The sorceress laughed. ‘So you saw the child?’
‘Yes. He is more beautiful than any mortal babe should ever be. He has already won the heart of Lady Eleanor.’
The sorceress seated herself opposite the widow. ‘You should be in better spirits,’ she said.
‘And what of Gilbert Goodwin?’ asked the widow.
‘What of him?’
‘Never has a man been more lovestruck.’
‘And Lady Eleanor?’
‘The same. Do you intend to return Lord Rodermere? For he is not missed at all, especially not by his wife who trembles at his very name.’ The widow stood, took a long clay pipe from a jug that sat on the mantelpiece and kicked a log with the heel of her boot, before sitting down again in her rocking chair. ‘You have made a mistake if you think Lord Rodermere is of any importance.’
‘He has dented my forest.’
‘Will you put a curse on every man who fells a tree?’ snapped the widow. ‘Perhaps it would have been best if you had travelled further than the forest and seen what is abroad before you laid your curse, for there are many roads that lead now to the city and news travels both ways upon the Queen’s highway.’
‘Tell me,’ the sorceress said, ignoring her jibe. ‘Did you examine the infant?’
‘Lady Eleanor would not let me hold of the babe. She seems as devoted to it as if it was hers and she has no need of a wet nurse. Though she did ask about the star that be on his thigh.’
The sorceress stood. ‘What star? The child was blemish free. Did you see it?’
‘No, for the infant was swaddled.’
‘She is mistaken.’
‘I think not,’ said the Widow Bott.
‘What did you tell her?’
‘That such a mark . . .’
‘Such a mark,’ the sorceress interrupted, ‘was not upon the child.’
The widow never once had been frightened of the sorceress. She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I have no need to argue with you,’ she said. ‘If you say there is no star then what I say means little.’
‘What did you say to Lady Eleanor?’
‘That such a mark shows him to be of faerie blood and the star, a gift. She asked what kind of gift and I told her that only his mother could answer that question. She blushed when she realised that she had unwittingly confessed that the child be not hers, milk or no milk. She begged me never to say a word. She showed me the note left pinned to a fur and I assured her that her secret was safe.’
‘Good, good. But there is no mark.’
‘If you say so,’ said the widow. ‘But Lady Eleanor knows more of your ways than her husband did. She asked if the babe be a hollow child for she has heard of women who give birth to changelings and having no appetite for life, they mock a mother’s love and fade away. I promised her this be no such child. Was I right?’
‘Yes. Yes,’ the sorceress said again and all the while the thought of the star worried her.
‘You should not toy with us as if we be puppets,’ said the widow.
‘Come, that is unfair – I do not.’
‘But you do. Look how many lives will be changed by your curse. You would be wise to leave it be, not have Lord Rodermere return to plague his wife, to accuse me again of being a witch. Let the good of his disappearance be your comfort.’
‘No, what is done is done and cannot be undone.’
The sorceress watched the Widow Bott as she relit her pipe.
‘So you know how all this will play out? How Lord Rodermere will meet his end?’
These questions annoyed the sorceress.
‘My curse will come to pass. What befalls the players on the way has little to do with me.’
‘I think you are mistaken. You are dealing with our lives.’
The Widow Bott pulled at the sorceress. But no one talks that way to her and she turned to leave.
‘Wait,’ said the widow. ‘Wait. You know there is a reward for anyone with information about Lord Rodermere that would lead to his safe recovery?’
‘They will never find him – of that I have no worry.’
‘You may have no worry, but I do. They may never find him unless you will it but what you have done this day will bring to leaf a tree of questions that fools and mountebanks will try to answer, their brains baited by the riddle of the boy’s unholy beauty. I will be marshalled and again accused of witchcraft. The monks feared nature’s beauty, seeing it as a seducer, a tormenter of men. Even in the soft petals of the rose, they thought they saw the face of evil. Do you believe this child will go unnoticed, that his very looks will not be brought into question? How far do you suppose the news of his birth has already travelled?’
The sorceress said, ‘Your word is enough, I am sure, to confirm that the child is the son of Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere. No one will question his parentage.’
‘Again, you are mistaken.’
The sorceress had no interest in this. What concerned her was the star.
‘Keep yourself to yourself, widow,’ she said, ‘and you will be safe.’
‘Perhaps. But for how long?’
‘Near seventeen years,’ said the sorceress.
She was in no mood to contemplate consequences and as she lifted the latch on the door, she congratulated herself that her powers had not waned.
The sorceress returns to her dwelling deep under her angel oak, whose veiny tendrils weave the domed roof of her chamber. Here stands her bed – raven black, the colour of dreams – with its canopy of stars. Fireflies light the room and gather, as do the moths, round one golden orb, a heavy pendant that swings slow across the chamber. She sleeps suspended between the streams of ages. Her spirit barely stirs to hear minutes passing. It is a parcel of time put to good use.
A moth’s wing flutters and almost seventeen years are gone.
Something gnaws at the edges of sleep. Not the rhythm of the days but her passion for Herkain, the King of the Beasts. It is not wise, she knows, to let herself visit him even in dreams for it brings her to the well of her own emptiness. He who had the sorceress’s very heart where all her love lay, who sunk his glorious teeth into its arteries, pulled it beating from her breast, left her heartless. He did not take her power, only her reason. She conjures the memory of Herkain’s tongue licking the flesh from her to reveal her pelt in all its lush resplendence. Once, she longed to return to him, ached to feel his prick deep inside her, to feel his strength contain her, the howl of his whole being released into hers. When they lay together they were one, she his dark, he her light.
Memory can disturb even the deepest sleeper with its incessant chimes upon the mind. Does the sorceress deceive herself when she dreams again of Herkain? Or is it the infant’s beauty that so enchants her that she cannot rest until she has the measure of the boy, knows what kind of fiend she has created?
Though he be half of faerie blood, all of him will be his father’s child. His beauty will corrupt him and the years will make a monster of the man.
And she wakes. By the