THE BEAUTY OF THE WOLF by Wray Delaney
When Francis Thursby, Lord Rodermere, inherits his father’s title he longs to cut swathes into the forest to forge his empire with little regard for the folk/ folklore therein. He is visited by The Sorceress who implores him to leave well alone – if he does so she will grant him one wish. He won’t be threatened (‘it’s not a threat’, she says, quite the opposite) and refuses to hear her out, committed as he is to his ‘vision’ at any expense. So she leaves him with a curse rather than a wish:
A faerie boy
will be born to you
whose beauty will
be your death.
Some years pass – he marries Eleanor – she has three daughters but only one survives – she dreads his knock at her door…
Convinced he is now cursed in some way he sets out to find the Sorceress. Once in (the little that’s left of) the forest now decimated by his ego, he’s smitten by a young woman who appears to him… He follows her… And is not seen again…
Nine months later, Eleanor wakes in the night, feels the empty space in the bed beside her, and relishes, as she does ever night, the knowledge her husband has not returned, but this evening she wakes to find faithful servant Gilbert Goodwin cradling the most divinely beautiful baby boy who has been left on the step with a note in Lord Rodermere’s unmistakable hand – ‘This is my son’…
What of the Sorceress’s plan?
