The Worsley Family Locket: Chapter 1 - Albert and Claude

Dear Edith,

At the time of writing this letter, you are only 4 weeks anew, born in the aftermath of the demise of your great family. If you have adhered to the instructions adorned upon the envelope, then you are reading this letter on the very eve of your 15th birthday. I pray it is one filled only with joy. It has long since been owed to a Worsley. I would like to begin by offering you my most heart-felt condolences. The passing of both your mother Lady Ethel Worsley and your sister Helen Worsley no doubt brings you the utmost desolation. They were buried together only days after you were brought into this world and although much time has passed for you now, I imagine the consequences you suffer are still as potent. Likely, it is a tragedy as raw and genuine as it is for me as I write.

My name is Albert Ackley and although you and I have never met, I dedicated 6 years of my adult life to the servitude of your family. During those years, as you already know, countless calamities befell your family. I remain the only living witness of them all. The validity and disposition of those abhorrent happenings is to this day a subject of prominent debate, suspicion and apprehension. My testimony, I now pledge to you, to be entirely composed of the truth. Now that Lady Ethel and dear Helen have passed, you are the sole survivor of the Worsley family, and as such, South-Peak Manor along with the impedimenta of your kindred will soon be in your possession. What you read next, will cause you a tremendous sum of consternation. You may feel obliged to put down this letter, without reading to the very end. It may be so ghastly and so unimaginable that you feel compelled to destroy the ink I have sewn to my paper. I beg that you do not.

I write this letter to you in the hope that my account of the horror that claimed dominance over South-Peak Manor, and the monster that became of the Lady Ethel Worsley, may permit you the conviction to defeat the evil that has thus far lingered unopposed. Only you have the power to do this. I have told my tale to innumerable others, yet thus far those dialogues have proven aporetic. My sleepless nights are tortured with the prospects of another burial on that hill where your family mounted their home. I fear the inevitable corollary your disbelieving might affect. Please, I implore you to hear these words. Somewhere amongst the solitude of antiquities enshrined within the manor lies a locket therein. It will at first strike you as a simple treasure. A clandestine gemstone concealed within the walls of a deep and dour coal-mine. It will appear small and unassuming, but shining a brighter silver than anything around. You will take to it. You will not know why. It is not extravagant by design, nor impressive in its construction. The true nature of the jewel is hidden behind a shroud of a mysterious absence of complication. The malicious disposition of the wretched thing will only reveal itself at the very end. By then, your life will be over.

The tale begins East with the peasant son of a humble labourer. Until 1881, I had been occupied all my life with agriculture. Innovation and industry had been revolutionising the world and at last these advancements had taken hold in my farm. New technologies ensured an unprecedented surplus of food, and as such, my faltering flesh and blood were no longer required. Thus, I left my home in Tunbridge, Kent to seek work in the city. Eventually I found employment in Winchester under your father, Lord Arthur Worsley, as a machinist in his manufactory. There, I worked onerous and lengthy shifts, for hours on end, making boxes, buckles and bit parts for steam engines. Though repetitive and always demanding attention, this type of work was notoriously unstable. Naturally, I found myself unemployed again within a year. That was when Lord Arthur Worsley took me in personally as a servant in his household. I questioned not what designs Lord Worsley had for selecting me for this job. I was grateful, and that alone, for such a position. Away from the gruelling struggles on the farm and the tribulations within the manufactory, servant work offered me a great source of sanctuary and privilege.

During my time as a servant of South-Peak Manor, I was awarded board and lodge and came to know your family as intimately as I knew my own. Your father, Lord Arthur Worsley was a reserved man. His hushed nature and nervous demeanour did not align with the power his successes and industry had gained him. He rarely sought my service, shooing me from whichever room he was in at the time of my entrance. His inclination, it seemed, was to hire me for the benefit of the rest of the family, not himself. Something I thought at first was a selfless act, but when the aberrant face of his manoeuvre was revealed from behind its mask, it became clear to me that your father was not in the slightest bit a charitable nor wholesome man. Your mother, Lady Ethel Worsley, was a sweet thing and treated me with regard, ignoring my lower repute among the household. She appreciated my company and I found comfort in hers, which was a dynamic that sorrowfully did not extend to her husband or her children. Her vulnerabilities showcased themselves whenever they came near, which was not a common occurrence. Her children in particular, were a cold and loveless bunch. It is of little wonder that the locket sought her out with such predatory intuition. The thing that was buried in her coffin bore not the slightest resemblance to the gentle creature I had befriended years ago.

