The Beauty of the Wolf

XVI

But the sorceress cannot leave. Not now, not until she knows what it is that the alchemist has hidden in the cellar. Crude curiosity pulls at her and to the house she returns.

Still no one had stirred. Then she heard it, the frantic flapping of wings and scratching of talons, and she perceived a smell – pungent, musty, animal. Determined to see the creature she was at the cellar door when she heard a call.

‘Master, master – is that you?’

A young man stared at her and through her to where the back door had swung open letting in the raw cold. Dark of skin and dark of eye, this, then, is the alchemist’s apprentice. Unlike his master his thoughts were guarded and he kept them close to him. The sorceress found it hard to fathom what he was thinking other than the obvious. The footprints in the snow increased his fears. She followed him as he took the stairs, two at a time, to his master’s chamber, cursing under his breath. One glance at the disarray of the bed clothes, enough to tell him what had happened.

In the apprentice’s ebony eyes she saw the heat of the sun from an unknown world, the place from whence he was stolen. He knows better than his master the power of magic, knows it possesses a life force that not even death can defy. He survived the seas where the battle with the waves had been fought. The wooden boat, weighed down with the thief’s treasure, ill-equipped to deal with the fury of such a tempest, had been tossed as if it were a child’s plaything and, limping into port, had brought him to these cold, anaemic shores.

Again the sound from the cellar. It is a noise that she sees he dreads and it is louder, more urgent than ever before. As he runs down the stairs, his thoughts, the ones she catches, have an energy to them, his whole being is more alive than the alchemist’s. She listens hard. He hopes his master’s secret is not to be discovered, he knows he must calm the creature in the cellar. She is in the passage when she hears a creak on the stairs and a young maidservant appears.

‘Oh, lord,’ she says, ‘Master Butter, what has happened?’

Master Butter speaks with a stammer and he is careful not to trip over his words. He knows that his stammer is especially pronounced in the presence of a pretty girl. He does his best to sound commanding.

‘Go into the kitchen, Mary,’ he says. ‘Stay there until . . .’

To his surprise she looks at him in a direct manner that has little fear in it.

‘Do you want me to help you?’ she asks, following him to the small cellar door at end of the passage.

For one moment he thinks he might laugh, the notion is so ridiculous.

‘No,’ he says.

The sorceress can see that Mary is new to the household and that she has never before met anyone like Master Butter. The colour of his skin, darker than the beams of the house. His eyes are darker still. He is tall. He turns to look at her as he takes his master’s key. Her presence gives him courage.

‘Be still,’ he says into the darkness of the alchemist’s cellar.

He opens the door, turns to make sure Mary will not follow and in that instant the sorceress slides in before him.

XVII

You are not from my realm, Thomas Finglas, and your magic confuses me. You confuse me, for I saw what it is that you keep locked in your cellar and she is not of this world. Did you steal her from Herkain’s realm? No, it is impossible for any mortal to pass through that watery curtain into the kingdom of the beasts and return alive to tell the tale for the flesh of man is the sweetest of all meats. There is something more worth knowing. Perhaps she was sold to you, this winged beast. She would not be the first – the unicorn, the griffin made the journey and survived. But no and no again. And methinks that if a ‘no’ was a brick then a wall I would build with them. You go against the wool of me and muddle my thoughts. How is this possible, what potions, what magic charm did you use to create her? Was it by the hem of my petticoat or have you stolen more from me?

A knot of human making pulled becomes more impossible to untangle and yet the sorceress, knowing all this and more, cannot let it be.

Who are you, Thomas Finglas? You who possess power enough to rob me of myself, to flood my mind with your narrative. Who are you? There is trickery here. By what means did you find my chamber? Was it with a knife you cut my petticoat or did you pull the fabric from me? And why did I feel nothing? The cloth is as good as my skin. The pain alone would have woken me and yet I was numb to you. How can that be? These questions enrage me. Never before have I not listened to my instinct. It has ruled me. In the depth of my ancient being my wisdom echoes loud: return to your chamber, sleep and dream. Let time take care of the curse, not you. Not you.

Her excuse is the beast. And so she follows the barge which looks to her eye as a black slug does that leaves a slime trail in the thin surface of ice and snow. She has no choice but to stay close to this Thomas Finglas for he holds the answer to the many questions that sit, crumbs upon her lips.

