Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  Upon returning to the house, ‘Kirkpatrick’s Folly,’ as it was known in less polite quarters, there was heard a sound so unearthly and unholy that Jessica, not known for cowardice, refused to go in until John checked things over.

  John was back only moments later, “Some misguided fool has gone and hired a professional keener if you can believe it. I’ve dispatched them,” he said, “and paid them for their pains,” he added in response to Jamie’s enquiring look.

  Later, around a lavish table of food laid for the wake, there was a narrowly averted international incident between a former French mistress of his father’s and a not so former Yugoslavian one.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening as the last of the crowd left, some still crying, others, having met hours earlier with the bottom of a bottle, hovering between recollecting every minute of their acquaintanceship with Jamie’s father and passing out cold in the driveway. Jamie’s primary emotion was relief.

  He retired then, to his father’s study, needing desperately the comfort of books, well-worn carpets and chairs and the last lingering scent of his father—pipe tobacco, dusty pages and the sharp overnote of lime from his aftershave. For Jamie it was the smell of comfort.

  John, no longer looking nor sounding like a plausible God, Muslim or otherwise, sank into the vast reaches of an old Victorian armchair. Jessica, long American legs tucked up demurely sat on a velvet-covered loveseat. Both accepted, with sighs of exhaustion, the glasses of Connemara Mist he offered them. It was his own brand, made by his family for over three hundred years and was the beverage of choice for rich drunks the world over.

  Through the south and west-facing windows, the evening sun poured flame. Jessica’s slippery apricot hair turned red as rubies and John’s neatly trimmed iron-grey coif seemed streaked with blood. They could see all of Belfast spread out below them, colored in the waning light in shades of brick and brimstone, of lavender and mint. Lights twinkled like jewels thrown from the hand of a careless sultan. And they perched above, minareted and mosqued, corbelled and fluted, blown-gold and husked against a cream-clotted sky. The study, sugar spun of iron and glass, sat at the far end of the house resembling nothing so much as a wrought-iron Victorian birdcage, safe from the vagaries of wind and rain, open to sky and light, to the moon and stars, though not, perhaps, to God.

  They drank their first drink in comfortable silence, all tired and without the fortitude required for speech. All having been said, all having been done, Jamie thought he would quite like to redrink himself into a stupor.

  Jamie had been born in this house on a cold, wet, windy Ides of March night. A snake had moved in the next day, the first snake, it was reputed, to be seen in Ireland since St. Patrick had banished them all in the Dark Ages. ‘Cursed by God or blessed by the devil, depending on how you look at it,’ had been his grandmother’s unhelpful summation some months later when all manner of wildlife had taken up residence in the House of Kirkpatrick. Feathered and furred things, that twittered, hummed and crept between struts of plaster and marble at night. A nest of squirrels, grey and plump, that settled in the baby’s wardrobe, a fawn that dropped grass and bluebells into his pram one sunny afternoon. It spooked the nanny, though to credit her, she didn’t resign until the butterflies came. It was a hot, humid August afternoon and she’d gone to check on Jamie, having put him down for a nap some two hours earlier. Upon looking into the crib, she found a dozen butterflies, iridescent dust swirling in the air as the wings rose and fell with the deep rhythms of infant sleep. There, resting on his back in all the breathing colors of orange and blue, silver and green, purple and red. ‘As if the lot of them were hypnotized,’ she later told the sympathetic housekeeper. Nannies came and went, but the animals stayed, including the five-foot long coal black snake, which turned out to have milky-white sightless eyes.

  Things began to grow that shouldn’t have, wild things untended by the hand of man, clumps of blue forget-me-nots between the cracks in the house’s masonry, meandering trails of buttercups across the immaculate green lawns, a white lilac tree that appeared outside his window that first spring and grew to a stunning twelve feet by the next spring. Pouring its blossoms with excess and abandon into his room where they rolled across the carpet like pearls toward an emperor.

