The Beauty of the Wolf

by Wray Delaney

  XXXVI

  Randa is not a name I know. I have no reason to know it yet it is the name of the demon who speaks to me.

  I thought at first the spirit of the wolf had followed me out of the forest but in all the tales I have heard of the great black wolf never once has it had a name. The wolf is always spoken of as ‘he’, and it is a female spirit that is here in my chamber, watching. I know not who she is or what she wants of me but I hear her as I heard her in the widow’s cottage. I hear her often.

  Randa who thinks me a thief. How do I know that?

  I asked her.

  ‘Why? Tell me why am I a thief?’

  ‘Your beauty has stolen my reason.’

  I heard her say it. What more evidence do I need to convince myself of my insanity?

  There is no one here. I listen to silence, the shadows talk. Whatever this strange enchantment is, it tortures me. Brewed from a witch’s hell broth, is it the Widow Bott’s doing? I am certain of only one thing: it began at her cottage. Wolf or demon, it springs from there.

  The forest I am as familiar with as the lines on the palm of my hand. I have never feared it. In all its seasons it has been a friend. Yet in the winter’s light of that late afternoon I felt as if the black wolf was on my heels. Only when I reached the stone steps leading up to the front door of the House of the Three Turrets did I feel it retreat. My heart was beating fast and I bent over to stop the world from spinning, to find my breath in the chaos of my being. I glanced back to the forest and through the beech trees thought I caught a glimpse of something – someone – watching me.

  A servant opened the door.

  ‘We have have been worried, Lord Beaumont,’ he said. ‘Your horse is long returned.’

  I had entered the hall, grateful to feel the warmth of the fire, when from high above there came the sound of shattering glass. I followed the servants as they ran up the stairs to see what had caused it and a glorious thought came to me that my father, sodden-witted, had fallen through a window in one of the turrets. It would have made sense to my mind if he had but what I discovered made little sense at all.

  The large window of my chamber was broken. In the darkness it was hard to see how such damage had occurred. Little could be done until the morning and I spent that night in another part of the house, returning to my chamber the following day. I was mystified by the extent of the destruction. There was no doubt that something monstrous had flown into the window with great violence. There was no wounded creature, but among the glass shards, I spied a splattering of blood and in all the confusion lay one flame-red feather. The sight of it picked at the stitching of my sanity.

  It was a week before I could return to my chamber and by then I had come to believe I was not alone.

  Sometimes I hear her, other times I swear I smell her, smell a perfume only found on the paws of a dog, and just as mysterious.

  Randa.

  What if I have created you from my imagination, made a powerful spirit from air so that I might have a companion, a friend to keep me from recognising my profound loneliness, to argue me out of murdering my father. Or is this the tail of the same coin? But if you are of my doing then why have I conjured a woman and not a man? A man would surely serve the same purpose. But I hear your thoughts and they are of a sweet woman’s soul. It is as if you are inside me, my little soul to keep me company. If that be the case then we are two parts of the same body and who is to say how much woman is mixed in with man? Or how much man is mixed in with woman when he first drinks from the cup of life?

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked. ‘To drive me mad?’

  ‘Perhaps I am your sanity,’ came the answer.

  ‘I doubt that. You are the dark side of the mirror, the face I cannot see. Sometimes I hear your thoughts. They fragment, dance me slowly insane and I am drunk again on another goblet of your sad song. Randa, whoever you are, my constant, invisible, unwanted companion, my only companion, who are you? What are you?’

  How can I love what terrifies me? Begone, I beg of you, my madness, begone.

  THE BEAST

  XXXVII

  If he could see my sad eyes and know me: a woman, not a woman, a beast, not a beast. A confusion of two made one. For what purpose, I know not.

  But I am here, the woman in me strong. I long for the love that these breasts of mine ache for. I like the softness of them and imagine the rest of me a map still to be discovered, that his hands, Beau’s hands, could find my skin beneath my fur and I would be free of my feathers. He would kiss the soft fruit between my legs and this kiss would wake me into human form, not this. Not this.

  Am I here, or am I a thing of dreams? Half dreamed for by my mother, half longed for and all to be forgotten by my father – he who could make no peace with the god he prays to. A god who flooded the world, who made Noah, a man, build an ark that he might take the animals, and leave us, half-beasts to drown.

  John told me stories of his land, his home. He said dreams had a power to them, that if you believed hard enough they could become the source of life. John was gentle, John who they called Butter. He thought butter be edible gold. Butter became his surname. Like my mother he spoke with a different tongue from my father.

  My mother kept her other tongue in a glass jar, full of ‘yes, mistress, no mistress’. It spoke kindly to a lord who had no ears to hear her, no eyes to see me with. When she spoke to me, only to me, did she use her own voice. She spoke of a boy who had been born cursed with beauty, who lived in a house with three turrets; of a wise woman whose cottage lay in the eye of a forest. I listened to her stories with a child’s understanding and wondered how beauty could be a curse. A beast like me is a curse but never beauty, surely not beauty. She told me I was wrong for what if all who looked upon this boy fell in love with him? Then I thought he would be doubly blessed.

  Alas, no. For the man behind the mask, she said, would never be seen for who he truly was.

  The day I left my father’s house I had nothing to hold me to the cloth of the sky apart from dreams. Up in the clouds, for the first time not weighted by fur and bone, my shape had purpose. My wings, filled with air, gave me grace, though I had little strength for flying. The cold had eaten into me and when I could go no further I found the cottage in the eye of the forest, just as my mother had said.

  The wise widow came out of her cottage into the darkness. I showed myself as I was, not hidden in invisibility and I smelled no fear in her.

  ‘My name is Randa,’ I said.

  ‘Randa? Be Bess your mother?’

  She said to come in, she said she had food, she had rabbit.

  ‘I am too big for your door,’ I said.

  She laughed and told me curl into myself, and there was space enough.

  It was she who taught me to hunt. There is an art to it which took some learning.

  Perhaps I should have stayed with her, content to sit by her fire. I took to liking the food in the pot. This would be the rest of my days, I thought, safe, and seen whole in the mirror of her gaze. I would put aside all thoughts of another life. But then I saw him.

  I was hunting, looking for deer, not looking for him. But there he was upon his horse and all that was in me fell from the sky. The widow called him Beau. Lord Beaumont. I had not imagined a face like his, not his beauty beyond reason. I had not thought I could ache for a touch as I ached for his.

  You were my dream, you are my future and I knew that I would never be parted from you. Not then, not now.

  The wise widow said, ‘Hush, little bird, he is not for you.’ She said he had been born into a curse, that his journey lay in a different direction, that I should leave him be.

  ‘Tell me,’ said I, ‘can the sun choose not to rise? Then I tell you, I can no more leave him be.’

  He will never love you. Hard words, their point pierced me. I knew the truth of them and still I followed him to the House of the Three Turrets.

  It will be enough to stay a little while out of the cold, to keep
him company. I do not speak the truth. How can it be enough when I long for him to fill all the loneliness in me?

  Under night’s cover I watch you sleeping. High in the beams of your chamber is where I stay. I lick my wounds, pull out the splinters of glass, wait until I heal. I long to touch you. When I did, you woke with a shudder. A nightmare, you called me. Randa, a thing of night horses.

  Your skin is as soft as velvet. Beneath its taut surface I hear your blood beat. Poets write sonnets to such beauty as yours. They talk of love. Such a small word is love yet its weight upon the soul is immeasurable. The L of longing, a fortress that crumples defeated into the O of a world of wooden hope, then the V, the void, the violence of desire, all held in place by the cheating E that promises an eternity of endings.

  Will you ever love me as I love you?

  THE BEAUTY

  XXXVIII

  Sleep is the only refuge from the mistress of my madness. Only in my dreams can I escape her.

  In my dreams there is a house like no other I have seen. Not built from heavy timbers that hold the darkness, this mansion is made of brick and stone, its walls tangled over with ivy and roses, the windows of such magnificent breadth and height they would make a cathedral blush.

  The chambers have double doors that reach to the ceiling and open onto vistas of rooms beyond. It appears uninhabited, for I see no furniture. Yet whenever I want to sit on a chair or think of a table there is the chair, there the table.

  Every night I dreamed of the same place until by degrees I believed I knew it better than the House of the Three Turrets. Never did I see another soul nor believe it to be haunted. Outside, I knew – though how I knew I cannot tell – there were beasts.

  That dream, that mansion became my solace, a reward for the daylight hours I spent under my father’s tyrannical roof with a ghost my only companion.

  I too wait for darkness but not to dream, to hunt. I climb to the highest turret. There are no windows, no glass to hurt me. I let myself fall before instinct as strong as breathing unfolds my wings. They have grown more powerful with use. I hold tight to the purse of my invisibility. The deer runs, knowing I am above her. I can smell her fear, see the wildness of death in her eyes. The sharpness of my claws are swift in the killing and then the taste of blood-raw meat that still has a heartbeat to it.

  I watch the square man with the cruel bones. You say he is Father, he with his feast of dead cooked animals. The sight of it is repulsive. There is an honesty in the chase, a humbling in the kill.

  And you slip away from me into another place.

  To sleep, to dream and to have no more to do with this waking world – that is all I desired. I refused to hear she who was my madness.

  I cared little about my clothes. I left my doublet unbraced, my stockings round my ankles, failed to shave and was delighted to see the ruin of myself in any unsuspecting glass I happened to pass. I had little interest in daylight. It was the nights I longed for.

  My father, being told of my melancholy, asked what ailed me. ‘Daylight,’ I replied, ‘for its reign is longer by far than night’s realm.’

  He stared at me for a while and took in my shabby appearance.

  ‘The mad are fools that no man should take seriously,’ he said. ‘I think I know the cause of your malady.’

  He had his back towards me as he filled his goblet.

  ‘Could it be, sir,’ I said, ‘that I am plagued and punished with insanity for your faults? Bad blood begets bad blood.’

