A Plague of Unicorns

by Jane Yolen

  However, as the time came closer for him to go to Cranford, he had even more unanswered questions. Many of them to do with the unspoken words about his father.

  “Why have I never seen an angel? Did Lucifer hurt anyone when he fell to earth? How do we walk about in heaven when our bones are buried below?”

  Alexandria said carefully, “Those are good questions to ask the monks.”

  “And where do babies come from?” James asked suddenly. “And how do they get there?” Now he was thinking about his brother, Bruce, who had been annoying him that morning, wanting to play trot-trot when James wanted to read.

  No one — not even Alexandria — was willing to answer that one.

  Cook had mumbled something about storks, which seemed minimally possible. Nurse ventured something about the cabbage patch, which even James did not give a moment’s credence to.

  Alford the stableman later told Uncle Archibald that he could show James how horses were bred and born, and was almost dismissed for his impertinence, though not without a great deal of laughter on Mother’s part.

  James thought her laughter was tinged with sadness at the thought of him going so far away. Or at least he hoped so.

  Uncle Archibald merely said in his slow way, “That’s hardly necessary, Alford.” And Alford was sent back to the barn without showing James anything at all.

  Suddenly, it was a mere ten days before James was to leave, and he and Alexandria sat in the kitchen as the sun began to inch towards the far hills.

  “I suppose,” James said, “that the monks at the monastery will teach me all that I need to know about having babies.”

  They were having tea, and Cook brought out honey cakes and gingerbread, as well as buns with currants and raisins. And James’ favorite — slices of white bread slathered in fresh butter and covered with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar.

  James and Alexandria had been reading a book together about explorations on the Continent, and without permission had taken it out of the library and had it with them. Alexandria insisted that James wipe his hands carefully, and his mouth, too, before touching the book again.

  “Otherwise,” she warned in a whisper, “you will be too sticky and too crumbly and will leave a mark. And then Uncle Archibald will know.”

  That was warning enough. James picked up the cloth and began to vigorously wipe first his hands, then his face, till the cloth was sticky all over.

  She added, “It’s all right to make marks on your jerkin,” she said, “but not on a book. Books are sacred.”

  James kept wiping dutifully, this time on his jerkin, but then realized Alexandria hadn’t answered his question. “But what about the monks?” he persisted. “Will they or won’t they tell me where babies come from?”

  “I am not certain they know anything at all about it,” said Alexandria. “They do not marry and are without issue.”

  “What’s issue?” he asked.

  “Children.” It was to be her last word on the subject, and no amount of pleading from her brother made her give any further explanation.

  Even with that, James still had been very eager to go to the abbey.

  Some monk will know something, he thought. Or surely the abbot . . .

  But as one day followed the next, he began to worry, and after three of those days were gone, he was no longer so certain that the abbey was where he wanted to be. In fact, he feared that the abbot wouldn’t warm to him or want him underfoot asking questions any more than his uncle did.

  He thought, in his own way, that if no one wanted to hear his questions or answer them, he would show everyone that he could be a good and silent boy. Then maybe he wouldn’t have to go to the abbey after all.

  James stayed silent — or as close to silent as possible for a boy of his age and personality to manage — for about half a day. Because he was really a bit afraid and a bit sad about leaving, and yet a bit excited, too. The feelings were all wrapped together in a kind of Christmas ball that one only gets to unwind at the high table during the yuletide feast.

  As he went silent, a kind of hush fell on the castle, as if it were under an enchantment, though really it was just everyone else taking a deep, cleansing breath and enjoying the cease of James’ endless questions. Even Alexandria seemed to relish the quiet.

  In fact, James went more than just silent. He went still. He walked slowly and quietly up the stairs, and when he came down again, he didn’t slide down the banister shouting, “Yahooooo!”

  He ate quickly at meals and left his dirty napkin by the side of the plate instead of forgetting and leaving it tucked in the top of his tunic to use later as a pirate’s bandanna or a highwayman’s mask.

  He spent some of the time he had left sitting moat-side and throwing out bits of his uneaten bread to the ducks and swans who flourished there, because, as he whispered to himself, “There aren’t any moat dragons here.”

  And as day followed day, everyone came to expect the quiet, forgetting how tiresome James had been.

  But on the third day of James’ silence, his mother and sister and Nanny began to worry whether in fact James had fallen ill, because since the day he’d asked his first questions at age one and a half, James had never been silent for long.

  “Maybe he’s got the influx,” said Nanny, who fancied herself a doctor.

  “Maybe he’s got the heebies and the jeebies,” said Alexandria, who read foreign books as well as English ones.

  “Maybe he just has the grumps,” his mother said. She’d had two brothers — one of them Uncle Archibald, the other in the Holy Land with her missing husband — and so she knew a bit about that sort of thing.

  But just in case James really was ill, they made him tisanes and forced him to drink these herbal teas concocted from blessed thistles, along with oil that Cook distilled from newly caught river cod. He had to take a long soak in a warm bath, the water sprinkled lavishly with sprigs of lavender, till he smelled like a bush and had wrinkled fingers and toes.

