The Golden Unicorn

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Then without warning a blaze of light shone directly into my face, and I heard voices through the crash of wind and water. More lights flashed upon me. A hand grasped my tender arm so that I cried out again in pain—and was engulfed by darkness.

  19

  Before I opened my eyes, I heard the crackle and felt the warmth of a roaring fire. Well wrapped in blankets, my wet clothes gone and a warm nightdress on my body, I lay on something soft drawn close to the fire. There was no more sea, no wind, no icy water sucking me down. As my eyes began to focus, I saw that this was the hearth where Tudor had lain earlier in the evening, but he wasn’t there now. And I was warm again, the water gone from my lungs—warm and safe. My hand felt for the pendant and it was still there at my throat. Whatever had happened, I hadn’t lost it.

  “She’s coming to,” a voice said.

  My eyes blurred and then cleared as I looked up into Nan’s face, and saw Evan beside her. Behind them I could see Judith, unmoving as a statue, her face white. Fear started up in me, and then I remembered that she was not the enemy.

  “John,” I said. “He’s out there. And the dog. He tried to—”

  Nan and Evan exchanged looks and again she bent over me. “Hush, Courtney. We know. The men have been searching, but I’m afraid we’ll have to wait till morning. Tudor came in by himself.”

  “But how—how did you find me? How—”

  This time Evan leaned toward me. “No more talk now. It can wait until you’re stronger.”

  I tried to struggle up from my cocoon of blankets. “I’m all right! I’m fine! I—”

  “You’re going up to bed,” he said, and picked me up, blankets and all. I stopped my struggle, feeling languorous and safe in his arms, willing to let everything go. Again I saw Judith’s face, sad and lost as Evan carried me toward the stairs.

  Nan came with me, and when I’d been tucked into my bed Evan stood beside me for a moment longer, looking down into my face. I saw in his the strain he must have been through hunting for me in that howling darkness.

  When I tried to speak, my words sounded ragged, my voice hoarse. “It’s over. I don’t need to run away now. You won’t let John—”

  “Hush,” Nan said again. “We think he’s been lost in the water.”

  “You’re not going to run away ever again,” Evan said quietly.

  “What a lovely thought to go to sleep on,” I murmured and he leaned down to kiss me. Drowsily I murmured something sweet and foolish, and then he went away. I was vaguely aware of candlelight, of Nan sitting in a chair across the room, of the lessening storm sounds outside. And then I was asleep.

  I never knew when the hurricane beat its way out to sea on its eastern course, leaving the island drenched and ravaged behind it. Though, as I learned later, it hadn’t been one of the worst storms, and damage was not too great out here in the South Fork. I slept and if I dreamed, nothing stayed with me. Dawn pressed at the window when I next opened my eyes, to see Nan asleep in her chair. The moment I stirred, she awakened, and as she came over to me I felt new energy surge through my body, while my mind brimmed with unanswered questions.

  “You should have gone to bed,” I told her.

  “I wanted to stay,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  “Wonderful! Free again. But I want to know everything. How did they come in time? How did they find me?”

  She moved about the room, stretching her arms over her head, wriggling her shoulders back to life, and then drew a chair closer to my bed and sat down, regarding me soberly and rather remotely.

  “Judith talked to Herndon last night. She told him the truth—as far as she knew it—about John. What Olive Asher had told her—that he was guilty of Alice’s death. And probably of Stacia’s. Herndon went through the storm to fetch Evan back to the house, and I returned with them. It was a good thing I had a man on each side of me to pull me along in that wind. Herndon didn’t know you were in any danger then, but he wanted to confront John, and he didn’t want to do it alone. Luckily Asher was uneasy. John thought he’d seen the unicorn moon, and he told Asher, so the old man stayed alert for anything that might happen. I think he may have been suspicious all along, but next to old Lawrence he loved John. Nevertheless, he couldn’t let anything else happen.”

  There was a deep weariness in Nan’s voice and she paused to rub her fingers across her eyes. I waited, not urging her.

  “Asher was trying to listen in the hall, and he heard some of what John said to you. When he realized that John meant to take you outside, bringing the dog with him, he was frightened. He knew he couldn’t stand against John alone, and it was sheer luck that brought the three of us back in time. Asher told us where John had taken you.”

  “He’s not my father,” I broke in. “Oh, Nan, I’m glad he’s not my father!”

  She was silent, watching me across the room.

  Perhaps she was the one who could tell me, I thought. I still needed to know the answer. “Nan, if I was your sister’s child, perhaps you know who my father was?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  There was something strange in her voice—something controlled and cold, so that I felt no sympathy in her. If she was my mother’s sister, she felt nothing toward me.

  “You’d better tell me all of it,” I said.

  She seemed to brace herself and I saw her touch her lips with her tongue, as if they were dry. When she spoke it was in the same cold, remote way.

  “You weren’t Alice’s baby either, Courtney. You were named after your real mother—Anabel. That was a little whimsy of Alice’s because it was a name I never liked, even though it was our mother’s too. I never used it, though it’s my right name.”

  It seemed an eon before I could speak. I couldn’t immediately grasp what she had told me. At the window the light grew brighter with the new day.