The alchemist was conscious by the time he was helped up the steps at the watergate of the House of the Three Turrets, his mind making a mosaic of his broken thoughts that the sorceress furiously pieced together to find an answer. There was none. Overriding everything was his simple anxiety to be home. Now she listened far more attentively to all that the moth of his memory brought to the light.

He thinks his apprentice will not know the right words to calm his child. The thought of her escaping into the streets fills him with dread. She will be hunted like an animal, torn apart. She is still only a child, he thinks. Only a child.

And the sorceress thinks, she is no child of this world.

XVIII

It was a bitter dawn and snow illuminated the grounds. The light made beard shapes of trimmed hedges and in the distance, looming large through unnatural angles of bush and wall, the three turrets rose, each spire impaling the sky’s tapestry. Surrounding all, the forest cast its shadows. The sorceress heard its familiar, deep, slow heartbeat. This was a place Thomas had never wanted to see again and he had a feeling – no, a surety – who it was who had sent for him and to know it made his bones cold as stone.

Two servants each took one of his arms to guide him lest he should slip. In defiance he pulled away. If death be waiting for him then he will meet it with dignity, not being handled as if he be a criminal.

One had to admire his courage and, in spite of herself, she did. The sorceress followed him up the steps to the great door where near seventeen years ago she had left a basket, certain of her powers. Where fifteen years ago Thomas came, certain of his powers. He is taken to an antechamber with no fire, no candle and there in the darkness he is left, the door closed, the key turned.

And then he says her name into the darkness of that worrisome chamber. How does he know her name? Fury rises up in her – and sinks back. It is never wise to trust a witch.

‘You are here,’ he whispers. ‘I cannot see you but I feel your presence. I know it is not my Bess. I am right, am I not? It is you who have been watching me, listening to my very thoughts. Did you come for your hem? Return me safe to London and I will give it to you.’

‘Where is it?’

Thomas jumps when she speaks. That at least she finds satisfying.

‘Where are you?’ He turns wildly this way and that and he cannot see her. ‘Help me, mistress, I must return to . . .’

‘To what? What is it – what is she – who you must return to?’

Here he stumbles.

‘You saw her?’

‘Yes, I saw her.’

‘I beg of thee. She cannot – must not be discovered. She would be . . . John Butter will not know what to do to calm her. I must return home.’

‘Tell me the truth of how you came by this winged beast and perhaps I will help you.’

He says as he might a prayer, ‘She is my daughter.’

This cannot be, the sorceress thinks.

‘Tell me how.’

And from the liquid dark of the chamber his wife is once more conjured, her voice set to nibble away at his paper-thin sanity.

‘Yes, Thomas, tell her. Tell her of your whore and the beast.’

‘I am listening,’ says the sorceress. ‘Tell me about the beast, Thomas.’

Again he floods her with his misery, his loss, the torn pieces of unstitched memory, a misleading patchwork of thoughts.

‘I loved her,’ he says.

‘But she was not your wife,’ says the ghost of Mistress Finglas whose tongue is blacker than Hell’s back door. ‘It was I who was your wife.’

‘Quiet,’ he shouts. ‘Quiet, woman, stop plaguing me. What more do you want?’

No one comes to see what is wrong. The silence thus disturbed takes time to thicken upon them once more.

The sorceress hears then a crackle, a laugh.

‘I want my house, my furnishings, my garden,’ says Mistress Finglas. ‘You went away to find an earl and came back with a whore, did you not, Husband?’

The alchemist’s dead wife clings to him as ivy to a house.

With a sigh he lets go of all the fragments of his memory for the sorceress to knit together.

Some fifteen years before he and John Butter had returned from the House of the Three Turrets, bringing with them a maid to work in the house. Upon seeing that the maid Bess was quickening with child and no father to its name, Mistress Finglas, the good, Christian woman that she was, insisted that Bess be thrown out for her ungodly ways. Thomas forbade it. In revenge she had hagridden the girl with that venomous tongue of hers. The babe would be cursed by the hellwain, born boneless, horns on its head, fur in its mouth, a tail in its breeches.