  Cursed by God or blessed by the devil? Who could say? Even his father, who could be quite prosaic when he chose to be, could not quite explain his son. How they’d lost him one terrible night when he was four and found him in the morning asleep and unharmed between the hooves of an unbroken horse. How a doe, two springs old perhaps, had followed him all one summer like an infatuated girl and how when they’d sent him away to school that year, sent him away from the animals and the ocean, she’d nearly died from it.

  Away from the ocean, for they thought it would surely kill him, drawn as he was to it. In times of sorrow, he shot like an arrow, true and straight, to the water. He could manage a sailboat alone on the rough Atlantic seas by the time he was ten. And it was always alone that he wanted to sail. ‘Not sad but not happy either, just less empty’ he’d replied to his father’s question of ‘why?’ His father had left it alone after that and Jamie continued, in sorrow and joy, to flee to the water’s welcoming arms.

  It was, on this night of his father’s funeral, all he wanted. The forgiveness of water. Either cursed by God or blessed by the devil, it no longer mattered as the pain was the same.

  He looked fondly into the faces of his two oldest and dearest friends and wished, desperately, that he was alone.

  The doorbell rang as John, ignoring a stern look from Jessica, refilled their glasses.

  Maggie, who was cook and counsel to the house of Kirkpatrick, poked her head in the door a moment later, “Sorry to disturb ye Jamie but there’s a pack of gypsies at the backdoor says ye’ll know they’ve only come to pay their respects.” Maggie quirked her eyebrows as if she thought this last was of dubious likelihood.

  “Aye, thank you Maggie, I’ll deal with it,” Jamie said, wearily rubbing the vertical crease between his eyebrows.

  “Jamie, do you really think—” John began but ceased abruptly at the black look he received. Tinkers had always been welcome on Kirkpatrick land and given Kirkpatrick hospitality without stint. It had been so since time immemorial and if Jamie’s look was anything to judge by, things weren’t about to change now.

  Kirkpatrick’s Folly, known as such for its hodgepodge of Victorian, Georgian and Edwardian stylings, (the result of a disagreement between the husband and wife who’d built it) sat above Belfast like an albatross above a hot and shimmering sea. Long, narrow Georgian windows looked out over the city of steel and blood, a city built on ships and all they could carry. In the back of the house, the windows were Victorian octagons, half-moons, small wavy glassed portholes that looked over broad green lawns, lush gardens and the stone walkways that graced the last twenty acres left of what had originally been an estate of estimable size. It was, however, still large enough to take in a travel weary party of gypsies for a day or two. It was this Jamie intended to say before returning to his friends and his bottle of whiskey.

  He was struck speechless however by the size of the group standing in utter quiet and stillness in his front garden. Three hundred Tinkers, Ireland’s gypsies, stood, hats off, heads inclined, caravans parked in a sedate line down the curving length of the drive. The silence was so absolute, so heavy, that Jamie thought he might buckle under the sheer weight and expectation of it. Salvation came in a throaty voice; a voice filled with vodka and cigarettes, a voice that rumbled up warmly, a Russian wind from his childhood.

  “Jemmy, my little boy, my baby,” arms enfolded him; scent like black cinnamon on gardenias enveloped him.

  “Yevgena,” he said in relief, in gratitude. “You came.”

  Black eyes, like Adriatic plums, Levantine in their seduction, met the green of his own. “Of course I came, where else would I be
but with you today? I am sorry to be late, it is not so easy being unofficial diplomat to this bunch,” she indicated the crowd, still silent and watchful, arrayed behind her. “But I ask a friend to come in my absence. I think perhaps,” Adriatic plums sparkled, “he was an appropriate substitute.”

  Jamie shook his head, a smile pricking at the corners of his mouth. “I’m not even going to ask how you know him.”

  Yevgena Vasiliovich, high queen to the gypsies, mother to every misfit and outcast in the world’s population, representative of her people in the United Nations and still, at sixty-four, looking like a courtesan from the court of Ivan the Terrible, shook her head. Then smiled the slow smile that had seduced heads of state in boardrooms and, it was rumored, bedrooms as well.

  “I wouldn’t tell you anyway, even if you are the prettiest, most charming boy in the world. Now are we going to stand out here all night or are you going to let me in?”

