by Wray Delaney
I hear John call for his master. He runs up the stairs then down. Fast is John.
Footsteps at the cellar door.
‘Be still,’ he says. ‘Mistress Randa, be still.’
It is the fox who pushes open the door, her snout before her. I feel the animal’s warm breath and the iron collar falls with a clank from my neck, resounding on the stone floor. Then she is gone. As I wonder at this inexplicable freedom, John turns and runs back up to my father’s laboratory. Boards creak, something is lifted, something bangs shut. A girl’s voice, questioning.
‘Stay here,’ says John Butter. ‘Stay back, Mary.’
But the girl is there, her hand to her mouth. I stand in the door so it cannot be closed again. I tower above John and know how much I have grown. He comes to me, holds out by its string a purse for Mistress Randa to take. For me to take. A purse.
He speaks in my mother’s tongue.
‘Keep this safe, mistress.’
Now I listen. He is not tip-tripping, his words stand upright like him.
‘Hold the purse when you wish to pass unseen. Hold it by the strings and you will be visible to all. You understand?’
I do not take it.
He thrusts it at me. ‘It is the hem of a sorceress’s petticoat. It is powerful. You understand? The master never knew how powerful.’
I take it.
‘Goodbye, Mistress Randa.’
Then they are gone too. The front door closes.
In my father’s laboratory I warmed myself by the fire, too tired for flight. I found food and ate, then with the daylight sleep took me deep. I woke to find it dark again, and saw all the possessions that my father held dearer than me.
I tore, broke, ruined, spoiled them all. I took no pleasure in the destruction but said more to him in that one act than I would ever say in words.
I hear my father’s wheedling voice. Tight I hold the purse and he sees me not. Behind him in the passage, a creature in the form of a woman with the smell of a fox. She sees me, I know she does. And I see the tear in her hem. I hear my father’s thoughts and feel as little pity for him as he feels for me. He stands in my way.
I flayed his face. I spared his life.
In soft, beguiling flakes of snow I rise up, rise up into the clouds that have long been waiting to embrace me. The wind in my wings makes sense of myself, all of myself, and at last I feel myself whole.
THE BEAUTY
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces’.
SONNET XVII WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
XXXI
‘You look like none of them,’ said Lord Rodermere.
My father was in the long gallery where he stood studying the portraits of our ancestors. His face a shade of a claret, his velvet breeches, his overstuffed codpiece and his large mutton sleeves, all of the same hue, lent themselves well to my imagining him to be a bloodied joint of meat.
‘Here, Lord Beaumont, with the nose of a buffoon, is your grandfather, a weak-willed man who believed in the magic of the forest. Fool. This here is your grandmother: if she had not been a countess she would have been burned for a witch. And on and on they go, the great and the ugly of the Rodermere family. Note, Lord Beaumont, not one of them possessed even a grain of beauty.’
He was drunk and rambled nonsense in his cups.
‘My lord,’ I said, ‘I wish to relinquish my name, title and claim to the land I stand to inherit and to be free of any obligation to you.’
He turned from the paintings to me. He looked almost rational and for a moment I thought that he would agree and allow me to leave. I waited for him to say he did not believe me to be his son and that as far as he was concerned I could go to the Devil.
He paused before he said, ‘You have her eyes. Golden.’ Then fell silent.
Thinking he had nothing more to say to me I started to walk away.
‘Od’s my will,’ he shouted after me. ‘You will not leave. If you do I assure you of one thing: that my whore of a wife, my daughter, my bastard of a steward will all be dead. That is my curse upon them for their treachery. Do you hear me, my son, do you hear me? If you leave that will be their fate. You will stay here and learn to be a man, for there is little merit in looks that belong to neither sex. I ask you – are you a girl to be bedded or are you a man enough to do the bedding?’
‘My lord, I do not know how I look for I have never seen myself in a glass.’
He refilled his goblet and his laughter echoed from the rafters.
‘Never seen yourself in a glass? Was Lady Rodermere frightened of you falling in love with your own reflection?’
I saw no point in arguing with a drunk. I kept the rhythm of my footsteps and with each beat of my shoe I told myself I would be gone from here. It would not be long and I would be gone from him and this rustic place. I was restless to see the world beyond the forest. To see London. To see the play.
That night I lay in my bed and his words that I had given little value to began to worry at me. Whose eyes do I have if not my own? What did he mean when he talked of beauty? What beauty and why did he doubt my sex? I told myself this was a speech made by a mad man when the bottle had toppled what little reason he had in favour of folly. Yet still that flea of a thought kept me awake, itched at my mind.
When I was a child I had a feeling of not belonging to this world. I was unsure of everything except that I was loved by my mother, by my sister, and by Master Goodwin who I considered my father.
This feeling – of being a stranger in my own world – I put aside when at the age of ten, a tutor, Doctor Grace, arrived from Cambridge and under his tutelage I began to give less credence to childish doubts. I was a part of this modern age, the future belonged to us, the young. And in that I became more settled to the idea of the man I would become.