  “Please tell me,” I managed at last.

  Hesitantly at first, she began to speak, and then with the words pouring out—as though they had been suppressed for so long that the pressure of release was too much to resist. Yet she still spoke without feeling, with nothing I could reach out to, even if I’d wanted to.

  “There are no good excuses for what I did, and I can only tell you how it seemed to me then. I was young and I was pregnant and I had no husband. It was a situation made for Alice’s machinations. The one thing she wanted more than anything else was an heir to satisfy old Lawrence and make certain of her own power in the family. She had given up hope of having a baby—even if John had given her one, it might not have been in time to provide that firstborn heir. So she promised me a home and a mother and father for my child—something I couldn’t give. She promised that the baby would be raised as a Rhodes, with all the care and benefit that implied. And I didn’t know the Rhodes then as well as I do now. Worst of all, she threatened to ruin your father if I didn’t do as she wanted.”

  “Who was my father?”

  Nan went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “I went abroad with Alice and we fooled old Lawrence completely. My sister and I looked a lot alike in those days, and it was simple to switch passports when we went into Switzerland. So you were safely born to Alice and John Rhodes.”

  Nan paused, and for a moment the room was very still. Then she went on.

  “After I saw you, I wasn’t sure any more. When we came home to the cottage in Montauk, where our mother was staying, I began to fight against Alice’s plan. As soon as Lawrence knew about the baby, he sent Herndon and Judith and John out to the cottage at once, to bring Alice and the baby home. When I told her I was going to tell the truth and keep the baby, no matter what, she brought up that big gun of hers and again told me just what she could do to your father if I didn’t take myself off and do it quickly. On the other hand, if I behaved, I could come back to East Hampton later and be a loving aunt to my own child—so the little girl wou
ldn’t have to grow up without knowing me. I could even watch over her and know what happened to her. Alice and I fought bitterly, but she was older and stronger-willed in those days, so she won and I went away. If only I’d stayed a little longer—”

  Her voice broke, but she controlled her emotion quickly and stared at me, stony-eyed. Her look said, “I loved that baby—but I don’t know you. I can’t love you.”

  After a moment she continued.

  “You know the rest. Olive saw John and Alice down on the beach and I think she told our mother. Mother went to pieces emotionally and mentally, and she’s never been right since. I didn’t learn of Alice’s death until months later, and then I came straight home—to find that my little Anabel was also supposed to be dead.”

  “Judith told me she gave me away partly for my own safety. But why wouldn’t I have been useful to John—presumably as his child.”

  “You could have been. But since he knew you weren’t Alice’s child or his, he was afraid of what might happen when I came back to town. Lawrence would never have forgiven our tricking him. In any case, when I returned to town, you were supposedly dead, and Herndon had gone back to Judith, as I always knew he would.”

  “Herndon?”

  “Yes. While Judith had her brief fling with John, Herndon was left hurt and terribly wounded, and I’d always loved him. Perhaps I had something of comfort and affection to give him at that time that Judith never did. And for a little while he turned to me. He was the decent one of the lot, Courtney. He was the one Lawrence trusted, and if he hadn’t been bewitched by Judith, life might have been different for him. Of course he never knew that Alice’s baby was mine—and his.”

  I tried to shut out her words that carried emotion only for the past, with nothing left over for the present. I closed my eyes and turned my head away from her. Even in the last words she had written in her notebook, Alice had carried on the lie—that I was her child.

  The cold, clear voice went on. “You owe me nothing but contempt, Courtney. Ever since Judith told me the truth about you yesterday and I knew what even she didn’t know—that you were my daughter—I’ve been trying to find some way to ease this story in the telling. But there wasn’t any easy way. I’ve never forgiven myself, and I won’t blame you for the way you feel. I’ll never ask—or want—anything of you. It’s too late for all that.”

  When I heard her leave her chair and walk to the door, I turned my head. “Nan,” I said, “wait.”

  Suddenly and clearly, watching her across the room, I could understand. I had already told her that I would never forgive those who had taken part in the deception. The control, the coldness, the remoteness of her manner—all these were a defense because she couldn’t bear to be hurt any more, and she didn’t dare expect anything from me except rejection for what she had done. I was out of bed in a moment, running across the floor in bare feet and nightgown.

  “I’ve come all this way to find you!” I cried. “I’ve come through all the years of my life to find you, and you can’t go away from me now!”

  The tears she had held back brimmed her eyes, spilled down her cheeks, yet she was afraid to reach out to me. So I put my arms about her and held her close, with my own wet cheek against hers.

  There were years of words to be bridged, understanding to be learned, both a mother and a father to become acquainted with—yet the human heart could span all this in an instant, and with my cheek against Nan’s, I knew I had come to the end of my search. Though strangely, even as I held her, I thought of Gwen and Leon and how fortunate I had been. They would have been truly happy for me now. Perhaps I was luckier than most—to have had two sets of parents.

  When we’d cried a little and laughed a little and could stop hugging each other, she managed to speak again.

  “Herndon still doesn’t know. I’m fond of him, Courtney, but there aren’t going to be any more secrets. I can give him the gift of you now, when he needs it most. And Judith—well, Judith will have to accept the past. She has her painting, and I know he’ll stand by her. I always knew that.”

