Chapter 1:
https://open.substack.com/pub/whimsicalwords/p/hauntings-of-claverton-castle?r=5m2is&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Chapter 29:
https://open.substack.com/pub/whimsicalwords/p/hauntings-of-claverton-castle-chapter-46b?r=5m2is&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Here’s a little something I wrote for a writer’s group that had a tradition of picking one word as a writing prompt each week. The word in this case was Voluminous.
As a time traveler who had just arrived in 1869, she wasn’t accustomed to wearing a voluminous skirt consisting of thirty yards of fabric supported by a crinoline. Fortunately, she was alone in the library—nobody was present to witness her awkward gait as she practiced moving around.
It was a pity the room wasn’t empty, because she had to maneuver the cumbersome crinoline around armchairs, foot stools, a sofa, a fainting couch, and side tables holding stacks of books. Worse, here and there about the room were precarious stacks of books on the floor that she kept knocking over with her hoop skirt.
Hauntings of Claverton Castle, Chapter 30
Gwydion Ewen, the footman who had waited upon the Prendregast family at Claverton Castle since his mid-teens, stepped out of the pantry and into the servants’ hall. He had been ruminating about his early years but couldn’t remember what had started this. Sometimes stray thoughts and childhood memories manifested seemingly out of nowhere.
Throughout his childhood in Ireland, Gwydion was not called Gwydion. He was called Colleen. The entire time, he knew he was a boy. Yet his family and community treated him like a girl and referred to him as “her” or “Colleen.” At eight years old, he secretly renamed himself Gwydion.
He grew up in a humble household in a poor neighborhood in Galway, Ireland. The brick houses were narrow and two stories tall, with brick walls around the yards. His extended family, including quite a few ancestral ghosts, was crowded into one such house; only Gwydion noticed the specters. He was the seventh of eight children. His parents were too busy at the mill to attend to the children and assigned the eldest two to mind the younger ones. Mostly the children ran loose on their own.
Gwydion recalled a morning when his eldest sister insisted he wash dishes, but when she turned her back, he ran off to attend the local free school. All eight children were supposed to attend it, under orders from Aunt Brigit, and Gwydion had a thirst for knowledge. Whilst he was in the school room, his siblings begged in the marketplace, ran and played in the muddy streets, and picked pockets. After school, Gwydion slipped up to the bedroom he shared with numerous siblings, and he enjoyed a brief quiet time with schoolbooks and the ghost of a child who died of consumption… until his siblings returned, loud and boastful.
In earliest childhood, he felt baffled and hurt in reaction to being considered a girl. As soon as he could speak so many words, he asked his mother, “Why does everyone think I’m a girl? When will they know I’m a boy?”
She stared at him before crossing her arms and smiling. “Well, dearie, you are in fact a girl and will never be a boy, not in this lifetime. What silly notions you have!” This confused him more.
He confided in the child ghost in his bedroom. “I have no reason to believe I’m a girl,” he told the specter.
“And I have no reason to believe I am alive,” the apparition said with a solemn, echoing moan before fading away.
One day, seeing one of his brothers naked, Gwydion realized why everyone thought he was a girl. He asked his brother, “When will I grow that between my legs?”
His brother laughed at him. “You’re so stupid, you don’t even know you’re a girl!” He ran off and told the other children; they all laughed at Gwydion. Not only did his siblings ostracize him, but despite his brother’s poor attendance, word got out at school, and he was ridiculed there, too. Gwydion was known as the girl who was too stupid to know she was a girl. He had no school friends. Gwydion learned to keep to himself and be laconic, whether he was around strangers or around people he knew for years.
He fortunately remained androgynous in appearance even during puberty. He was about five-foot-eight, with muscular limbs and narrow hips. He was neither scrawny nor plump. His face was somewhat heart-shaped, and his eyes large and heavy-lidded.
One evening before dinner, Great Aunt Brigit said, “Well, Colleen, my girl, it is your turn to set the table.”
She stepped out of the room long enough for Fanny to say, “You heard her, Colleen! Set the table, Colleen!”
Gwydion’s nostrils flared, and he clenched his fists and glared at Fanny. He despised that hateful name. “Stop your nagging!”
“Aw, is that any way to talk to your older sister? Now, Colleen, do as you’re told!”
Aunt Brigit returned with an armload of firewood. “What is this, girls? Why aren’t you setting the table, Colleen?”
Gwydion glared at a stack of plates and, in his fury, wished to smash one over Fanny’s head. Better yet, he wished the table to already be set. He stared, willing the plates to set themselves on the table. They flew straight up in the air and glided from the sideboard to the table. They landed in the center, with several plates sliding off the stack. Only one of them cracked.
