But the nearest thing he had to a friend, or even a drinking companion, had liquor not been harshly forbidden in No Popery, was an Abenaki Indian named—as near as he could ever translate it for Dr. Dapper—Rain Coming, who dwelled with his tribe in a birchbark village some three or four miles away. He was short, square-built, and ageless, his skin the texture of granite and the color of a worn old coin, and he actually spoke only a little more English than the handful of Abenaki words that Dr. Dapper had awkwardly acquired. Yet somehow they were comfortable in one another’s company, and could spend unlikely amounts of time together in complete silence. The Indian’s herb lore, proffered in brief grunts and gestures, had resulted in more than one miraculous-appearing cure, for which Dr. Dapper received the credit. In return, he did his best to teach Rain Coming how to cheat at cards. That enterprise failed, due primarily to the other’s complete lack of the competitive instinct; or, rather (at least, so Dr. Dapper always felt), to Rain Coming’s serene certainty that whatever the game, he had already triumphed simply by taking part, and there was nothing further to say. Dr. Dapper would have given a good deal to possess such inborn assurance.
Rigorously honest with himself, if with no other, Dr. Dapper never blamed Mistress Remorse Kirtley, the minister’s thin, whispering wife, for luring him into temptation. While she was hardly the most attractive woman of his extensive experience, marriage to the good reverend having bleached most of the color and spirit out of her, curiously she aroused Olfert Dapper’s occasional sympathy as well as his lust, which was not something that had happened to him before. Her husband suffered frequently from what Dr. Dapper pronounced to be “dyspeptic lassitude,” but which even a middle-aged Dutch cardsharp could recognize as a stomach exhausted by constant and indiscriminate overeating. He treated these regular complaints with various decoctions of dandelion, mint, wormwood, and yarrow, and spent much time in the kitchen with the grateful, attentive Mistress Kirtley, carefully explicating these remedies to her. In this manner they became well-acquainted, though Dr. Dapper was careful never to presume on the warming relationship. The first commandment of his chosen profession, passed down through every age of mankind, remained, as it still remains, “Thou shalt let them come to you . . .”
The days passed, and the seasons passed: the hottest summer Olfert Dapper had ever endured crisping into the most dazzlingly delightful autumn by far, then hardening into a winter as merciless as any he had known in the Netherlands—more so, indeed, for the complete lack of civilized refuge, such as a lively coffee shop or a cheerful bordello. Dr. Dapper spent those endless months most often in bed, or huddled at his fireside with a quilt over his shoulders, his feet in a bucket of heated snow water, and his mind lost in memories of a Utrecht pub, drinking spiced jenever with Margot Zeldenthuis. Would she remember him, after all this time? More to the point, would that Eck en Viel idiot recognize him on the street, and could his States-General cousin, or whatever he was, still be holding a grudge? How much longer must he remain exiled in this fearful, barbaric place? He thought of the canals of Utrecht, and of the sharp wind over the Rhône, and for the first time since coming ashore felt no slightest trace of hope.
Spring slipped up imperceptibly, its timorous inroads into the iron cold like the forays of the turning tide just beginning to nibble at a child’s invulnerable sand fortress. Dr. Dapper was yet suffering from chilblains when Rain Coming, whom he had not seen for a good month—and whom he rather suspected actually hibernated during the worst of the winter—came to tell him that the ice was two days from breaking on the Kennebec, and that the first rains, a day after, would almost immediately produce the various wild herbs Dr. Dapper had grudgingly begun to depend on for his improvised medicines. They set out together on the first nearly-warm day in April, with a pale, watery sun overhead and a small breeze honing its edge on the back of Dr. Dapper’s neck.
They walked for a long time, in and out of pine groves, crossing muddy meadows, up and down the slopes of thickly wooded valleys and ravines. Their path seemed aimless, almost without direction, but periodically Rain Coming would halt and nod toward a few tiny petals in the shadow of a tree, or a fungus growing on that same tree; a single mushroom poking its brown head out of a patch of damp grass; a few queer-looking leaves, invariably hanging somewhere out of reach. And Olfert Dapper would dutifully climb and stretch, tug and twist and pluck, sometimes digging with both hands to fetch some plant up by its roots, and then drop his find carefully into the sack he carried at his waist, and trudge on beside the Abenaki. The sack grew heavier.
