The cat, black as midnight, perfect in from and feature, lay before an open hearth,
as though resting, in death, trussed, like a roe deer carried home from the hunt, legs lace.
Cat lay, having ceased her struggles, staring at the fire, as though contemplating her
eight lives, stoic, perhaps merely exhausted, resigned, retaining dignity in the certain death's face.
The Queen found this way to amuse herself, withe the men away playing at wars,
a charm for invisibility, she, too empty to take any great art seriously, even the Black grace.
Queen Morgause knew that magic ran in her blood, as a member of the Old Race.
Into the cauldron of boiling water, at the hearth, the Queen flung cat, then stood watch,
the horrible convulsions and a single dreadful cry as cat quickly passed into death, on the boil.
Queen Morgause of Lothian and Orkney sat before her cauldron and waited,
occasionally she stirred to poke the cat with her wooden spoon as the stench did uncoil.
A watcher in the night would have seen, in the flattering reddish glow of the peat fire,
what an exquisite creature she was tonight, with her deep, big eyes, glistening hair, quite royal.
She practiced her magic, before the iron cauldron, with the candle and a sheet of polished brass,
not so much as for a need of invisibility, more an excuse for standing long before her mirror loyal,
Queen Morgause knew that was the undisputed beauty of her era Medieval.
The cat had come to pieces, leaving only a deep scum of hair and grease and gobbets, the white bones
eddied in the broth, heavier ones lying still, the others lifting gracefully, like leaves in an autumn blown.
The Queen, wrinkling her nose to the stench, strained the liquid into a second pot, leaving
on the flannel strainer, a sodden mass of matted hair and meat shreds and delicate white bone.
She blew on the sediment and began turning it over with her wooden spoon, prodding them
to let heat out, soon she was able to pick out the delicate bones and place them in a neat pile grown.
The Queen knew that every pure black cat had a certain bone, which, when held in the mouth after
boiling the live cat, endowed invisibility, but nobody knew which bone, hence the need of the mirror shone,
The Queen sought not indivisibility, truly, as she felt herself to be far too beautiful to disappear.
The Queen scraped the remains of her cat into two heaps, one of bone and one of steaming meat
daintily she took one bone between her teeth, stood before her brass, looking at herself in sleepy pleasure.
She threw the bone into the fire and fetched another, standing, turning, and reaching,
placing the bone in her mouth and looking to see if she had vanished, a look in one long measure.
She moved so gracefully, as if a dancer, pacing out her patterned steps, most beauteously,
she moved as if someone was there to watch her, or, rather, as if it were her reflection she did treasure.
Queen Morgause lost interest, before testing all the bones, and stretched herself, as a cat, before the fire at leisure.