Only his wife, Eleanor, Lady Rodermere, and his little daughter, Lady Clare Thursby, kept their hopes to themselves and their prayers tight on their lips for both wife and daughter prayed – prayed as they had never done before – that Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere, might not be found.
Wife and daughter dared to believe that their prayers had been answered. It had been a harsh winter when even the birds had fallen from the sky, frozen by the cold. Surely, Lady Rodermere told herself, no one could survive in the forest in such unforgiving weather.
Nine months have passed. It is midnight in the House of the Three Turrets. A servant sleepily attends to the fires before returning to his trundle bed. The cat, all whiskers and claws, sits watching the space behind the cupboard in hope of a mouse. The flea sucks on the sweet flesh of dreamers till he is ready to burst with blood. The distant church bells ring the hour. The dogs in the hall begin to bark.
Yes, this is the hour that will alter all the hours to come.
The infant was brought to the sorceress at one of the clock, one minute after his birth, more beautiful than even she had imagined. There was no kiss upon his brow, no faerie wish to interfere with her curse, or so she supposed, for who would dare disobey her? So certain was she of her powers that she did not examine the babe – perhaps his beauty beguiled her but she took the word of his mother when she said she had not kissed the boy, that he was innocent of any wish.
What is done is done and one kiss would not have the power to interfere with the sorceress’s magic. But she had no notion of what a mother’s love in all its sticky gore was like. Only later did she discover that the faerie had lied and the sorceress was aggrieved that she had ever trusted her womb-ridden words.
Her task that morn was to make sure that Lady Rodermere took this infant as her own, to love and to cherish.
She placed the basket with the babe in it on the steps leading up to the great front door of the House of the Three Turrets. The dogs howled but the household did not stir; it was asleep, deep under her spell. She required only two people to be awake: Master Gilbert Goodwin, Lord Rodermere’s trusted steward, and Lady Rodermere, Lord Rodermere’s trusted wife.
Lady Eleanor was lying in her great bed, listening to the dogs. She watched the door and held her breath, every sinew in her body stretched to breaking. She stayed that way, suspended between sleep and wakefulness, taking short, sharp breaths until she could tentatively assure herself that there was no tightening of the air, no drowning of hope, no weighted foot upon the stair. Her husband had not returned. She lay back on the linen sheets, relished the chilly space around her, the warm island her body had made in the centre of that vast cold bed.
Lady Eleanor, unlike her lord, believes in the Queen of Elfame. She is certain that her husband has been faerie-taken and she prays that he might never be returned to the shores of her bed.
Through the large bottle-glass panes of the window a beam of moonlight falls accusingly on the carved wooden cradle. It has been in this chamber ever since Eleanor first wed Francis, Lord Rodermere. Three daughters born, one still lives. Over the years the cradle has come to represent her failure to produce a son, an heir for his vast estate. Tomorrow, she thinks, she will have it removed.
Her bravery wavers, for the dogs have not ceased their howling. She rises, puts on her fur-lined gown over her underdress, her feet bare on the chill oak floor, as cold as the fear in her heart.
Please do not send his lordship back, please do not.
Taking a candle, she opens her chamber door, listening for distant voices in that cavernous House of the Three Turrets. There are none. For a moment she wonders whether she should call for Agnes, her maid. Eleanor has always loathed the black whalebone beams of the long gallery, full as it is of oaken shadows. Hearing Agnes’s peaceful snores from the adjoining chamber, she thinks better of it.
At the main staircase Eleanor stops and looks over the banisters. The dogs are now whining; why, she cannot fathom. Only her husband’s steward is there. What could be the reason for the hounds to be so disturbed? She watches Master Goodwin. He is holding a basket, staring at its contents with a puzzled expression. Snow dusts his doublet and cakes his boots. The glow from the fire catches his face. A face to be relied on, she thinks, and in that moment she sees him for the first time, as if she had never noticed him before. Kind eyes, generous lips unlike her husband’s mean, hard slit of a mouth. She wonders what those lips might feel like if they were to kiss hers. One thought stitches itself into another forbidden thought and she finds herself imagining Gilbert Goodwin being a gentle lover . . . and in that instant she knows what she wants, what she longs for: to be loved without leaden cruelty.
So the sorceress’s magic begins to work, for tell me how does a cuckoo lay her egg in a magpie’s nest if not with the help of nature’s charms?
Lord Rodermere had never considered his wife to be a handsome woman but that night Eleanor is not without beauty – a slight frame, delicate. Her hair is tumbled, sleep has given her a soft glow. As she walks slowly down the grand staircase, holding on to the balustrade, her gown falls open. The outline of her body, her breasts, show through the muslin underdress.
Gilbert Goodwin is suddenly aware of her and sees, not the wife of his lord and master, but someone vulnerable, lost; finds himself moved by the very image of her.
Eleanor and, she suspects, Gilbert Goodwin, knows there is another, invisible, presence watching them. This house of whispering oak seems always to be calling the forest closer, admitting its spirits.
‘What is it?’ she says.
Gilbert holds out the basket to her.
Her sad brown eyes take in the infant, fast asleep in the wicker basket, wrapped only in rabbit fur.
‘Is it faerie born?’ she asks.
‘I do not know, my lady,’ says Gilbert.
He does not think it an unwise question.
The babe lifts one small, perfect hand, nails as delicate as sea shells. She touches his finger and feels her heart being pulled towards the infant’s, knotted round his.
‘Have you ever seen such a beautiful child?’ she says.
‘No, my lady. There is a note.’
Pinned to the fur, written in the unmistakable hand of Francis, Earl of Rodermere, it reads, This is my son.
Later that St Valentine’s Day, when the snow had settled thick and white, covering the truth of earth and the lies of lovers, Eleanor wondered who it was who had entered the house that bitter winter morn, who it was who had been intent upon mischief. In the quiet of that afternoon, as the sun once more began to fail and the snow fluttered at the window, she shuddered with the joy of remembering and felt not one ounce of guilt.
Gilbert, Eleanor at his side, had carried the basket up the stairs, through the long gallery to her chamber. Neither of them had said a word, nor had the infant announced its arrival. Gilbert closed the door and they waited, hoping that none of the servants had heard or seen them.
She whispered, ‘My maid is asleep in there,’ and Gilbert Goodwin silently closed the door to the antechamber.
Still the infant had not cried out.
At the end of the bed was a chest where Eleanor had kept the swaddling clothes and the sheepskin bedding that her babes had slept in when newly born. She took out what was needed and wrapped the babe in the long linen cloth before laying him in the cradle to sleep. His hand fought