by Wray Delaney
‘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 lost the optimism that had once given him an arrogance that marked him out, as if he alone knew the answer to all the world’s conundrums. His mind is kept sharp with knowledge yet his wits are dulled by superstition and a terror of the power he has unleashed.
This dead wife of his is an indigestible piece of gristle. Her bitter words sit heavy on the right side of his stomach, a pain no remedy of his devising can ease. A cold wind moans into the chamber through the gaps in the glass. He hears the vengeful night conquering the current of the Thames, transforming water into ice.
He hears with a heavy heart his late wife’s waspish voice prattle on.
‘I would call you an adulterer, a dealer in the Devil’s magic.’
He sinks back and pulls the covers up over him.
‘And you,’ says Thomas Finglas, ‘what brought you to our table apart from rumours and lies to make misery of my tomorrows? Never once an infant came from that barren womb of yours to comfort my days. Be damned, be gone.’
He thinks back to his mistress, his beloved Bess, her flesh so soft, her breasts so firm, her belly round. Her belly round that had given him his one and only infant, a secret to be protected from this cruel world and from his wife’s vicious temper.
‘You never knew the truth, woman,’ he says into the hollow silence.
The sorceress is intrigued.
‘Tell me, Thomas,’ she says. ‘Tell me the truth.’
‘Bess . . . is that you? Bess . . .’
Sleep takes him, exhausted, in its kind embrace. And just as he dreams of Bess’s round bottom, her soft cheek, just as he feels her lips upon his, downstairs something heavy falls.
‘The cat,’ says Thomas sleepily.
He cares little, for only Beelzebub now will make him rise from this floating warmth of oblivion, from the tender-breasted Bess. All else can go to the Devil.
‘The cat,’ he says again, his eyes heavy, his mind at last clear of the past.
But it is no cat.
XV
There are two men in the house, heavy of build but nimble of foot, the stench of the river and the tavern on them, mercenaries in search of any paid work. Kidnapping, assault, murder, all arts they are well-versed in as long as they are paid and can own their own boots. Each step they take in hope of waylaying their prey.
Thomas’s apprentice, John Butter, does not wake at the sound of the intruders. He is asleep in the kitchen. He, unlike his master, sleeps the deep sleep of youth. Walls may crash, trees may fall and still he would dream on.
Thomas wakes with a start. He tries to gather his dreaming wits and fails.
‘Bess?’ he calls into the darkness. ‘In the name of God, show yourself.’
Swift are the two men. He has no chance to scream before he is muffled in a cloak, wrapped and strapped.
His two assailants are big-built, battle-dented men. Thomas is an easy customer. The knife held to his side tells him they mean business.
‘Keep quiet and no harm will come to you. Make a sound and the knife will find its home in your heart.’
He is bundled from the chamber. The vixen slips out unseen before them.
The garden gate creaks back and forth in the wind. Thomas struggles to free his face from the cloak, shaking his head vigorously. From the low window of his cellar comes the high-pitched yowl and the vixen sees there again the feathered creature who stares out through the bars, eyes glinting; a halo of light outlines its shape, talons scrape at the glass. The image is disjointed by the round panes so there appears more than one and behind all a shadow of wings looms great. The sight seems to torture Thomas.
Under his breath he whispers, ‘In the name of God be secret and in all your doings be still.’
Momentarily, the sound stops his assailants.
‘What’s that?’ says one, lifting his lantern.
He points at the cellar window. The sound sends a shiver down their hardened spines. Not even in war, when the battle was over and men lay wounded and dying, had these two heard such a cry.
‘Let us be gone from this cursed place,’ says the other and pulls Thomas into the alleyway. And in that moment, not fully able to see his enemies, he tries to make a fight of it. His reward for his effort is a sharp blow to the head. He stumbles and loses consciousness.
The mercenaries take hold of an arm each and carry Thomas with all haste towards the river. If anyone had the gall to stop them they would say they were helping an old drunk home. But no one is about to see them and only their footsteps tell which way they are bound. By the water steps, not far from the Unicorn alehouse, they drag Thomas to where a barge is waiting. On board is a gentleman, dressed in black, his jerkin slashed through with red taffeta, a fur-lined cloak speaks of a wealthy master.
‘What is this?’ he says, seeing Thomas unconscious. ‘Is he alive? I am not taking a dead man to the House of the Three Turrets.’
‘He is not dead. He will recover soon enough. Now, where is the money?’
The knife glitters in the darkness. Neither party wants an argument. A purse of coins is handed over and Thomas is dragged into a curtained cabin.
The oarsmen push off and out into the slushy water towards the middle of the river where a ribbon of mercury is all that is left of the fast-flowing tide, for the Thames has by degrees begun to turn white. Behind the barge London Bridge looms monstrous high, and an army of buildings, a fortress to remind England’s enemies that this country is ruled by a queen with a lion’s heart.
When the river freezes it speaks; fragments of ice crackling with confessions of the murdered and the lost. On the ill-lit bridge the sorceress alone sees the frosted ghost of a young woman, a group of drunken men laughing, jostling her. She loses her footing and slips, tumbles unnoticed into the icy, churning waters. The voices of the dead bring an eerie sense of solitude to this usually frantic thoroughfare. Among them Thomas hears his Bess.
‘Not long, my love, ’til we embrace again. Not long, my love.’
The river is near deserted. The oarsmen battle on, sweating even in the cold of this grievous night. Slowly the city disappears, past Westminster and out into the pitchy black darkness of the countryside.
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.
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.