The Beauty of the Wolf

by Wray Delaney

  It came to me, a story that had long held sway over my imagination. It was of Hermaphroditos, a handsome youth who attracted the love of a Naiad nymph, Salmakis. She prayed that they might never be parted and the gods, more obliging than they are now, answered her prayers and merged their two forms into a winged youth. I imagined him with my haggard’s feathers, female thighs and breasts. But when Hermaphroditos, like Gally, lifted her dress, there sat a penis and balls. The remembering sent a shiver of delight down me. I had learned about lust and the joy to be found in the sameness and difference of sex.

  Gally never came again. That did not worry me. It was Randa who concerned me for she too was gone, never to return. As time passed I found it hard to confess, even to myself, that I was bereft without her. The only tangible thing I had left of her was a fire-red feather.

  THE BEAST

  XLV

  Misery makes me careless. I have lived locked away, hidden in the shadows, invisibility my only friend. I belong nowhere, to no one, not even to myself. I am an abomination. I saw drawings in a book, in his, in Beau’s book – of demons, winged and horned, spiked of tail. They prey on men. Is that me? Is it?

  I climb the stairs of the tallest turret. I hope with all my being that my wings fail me, let me fall as a stone to ground. Alas, my will if not my soul has an irrepressible desire for the sky. It is my will that lifts me, lifts me above the forest. My eyes are wet, as John Butter’s were when he chained me. There is a sob in me so very loud I dare not let it out. It would bring down the clouds, wake the dead trees.

  I am lost in sadness. I am in the clearing by the widow’s cottage. The Widow Bott called me little bird which I am not and never was. There is no ointment to soothe my agony, no potion to heal my broken soul. No knife could be as sharp, no sword as pointed as this pain of love, this love unreturned.

  It is the fox, the vixen. She is here with her fiery breath. She came so sudden but I am invisible, she cannot see me. Smell me, yes. See me, no. Then why come to me in such a manner, with twists and turns? She is changing by degrees and I know her: red of hair, handsome of face, wise of eye, cruel of mouth. I know her. She who gave me my freedom. I know the sorceress.

  ‘I want what is mine,’ she says to me who is not there, who cannot be seen. Though she sees me. ‘The hem of my dress,’ says she.

  I move fast away, hold the purse tight by its strings so she might glimpse me.

  Wondrous. She says Randa has grown wondrous. She says this is not the place for me.

  I fold my leathery wings about my naked breasts. There is no place for me.

  She holds out her hand, her fingers long and gnarled, her eyes brighter than flame, alight with desire.

  ‘My hem,’ she hisses, ‘my hem.’

  Her gaze never falters. She points to the dark heart of the forest. She says, there, there is where Randa belongs. Still she holds out her hand.

  I let fall the purse, my invisibility, my friend. And it is gone. And the sorceress is gone.

  If the darkness be my death, I have no fear. I go where she pointed, into the forest to a place I think no different than where I was until mossy velvet brushes my feathers and my fur, and I enter the softness of spring to the song of a cuckoo.

  THE BEAUTY

  XLVI

  Spring arrived. I had been kept prisoner under winter’s bitter rule and my father’s malice but now I knew my family were safe I determined to be gone from the House of the Three Turrets.

  In late April, when the nightingales had begun their sweet song and sunny showers perfumed the air, I received another letter delivered by the bargeman, this written by my sister, Lady Clare. It was full of details from an orderly life unlike mine which was lived on the margins of chaos. I wanted to tell her about Randa but when I put pen to paper what I wrote belonged more to madness than anything that could claim reality, a fantasy of the irrational thought it most probably was. So I stuck to banalities and I did not tell her of the hawk, the house or the whores.

  I hoped that I would receive many more letters, but if they were sent they all failed to arrive apart from one that started in the middle with no explanation of how the middle became so isolated from its usual companions, the beginning and the end.

  It was concerned with the alchemist Thomas Finglas, not so much for what he had done but for what his apprentice John Butter had achieved in his place.

