The Beauty of the Wolf. Wray Delaney

she said.

      She was lying, trying to hide her thoughts, the sorceress knew it. One name escaped the store cupboard of her mind. Sir Percival Hayes.

      ‘What are you frightened of?’ the sorceress asked. ‘Who is this man – this Sir Percival Hayes?’

      The widow shivered. The sorceress caught her eye. ‘I am waiting,’ she said, ‘and I am not in the mood to be lied to.’

      ‘Sir Percival Hayes has an estate not far from here. Lady Eleanor is his cousin. When the earl vanished, Sir Percival went to the house and swore he would be found. He too had heard stories of people being elfin taken – it was a subject that much interested him. Cunning men and wizards made a path to the door of the House of the Three Turrets, promising that they had the charm, knew the spell that would release Lord Rodermere from the faerie realm. Two years of fools came and went, and for all their enquiries—’

      ‘Yes, yes,’ the sorceress interrupted. ‘Nothing was discovered.’

      ‘Mistress, let me tell this in my way.’

      At last a spark of the woman she remembered.

      ‘After two years had passed, Sir Percival sent from London his own alchemist, Master Thomas Finglas.’

      The old widow was silent awhile and then said, ‘He brought with him his apprentice, a lad whose skin was as dark as an acorn. They made a strange pair, the boy and the man. The alchemist, I was told, handed Gilbert Goodwin a letter from Sir Percival who wrote that Master Finglas was tasked to bring back Lord Rodermere from the faerie realm. You may well imagine that Master Goodwin was none too eager to welcome this guest. Near two years had passed, two years of managing his master’s estate, of loving his master’s wife, of sleeping in his master’s bed. The last thing he wanted was his master’s return.’ ‘The quest failed,’ said the sorceress. ‘The alchemist – you met him?’

      The widow nodded.

      ‘What sort of trickster was he? Soaked in books, steeped in knowledge, lacking in wisdom?’

      The widow looked her straight in the eye. ‘If you know all, why did you never come when I called for you?’ She gazed into the embers of the fire and said, ‘Master Finglas failed to find Lord Rodermere and his failure to do so turned Sir Percival Hayes against all such alchemy. He had me examined for witchcraft. He said there be reports of me dancing with the black wolf, he even accused me of casting an owl-hunting enchantment on Lord Rodermere. He said I worked with a familiar.’

      ‘What led him to think this?’

      ‘I know not. Sir Percival sent his steward here this Yuletide to collect proofs against me: cheese that would not curdle, butter that would not come, the ale that drew flat.’

      The sorceress laughed. ‘As if we would be bothered with such domesticity.’

      ‘There is more,’ she said. ‘I be accused of bewitching Lady Rodermere’s maid, Agnes Dawse, and by doing so cause her death. But I did nothing, nothing. I never even saw her when she was ill.’

      Sleep had made the sorceress slow. She should have known from the moment the widow opened the door that the spell that kept her safe was broken and age had taken its revenge. She had cast herself from the sorceress by the folly of her tongue. The sorceress should have been more circumspect. The tear in her dress was a weakness that pulled her imperceptibly into the mortal world. Time is the giver and time the thief.

      ‘You betrayed me, old widow. You spoke my name.’

      Her fury rumbled the rafters of the cottage and she was in a mind to bring it down on the old widow and let it be her tomb.

      ‘Do you not care what happens to me?’ said the Widow Bott. ‘Be it of no importance to you?’

      ‘Some may think that a tear in their petticoat is of no importance.’ The sorceress showed her where the cloth had been taken. ‘If you can tell me where I might find the missing piece, I could be kind to you still.’

      The widow peered at the hem and felt the fabric between her fingers. Snow thudded to the floor from a hole in the thatch.

      ‘I think I saw it – but I cannot be certain.’

      Then the sorceress caught it – a fleck of a secret in the widow’s eye.

      ‘Be warned, old widow,’ said the sorceress, her anger a blood-red moon, ‘for I speak willow words that, if I so desire, can snatch your soul away, turn your good fortune to bad and bad to evil. My magic is eternal. What is it you are keeping from me?’

      The widow shivered.

      ‘A scrap of your hem. He had it. The alchemist had it.’

      Blinded by rage at what she had heard, such was her impatience to be gone that in all the Widow Bott had said the sorceress had missed the details. The truth, as tiny as spring flowers, lay unnoticeable beneath the snow.

XIV

      That night, this night, midnight, the end of Christmastide. Father Thames has begun to freeze, so tight is winter’s grip. Silent, soft, canny snow begins to fall; thick is each determined flake that gathers unrelenting in its purpose to make white this plague-ridden, shit-filled city.

      On such a night in Southwark, the bastard side of the Thames, by the sign of the Unicorn where the houses bow towards one another, their spidery beams made solid with salacious gossip. There the torches that would have lent light to the street have long been defeated, but one paltry candle burns in the cellar window of the house of the alchemist, Thomas Finglas. A vixen trots up the narrow alleyway, her soft pads leaving paw prints that are soon to vanish in a layer of crisp snow. She sniffs the night air and sees at the bars of the cellar window a creature, not of human shape. For a moment their eyes meet. Then, with a nod, the fox sets off once more, her brush proud behind her, her breath licked with flames. At the back door, the sorceress hesitates and listens. From the cellar comes an unearthly cry.

      Herkain’s long-ago words return to her unheeded.

      ‘Pride, my love, is the Mistress of Misrule.’

      Pride? she thinks. No, it is not pride that brings me here, unless pride be the essence of my being. She is here to retrieve what is rightfully hers, a piece of her hem, perilous, too powerful to be taken by a mere mortal.

      Unseen, a ghost, she steps into the house and as she enters the threads from the stolen hem needle into her, pull her towards this unknown thief. Quite suddenly she feels her powers wane, her magic weaken. Surely it is impossible that a man could possess wizardry equal to her own?

      Not a sound do her feet make on the stairs and there, in a tattered, long-neglected chamber, the alchemist lies on his lumpy mattress. The sorceress can hear his thoughts as she can with most mortals. In the flicker of troublesome dreams he notes the bluish light, the bitter cold, and longs for a peaceful sleep to rob him of all conscious thought. He thinks the cause of so much waking is a dry brain and his continual fears, he believes, account for his lack of sleep.

      But it is the memory of his late wife, deep buried, that is the cause. He had hoped with her death would go all the bell, book and candle curses that had tortured his days, made barren his nights. Half asleep he stares up at the canopy of the bed. His disquiet mind frets at the shabby drapes until in the fabric he sees the face of his dead wife, hears her voice crab-clawing at him.

      ‘Nay, Husband. I would call you a murderer.’

      And into the covers of his bed, he mumbles, ‘It was your curiosity that killed you, woman, not me.’

      Her cackle was as thick as his blood and just as black. ‘Suspicion will always fall on you, husband. I made sure of it – a gift from my winding sheet. I might be dead and maggoty-eaten but the power of my mischievous tongue has outlived me, has it not, Husband?’

      Thomas sits bolt upright in bed. He is a thin man, his eyes hooded by anxiety. He has