  But there was someone else I had to tell before we told Herndon. I couldn’t love Herndon as a father yet—and whether I ever would must wait on time and on how he felt about me as well. Yet something had begun between us when we’d walked together only a short time before.

  Now, however, it was Evan I must talk to, and I wanted to see him quickly.

  Outside, when I reached the terrace, the view was one of devastation. Part of the beach had been lifted to the terrace, it seemed, grasses and foliage were flattened, and everything outdoors bore scars of the storm. The wooden steps had been broken and partly washed away, but Evan was climbing the altered bank, and when he saw me he came quickly up to my side.

  “How are you, Courtney?”

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. “Will you listen, please?”

  He listened gravely, not touching me, and I knew he was glad about Nan. As I talked I looked down the sandy bank and saw that the old figurehead had been shifted by the storm, but had somehow not been swept out to sea. Hesther no longer stared off toward far horizons, but with her sand-beaten face turned inland, she seemed to be watching me with an air of wise understanding. So another Rhodes has come home, she seemed to be saying—a Rhodes from Ethan’s time, perhaps. I touched the shining surface of my golden unicorn and knew the bond was there.

  But now there had been enough of talking.

  “Hold me,” I said to Evan. “Just hold me and tell me a lot of foolish things I need to hear.”

  His tenderness was healing and I knew that all my searching was over. I had come home indeed—at last.

  Acknowledgments

  My special thanks to Miss Dorothy King of the East Hampton Free Library for her assistance when I was doing my research for this book. I am also grateful to Mrs. Amy Bassford and Mrs. Condie Lamb, who helped me immensely.

  The background is as I saw it and responded to it in that charming village. However, I “built” my own house on the dunes, and the family that lives at The Shingles is peopled entirely from my imagination. That, too, is the source of all the story happenings.

  A Biography of Phyllis A. Whitney

  Phyllis Ayame Whitney (1903–2008) was a prolific author of seventy-six adult and children’s novels. Over fifty million copies of her books were sold worldwide during the course of her sixty-year writing career, establishing her as one of the most successful mystery and romantic suspense writers of the twentieth century. Whitney’s dedication to the craft and quality of writing earned her three lifetime achievement awards and the title “The Queen of the American Gothics.”

  Whitney was born in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, to American parents, Mary Lillian (Lilly) Mandeville and Charles (Charlie) Whitney. Charles worked for an American shipping line. When Whitney was a child, her family moved to Manila in the Philippines, and eventually settled in Hankow, China.

  Whitney began writing stories as a teenager but focused most of her artistic attention on her other passion: dance. When her father passed away in China in 1918, Whitney and her mother took a ten-day journey across the Pacific Ocean to America, and they settled in Berkley, California. Later they moved to San Antonio, Texas. Lilly continued to be an avid supporter of Whitney’s dancing, creating beautiful costumes for her performances. While in high school, her mother passed away, and Whitney moved in with her aunt in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from high school in 1924, Whitney turned her attention to writing, nabbing her first major publication in the Chicago Daily News. She made a small income from writing stories at the start of her career, and would eventually go on to publish around one hundred short stories in pulp magazines by the 1930s.

  In 1925, Whitney married George A. Garner, and nine years later gave birth to their daughter, Georgia. During this time, she also worked in the children’s room in the Chicago Public Libr
ary (1942–1946) and at the Philadelphia Inquirer (1947–1948).

  After the release of her first novel, A Place for Ann (1941), a career story for girls, Whitney turned her eye toward publishing full-time, taking a job as the children’s book editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and releasing three more novels in the next three years, including A Star for Ginny. She also began teaching juvenile fiction writing courses at Northwestern University. Whitney began her career writing young adult novels and first found success in the adult market with the 1943 publication of Red Is for Murder, also known by the alternative title The Red Carnelian.

  In 1946, Whitney moved to Staten Island, New York, and taught juvenile fiction writing at New York University. She divorced in 1948 and married her second husband, Lovell F. Jahnke, in 1950. They lived on Staten Island for twenty years before relocating to Northern New Jersey. Whitney traveled around the world, visiting every single setting of her novels, with the exception of Newport, Rhode Island, due to a health emergency. She would exhaustively research the land, culture, and history, making it a custom to write from the viewpoint of an American visiting these exotic locations for the first time. She imbued the cultural, physical, and emotional facets of each country to transport her readers to places they’ve never been.

  Whitney wrote one to two books a year with grand commercial success, and by the mid-1960s, she had published thirty-seven novels. She had reached international acclaim, leading Time magazine to hail her as “one of the best genre writers.” Her work was especially popular in Britain and throughout Europe.

  Whitney won the Edgar Award for Mystery of the Haunted Pool (1961) and Mystery of the Hidden Hand (1964), and was shortlisted three more times for Secret of the Tiger’s Eye (1962), Secret of the Missing Footprint (1971), and Mystery of the Scowling Boy (1974). She received three lifetime achievement awards: the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1985, the Agatha in 1989, and the lifetime achievement award from the Society of Midland Authors in 1995.