Page 23 of Winterset

“Now, my dear…” the vicar began in a soothing tone.

“The beast?” Kyria repeated, glancing around. “What beast? What are you talking about?”

“The Beast of Craydon Tor,” Mrs. Bennett said in tones of awe.

“It’s nothing,” Anna said flatly. “Just a local legend.”

“My dear, how can you say that?” the vicar’s wife admonished her.

“The area is full of legends,” Kit said. “All of them apocryphal, I’m sure.”

“I told you one of them,” Reed said to his sister. “How the staghounds on the columns at the gate come to life at the full moon and follow their dead master as he races on his phantom horse through the countryside.”

“Yes, you did,” Kyria said with a dramatic shudder, “and it gave me the shivers, I can tell you. But is that what they call the beast?”

“The Beast is something altogether different,” the squire’s wife said.

“Long, long ago,” piped up Felicity Bennett, in the tone of one telling a fairy tale, “there was an important nobleman—one of the de Winters, perhaps, but it was so long ago, no one knows who. He had a beautiful young daughter, and he betrothed her to another lord. But the daughter had already fallen in love with a local lad, and when her father told her that she was to marry the lord, she refused. He locked her in her room, but the local lad helped her escape and they fled into the forest. Lord de Winter and his men hunted them down and killed the girl’s lover right in front of her. He took her back to the castle, and that very night, the girl, crazed with grief, flung herself to her death in the castle courtyard.”

“A rather typical legend,” Mr. Norton, the solicitor said, somewhat pompously.

“I don’t understand,” Rosemary Farrington said. “It’s very sad, but what does it have to do with a beast?”

“That’s the next part.” Felicity picked up the story. “The boy the nobleman killed was the son of a witch, and she was furious. She went to the nobleman and put a curse on him for having killed her son, and for causing his own daughter’s death, as well. She changed him into a beast, part man, part animal, and doomed him to roam the earth forever, reviled by everyone.” She stopped with a pleased look on her face.

“A lot you know about it,” her brother put in scornfully.

“Oh, and I suppose you know better?” Felicity pouted, putting her hands on her hips.

“There are other variations of the story,” the solicitor said. “That every seven years the present Lord de Winter turns into the Beast, or that every generation a de Winter is born a beast. But Miss Bennett’s version is the most popular.”

“They call him the Beast of Craydon Tor,” Reed went on. “I was told all about it when I bought Winterset. The Beast supposedly lives in the woods around Craydon Tor.”

“It’s all nonsense,” Anna said. “Just a bogeyman to frighten children.”

“But he’s been seen!” Mrs. Burroughs protested. “Many, many times. I read about it in a book Dr. Felton lent me.”

“There have been stories that he has been sighted,” Anna replied. “But none of them have ever described him in the same way, have they?”

“No,” her brother agreed. “Some have said it was a dark animal, like a panther. Others have said it walked upright and had a head like a lion. And then there are those who said it looked like a man, but with claws and hair all around his face and long, sharp teeth.”

“Besides,” Mr. Norton, clearly a skeptic, put in, “it’s nothing but hearsay—some priest recounting legends of beasts, or a newspaper story full of things like ‘a local farmer said.’”

“But what about those killings?” the squire asked. “Those were the work of the Beast. I was just a baby when they happened, but I remember everyone talking about them when I was young.”

“Killings?” Kyria asked, her eyes wide. Beside her Reed looked almost as surprised.

“Oh, yes,” the squire nodded, looking important. “It was nigh on fifty years ago when it happened. Four years or so before Lord and Lady de Winter died in that fire—” He turned toward Anna and Kit, adding, “Your grandparents, your uncle’s parents. Terrible tragedy, that.” He gave a sigh and a lugubrious shake of his head, then went on. “But a few years before that, the Beast killed two people.”

“Really?” Kyria looked amazed.

“I never heard about this,” Reed commented.

“There were killings at that time,” Mr. Norton said, in the carefully precise way he spoke.

“The victims were clawed,” Mrs. Burroughs said, much more firmly than was her wont. “That is what everyone says. One of them had his throat ripped out.”

Her words seemed to hang in the silence, harsh and terrible.