Читать книгу The Beauty of the Wolf - Wray Delaney - Страница 24

XVI

But the sorceress cannot leave. Not now, not until she knows what it is that the alchemist has hidden in the cellar. Crude curiosity pulls at her and to the house she returns.

Still no one had stirred. Then she heard it, the frantic flapping of wings and scratching of talons, and she perceived a smell – pungent, musty, animal. Determined to see the creature she was at the cellar door when she heard a call.

‘Master, master – is that you?’

A young man stared at her and through her to where the back door had swung open letting in the raw cold. Dark of skin and dark of eye, this, then, is the alchemist’s apprentice. Unlike his master his thoughts were guarded and he kept them close to him. The sorceress found it hard to fathom what he was thinking other than the obvious. The footprints in the snow increased his fears. She followed him as he took the stairs, two at a time, to his master’s chamber, cursing under his breath. One glance at the disarray of the bed clothes, enough to tell him what had happened.

In the apprentice’s ebony eyes she saw the heat of the sun from an unknown world, the place from whence he was stolen. He knows better than his master the power of magic, knows it possesses a life force that not even death can defy. He survived the seas where the battle with the waves had been fought. The wooden boat, weighed down with the thief’s treasure, ill-equipped to deal with the fury of such a tempest, had been tossed as if it were a child’s plaything and, limping into port, had brought him to these cold, anaemic shores.

Again the sound from the cellar. It is a noise that she sees he dreads and it is louder, more urgent than ever before. As he runs down the stairs, his thoughts, the ones she catches, have an energy to them, his whole being is more alive than the alchemist’s. She listens hard. He hopes his master’s secret is not to be discovered, he knows he must calm the creature in the cellar. She is in the passage when she hears a creak on the stairs and a young maidservant appears.

‘Oh, lord,’ she says, ‘Master Butter, what has happened?’

Master Butter speaks with a stammer and he is careful not to trip over his words. He knows that his stammer is especially pronounced in the presence of a pretty girl. He does his best to sound commanding.

‘Go into the kitchen, Mary,’ he says. ‘Stay there until . . .’

To his surprise she looks at him in a direct manner that has little fear in it.

‘Do you want me to help you?’ she asks, following him to the small cellar door at end of the passage.

For one moment he thinks he might laugh, the notion is so ridiculous.

‘No,’ he says.

The sorceress can see that Mary is new to the household and that she has never before met anyone like Master Butter. The colour of his skin, darker than the beams of the house. His eyes are darker still. He is tall. He turns to look at her as he takes his master’s key. Her presence gives him courage.

‘Be still,’ he says into the darkness of the alchemist’s cellar.

He opens the door, turns to make sure Mary will not follow and in that instant the sorceress slides in before him.