  Jamie nodded and turning back to the people, some of Europe’s most poverty-stricken and proud, said, “Thank you for coming, my father would be honored, my home is your home tonight and you are welcome.”

  There were nods at this but it wasn’t until Yevgena inclined her head at them that they began to move and talk.

  Yevgena tucked her arm through his own. “I suppose you are keeping watch with that old terror from Oxford tonight are you?”

  “I suppose I am,” Jamie said as the ‘old terror’ came out into the entryway.

  “Saints and bawds preserve us it’s the Queen of the Gypsies herself come to visit,” John said, a grudging affection tinting the dryness of his tone.

  “The ancient mariner still lives I see,” Yevgena retorted in turn and then, characteristically, grabbed John by the ears and treated him to an exuberant Russian kiss on each cheek.

  Drawn by the scent of drama, Jessica appeared in the hall, cheeks whiskey-flushed, top two buttons of her sedate suit popped open, looking for all the world like a freshly tumbled dairy maid.

  Exquisite ink black eyebrows arched over narrowed eyes, “Jemmy?” Yevgena demanded, laying a proprietary hand along his forearm.

  “Don’t you recognize my playmate?” Jamie asked causing Jessica’s buttermilk skin to glow red.

  Yevgena turned her head this way and that, narrowing her eyes even further, making Jessica twitch in discomfort under such intense scrutiny. A delighted smile dawned upon Levantine shores.

  “Jessitchka?”

  Jessica nodded and was swept up in the same fierce hug that Jamie had experienced only moments ago.

  “Well,” Yevgena held her at arm’s length, “you have filled out most admirably. These two,” she spoke to John, “spent a summer with me in California when they were only so high,” she waved her hand at a height of about five feet, “such mischief makers they were. Still are I imagine,” she gave Jamie an arch look. “Now,” she flung off her red cloak, “will someone get me a drink?” She strode imperiously into the study, flicking back a wing of hair impatiently.

  “Vodka,” John, having followed her into the room, had Waterford decanter in hand and an evil twinkle in his eyes.

  Yevgena held her hands up, “John my darling there are things you don’t seem to remember so well, a Russian gypsy with a bottle of vodka is a disaster waiting to happen. I’ll have some of that fog stuff you men swill.”

  “Mist,” Jamie said.

  “Fog, mist, is all bad weather; just don’t put any ice in it.”

  Jamie brought her drink as specified and then excused himself for a moment while he made arrangements for the Tinkers’ dinner.

  Yevgena wasted no time in coming directly to the point.

  “How is he, how is my Jemmy?” she asked, eyes gone opaque and piercing.

  “Not so good,” John said. “It was as you know rather unexpected, Jamie was in Paris on business. I think,” he hesitated a moment, “I think his father was waiting for him to be away.”

  “My poor sweet James,” Yevgena said, all of her sixty-four years echoing in her voice. John knew she meant the father, not the son, for both had been surrogate sons to her, though she was officially Jamie’s godmother.

  Yevgena Vasiliovich had been ‘marked for reduction’ some twenty-two years earlier in the Csillag internment camp and had been saved only by chance, the end of the war and the fleeing of the Nazis. The Csillag had merely been a way station for Auschwitz. Jewish by birth, gypsy by marriage she was doubly cursed under Hitler’s regime. She and her family, a husband, three adolescent daughters and a pair of rosy brown twin boys had been rounded up and forced to march the fifty miles to the camp. Within a month, both her husband and daughters were dead of typhus and the boys had been transported to Auschwitz. She was never able to determine what happened to them, though the monstrous stories of Josef Mengele’s private labs and his intense fascination with twins had never ceased to haunt her sleeping and waking hours. She herself had been transported to Auschwitz a month after the boys and had been due to go to the ovens when liberation occurred. She’d been too weak to walk out of the camp on her own accord and had thought to merely huddle in a corner and die, but as fate would have it, an Irish diplomat, there on a fact-finding mission for the UN, discovered her and carried her out. She spent several weeks in a British field hospital, her resurrector coming to see her as often as he could.

