agony that brought with it fragmentary images: a carriage with crested doors, a cliff’s edge crumbling beneath wheels, parchment stained red, something about a goose with disturbingly human expressions.
He struggled to sit upright, muscles screaming objections in languages primitive and visceral. His determination ignored their protests, forcing his torso to rise. His bare chest gleamed in the starlight, each defined muscle highlighted like a cartographer’s masterpiece. He was sculpted like a classical statue that had been specifically commissioned to make other statues feel inadequate about their fitness regimens. Dried blood mapped constellations across his skin, joining the vast library of scars that already resided there—a jagged line across his left pectoral, a star-shaped pucker near his collarbone, a long slash that disappeared beneath his waistband.
But whose scars were they? What tales did they tell?
He patted his pockets with fingers that felt strangely disconnected from his commands, finding them disappointingly empty of identification. His trousers, however, were clearly expensive—the kind only worn by men with more money than sense or a pathological fear of reasonable fabric prices. The material whispered against his skin, silk and wool blend speaking of tailors who charged more for a pair of breeches than most men earned in a month.
“Who am I?” he asked the indifferent night, his voice emerging as a rasp that scraped against his dry throat.
The herbs around him rustled in the breeze, releasing scents that seemed almost deliberately medicinal. Sage with its earthiness, rosemary with its pine-like clarity, thyme with its subtle sweetness, and something spicy he couldn’t name that tickled his nose with every inhale. He’d landed in what appeared to be a wild herb garden, though “landed” suggested more dignity than “crashed like a human meteor, creating a man-shaped divot in carefully tended plants.”
In the distance, a light bobbed—a lantern, its golden glow cutting through the darkness like a knife. It moved with purpose along what might be a path, swinging slightly with each step of its unseen bearer. Gideon squinted, his vision blurring at the edges. The light was coming directly toward him, as if summoned by his existential crisis or perhaps by the destruction of what he was beginning to suspect might be someone’s prized herb collection.
He attempted to stand, pushing against the damp earth with palms that stung with a dozen small cuts. His body betrayed him immediately. The world tilted like a ship in a tempest, stars whirling in nauseating circles overhead. His stomach lurched in sympathetic revolution, and he collapsed back into the herbs with a grunt that would have embarrassed him had he the capacity for shame at that moment.
As darkness claimed him once more, the scent of crushed herbs enveloped him like a pungent blanket. In the far distance came the soft, almost thoughtful honk of a goose—a sound that somehow managed to convey both satisfaction and the promise of future complications.
His last conscious thought was that he should have read the fine print of whatever contract he’d signed with fate.