Five months later, Bess began her labour. Not even the pain of the oncoming infant was allowed to interfere with the main meal of the day. Betwixt two courses the babe slipped slithering, bloody, between her mother’s legs, and not a cry did either make. Bess held her close, and there they sat, tied together by the cord. She was baffled by the newborn’s silence as liver-like, the placenta slopped onto the stone floor. She cut the cord with the carving knife, wrapped the creature and warmed her by the fire. Then served roast chicken and with the gravy quietly informed her master of their daughter’s birth. Pushing back his chair hard he rose abruptly as it fell backwards. The noise of it startled his wife. She looked up from her plate, mouth wide open, stuffed with chicken meat, so that all the chewing and her few black teeth could be seen.

She said, ‘What is it, Husband?’

And he, repulsed by the very sight of her, felt himself on the precipice of declaring a truth, the truth that was well known to all three of them.

Like the newborn babe he remained silent, even when his wife asked, ‘Husband, where go you?’ and gravy rolled down her double chins.

Downstairs in the kitchen Bess wept and showed him their newborn, eyes closed and silent, her tufted hair red like her mother’s.

Mistress Finglas, puffing and hefting herself after her husband, demanded to know what all the fuss be about.

Then seeing the babe so still, wax white, said, ‘I told you, I told you so I did, the pucklar would come and steal the bastard.’

Good, kind Bess, by then at her mind’s end, screamed, ‘If she be dead. So be me.’

Master Finglas gathered mother and child into his laboratory and closed and bolted the door against the fury of his wife. Mistress Finglas, knees bent, praying that wood might become parchment, stayed there cursing less the child should think to cry its way back to life.

‘I hear a crow croak from the next roof, and you know what that means, Husband,’ she shouted. ‘A coffin in the ground, a coffin in the ground. Serves you both right.’

No answer came and on the second day, the door still barred to her, she took to boxing the ears of her husband’s apprentice, demanding he open it.

‘I . . . I . . . I cannot,’ stammered the terrified boy.

Having beaten John Butter until the worst of her rage had subsided, Mistress Finglas left him curled in upon himself outside his master’s door, lifted her skirts high and crossed the stinking alleyway to the house of her neighbour. She huffed up the narrow stairs and there she stayed by the window and talked away the hours in unwise words. She knew, she said, what they be doing, her husband and the whore, they be eating the flesh of the unbaptised babe. Her jealous imaginings gave birth to rumour, its midwife being gossip that to this night still haunted the alchemist’s good reputation.

On the third day, in desperation, Mistress Finglas cut up her husband’s fur-lined cloak. The wanton waste of such a necessity gave her untold pleasure. She wondered what her scissors, razorsharp, would feel like plunged into the heart of her cheating husband. On the fourth day she went to church, fired by the idea of Hell’s vengeance and all the demonic winged beasts to be found there.

On the fifth day, the door to her husband’s laboratory opened. Bess returned to the kitchen, her husband to his business, and neither had a word to say about the baby.

‘Where is it?’ demanded Mistress Finglas.

‘Where is what?’ asked her husband.

‘The babe.’

‘There is no babe.’

‘You jest, Husband. I saw it with my own eyes.’

XIX

A key turns in the door, candlelight falls on the tormented face of the alchemist. A servant, carrying a gown, enters to find Master Finglas arguing with his dead wife, on the brink of losing his mind. The gown, which is far grander than any the alchemist has ever owned, pulls him back to the present. The sudden warmth that envelops him feels like the arms of his Bess, tears sting his eyes at the memory of her loving. He stands straight, rubs his hand over his bare head. He is escorted through the long gallery with its rows of paintings of the Rodermere family from the first to the present. He notices that one is missing, a shiny patch of wall marks out the square space where it used to hang. It was not a large portrait, yet he had considered it the finest there. It was of Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere, his hawk at his wrist.

The sorceress slips her hand into his. He stiffens, stops breathing for a moment, then squeezes her fingers gently. He is mystified by the softness of her skin. What did he expect? Scales? As much as she hates to admit it, by the hem of her petticoat their fates are tied to one another.

‘Do not leave me,’ he whispers as a door is opened.