  . . . for ever since Master Finglas’s terrible accident . . .

  What accident, Clare did not say. But it was John Butter who was responsible for the making of potions and she claimed that in the space of three weeks her skin had become less red and the worst of the blemishes showed signs of fading.

  . . . I am beginning to feel more confident as to my appearance.

  Most of what she had to say had more to do with Master John Butter than her complexion and ended abruptly with . . . I will tell you all when next I write.

  That was to be her last letter. I heard no more from Clare or my mother and shortly afterwards it became quite clear that I could stay not a day more in my father’s house without fulfilling the curse that I had inherited at birth.

  XLVII

  Parson Pegwell had become anxious that after my miraculous recovery he might no longer be needed. To guarantee his place in my father’s affections he claimed from the pulpit that he alone knew who was responsible for Lord Rodermere’s disappearance. This notion my father took to, for those lost years were a cause of constant concern to him. The parson, now certain of my father’s attention, declared the perpetrator to be none other than the witch, Widow Bott.

  Lord Rodermere remembered the handsome woman who had refused his advances. He wrote to Sir Percival Hayes asking what he knew about the widow. Sir Percival’s steward wrote back to confirm that he had questioned her and had threatened to have her drowned if she did not name the demon with whom she worked. Now she was accused of a far greater crime: not only that of witchcraft but also for debauching my father, turning him from the path of the Lord.

  The widow was dragged to the House of the Three Turrets and tied to a chair in the great hall. When Lord Rodermere saw her he could only imagine that he must indeed have been bewitched to have ever desired such a hag.

  The parson thrust long pins into her body to see if they drew blood. Lord Rodermere had her clothes and cap torn from her and her head shaved. All this was done with unmeasured violence. From my chamber I had heard the widow’s screams and, outraged, I attempted to stop the unfounded persecution and told my father he was no better than a barbarian. He had his henchmen drag me away and lock me in my chamber. It by then being evening and my father having other entertainments in prospect, he sent the widow naked back to her cottage, threatening that the following day she would be arrested and sent for trial.

  The next day she was gone, much to the outrage of Francis, Lord Rodermere. Parson Pegwell was greatly aggrieved and that Sunday he accused his congregation of hiding her, warning that anyone found to have done such a thing would be hanged. Where she had gone no one knew, and no one claimed to know. Once again Parson Pegwell felt all the advances he had made with my father fall away. There being no Widow Bott to torture, my father returned to his main obsession: hunting.

  He kept all manner of sport hounds that ran for the buck, fox, hare, otter and badger, though I secretly wondered if the chase was not an excuse to go looking for the watery curtain behind which all time was stolen from him.

  I was never asked to join him. In truth I made sure that I stayed as far away from the man as possible for the desire to kill him never once abated. If anything, frustration and a lack of purpose in my life had increased it and I thought I would grow old under my father’s bitter roof if I did not take action and by doing so free myself.

  All at once everything changed and the cards life had thrown at me were tossed for a jester to catch and play with as he fancied.

  My father had returned from hunting with some local landowners. Usually, he hardly bothered to recogn
ise my presence, yet for some inexplicable reason, I was called into the courtyard where he was sitting high on his horse. He bent and took from a huntsman a dead fox. The hounds were near driven wild by the smell of it and the noise was deafening until Lord Rodermere shouted for silence and the dogs became quiet.

  I had known him long enough to tell by the tenor of his voice what mood he was in. There was a solemn note to it and in its quietness lay his true fury.

  ‘This is Lord Beaumont Thursby,’ he announced to his companions. ‘My son.’ There was a polite murmur that stopped when he said with distaste, ‘My son – who is more beautiful than a girl.’ He dismounted, took out his dagger, cut off the brush of the fox and threw its body to the dogs. ‘You are not a man,’ he said to me. ‘You are nothing, a beautiful nothing.’

