The Beauty of the Wolf. Wray Delaney

said Gilbert.

      ‘Not yet awhile,’ she said and sat to rock the cradle, to think what she should do, how she would explain the child’s sudden appearance. Could she claim the baby as her own? True, when she was with child, she had been slight, had never grown to the size of a galleon in full sail.

      Back and forth, back and forth, the cradle rocks back and forth and with each gentle movement she feels a strange heat. It starts in her thighs and spreads up into her belly, into her very womb, up to her breasts. It is an overwhelming heat, the like of which she had never experienced before. She stands up abruptly and forgetting all about Gilbert, forgetting all about modesty, she throws off her fur-lined gown. Still her womb feels to be a cauldron of flame. She discards her underdress.

      ‘I am on fire,’ she says.

      Gilbert sees her naked, her arms wide open and turns his face away.

      ‘My lady, shall I call for Agnes?’

      She looks at him and he turns to her, his full lips parted. She leans forward, her lips touch his. It is kindling for the blaze.

      Frantically, she undoes his doublet. He pulls off his shirt, her hand slips into his breeches, she is pleased to feel his cock is hard. On the bed he parts her tender limbs, kisses her lips, her neck. He nuzzles her breasts and gently enters her, not with the violence she is used to, nor is the act over with the pain of a few uncaring thrusts.

      Gilbert whispers, ‘Slowly, my lady, slowly.’

      He takes his time, waits for her. At each stile the lovers encounter he helps her over, and deeper into her he goes. Then, at the height of their ardour, when all appears lost, Eleanor gives a cry that wakes the baby, that makes the lovers pull away, she embarrassed by the completion of an act that she never knew could be so tender.

      Gilbert climbs out of bed, picks up the infant and holds it to him. They wait for the knock on the door, for their sin to be discovered.

      But there is not a sound, the house is still wrapped in an enchanting spell. The sorceress would not allow these two lovers to be disturbed. More needs to happen before the cuckoo is well and truly hatched.

IX

      Eleanor looks at Gilbert, naked, holding the infant close to him and her breasts ache. They feel full, painfully full, just as when she’d had her own babes. Leaking milk, she takes the babe from Gilbert and begins to feed him. With each thirsting suck he assures his place in her affections. She looks up at her new lover.

      ‘Tell me what has happened to us – do you know?’

      Tears fill his eyes.

      When the infant had finished feeding, Eleanor searched hungrily for a mark upon him for she had no doubt that her husband had been faerie-taken, no doubt that this was his child.

      The infant fell asleep and Gilbert wrapped him warm and snug and laid him in the cradle. And as he did so, the steward felt that time had gathered itself in quick, aching heartbeats, each beat becoming a month, the months becoming nine. This faerie child was as much his and his mistress’s – born in a flame of a desire – as ever it was his master’s.

      Gilbert awoke only when there was a tear of light in night’s icy cloth. Eleanor had the babe at her breast once more.

      She reached out towards her lover and whispered softly, ‘I will not give up the child. He is ours. What will we say? What should we do?’

      Gilbert kissed her.

      ‘Leave that to me,’ he said.

      In a basket near the bed lay a heap of bloodied sheets. Blood spilt on the floor, jugs of water, pink in colour, clothes and all such stuff to dress a stage for a woman who had given birth.

      When Agnes finally stirred she was confused first by how late the hour was, then mystified at the sight of her mistress propped up on pillows with a newborn babe.

      ‘Oh, my lady,’ said Agnes, ‘why did you not wake me?’

      ‘I tried,’ said Lady Rodermere, ‘but you were fast asleep and it came so quick upon me.’

      ‘Was no one with you, my lady?’

      Not a beat did Eleanor miss.

      ‘Yes – Gilbert Goodwin.’

      After all it was the steward’s duty to make sure that any child born to Lord Rodermere’s wife was no usurper.

      ‘I am most truly sorry,’ said Agnes. ‘The thought of you being on your own, and you never knowing you were with child.’

      Eleanor felt the smile deep within her and kept her face solemn as she said, ‘If asked, perhaps it would be best that you were to say you were with me all night.’

      ‘Willingly,’ Agnes said.

      And by doing so is caught in the nest of lies.

X

      It was Gilbert Goodwin who after the infant’s birth sent for the Widow Bott. The widow had delivered many a changeling child and watched them fade as bluebells in a wood when the season has passed. For the truth is, there are few children who have a mortal and a faerie for a parent and those that are born always have a longing to return to our world rather than stay in the human realm, and who can blame them. Changeling children, instead of being plump and round are sickly things that hang on to life as does a spider swing on a thread in a tempest. These changeling babes, left behind unwanted by the goblins, are placed in cradles where newborn babes lie and when no one is looking they take the child’s form as their own. But not this half-elfin child. He was born to be the sorceress’s instrument of death.

      Lord Rodermere had often decried faeries as diminutive creatures made of air and imagination. But we are giants for we hold sway over the superstitions of humankind. I have hunted the skies, chased the clouds in my chariot, I have seen wisdom in the eye of a snake, strength beyond its size in an ant, and cruelty in the hand of man. Our sizes, our shapes, our very natures are beyond the comprehension of most. We are concerned with pleasure and the joy of love, we use our powers to shift our shapes, to build enchanted dwellings, to fashion magic objects and to take dire revenge on mortals who offend us. But for those we protect, such as the Widow Bott, we ensure their youth and health.

      She has a far greater understanding in the knowledge of herbs and plants and their properties than many an apothecary, much more than the quack wizard, or so called alchemist, hoping to turn lead to gold, to cheat men from their money.

      So it was important – nay, I would say it was a necessity – that Gilbert called for her, for she alone could sway all incredulity, she could assure any doubters that the sheets held the evidence of a human birth, not the blood of a slaughtered rabbit. In short, she would give weight to the child’s arrival, confirm that he was indeed the son of Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere.

XI

      The sorceress had no desire to remain at the House of the Three Turrets that morning. It pained her to see her trees used that way, their branches bent, carved into unforgiving shapes. Instead she went to the widow’s cottage and waited by the fire.

      It was dark by the time the Widow Bott returned. Wrapped against the cold, her cloak caked in frost, snow and she came in as one. Putting down her basket, she fumbled for a candle to light. The sorceress lit it for her, set the fire to blaze and the pot upon it.

      ‘I should have known that you would be here,’ said the Widow Bott. ‘Well, I am not talking to the air. Show yourself, or be gone. I am tired and it shivers me when I cannot see you for who you are.’

      For some reason she was out of sorts.

      ‘You always know when I am near,’ said the sorceress, to comfort her.