The chamber they entered was hung with tapestries all depicting a hunting party. The riders looked out at Thomas; the hounds were running for the fox who, like the hunters, stared out at the viewer unconcerned, or so it appeared, by the nearness of danger. And in front of a roaring fire stood Sir Percival Hayes, Thomas’s old master and benefactor. Whippet lean, his clothes extravagant; a ruff of Dutch lace that could be valued in acres of land was gathered round his neck. The effect of the ruff was to disjoint his head from his body as if the two were different domains serving different masters. His face was by far the more sinister. He had hooded eyes, a long nose, lips too full. He could be taken for a younger man yet look closer and the fine lines that wrinkled his skin gave away his age. He was known at court as the Badger for his dark hair had a white stripe through it. Once head and body were joined as one his whole appearance spoke of menace.

Fifteen years, thought Thomas, can so change a man. When he had been in Sir Percival’s favour his master’s face had been open to the world. Now it is closed, iron conclusions have crushed the dreams of the younger man, made him an unmovable force of convention.

In those distant days, Sir Percival wanted to know the mysteries of alchemy and more. He had sought out Thomas Finglas. Having sieved through all the cunning men and quacks in London who pretended knowledge of the chemical theatre, Thomas stood apart. He was learned, spoke Greek, Latin, French and German as well as he spoke English. His interest was not in what he considered the cheap trick of turning lead into gold, but in the faerie realm for he believed if its power could be harnessed then all the secrets of nature would be at man’s command. Thomas had been with his master two years – in which he married, realised his mistake, and was able to do nothing but be bound to it for better or worse – when he had been sent here to return Lord Rodermere to the House of the Three Turrets.

XX

Sir Percival Hayes poured a goblet of wine, took a sip and helped himself to sweetmeats from a dish before him. He ate with a ladylike delicacy then slowly took out a fine linen handkerchief and wiped his fingers. At last he turned to Thomas.

‘Do you remember, Master Finglas, when you came back to London from a summer of bedding a nursemaid and had the audacity to tell me that your work had been successful? And you produced this?’ Sir Percival waved a scroll at Thomas. ‘I dismissed you as a fraud, did I not? Threw you out of my house, along with that shrew you married. These days, I believe, your practice deals mainly with pimps and whores and cures for the pox.’

‘Not entirely, Sir Percival,’ Thomas muttered.

‘Did I ask you to speak? No, I did not. I am talking, you are listening. After your departure I washed my mind clean of your nonsense, determined to meddle no more in the Devil’s Cauldron. From that day forth, my role at the court of Her Majesty would be to root out superstition, hunt witches and those who profess to deal with the Devil’s magic. In that, I have served Her Majesty faithfully. I cite you as an example of a cunning man, a mountebank, and from the reports my spies have gathered on you, I was right in my assertions.’

Thomas was trembling. The question he wanted to ask came out in a low whisper.

‘Sir, why have you brought me here?’

Sir Percival poured his third glass of wine.

‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘my cousin Eleanor, Lady Rodermere, was wed to Master Gilbert Goodwin. The service took place in the chapel and afterwards there was to be a feast for the guests in the banqueting hall. I was there as a representative of Her Majesty. I had argued on Lady Rodermere’s behalf that as Lord Rodermere had been missing for near eighteen years he should be considered dead and she free to marry again. So, tell me’, Sir Percival drained the third glass of wine, ‘did you pick a date at hazard? Or was it something you calculated on an astrological chart? Or was it decided on the throw of a dice?’

Thomas feels the pit of his stomach to be lead.

I watch you, Thomas. Beads of sweat pepper your forehead. You are caught in a quandary of your own making.

‘Have you lost your tongue, man?’ said Sir Percival. ‘I asked you a question.’

Thomas mumbled and at last asked why is this important, why now is it so important that he should be dragged from his bed and bundled here?

She is pleased that he has roused himself and still has some fight in him.

Sir Percival stood and handed Thomas the scroll.

‘Read it,’ he commanded.

Thomas did not need to. He knew exactly what it said. After all, he was its author.

‘Read it,’ said Sir Percival again.

Thomas looked down on the grave of his own words. All that was written there was the date and the time of Lord Rodermere’s return.

‘Yesterday,’ said Sir Percival, ‘on the date, at the very time stated there, just as glasses were raised to toast the bride and groom, a dead man walked into the banqueting hall, a ghost at the feast. He looked not one day older than when he vanished. He was wearing the same garments; they were fresh, not a blemish to be seen. The intensity of the silence was so dense that you could hear the unsaid: “This is not possible.” Because standing in the middle of the banqueting hall was Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere, returned, as he told us, after one day – one day – in the realm of the faeries.’