It was nearly twilight, with a half-moon already rising, when Rain Coming finally grunted in satisfaction, and they turned back toward No Popery. Weary as he was, Dr. Dapper was anxious to move quickly, knowing that the great wild cats whose broad footprints he had seen several times—“catamounts,” the villagers called them—hunted mainly at dusk and dawn. He also knew that the black bears of the region were just waking now from their winter sleep, most often hungry and irritable. He walked increasingly close beside Rain Coming as the sky darkened, even bumping against him from time to time.
When his companion halted abruptly, and he heard, directly ahead, the sound of a large body moving in a thicket, then glimpsed the shadow in the moonlight, Dr. Dapper froze where he stood and refused to go further. Rain Coming’s nods and earnest gestures of reassurance made no difference, so the Abenaki finally shrugged—something Dr. Dapper had never seen him or any Indian do before—and walked calmly on, quickly vanishing into the same thicket. He did not look back.
The threat of abandonment changed Dr. Dapper’s mind for him, and he hurried to catch up with Rain Coming. The Abenaki had halted again at the far edge of the clearing, staring toward a rough, stony meadow slanting slightly uphill. They had come that way, and Dr. Dapper remembered glimpsing deer there, and stumbling over two or three burrows of the badger-like diggers the colonists called “land-beavers.” But now there was nothing at all to be seen in the meadow . . .
. . . except something that should not have been.
Dr. Dapper did not write of it for a long time, for reasons that he never could explain to himself. When he did come to describe what he saw that spring night, remembering his fear that he might have been hallucinating out of weariness, he wrote:
“. . . by moonlight its coat is a kind of golden-gray, the very color of the moon itself. It seems a sturdy-built creature, though rather small—I cannot imagine it bearing a person of my stature for any distance. The hoofs are indeed cloven, as Pliny attests, though he is much in error regarding nearly every other aspect of the beast. The tail is lionlike, the mane as long as that of the wild ponies of the English moors—though less thick and shaggy—and the celebrated horn above its eyes would seem disproportionate in length and evident mass to the musculature of its rather slender neck. Yet so is the unicorn made.”
Dr. Dapper cried out at the sight, a loss of self-control quite outside his usual humours. The unicorn wheeled on the instant, its horn fiery as a new scar in the moonlight—and then it was gone, leaving no footprints behind on the wet and muddy hillside . . . leaving nothing but the wondering glory in Dr. Dapper’s eyes.
Rain Coming looked at Dr. Dapper without speaking, and Dr. Dapper looked back at him. There was no need to speak on either side: what had been seen, even for the single crystal moment, was greater than accusation, beyond apology. They walked on back to the village of No Popery together, bound in an understanding far greater than when they had set out that morning, so long ago.
What Rain Coming thought of their encounter, Dr. Dapper never knew, nor expected to know. Indeed, when he asked his friend whether the Abenaki tongue even had a word for unicorn, Rain Coming pretended not to comprehend, and grew plainly irritated when the matter was pressed further. He came less often to the village in those later days, and was even less conversational when he did. He seemed to Dr. Dapper almost to have set his body aside to follow in his puzzled heart whatever that moment on the
meadow had meant to him. A good—if uneasy—Netherlandish Calvinist, Dr. Dapper mused at times over the question of whether Indians could become saints.
Dr. Dapper missed his friend, but Rain Coming’s place had largely been taken by a conflagration of yearning to see the unicorn again. He spoke to no one about it—certainly not to the Reverend Kirtley, who would have immediately denounced his vision as a sending from hell. Nor did Dr. Dapper consider taking Prouty, the schoolmaster, into his confidence, for the man was even more fearfully rigid than the reverend, who at least had his unshakable faith to bolster him; while Prouty, Dr. Dapper suspected, needed only the least suggestion that the universe was not as he had been taught—such as the existence of unicorns—to push him quite over the edge of reason, likely into Quakerism, or something worse. Dr. Dapper had enough on his conscience, such as it was, without the added responsibility for destroying Master Prouty’s trembling foundations.
