Читать книгу The Beauty of the Wolf - Wray Delaney, Wray Delaney - Страница 32

XXIV

She enjoys such carnal acts and Thomas’s desperation has a tenderness to it. He is not, as she would have supposed, a greedy lover. But she is in control, not he and her mind is elsewhere.

She is thinking it would be wise to trust the power of her curse and let it work its fatal magic. And yet she cannot for a maggot of a thought niggles at her: she fears the boy was faerie-blessed.

Lady Clare’s deep love for her brother goes back to infancy. Her memories trouble the sorceress. She had willed Lady Clare to return to them but she did not, her mind flooded with thoughts of being so soon parted from her brother. Has the sorceress been too quick in her judgment? For it appears from the affection Lady Clare holds him in that he possesses a true beauty: he has kindness, love, intelligence. Not one ounce of his bastard of a father shows in him at all. When Beau smiles, it is a smile that would bring a queen to her knees. That is as it should but not the rest. Could it be that he as yet has no knowledge of his power? Lady Clare is not in one small part envious of his looks. The sorceress had imagined that she would loathe her brother, resent his beauty. Surely that is the pattern of human nature: to be shaped by jealousy, to be broken by envy. It shivers her to think she had been so unwise as to believe that her powers were incorruptible. She comforts herself with this thought: Lord Beaumont has many chambers of his soul yet to grow into. If he is not corrupted now there are years enough for him to become so.

No one interferes with her curses.

‘Where are you going?’ says Thomas Finglas. ‘Stay, I beg you.’

Invisible once more, she is gone.