Learning taught me the guilt of words, the weight of knowledge; that there were many languages and all held their secrets. I had taken comfort in the stories of Ovid, the wisdom of Socrates, was reassured by the straight line of the written word, be it Greek or Latin. I believed without question that there was a rational order to be found in all things, even in the serpent and the circle.
As I grew I came to believe that my infantile memories had nothing to do with reality, but were to do with stories I had been told as a child from which my imagination had made a false truth. I had thought I remembered a chamber in the forest deep under a tree, a black bed therein with black drapes, a sleeping woman as young as dawn, as ancient as time.
Now I was confronted by the certainty that I had once seen such a chamber. I recalled the blueness of the woman’s veins, that looked to me like the roots of trees when they emerge from the earth. Sleep could not hide her age, her skin, papery as autumn leaves. In that chamber I thought she would wake and tell me I was home. Yesterday I had caught a glimpse of her shadow in the long gallery. I was shocked to hear her thoughts as I had heard them when I was small: my beauty would corrupt me, make a monster of me. What had beauty to do with me?
True, I had never seen myself in a glass but many men had not. It did not follow that they had not a clear idea of who they were in the mirror of their mind. I was lean, my hair was dark. I had good feet so Lady Clare told me. But as to my face, in whether or not it be fair, I had little interest. I supposed it to be a face as ordinary as any other man’s, flattered only by the light of youth. Yet it was that word beauty that danced wayward in my head and kept sleep from me.
The following morning Lord Rodermere called to him my tutor, Doctor Grace, and informed him that his services were no longer needed.
‘Your son shows great promise, my lord,’ said my tutor. ‘He could be a scholar. I would even suggest he might attend one of the universities.’
‘My son to be some learned coxcomb?’ shouted my father. ‘I would rather h
e hanged than study. It behoves the sons of the aristocracy to blow a horn call correctly, to hunt skilfully, to train a hawk well and carry it elegantly. Literature can be left to ninny-hammers.’
At least Doctor Grace did not suffer the fate of Master Finglas, put unclothed on a horse. A carriage was summoned to take him to London and I was much saddened at his leaving.
As he climbed into the coach, he said, ‘From an unpromising beginning, Lord Beaumount, you have turned into a diligent student. Hunting, I believe, is useful for mastering the art of war. In learning lies peace.’
I returned to my chamber to find a glass had been hung on the wall and, for the first time, I was confronted with my own reflection.
No, it cannot be me. I appear unreal, my face a mask. What freak of nature stands before me? No man was given this unearthly appearance. What some might call beauty, I find monstrous. I am defeated by this, my own image. I had believed that the absence of mirrors was to protect my sister from the truth of her blemished face, that the reason the servants were not allowed to look directly upon us was to do with her sensitivity. It had never occurred to me it might have been not for her protection but for mine.
I laugh aloud to think that Doctor Grace’s failing eyesight must have gone much in his favour when he had been employed to teach me.
My eyes do indeed shine golden in the candlelight. I have never seen anyone with amber eyes. My skin is smooth as silk, not one blemish to be found upon it. This face, this unknown face of mine appears as if someone has spent precious hours with brushes to achieve its ivory complexion, gone to ridiculous lengths to line my eyes with kohl, to blush my cheeks pink, to stain my lips red, to frame it all in thick, dark curls. Can this creature be me? This androgynous beast that stares back at me? It does not reflect in any small way the perception I have of myself. Up to this moment I only knew the outline of my features. My skin, unlike my sister’s, was smooth. Yet to me Clare was a beauty for she had a gentle spirit within her. And there was no doubt in her mind of who she was.
My very soul has by this one gaze been shattered into a thousand fragments. I am but an actor who has no desire to study himself further for fear that he has been miscast in this drama and knows not what part he is to play, for staring back at me in that silvered surface lies the truth. Undeniable, unbearable. I look nothing like my mother, nothing like my sister, nothing like my father. So who, pray, am I? It was undeniable: I was a cuckoo. In some truths seeds of madness grow.
Never had I felt more lost, more set apart from others than I did at that moment. If this was beauty, then I wanted nothing more to do with its reflection in Narcissus’s pool.
XXXII
The house I grew up in, so full of warmth and laughter, had in a matter of days shown itself to be built on shifting sands. Why had my mother not told me the truth?
I had not seen myself staying there under such a tyrant any longer than the sundial took to find midday. And yet there was no escape for me. I did not for a moment think that Lord Rodermere would fail to carry out his threat to have my family murdered. As he told me, time and time again, I was their only protection against the Grim Reaper.
He proved to be a pitiless master to his peasants, to his servants. Full of petty injustices, he blamed everything and everyone for his time lost. Nothing pleased him. We had nothing in common and my utter contempt for he who gave me life began by degrees to disturb me. The more I saw of him the deeper ran my dislike of this man I was obliged to call ‘my lord’.
