Post by Wilhelm Opens-the-Way on Nov 30, 2010 10:54:47 GMT -8
Beast boy, that's what they called me. Only the nurse Yevette who taught me the piano and the gardener, an old man at arms, Rene, a Frenchman who taught me the sword called me Wilhelm. To everyone else, all of the nuns who kept the manor, I was simply 'beast boy'.
"Beast boy," Sister Agatha would say, rapping my knuckles with her cane until they bled, "Sit up straight. The good Lord Jesus looks ill upon those who slouch." And my penmenship was 'of the devil', which, I'll admit it was a bit atrocious at first. I mean you try writing your Latin or Cyrillic alphabet in Crinos with a dipped pen. The Sister was Kinfolk, so depending on the day I was either the spawn of the Devil, or the spawn of the Wyrm. She treated both equally, and the end result was the same: knuckles bloodied. But I owe the sisters for my education, I must say, and that, I'm certain because of my mother.
Ah yes, Lady Elanora Windsor, of those Windsors. She was a commanding woman. Here was a woman that didn't so much enter a room as sweep into it, like an autumn wind. When mother came to the manor, you just knew it. No matter how dark or dank my little room in the far west wing might have been, I could always tell when she was there. The servants moved-double quick, and with a smile in their hearts. They were happy to see my mother come to stay at the manor. I caught her looking in on me when I was sleeping a few times, and I would often watch her through a crack in the wall near the drawing room. She was regal, elegant, and though it was wartime and amenities were scarce, she always had make-up and wore a beautiful if severe dress. She had a steely look in her eyes however, as if years of war had already taken their toll.
Twice she touched me, that I can recall. The first time I was very young, and I hardly remember it, but it was a frightening look in her eyes that I remember best. Her hand, at first on my furry cheek, strayed down to my throat, and stayed there for a long time. I felt the pinpricks of her fingernails against it. Then she swept out of the room. I can almost still smell the scent of her imported Parisian perfume.
The last time I saw her the year was 1939, and the Blitz had taken it's toll on London. Children were being shipped out to the countryside en masse, and the manor being large and my mother being nobility, it was her duty to house them. So for that brief and terrible winter, while the bombs turned London into a grey wasteland, there were the sounds of children in that great old drafty house.
That's when I met Clara, and things changed forever. She followed me back to the cupbord beneath the scullery one night, the 'beast boy' she'd heard about. I climbed inside with one of my books, one about Alexander the Great, I think, and she followed me in with her candle, in the darkened house, int the servants quarters, down beneath the scullery doors, fearless. She had seen me through the cracks of the house that were my refuge, tracked me through the clicking of my claws, wanting to meet the 'beast boy' she'd heard the nuns whispering about.
It was I that was terrified, as she touched the downy fur of my face, closed her jewel eyes, and with the boldness that only comes of being eight, she kissed me.
I must have wanted everso badly to be a normal boy for her just then, that in that twilight instant beneath the scullery, I suddenly was. My fur receeded, my legs became the gangly, pale legs of a boy's, instead of the half-wolfen form I had known all my life. Like the young prince in a storybook, I was transformed, from a child, to a boy, from an abomination before God, to someone real.
If there is a moment of my life that made me believe in magic, that was it.
Then the cupboard flung open, and with a scream, my mother wrenched Clara out of the cupboard by her tiny wrist. I sat there stunned, in sagging breeches made for a beast boy, half nude. Anything but the picture of innocence that we truly were, my mother touched me for the second, and last time in my life that I can remember. She struck me hard in the face, already rosy with sudden shame. But that would not be the worst of it, for I knew without her saying a word as the nuns, tore me from the cupboard, my outstretched hand reaching for young Clara, fingertips brushing for a single tender instant, that thing I feared the most in all the world would soon come to pass.
Father was coming.