  When she’d been released from hospital she’d nowhere to go, no family left, no home, no life. It was then that James Kirkpatrick the First, Jamie’s grandfather, had offered her a job as a personal assistant. The title came to mean many things over the years and she had become an integral part of the Kirkpatrick family while not really meaning to. She was secretary, counsel, confidante, hostess and friend to her rescuer and after seeing how lonely a young man the second James Kirkpatrick was, she’d become a mother figure to him. Jamie, her Jemmy, had barely been more than a toddler at the time and she’d taken him to her heart with a fierceness that shocked and frightened her. Today she’d not actually been late for the funeral she just hadn’t seen how she could bear to watch one son bury the other.

  “He has been drinking?” she asked, looking directly at Jessica, knowing that John’s views on drinking were somewhat more slanted.

  “Yes,” Jessica drew the word out reluctantly, “but only for the day and night before.”

  “We will let him have his way tonight but after that, pffft,” Yevgena’s long red fingernails sliced the air across her throat, “he is broke off.”

  “Cut off,” John said on the rise of a yawn, “and who may I ask is going to wean him away from the bottle?”

  “I have a plan, not to worry,” Yevgena said in a tone that inspired alarm in her listeners. “Now let us join Jamie outside, is not good for him to brood about in this room, his father is too much here.”

  The sight that greeted them outside was rather startling to the Anglo-Saxon sensibilities of how a funeral day was to be spent. Fires were lit in pits, food was being cooked and distributed, spices skirled and scented the unseasonably warm air, children barefoot and laughing were running about and torches lit the night like great pulsating stars.

  “Are you certain this is wise?” John asked, watching Jamie make a crown of ivy and crocus for a particularly grubby little girl.

  “He will have his whole life to mourn his father, tonight though is a dangerous time, tonight and for the next while. Jamie needs to look after someone, otherwise,” Yevgena looked soberly through the thickening twilight, “he will be devoured by the pain. I saw it happen to his father, I won’t allow it to happen to him.”

  “You could have brought him a puppy, three hundred gypsies is a little excessive even by your standards.”

  “Puppies he has,” Yevgena retorted smoothly, “it is something else entirely that he needs.”

  John, feeling that to enquire further would be to implicate himself in later crimes, wandered of
f to better acquaint himself with Gypsy custom and drink.

  Yevgena, followed by Jessica, made her way over to Jamie, stopping here and there to pat a baby, enquire as to the health of various people and to drop in her wake beads and baubles of such color and quantity as to cause a great squealing and delight amongst the children.

  She stooped over Jamie, kissing him gently on the top of his head as he knelt in the grass surrounded by a group of giggling girls, pulling coins out of their ears and making a variety of accessories from the supplies in his garden.

  “You need a haircut,” she chided gently, pushing back the golden hair that hung in his eyes. “You also need a woman to look after you,” she smiled at Jessica, “why don’t you make an honest man of this boy?”

  “When he makes a dishonest woman of me I’ll be more than happy to,” Jessica replied, only half in jest.

  “Where is that wife of yours anyhow?” Yevgena asked sharply, bantering stripped from her words like blistered paint.

  Jamie finished wrapping a length of cream and green ivy around a dark-eyed cherub’s neck before answering.

  “Yevgena you know full well where Colleen is and that she is not my wife anymore.”

  “Isn’t she? Have you divorced yet? No, I didn’t think so, her place is here not stuck up there in that home for dried up—”

  “Yevgena,” Jamie’s voice was harsh, “don’t.”

  “Alright, alright,” Yevgena spread her fingers in pure Russian placation, “I only thought that—”

  “Yevgena,” the tone was icy.

  Yevgena rolled her eyes and left him to his flowersmithing, pulling Jessica neatly to her side and leading her towards the cobbled stone paths that ran through the formal rose gardens.

  “Are there any women for Jamie?”

  Jessica, feeling rather harassed, answered diplomatically, “Not that I know of.”

  “He needs to move on with his life,” Yevgena said firmly.