The Collinwood maidservant Beth goes to Gypsy Magda to plead with her to remove the werewolf curse from Quentin. Now that his wife Jenny is dead, Beth hopes to marry him herself. But Magda tells her that the curse, once cast, cannot be revoked, and it will carry on to Quentin’s male children. If Beth marries Quentin, her own sons with him will become cute little were-puppies (Magda doesn’t put it that way, but it’s my mental picture).
Then Beth tells Magda something the gypsy-woman doesn’t know: Quentin is already a father and Magda has cursed her own blood. It’s been hinted at before; during some of Mad Jenny’s rants about her “babies,” one began to suspect that she wasn’t really referring to her baby-doll collection. Beth now reveals that after Quentin and Laura ran off together, Jenny gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Since she’d gone mad by then, Judith took the babies away to be cared for by a woman in Collinsport. Beth often goes into town to visit them and pays their nurse. Quentin knows nothing about this–presumably, he was gone before he had any idea his wife was even pregnant. Beth is adamant that the existence of the children remain unknown to Quentin.
Once Magda learns that her werewolf curse also encompasses Quentin’s infant son–her own nephew–she’s contrite and anxious to revoke it. But such curses can’t be removed easily.
Barnabas gets involved with all this when he bites Beth and makes her tell him everything she knows about Quentin’s werewolf problem (which he already strongly suspects) and about the twin children (which he didn’t). Beth is sent to have a silver pentagram made to protect the little boy from the curse; the silversmith is a teenaged boy, who will become the aged Abe-Vigoda character we saw in the 1960s.
But before this plot can progress, Barnabas has to face a crises involving two other young boys–1890s Jameson and 1960s David.
Jameson has had a bad dream and awakes crying that “David Collins is dead!”
Continue reading “Dark Shadows: First Werewolves, then Vampires”