  I expected him to rise in anger but he was never interested in any answer that did not come from his own tongue, neither did he value any opinion that was not of his own making.

  ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that your need for sleep is due to the lack of carnal copulation. I would say it is the poisonous vapours of the seed too long kept in the testicles that affect the brain and heart. It is simple: your melancholy is the result of your virginity and an underused cock.’

  I saw no point in contradicting him. It would have illustrated too much sanity on my part.

  ‘There is a cure that will bring you to your senses,’ he said. ‘You simply need to indulge the bodily fluids with sexual delights.’

  To that end whores were brought from London to the House of the Three Turrets, more, I suspected, for Lord Rodermere’s entertainment than mine. Seeing that I had no interest in them, he partook liberally of the delights on offer. And though he did not say it, he decided I was beyond redemption.

  My tutor Doctor Grace had often talked of the influence that the heavens and stars have upon the humour of our souls. If he was right I concluded that I must have been born under a most vexed and sorrowful star. Perhaps best to sleep and live in enchanting dreams that become nightly more precious to me than the solid earth beneath my feet.

  Just when I was convinced that I had truly strayed from the road to sanity, at least in the daylight hours, something occurred that gave me hope that I had not lost all reason.

  It was one of my father’s servants who discovered, at the top of the tallest of the three turrets, above their master’s bedchamber, the half-eaten carcass of a deer and the bones of numerous chickens and rabbits. The discovery sent fear running through the household and relief dancing in my soul. Servants who had held their peace began to talk of hearing scratching sounds at night, of being terrified to go into my chamber when I was not there, certain that within was something malign, something demonic. A bad omen, they said. It was a bad omen when the window of my chamber first broke for they knew no bird so great that could cause such damage.

  What a hungry ghost you are, Randa. And for the first time in a long age I laughed.

  THE BEAST

  XXXIX

  If the seas be wine Lord Rodermere would drink them dry. I watch him. He groans in his sleep and methinks he is a beast created by his own hand and knows it not; a little horned worm, jealous of his son, of his beauty. His youth.

  He is filled with rotting meat that moulders in his gut, giving off ill humours and wretched dreams.

  These nights, I, Randa, I go to his chamber out of fear of what Beau might do for I can see that he fights every day this murderous curse that urges him to kill this monster, this father.

  Beau, sweet Beau, paces dagger in hand. He says this must be done if he is to find peace. What enchantment is it that has control of his gentle nature? He thinks I am his madness. I know I am his saviour.

  Perhaps I should do the killing for him. It would take so little, I would be swift with this bloated creature of titles. Between the dream and the dying he would not know who had done it. I stand at his bed and watch him, a father, another father careless of his seed. He wakes and I do not hide myself but stretch my wings. His eyes wide with terror, he crawls up the bed, pulls the covers round his ears.

  ‘Oh my lord, save me,’ he whimpers and remembering another lord he speaks long-forgotten prayers to his god, my father’s god, as if that will protect him.

  I delight in his terror, in my power.

  Then the door to the chamber opens and Beau is here, dagger in hand. He sleeps and knows not what he does.

  Invisible again, I swoop on him, drag him from the place. At the foot of the stairs to the turret he wakes.

  ‘Have I killed him?’ he asks, uncertain, and I whisper that it is a nightmare, just a nightmare.

  He stops. ‘Are you sure,’ he says, ‘mistress of my madness?’

  The house rings with the screams of his father.

  THE BEAUTY

  XL

  Once asleep my father rarely stirred until well past ten in the morning. The House of the Three Turrets could have fallen down around him and still he would be snoring. But one night he found himself woken from his stupor in a state of terror, sure that a huge, winged monster stood at the foot of his bed.

  The following day, seeking spiritual guidance, he invited Parson Pegwell to dine and insisted I join them. We made an odd party. The parson was a fanatical pig of a cleric, who grubbed
about in my father’s trough for favours. Fearing there be none, he saw a way to secure his place by claiming that he could drive out the evil spirit.

  ‘I have heard that a melancholic humour can encourage the Devil to enter the soul,’ said my father.

  ‘Precisely, my lord,’ said the parson who due to the quantity of wine was failing to say anything precisely. ‘The Devil is canny and only has to find a weakness to worm its way into you.’

  Lord Rodermere thought about that. ‘If my son has such a demon in him would it be possible for that demon to escape at night and haunt another?’

  ‘It would need no encouragement,’ said Parson Pegwell. ‘I am certain, my lord, that what you saw last night came out of your son for I am afraid he is possessed.’

  They spoke of me as if I was not present or had become invisible. Parson Pegwell talked more garbage than any lunatic, none of his thoughts being new but were full of superstition that belonged to a world fast fading. As I listened to them I wondered who here was the madman. I ventured not me.

  ‘Can anything be done?’

  ‘Yes, Lord Rodermere, most definitely, yes. We have the tools in the church, we have the power of prayer, the holy oils. These are enough to make even the Devil afraid.’