  On Uncle Archibald’s command, after each warm bath, he had to run and jump into the cold Callan River, which flowed sluggishly nearby.

  None of this seemed to clear up James’ condition. And that night, he dreamed of his father in the faraway Holy Land. In the dream he was sure that his father — who was big and tough and sometimes funny — was never coming back home. James woke covered with sweat. He knew for certain that he didn’t want to leave home. Indeed, he thought, no one can give me a reason why I should.

  Leaving was three days away now, which was too big and too real to ignore. Yet it was too frightening to think about as well, which was why he thought about it every waking moment and had nightmares about it every night.

  The truth was, he’d never actually been very far away from home before. When his father had first been reported missing, James — as the possible new duke and Lord of Callanshire — had been protected.

  “Overprotected,” Uncle Archibald had grumbled. “The treasury cannot stand the extra pay.” He meant he’d have to cut back on the herb garden.

  That was how it came about that James never got to leave the shire, except to go riding in the castle woods with guards or fish its many streams. He’d never gone anywhere for a weekend, nor anywhere overnight.

  It seemed so unfair. Alexandria got to spend weeks at Aunt Alice’s house in Hockney, studying tapestry making, of all things. Aunt Alice was noted for her needlework and her oddities. It was said she drank mead and could shoot a great bow like a man. She could read seven languages and speak the language of Cathay. (Though not read it.) But she was also the best tapestry maker in the three counties of Callanshire: Callan, East Riding, and Hockney.

  Aunt Alice was supposed to instruct Alexandria on the fine art of womanly pursuits if she was ever to get married.

  Even baby Bruce, once he was three and it was certain he would live, would get to go on a fortnight trip in the summer with Mother to visit the grandparents two shires away.

  But ever
since his father had gone missing, James had to stay at home. Never to travel, never to go outside the castle grounds. Never, that was, until now. With Bruce now a healthy two-year-old, and James so full of questions, even Mother was ready to let him go. In fact, she was eager to see the last of him.

  Or so it seemed to James.

  He woke in the middle of the night before his ninth birthday sobbing about a stomachache. And it was true. His stomach hurt, or maybe it was his head. Or even — he thought — his heart.

  Nanny woke Mother.

  “Will they even like me at the abbey?” James asked as his mother bent over him, spooning warm milk with honey into his mouth.

  She ran a hand though his shining golden hair, so like her own. “How could they not?” she said.

  “I’m tiresome,” he whispered. “Everyone says so.”

  But at that very minute, Bruce in the other bed sat up talking in his sleep as he often did, and Mother turned towards him, so she didn’t actually hear what James had just said, and therefore didn’t contradict him.

  Suddenly, the honey milk threatened to come up again. James reached for the bowl on his bed stand.

  But when his mother put her hand on his head again, the milk settled down and so did James. And soon, with his mother singing him his old nursery lullaby and rubbing his head with lavender cream, he went back to sleep.

  7

  IN WHICH JAMES FINALLY GETS TO LEAVE THE CASTLE

  Will the monks answer my questions?” James asked Cumbersome the next morning. The honeyed milk had done its work. Or else a good night’s sleep had. He had forgotten all about his birthday in the relief of being well again.

  “To the best of their ability, I’m certain,” the tutor replied, nodding his head, which, James sometimes thought, looked very much like one of Uncle Archibald’s allium flowers waving on a single leggy stalk. He handed a small book to James with a blue ribbon around it. “Suitable for your ninth birthday, m’lord,” he said.

  James took a quick peek at the spine of the book. A Boy’s Book of Small Prayers. He wished it had been a book that identified beetles or talked about globes, but he knew better than to complain. “I am honored,” he said.

  Later that morning, James went and sat in the garden, where he practiced the rhymes Alexandria had taught him, the ones about the kings and queens, then one about the seven seas, and another about the twelve tribes of Israel, until he was word perfect. He knew he would need to be word perfect for the monks to appreciate him.

  He’d have liked to ask Alexandria if he was saying them correctly, but she was off with Aunt Alice for her own lessons, so she was not around for him to ask anything of her at all.

  So he decided to go to his mother’s rooms, where he guessed she’d be sitting with her ladies, perhaps unpicking a section of a very large tapestry of soldiers hunting a unicorn that she’d been working on ever since he could remember.

  James knew unicorns could be very vicious beasts and their horns were greatly prized by kings, but he rather liked the beasts.

  Alexandria had read him a treatise on unicorns. She had a rhyme for that as well.

  The unicorn’s a wily beast.

  Its horn is six foot long at least.

  Which could quite cut a man in two

  If that is what the beast would do.

  Its feet are cloven like a deer,

  But no fair maiden need have fear,

  For if she sits and does not stir,

  The unicorn will come to her.

  He went up to his mother’s rooms quietly, and if she had held out her hand to him, he wouldn’t have said a word. But she was busy and hardly turned to look at him. So in a torrent of words like a cloudburst, all the questions he hadn’t asked for days and days seemed to tumble out.