The Worsleys were once magnates of the town. They held a near celebrity status among the inferiors they watched from their hill upon high. Lord Arthur, the esteemed business tycoon, though a very private man, was a celebrated figure among the people. Even your siblings, though a deplorable mob, were held in high regard by swathes of those fortunate enough not to fraternise with them. But if the Worsley family was the luxurious crown donned atop the village, Lady Ethel was undoubtedly the centrepiece jewel. Known and beloved by her peers. She had the soft voice and genial inclination that lacked in abundance among her family. They were reclusive, reticent and alien – the padlocked diary written in a foreign tongue. Your mother was a beautifully illustrated, open book. At least that was the case until the fateful day at the market when the boat came and the locket shone.

Your mother first came to own the locket 7 months into her pregnancy with Benjamin. During the late stages of her pregnancies, I would often accompany her on excursions forth from the manner. Her favourite spot to visit was a port at the bay where merchants gathered from perceivably all corners of the globe. Together, they formed a tunnel of exorbitance, bargain and mysticism that ran the very length of the jetty crag. So decorated it was, that upon entry through the mouth of the market, one became shielded from the chill of the ocean’s breath and the hysterics of the swirling gulls above. Every time your mother visited this place, she felt as though she had passed through a tear in the fabric of space-time and had found herself in some alien world where hustle and curiosity reigned supreme. Dark-skinned vendors sold wooden toys and masks that were carved by hand and dangled from ashen strings. Short, plumb-eyed people cooked food in shallow cauldrons larger than a table and filled the air with exotic scents that lured the senses toward their enterprise. Others brought the skins of beasts whose existence outside the realms of books and fairy-tales neither of us could truthfully validate.

One day, at this very quay-side market not far from the Manor, had arrived by cramped, wooden boat, a particularly dishevelled stranger. He had come alone, shivering as he mounted the stone landing. His clothes were ragged and dirty and the man’s eyes appeared blushed with the stains of unrest and irritation. Even by the shockingly low standards of poverty at the time, this man seemed by all pretences to be as destitute and as stricken as they come. I imagined, as I beheld the diminutive boat wobbling atop the crashing waves like a house of straw upon quaking tectonic plates, that he had perhaps been marooned on a tropical island for months before building this limp raft out of driftwood and pebbles. And yet, the most opulent treasure on that quay was to be found dangling around the man’s neck. The holy grail in the hands of a festering beggar. A locket that shone a silver so bright it dimmed the sun in the cloudless sky above. Once seeing the locket, the condition of the bearer mattered not a jot. For now he was the most privileged of all men. Though simple by design, it was a dazzling prize and all who espied it became entranced by its spell.

The man named Claude, juxtaposing wealth and scarcity, was a puzzling salesman. When he and your mother spoke, Claude wavered between wishing to retain the jewel and attempting to rid himself of it, like a frenzied pendulum that swung wildly from one direction to the other. In one moment, he admonished Lady Ethel for looking too greedily at the locket, though the very next he was begging for her to take it without any payment necessary. I know not exactly how much your mother parted with for the locket, but she had a certain spring in her step on the way back to the Manor that often accompanied the procurement of a bargain. Inside the locket, Claude had been keeping an image of himself in his youth. Lady Ethel, thinking it was odd, lingered on the thought for no more than a moment, before ripping it out. She tasked me with returning the photograph to the salesman, which was a mission I embarked upon the following morning. It was an errand however I was doomed to fail. I did not tell her at the time, as she was heavily pregnant with your brother and I had no desire to burden her with stress, but I was informed by market-regulars that only hours after her agreement with the bizarre Claude, the man had thrown himself from the harbour and drowned. Claude had immediately regretted ceding the locket and reputedly babbled incomprehensibly while demanding passers-by tell him where he could find Lady Ethel. Only when none he had beckoned would disclose such delicate information, the man made another decision he could not reverse.

Though terrible what had occurred, I found that my thoughts only concerned the locket. Seeing the locket again, touching its smooth surface and perhaps even wearing it around my neck. Driven by a crescive lust, I returned to the Manor and spoke nothing of the death of Claude.