  He gestured to his servant to take me to him. I shook myself free and went of my own accord. My father grabbed me by my hair and undid my codpiece.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘he has a penis and balls yet they make a mockery of his face. Have you breasts, sir?’

  Now I fought to free myself. I heard laughter as he smeared my face with the blood of the fox’s brush.

  ‘You disgust me,’ he said. ‘Are you not man enough to fight?’

  He threw me into the dirt and the bloodied brush after me, then picked up his riding whip and brought it down on my back, again and again. I managed to stand and, head down, charged at him as would a bull. He fell backwards and the voice in my head screamed now, kill him, now, now. I found his dagger where he had dropped it and I was on him, the blade at his neck.

  His servant was fast upon me and held me tight as, fighting for breath, Lord Rodermere struggled to his feet.

  The hunting party was uneasy, unsure.

  ‘Leave the boy be,’ one gentleman was brave enough to say. ‘We have enjoyed enough sport for one day. Come, my lord, let us drink some wine.’

  Lord Rodermere was puffing, purple-faced. He turned to his companions, who, no longer laughing, did not know what to make of the play before them. He again had his dagger in his hand.

  ‘Shall I cut the head off this half-formed changeling?’ he asked. ‘Have it stuffed and mounted on the wall in the great hall? Perhaps then,’ he said as he went into the house, ‘my true son will return.’

  XLVIII

  I felt my belly to be a furnace. My veins ran with molten fury that no rational thought could quench. It made a madman of me, a true madman, fooled into believing that I had a mind of steel and the will to murder my father. All that stopped me from such a reckless act was a fox cub.

  I had gone into the house gasping for breath. I could see nothing, nothing but the colour of blood, smell nothing but the smell of blood, taste nothing but the taste of blood. I stood in the passage with my back against the cool stone wall, adjusted my shirt, my doublet, my breeches, and with blurred vision watched servants rush past holding platters piled high with food, jugs of wine vanishing into the white light of the sun. I cared little who saw me. Lunacy was my companion. The Devil urged me on to retrieve my rapier from the armourer. The knowledge that I would hang for my deed bothered me not a jot. I would kill my father and dance at his dying.

  The kitchen echoed the sound of the fury within me – the clatter of pans, the shouting of servants driven by the irrational urgency of their master’s insatiable hunger. I was about to cross the kitchen courtyard when I spied a covered basket, on top of which sat a large stone. I noticed it and did not. It was what I heard that made me stop. The sound of an animal. I went closer.

  ‘There’s nothing in there, Lord Beaumont, but dead vermin,’ said a servant. ‘The gamekeeper is coming for it when he has done.’

  Again the soft whimpering. I lifted the lid and saw two dead fox cubs and from under their corpses a third sharp face stared at me, eyes filled with terror.

  ‘Your lordship, I would not,’ said the servant. ‘They will be riddled with fleas.’

  What did I care? I was riddled with rage – a flea would be a wholesome companion. I picked up the little fox and put it inside my doublet, I felt it curl up and fall almost instantly asleep. Taking a loaf, some meat, and an apple l walked away from the house into the waiting forest. Only there among the tall columns of the cathedral trees was I able to take in the sweet air. At last, soothed by the birdsong, by the hum of bees, by the shade of the green mosaic above, I found my balance. With each step I took deeper into the forest I told myself that I was one stride further from the man who I would never again acknowledge as my father. His seed may have given me life but that life, I reasoned, was my own. Not his.

  That realisation began to cool the humours in me and I saw in the shadows the jiggering madman I could so easily have become.