  “But what if I don’t want to go to the abbey? What if it makes me have more stomachaches? What if no one knows to give me honeyed milk? What if —”

  Mother looked up sternly. “We Callanders have always done our duty,” she said. “And going to the abbey is yours, James.” Then she reached down at her feet and drew up a wrapped box and handed it to him. “For your ninth birthday, my son. I wish your sister were here to share a cake with you. Cook has made one special. Now remember what I said about doing your duty.”

  “Will the monks treat me well?” he asked his uncle in his study, where he was scribbling his name at the bottom of some great document and looking peeved.

  “They had better,” Uncle Archibald said. “Your late father and I are much too important to the abbey’s finances for them to treat you poorly. I trust they will appreciate your finer qualities. Your . . . your . . .” And here Uncle Archibald thought a bit, then said, “Your love of learning, for one. And your curious mind.”

  James ignored the word late. His father was never late for anything.

  “Do you mean,” James asked, “that my curiosity is odd, or that my mind is strange?”

  “I said what I meant,” his uncle told him. “Now run along. I have business to attend to.”

  At the door, James turned. “It’s my birthday,” he said.

  Without looking up from the paper he was reading, Uncle Archibald said, “So it is. Celebrate it with care.”

  James went downstairs to the kitchen, where Cook had a birthday cake all baked, and they shared it without questions, without answers. Because cake is like a stopper in a bottle. It keeps things corked up inside.

  The day James was to travel to Cranford Abbey dawned a pearly grey, which fitted his mood. He sat up in bed and stared out the corbelled window.

  “Good!” he said to the maid, a plain young woman aptly named Jane, who’d come in to open all the curtains and bring him a basin of hot water for his wash. “It’s all good.”

  “Good, young sir?” Jane asked.

  “Good that the day is as sorry looking as I feel.” He dangled his feet over the side of the bed.

  “One day, I suppose,” he said to himself, but loud enough that Jane the maid could hear him, “I will be old enough and tall enough so that when I put my feet over the bed, they will touch the rushes on the floor. Isn’t that so?”

  “You don’t want to be rushing time,” Jane told him. “All too soon you’ll have to work for your supper.”

  He thought about that a moment, then said, “But I’m a duke’s son.” And maybe even already the duke, he said to himself, but didn’t want to think any more about it.

  She stared at him, her hands on her hips. “And doesn’t your uncle work hard to keep this castle and all the people in it fed and safe?”

  James had never thought of it like that before. Yes, the Callanders did their duty, but that meant things like keeping up a fine appearance and saying please and thank you and learning their ABCs. And sometimes — as his father had done — following the king into a just war. But he never considered keeping people fed and safe as important work. Maybe it was what made Uncle Archibald so cranky.

  Then he had a further thought. Learning is work, too.

  And so was being a hero like his father, he supposed. He grimly thought that his father had done his duty even though he may have died for it and been buried in a foreign land.

  “Do you think I’ll be able to work for my supper when I’m grown?” He meant learning and being a hero more than he meant keeping people fed and safe, though Jane was not to know that.

  Jane nodded. “We little folk count on it.”

  “You’re not so little,” he pointed out. She was a big girl. Tall, too.

  “And you’re not so grown,” she retorted, “that I can’t report your cheek to your uncle.” But she smiled when she said it, and was still smiling when she left the room moments later, so he knew she wouldn’t.

  James had lots of things to think about as he got dressed in the clothes that Nanny had set out the night before. Questions about growing and taking care of the little folk and being a hero so filled his mind that he forgot for the moment to be sad.

  Nanny
came in to help with the last bit of packing and the clean clothes she was sending along to the abbey because — as she had said to James’ mother only that morning — “No abbot is going to say we sent a duke’s son there with greying clothes and a smudge on his nose.”

  His mother had sighed before telling her, “I’m afraid that once he’s gone off with the guard, the smudge is inevitable.”

  As Nanny set down the clothes on the newly vacated bed, she took out the soft, wet clootie and headed in James’ direction.

  “I’m glad of one thing, Nanny,” James said, in between the swishes of the clootie across his face.

  “What’s that?” Nanny asked, too distracted to see she’d stepped into a trap.

  “No more wet face cloths,” James said. “No one cares if a boy has a smudge at an abbey.”

  He thought he was being sassy and clever, but in that he was quite wrong, for he was soon to find out what the abbot thought of smudges. And Nanny, who had known him since he was a newborn, simply ignored him and scrubbed all the harder until he could feel the shine as hot spots on his cheeks and nose and behind each ear.

  Alexandria had not come home from Aunt Danger’s house but had sent a note by a fast rider, along with a birthday package. It turned out to be a sheaf of foolscap paper she had bound herself and decorated with Latin mottoes, plus a goose-feather pen and a precious bottle of ink so black it looked the color of one of Nanny’s famous peaty lochs. Or at least the color as she described it.

  “So you can write your questions down without troubling too many people,” Alexandria’s note said. “And learn Latin at the same time. I shall be home in fifteen days.”