Читать книгу The Beauty of the Wolf - Wray Delaney - Страница 28

XX

Sir Percival Hayes poured a goblet of wine, took a sip and helped himself to sweetmeats from a dish before him. He ate with a ladylike delicacy then slowly took out a fine linen handkerchief and wiped his fingers. At last he turned to Thomas.

‘Do you remember, Master Finglas, when you came back to London from a summer of bedding a nursemaid and had the audacity to tell me that your work had been successful? And you produced this?’ Sir Percival waved a scroll at Thomas. ‘I dismissed you as a fraud, did I not? Threw you out of my house, along with that shrew you married. These days, I believe, your practice deals mainly with pimps and whores and cures for the pox.’

‘Not entirely, Sir Percival,’ Thomas muttered.

‘Did I ask you to speak? No, I did not. I am talking, you are listening. After your departure I washed my mind clean of your nonsense, determined to meddle no more in the Devil’s Cauldron. From that day forth, my role at the court of Her Majesty would be to root out superstition, hunt witches and those who profess to deal with the Devil’s magic. In that, I have served Her Majesty faithfully. I cite you as an example of a cunning man, a mountebank, and from the reports my spies have gathered on you, I was right in my assertions.’

Thomas was trembling. The question he wanted to ask came out in a low whisper.

‘Sir, why have you brought me here?’

Sir Percival poured his third glass of wine.

‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘my cousin Eleanor, Lady Rodermere, was wed to Master Gilbert Goodwin. The service took place in the chapel and afterwards there was to be a feast for the guests in the banqueting hall. I was there as a representative of Her Majesty. I had argued on Lady Rodermere’s behalf that as Lord Rodermere had been missing for near eighteen years he should be considered dead and she free to marry again. So, tell me’, Sir Percival drained the third glass of wine, ‘did you pick a date at hazard? Or was it something you calculated on an astrological chart? Or was it decided on the throw of a dice?’

Thomas feels the pit of his stomach to be lead.

I watch you, Thomas. Beads of sweat pepper your forehead. You are caught in a quandary of your own making.

‘Have you lost your tongue, man?’ said Sir Percival. ‘I asked you a question.’

Thomas mumbled and at last asked why is this important, why now is it so important that he should be dragged from his bed and bundled here?

She is pleased that he has roused himself and still has some fight in him.

Sir Percival stood and handed Thomas the scroll.

‘Read it,’ he commanded.

Thomas did not need to. He knew exactly what it said. After all, he was its author.

‘Read it,’ said Sir Percival again.

Thomas looked down on the grave of his own words. All that was written there was the date and the time of Lord Rodermere’s return.

‘Yesterday,’ said Sir Percival, ‘on the date, at the very time stated there, just as glasses were raised to toast the bride and groom, a dead man walked into the banqueting hall, a ghost at the feast. He looked not one day older than when he vanished. He was wearing the same garments; they were fresh, not a blemish to be seen. The intensity of the silence was so dense that you could hear the unsaid: “This is not possible.” Because standing in the middle of the banqueting hall was Francis Thursby, Earl of Rodermere, returned, as he told us, after one day – one day – in the realm of the faeries.’