It does say something to his good, surely; to the influence that the simple life and simple values of No Popery had had on him—or perhaps it was only the silent, mysterious reproach of Rain Coming—that it never occurred to Dr. Dapper that there could be immense profit in the possession of a live unicorn, or even the hide, hair, and horn of a dead one. He merely wanted to see it again; and he knew without questioning, as one sometimes knows these things, that he never would be allowed to see it alone. It had clearly never been meant for him in the first place, but rather for his wise and strangely innocent companion, for Rain Coming of the Abenaki. Whom do I know in this savage land who is wise and innocent in that same way, who deserves to see what I by chance saw? With all their talk of Jesus, and all their damned endless praying, there must be someone!
And it was at that moment, in the spring, that Remorse Kirtley came to him, as he had known she would.
It was not an occasion of sin that brought her, but the perfectly legitimate pretext of her husband’s rebellious stomach quarreling with his eight-course dinner, as it and he were habituated to do. If Dr. Dapper could possibly attend on him . . . ?
Remorse Kirtley was not a beauty, but her eyes were the deep, sweet brown of a sunflower heart, and her mouth, close to, was not nearly as thin and prim and small as it appeared most of the time. Indeed, she was definitely standing closer to him than was at all proper for a good Puritan wife, and it was with a real and regretful effort that Dr. Dapper banished temptation and agreed to accompany her once more to the reverend’s bedside. A thought had occurred to him, gazing into those sunflower eyes.
While the infusion of wild grasses that he had learned would not only soothe the reverend’s much put-upon intestines but send him off to sleep as well was steeping, he told the minister, “That, I fear, was the last of the herbal medicines that I have gathered with my heathen friend of the Abenaki. Tomorrow, or the next day, I must go forth again to replenish my supply, and I would ask that you give your wife leave to accompany me. These plants grow close to the ground, and my eyes are not what they were.”
Reverend Kirtley was a fool, but not quite the fool he seemed. Having long since reassured himself of his wife’s holy unattractiveness, his main objection to her passing an afternoon in Dr. Dapper’s company concerned not what she might do, but that she might be thought to be doing it. “It would give the impression of unseemliness,” he protested, “of impropriety. Surely another—a child, perhaps, to avoid false appearances . . . ?”
Olfert Dapper shrugged plaintively, if such a thing were possible. “The little ones can so rarely identify what I seek,” he pointed out, “while their elders know, but cannot see. Mistress Remorse would be the perfect choice, as—ah—intimately acquainted with your intestinal needs as she is, and with the exact admixture and administration of my medicinal agents. Still, if you would prefer that I employ a stranger, which would require at least some inescapable discussion—”
What had worked in Amsterdam and Utrecht worked just as flawlessly in the Territory of Sagadahock. The reverend hastily disavowed any such suggestion, assuring Dr. Dapper that he might borrow his good wife’s assistance on whatever day suited him best, for all the world as though he were granting him the use of a favored spade or horse. Dr. Dapper suggested the following Monday, and Reverend Kirtley agreed eagerly. Mistress Remorse Kirtley’s opinion was not solicited, which did not seem to distress her at all.
She was waiting, dressed as roughly and soberly as any farm laborer, when Dr. Dapper came to the minister’s house at dawn on that Monday morning. They spoke little on setting off, making use of a route that kept them largely out of sight of anyone who might be working his fields early or slipping home from some wrongful enjoyment with a view to avoiding the village constable’s eye. Mistress Kirtley was hardly the equal of Rain Coming in espying a half-hidden leaf in a patch of nettles, or a few wild berries among the weeds reclaiming a long-abandoned garden; but she did well enough, and she kept easy pace with Dr. Dapper, her stride suggesting longer legs than he had permitted himself to imagine. Once or twice, when he glanced sideways to see her lifting her pale face, eyes almost closed, to the warming sun, she would turn and show him a very small smile, such as he had never seen on her mouth before. He fancied that perhaps no one else ever had.