  By the time – what time? By this time I was deep in the forest in a moss-filled twilight where the trees huddled close together. I felt the wild thing inside my doublet move. I had long forgotten my companion, my reason for not going to the armoury, for not murdering my father. I sat on a log and put the fox cub down on the forest floor, thinking he would bolt as fast as his small legs would allow. Instead, he too sat, his head on one side, his blue eyes looking up at me. I had never seen a fox with eyes that colour, neither had I known a wild creature to be so tame. He took with delicacy the meat I gave him, not with the raw savagery I expected. When he had finished eating he wandered off and I was about to stand when he came back and jumped up on my lap. He pawed at my doublet, seemingly in hope of climbing back in. He must be wounded, I reasoned, but I had not seen any mark on his body. I examined the creature and, finding nothing, put him once more in my doublet. I had no wish to dawdle. Of all my ill-worked-out intentions, one was solid: I would not return to my father’s house. The fox stuck his head out of my doublet, his eyes sparkled, his nose twitched but he showed no inclination to leave.

  The only way to think of my journey was to imagine I was with my haggard, high above the forest, staring at the landscape below. I saw the vast expanse of wood hugging the river and beyond, in the far-off smoky shadows of the horizon, was the village I hoped to reach before dusk. The sunlight reappeared, shimmering, and I wondered if I might not find again the watery curtain that as a child I once ran through. But the more I walked, the more I realised that for too long my life had been steeped in forest stories and forest magic. Reality belonged to the world beyond these woods. If I was to go to London I must learn to walk with my feet firm upon the ground.

  XLIX

  I was in the middle of an imaginary duel with my father when I stopped for I heard chattering. And there, strung between two saplings, was a washing line where hung a collection of tatty shirts and thread-worn petticoats. In the gaps between the breeze of clothes I could make out what lay beyond – a large, canvas-covered wagon with lettering on the side that announced Master Ben Shakeshaft and his Medley of Players.

  The name I knew, but how I could not recall. It hovered in my memory just out of my grasp. Not far from the caravan, in the centre of the clearing, was a long trestle table bearing the remains of a roasted chicken and round it sat a group of four squabbling men and a woman. The cause of their disagreement was to do with a lardy lad with a deep voice. Intrigued, I listened awhile.

  ‘I never wanted to be a bloody actor,’ he said. ‘And it’s not my fault my voice broke.’

  ‘A nincompoop, Master Pennyworth, that’s what you are,’ said the large woman, who appeared to rise from the middle of the table and was made mostly of stomach and bust into which her face fell. Her features were that of a man, her chin hairy and whether her lumps and bumps were due to stuffing or flesh I could not tell. She had large hands with which she slapped the lardy lad.

  ‘A worthless bottom of a boy – all cock and no tail that anyone might fancy.’

  ‘Ow, that hurt, mistress.’

  This drama much amused me and went part way to making me forget how angry I was.

  A man stood on the steps of the caravan surveying the scene. He too was watching the ar
gument with interest. A wiry fellow was he with a massive forehead and a long nose. Round his scrawny neck was tied a wide white cloth and in his hand he held a chicken drumstick.

  ‘Now, now,’ he said, addressing the woman. ‘This is not helping, my sweet sorrow.’

  One of the party at the table stood up and I wondered why I had not noticed him first.

  He appeared the most educated of the group and in a voice that might roll over hills and be heard in the deepest valley said, ‘Master Shakeshaft, my mind is worn thin due to imagining Master Pennyworth to be anything other than a fart-filled, ugly, pox-ridden, useless turd of an actor who could not fool a blind man into believing him to be a girl.’

  ‘I said all my lines and in the right order, which is more than Master Merrymay did,’ said the lad in his own defence.

  Master Merrymay rose to object and was immediately dismissed with a wave of a hand.

  ‘Pray tell me, Master Shakeshaft,’ said the actor with a voice that would roll over hills, ‘without a boy to play the female roles what do you suggest we do?’

  ‘Master Cuthbert,’ said Master Shakeshaft, ‘it is but a little hurdle and it will be surmounted.’

  Master Cuthbert took a deep breath and as if talking to a moon-headed calf said, ‘In one week’s time we are booked in London to perform a new play at the Gate, and thus far we are in a storm of confusion, and no boy to play the female role since the last one left in a huff. This noodlehead would be more effective if he were to address sheep at a slaughterhouse for they would willingly lay down their lives to avoid listening to any more of his drivel.’