The Beauty of the Wolf. Wray Delaney

so stupefied by it that he loses his footing, stumbles backwards, feeling each word of hers as a blow.

      ‘I am not still,’ she says. ‘I never will be. And whatever your God of retribution might say, I will no longer be secret.’

      She screams a scream so piercing it shatters windows, sets dogs to howl. Now the sorceress sees the shape of the beast, she sees the glint of her talons. She hears the flapping of her immense wings. She hears Thomas Finglas cry out in agony. There is a rush of air and the beast is in the snowy garden and the sorceress is in time to see her silhouetted against the night sky, a magnificent winged creature who does not belong to the world of man. The sorceress watches enchanted as the creature tilts her head and inhales the thick, foul breath of the city. She opens her mouth and tastes the snow, stretches her wings to their full extent and swoops out over the river. And she is gone.

      ‘Randa, come back . . . Randa . . . in all your doings be still . . .’

      Thomas’s words collapse in on him. The sorceress lights the candle. He is on his knees in the passage. Blood runs down the torn ribbons of his face, he looks like a martyr and she has little sympathy.

      Revenge, she thinks, is the sweetest sweetmeat of all.

      ‘My hem,’ she says. ‘Give me my hem.’

THE BEAST

       ’Tis my sole plague to be alone,

       I am a beast, a monster grown . . .

      THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY ROBERT BURTON