“Aw sure look it!” Great Aunt Brigit stared at the table. Fanny dropped the wooden spoon in the pot of boiling potatoes and onions to stare at the table before turning to gawk at Gwydion.
Though he scarcely believed what he had done, Gwydion figured he may as well take it further. He continued to stare at the plates and willed them to move individually. Each plate flew to a specific place, one at a time. In seconds, the plates formed two rows lengthwise down the table.
Customarily the family noisily crowded around the table, but Gwydion blinked, turned, and saw most of the family crowded around the doorway and staring at him with their mouths hanging open.
“Well, Colleen, my girl,” Great Aunt Brigit said. Gwydion flinched. Misunderstanding, his aunt tapped him on the shoulder. “You’re not in trouble, mind. You’ve been touched by the wee folk. Now let’s see you do that with the flatware.” The flatware drawer flew open, and forks, knives, and spoons soared through the air and landed on the table.
Gwydion’s siblings stopped teasing and bullying him.
One day, passing the sitting room, he heard low adult voices and paused. His mother said, “She could make something of herself with a power like that.”
Gwydion’s father grunted. “What could she make of herself? A laughingstock? Those powers may be evil.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And you don’t know that they’re not. I’ve heard about such abilities. Men in dark suits take away such children. There can’t be anything good of that.” Years later, Gwydion surmised that the men in dark suits were butlers taking children away to work as servants.
At fourteen, Gwydion cut his curly, light brown hair and slipped out of the crowded bedroom and into the night. He skulked through muddy alleys flanked by brick or stone walls surrounding backyards of houses. He sought clothing drying on clothes lines from lower- and middle-class families. He climbed brick walls and pulled boy clothing off the lines. After three clotheslines, he had an entire suit of clothes and linen with which to bind his breasts.
He stowed away on a ship to England. He did not wish anyone to recognize him; he hoped nobody who considered him a girl would see and identify him.
By the time he departed for England, Gwydion resented the message that he was someone other than his true self. Disturbing memories often resurfaced on the boat, at the docks, and in the streets. He kept recalling his brother or other bullies guffawing and yelling, “Look! It is the girl who’s so stupid she thinks she’s a boy!” The anger conjured by these memories caused him to lift objects here and there.
On an overcast autumn day, Gwydion trod through a crowded street in Bath, along the quay. He rushed past ropes drifting upward off the docks. Mooring ropes, attached to boats, wavered in the air, splashed into the water, lifted, and waved about again. Sailors and pedestrians stopped to stare and hastily stepped out of his path. As he was about to turn onto the arched stone Pulteney Bridge, a woman in sober black clothes stood before him and held up her hand. “Excuse me, lad.”
Gwydion stopped in his tracks and stared at the woman. She was stout and middle-aged, and her dark brown hair was mostly hidden beneath a bonnet. With her almond-shaped eyes black as coal under fine half-moon eyebrows, she coldly peered down at the boy. She was handsome and dignified rather than pretty. Gwydion raised his eyebrows.
“Hello, young man. I saw what you did to the ropes.”
Gwydion froze and widened his pale blue eyes. He gulped. “And how would you know I did it?”
“It was obvious: the ropes kept moving beside you, whilst you were walking. Do I seem a fool?”
Gwydion gulped and scanned his surroundings. He’d need to either push pedestrians out of his way or jump into the River Avon. “No, ma’am, I don’t take you for a fool.”
“Might you be seeking employment?”
Gwydion widened his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” The woman was Charis Dunn.
Gwydion was now thirty-seven years old and hadn’t dressed like a girl or passed off as a girl since he was fourteen. Now his life of falsehood was long over.
His body did physically resemble a woman under the layers of clothes; he could not forget. He said little about his childhood, sometimes falsehoods. He remained secretive about his physical body and his misfit past, rather than confide in people who would not accept him for who or what he was. He figured that if anyone discovered his secret, they would reject him.
Sharing a bedroom with another footman in the manor house’s top floor, Gwydion managed to never be seen unclothed. He wished for his own room, but at least he had his own bed and a cupboard where he stored his clothing and possessions. He hastily changed his clothes, at least the bottom layers, whilst his roommate did not occupy the room. The other footman, Barrowman, was amiable… and was unaware of Gwydion’s secret.
Occasionally, Gwydion wondered if anyone else was like him. He knew Sensitives were aplenty, but he knew of no one else who knew themselves to be men yet had the appearance of women, or vice versa. However, no doubt any such person would be as secretive as he.