She appeared not to notice that Dr. Dapper was slowly, subtly bending their search in a wide curve back toward the little meadow where a greater wonder even than her smile had come upon him. But when they sat down together upon the ground just beyond the clearing—considerably dryer now than then—to eat the midday meal she had prepared of dried meat, cheese, barley bread, and mild ale, Mistress Kirtley looked straight across the lunch into Dr. Dapper’s eyes and said quietly, “I know this place. There are none of your herbs growing here.”
“That is true, ma’am,” Dr. Dapper replied, for he always knew when lying would not serve him. It was a skill that set him apart from most other practitioners of his silken art.
“Then why did you bring me here?” Mistress Kirtley neither raised her voice nor showed any sign of alarm. She might have been asking the question out of casual politeness, had it not been for the slightest dilation of her eyes.
“Because there is something I greatly wish you to see.” Dr. Dapper nodded calmly toward the meal laid out on a kerchief between them. “Do enjoy, as I am enjoying it, the repast you have so clearly gone to a deal of trouble to prepare for us—and wait meanwhile. Only wait a little, dear Mistress Kirtley.”
In fact, for all the assurance in his tone, he had no notion whether the unicorn would appear at all. He knew it had been no phantasm, no trick of the moon or of his mind—one look at Rain Coming’s reaction to the vision had told him that—but whether or not it would return to the meadow, whether or not a certain legend might prove true . . . all that was pure gamble, and Olfert Dapper in his soul was as pure a gambler as had ever lived in Old World or New, in Utrecht or No Popery. He washed his meat and cheese down with his ale and smiled at Mistress Kirtley, and she smiled back at him. And they waited together.
But the day was warm, the ale excellent, and the early gnats’ almost inaudible buzzing became a kind of lullaby for Dr. Dapper. He never admitted that he had been asleep when the unicorn came; but it was Remorse Kirtley’s soft gasp that roused him, and he saw her on her feet with both hands pressed to her mouth and her dark Dutch-style cap fallen to the ground. He had never seen her rich brown hair loose before.
The unicorn was standing in the center of the meadow, facing her, plainly considering her, as surely as she was taking its truth into herself. By moonlight it had seemed more delicately made, almost fragile; today it appeared not only larger than he remembered, but quite possibly dangerous, with the sun glinting on the long spiral horn. Dr. Dapper, rising slowly to his feet, noticed for the first time the small curl of beard beneath its lower jaw, such as he had given to his depiction of a lion in his book on Africa. Did that mean the creature was male? Was it a sign of maturity? These and other questions tumbled roundabout through his mind, for Dr. Dapper
had always possessed the passionate curiosity of the true scientist in his inmost nature. He had, however, always been careful not to let it get out of hand.
Remorse Kirtley held out both of her open hands to the unicorn. It tossed its head once, like a horse, but did not whinny or nicker—indeed, Dr. Dapper had never heard it make a sound. It paced slowly toward the woman, its horn pointing at her heart. She did not flinch, but sank slowly into a sitting position, her legs folding under her as gracefully as those of the unicorn’s as it lowered its head into her lap. The horn lay across her thighs.
Dr. Dapper could see her face now. It wore the dazed, foolishly transcendent expression he had seen and scorned in so many of the paintings of his homeland: Mary receiving the Annunciation, saints ravished by the converse of angels, holy hermits gazing up enraptured at golden clouds aswarm with cherubim . . . every one looking as gloriously vacant as Remorse Kirtley looked now. Dr. Dapper envied her, and made notes for another book.
He could not tell whether the unicorn was actually asleep. Remorse Kirtley stroked its neck and played timidly with the white feathers of its mane—she never touched the horn—but the unicorn’s eyes remained closed, and its slow breathing never altered. Dr. Dapper thought, in a vague and distant way, This is the moment when the knights rush out from cover and spring on it, as it rouses a moment too late. I know what I should do, if I were a braver man, and a worse one. The unicorn smelled to him like new bread, and like new candles, and, strangely, like cool old wells in shadowy gardens.
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