He demanded we took our meals together and they were served in the vast banqueting hall where the long wooden table groaned with the weight of roasted animals – venison, rabbit, pork, beef. Bread was served by the basket, cheese by the board and wine by the flagon. It was never enough. No matter how much he devoured, he was hungry still. He had a hunger on him that I have never seen on any other person. My own lack of appetite came from revulsion at watching such insatiable greed.
A thought came to me that alleviated the boredom of these meals. I began to imagine that I had poisoned each dish he was consuming. It shocked me to find that such a vision of his death throes delighted me.
We never talked while he concentrated on his plate. He sat at the head of the table and I chose the chair furthest from him. The dogs walked back and forth in hope of a bone or two. Conversation there was none, unless it was to rant and shout, and mostly he would growl at the servants demanding more, more, and more again. His temper terrified all those who waited on him for it was hard to judge from one moment to the next the high or low of his rage. Finally, the wine if not the food would soothe his befuddled mind until at last he would bellow himself into a stupor.
His hatred of my mother was vicious. ‘That bawd was the dullest woman in bed,’ he would shout. ‘No womb for a son.’
I refused to rise to such provocation. But when he talked of my sister I was less tolerant.
‘Three useless daughters your mother gave me. Two gravestones and the ugliest bitch of all survived. Who would want to marry her?’ he said. ‘Looking into that face on your wedding night would be enough to wilt even the strongest cock.’ This thought amused him greatly. ‘I should have sent her to a convent where no man would be obliged to look on her.’
At this my blood would rise. In truth I was possessed by murderous thoughts and became afraid that my very being was not mine to command. I would fall asleep thinking of killing him; wake, and my first thought would be how to best do the deed in such manner that the finger of blame would not point at me.
If I could but banish all such notions from my mind, then I might return to myself. How such a passion had come about in me I did not understand but I did not doubt that I would be his death if I stayed in his house.
I had all but given up listening to him, merely conscious of his beef-witted grunts, when one day he suddenly he stood and shouted at me down the long table.
‘Did you not hear me? A sorceress put a curse on me.’ He stopped abruptly and changed the subject. ‘Beau. Bloody stupid name, Beau. A ninny-nothing name.’ He swayed unsteadily back and forth. ‘Tell me how it goes, the curse.’
I shrugged. This was the first I had heard tell of it.
‘You are a dumb-witted knave, are you not?’
He took a chicken by a drumstick and threw it down the table at me. I did not move. Drink had spoiled his aim and the dogs obligingly cleaned up the mess.
He sat down heavily in his chair.
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember. The curse was written on the bark of one of the first oak trees I felled to build this house. Written in gold, those words were . . . a faerie boy will be born to me. You hear that? Born to me . . . whose beauty will be my death.’
He took another draught from his goblet. ‘A faerie boy will be my death – and you could not kill a rabbit. I doubt you have the balls to do such a thing. So you see, old sorceress,’ he shouted at the rafters, ‘here is my son – Lord Beaumont, pretty Lord Beaumont, a faerie boy. I drink to my murderer.’
I did not lift my goblet. I felt for my dagger and through the fog of rage one grain of reason tipped the scales: it was the curse, this bloodlust on me, and I had been made a puppet.
‘Why do you not drink?’
I knew it would not be long until he lost all use of limb and tongue. He slumped in his chair, his eyes heavy, his mind wandering in wine.
‘I do not believe in the elfin queen,’ he said. ‘I do not believe in magic.’
I hoped he might say he did not believe I was his son.
‘Witches,’ he said, ‘now that is another matter. As is the Devil. A woman with a will needs to be broken with a whip,’ he said.
Dear lord, at that instant I would have killed him. He brought his fist down hard on the table so that the dishes jumped.
‘Never marry a bitch with a forked tongue, for she will be off gadding and you will never know if your child is yours or some other sop’s. Better by far lie under an old hedge, than with a young upsta
rt of a bush.’
A voice in my head said, do it, do it. One blow and it is over. I stood up.
‘What – will you come at me, pretty nothing?’
Sweat broke out on my forehead and I felt I was battling to stop myself falling on him and by doing so know myself to be his son.
‘Who then was my mother,’ I asked, ‘if not your wife?’
‘Beautiful . . .’ he said. ‘The most beautiful woman I have ever seen. The only woman to tame my prick. One day, one day was all I had with her, that was all.’ His eyes began to close. ‘One fucking day . . .’
His words slurred into sleep.
None of the servants dared move. I went to the end of the table, lifted his hand and let it fall. He did not wake. He would be like that until morning.
My father had taken up residence in the tallest turret and it took four servants to carry him up to his bedchamber every night. My chamber was at the far end of the house. I went to it through the long gallery for there was one portrait I wanted to look at again. A small painting, lovingly placed in an elaborately carved frame. Perhaps it was hoped the frame would detract from my sister’s blemished face for against all advice she had refused to have her skin painted soft. The portrait had been returned by a suitor, much to the sadness of my mother and Master Goodwin.
‘What use is a lie?’ Lady Clare had said to our mother. ‘The humiliation would have been even worse when he saw me as I am.’