Читать книгу The Beauty of the Wolf - Wray Delaney - Страница 18

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It was Gilbert Goodwin who after the infant’s birth sent for the Widow Bott. The widow had delivered many a changeling child and watched them fade as bluebells in a wood when the season has passed. For the truth is, there are few children who have a mortal and a faerie for a parent and those that are born always have a longing to return to our world rather than stay in the human realm, and who can blame them. Changeling children, instead of being plump and round are sickly things that hang on to life as does a spider swing on a thread in a tempest. These changeling babes, left behind unwanted by the goblins, are placed in cradles where newborn babes lie and when no one is looking they take the child’s form as their own. But not this half-elfin child. He was born to be the sorceress’s instrument of death.

Lord Rodermere had often decried faeries as diminutive creatures made of air and imagination. But we are giants for we hold sway over the superstitions of humankind. I have hunted the skies, chased the clouds in my chariot, I have seen wisdom in the eye of a snake, strength beyond its size in an ant, and cruelty in the hand of man. Our sizes, our shapes, our very natures are beyond the comprehension of most. We are concerned with pleasure and the joy of love, we use our powers to shift our shapes, to build enchanted dwellings, to fashion magic objects and to take dire revenge on mortals who offend us. But for those we protect, such as the Widow Bott, we ensure their youth and health.

She has a far greater understanding in the knowledge of herbs and plants and their properties than many an apothecary, much more than the quack wizard, or so called alchemist, hoping to turn lead to gold, to cheat men from their money.

So it was important – nay, I would say it was a necessity – that Gilbert called for her, for she alone could sway all incredulity, she could assure any doubters that the sheets held the evidence of a human birth, not the blood of a slaughtered rabbit. In short, she would give weight to the child’s arrival, confirm that he was indeed the son of Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere.