A Plague of Unicorns Read online

  “But,” James said, filling the room with more questions, since it felt as if all the air had suddenly rushed out of it, “if Father is on his own Crusade, is it dangerous? And if he is following the Saviour’s footsteps, will they lead him to the Crucifixion? And if . . . and if . . .” He finally ran out of queries.

  His mother looked at him deeply, as if she understood everything he was feeling, everything he was trying to say. But instead of putting a comforting arm around him, she said simply, “Go tell Nanny you’ve got another smudge, and tell her I said your face needs washing.”

  Which he did, without asking her another question, without thinking about anything, and especially not thinking about the unshed tears in her eyes.

  In the nursery, baby Bruce was just getting up from his morning nap, or just arising from his night sleep. It was hard to tell which. He slept a lot.

  James asked Nanny, “Do all babies sleep this much, or just our Bruce?”

  Nanny snapped, “You didn’t sleep at all!”

  But if she thought that would stop James, she was mistaken. “Why do some babies sleep all the time and others not at all? Is it because they have different lullabies in their blood? Or is it a sign of goodness? Or badness? Or —”

  “Talking too much is a sign of a slovenly mind,” Nanny said. “That smudge on the side of your nose is another.” And holding baby Bruce in one arm, she attacked James’ nose with a clootie until he felt scrubbed raw of skin and of questions.

  Finally managing to wiggle away from Nanny’s fierce attentions and baby Bruce’s drools, James went outside.

  But where to go? Nanny, Cook, all the housemaids, the stableman who worked with the horses, the dog-boy who cared for the hounds, the blacksmith who shoed the horses and made swords and belt buckles for the soldiers as well as knives for the kitchen, the ten soldiers, and Master Henry who taught them swordsmanship — they all tended to look very busy whenever James got near. In fact, they turned their backs or bent over their tasks or marched in the other direction rather than engage with him. So he had very few people to talk to, which caused him to have an even greater store of unanswered questions.

  Even his succession of tutors had run from him. In fact, every single one had quit in the last two years because of the incessant queries. Including his father, who — he was sure — went off on Crusade mostly to get away from him. In fact, the next-to-last thing his father had said before leaving on his great roan horse was, “James, cultivate silence. It will serve you well.” And then he added, “You are a good son, so mind your manners, say your prayers, and keep yourself to yourself.” And then he was gone.

  Yes, thought James, everyone ignores me or runs away from me. Well, except Alexandria, and his latest tutor, Benedict Cumber.

  (“Cumbersome!” Alexandria had called him, and it had stuck.)

  Cumbersome had been around less than two months, brought in after the last tutor had gone, slamming the door behind him — a heavy door that made a very large bang — and shouting, “Thank the Lord! No more questions!”

  At first Cumbersome had paid a lot of attention to James — Master James he called him, and “sir,” which the other tutors had not. But question after question seemed to have worn the man down as well. James was pretty sure Cumbersome was already tired of him.

  James thought about the day before, when the two of them had been in the library. James was supposedly studying his geography and was stuck on the countries bordering France. They seemed to move around and change names a lot.

  “How can a country change its name?” James had asked Cumbersome. “Can I change my name? I’d like to be Forrest or Merrie or —”

  “Look at the globe, Master James,” Cumbersome had said dryly. “It will tell you what you need to know.”

  Everything about Cumbersome is dry, James thought. Even his nose never runs. (James’ nose ran all the time.)

  “If you wouldn’t ask so many questions,” Cumbersome added, “you would find a whole lot more answers on your own.” It was something the duke had often said, and so James was startled into a moment of silence.

  But at last he sighed and said to Cumbersome, “If I didn’t ask questions, how would I know when I had the wrong answers?”

  Cumbersome rolled his eyes and went out of the room, leaving James alone with the globe.

  “Globe,” James said, “why are you round?”

  The globe, of course, didn’t answer.

  Cumbersome’s leaving the room hadn’t surprised James. Everyone in the castle hastened away from him. Most of them even before he’d opened his mouth.

  As if, he thought, my questions walk before me, and I am but their shadow. It was not a comforting thought.

  The gardeners — there were four of them, a father and his three sons — all suddenly found important work to do whenever James came down the path.

  “The young heir can be maddening with his questions,” advised the head gardener to his boys. “He asks questions he doesn’t need to know the answers for, like, ‘Do roses come in black for funerals?’ and, ‘Are caterpillars useful for more than making butterflies?’ If you are not careful, he could pull you away from an entire day of work.”

  The gardener’s youngest son, a boy called Weed, agreed. “He asked me once if I really had a green thumb,” Weed said. “I had to take off my glove to show him it was just like his. I think he was disappointed in me, Da.”

  The maids had orders not to speak to James, for it was hard to escape a lengthy conversation with him once it started. Besides, he asked the oddest things, like, “Why do maids dust things when it’s dust they should be removing?”

  But even the maids who liked to tease James had to get on with their work. So they just put their hands over their mouths and giggled if they had to be in the same room with him.

  And then there was Henry, Master-at-Arms, who always seemed to shout at his men whenever he spied James skipping on the path towards their parade grounds, his voice rising in the cadenced count till James worried Master Henry would lose his voice for good.

  But where do lost voices go? James wondered. And can they be found? Though it was a question that plagued him for days, he found no one to ask.

  Uncle Archibald, his mother’s brother who lived with them ever since the Green Knight took over his castle, was the one who found James the most tiring of all. He never called James “my favorite nephew” or “my almost son,” as he did with baby Bruce. Or “castle treasure,” which was what he called Alexandria.

  He called James “that yammering boy who never stops talking.” This was ironic because Uncle Archibald was a great talker himself, and heartily disliked being interrupted when he discoursed about herbs. And he was always discoursing about them.

  James couldn’t help yammering. Couldn’t help interrupting. Couldn’t help asking questions. The world seemed so big, and he knew so little about it. Surely asking questions was the best and quickest way to find out more.

  Evidently, no one else felt that way.

  Even Mother.

  Of all the household, only Cook gave him a bit of her time.

  Though his mother had banned him from the kitchen during cooking time, as he was a “distracting influence around sharp things and hot fires,” he would sometimes venture in when Cook had taken a moment to put her feet up.

  Whenever she saw him, she would wipe her massive hands on her apron, which, even in the early morning, would already be stained from cooking.

  She’d hand him a bit of buttered white bread — well toasted over the fire — with a dollop of jam on top.

  “Is it blaeberry?” he would ask. “Is it strawberry? Is it . . .” But by then his mouth would be too full to ask anything more.

  Cook smiled, knowing that her trick worked every time. She was a big woman with a smile that reminded people that once she was quite beautiful. She was thoughtful, too, and wondered why the others in the castle didn’t find their own ways of distracting the young heir instead of
ignoring him.

  Him and his questions.

  The only other person who would willingly spend time with James was Alexandria. She had adored him from the moment she’d held him in her arms, when she was ten years old.

  Alexandria never shooed James away or shut her door to him. She was a very observant eighteen-year-old who read all the time — Scripture, romances, and anything on history that she could find. Best of all, she never shirked from telling him what she knew.

  And as far as James was concerned, Alexandria knew everything.

  5

  IN WHICH JAMES GETS ALEXANDRIA TO EXPLAIN MANY THINGS

  James went most often to Alexandria when he had questions, though when she was busy with young lady things — like sewing tapestries or taking lessons on the lute — he knew to stay away. And when she was off on one of her long trips, he missed her so much, he could feel an empty space in his chest.

  “That’s a piece of my heart gone,” he would whisper to himself, though not aloud, because missing one’s older sister was not a proper young duke thing to do. Besides, he didn’t know if he was missing a piece from the right side of his chest or the left, and he hadn’t Alexandria to tell him.

  But whenever she was home and not terribly busy with young lady things, James would bombard her with questions like the names of flowers in the garden, or the songs of birds, or the seven miracles spoken of in the Hebrew Testament, or the twelve-best ways to prepare eggs. She knew all the answers. Or at least she answered where she could.

  If he asked why the sky was blue or if the world was really round like the globe, or when spring would make its way to the castle again, she would lead him by the hand into their father’s library to discover the books together — books on colors and books on circumnavigating the world and books that predicted weather.

  “Let’s see if we can find the answers here,” she said, “instead of bothering every busy person in the castle.”

  Some of the books in the library were in English, which he could read, but most of the scrolls were in Latin, which he couldn’t, though Alexandria translated for him.

  “Girls often know Latin,” she assured him.

  “So do monks,” he said. “And they aren’t girls.”

  Alexandria laughed and tousled his hair. “Not even close.”

  She also helped him remember things by teaching him little rhymes, like:

  Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee,

  Harry, Dick, John, Harry three:

  This was a rhyme about all the important kings up to their time. She had learned it from her old tutor, who no longer taught and had moved south where it was warm most of the year.

  “And what about the queens?” James asked her.

  Alexandria had smiled. It lit up her face, softened the angles, and meant she was extremely pleased with the question. “We shall have to figure that one out for ourselves. Make our own rhyme.”

  “Maybe there haven’t been enough queens for a rhyme,” James said.

  “Excelsior!” Alexandria told him, which was what she said when she meant, “Well done, James.”

  They came up with:

  Tilda, Jane, Mary, Lizzy,

  They all make me very dizzy.

  Then James twirled around and around, until the twirling made him fall down with actual dizziness, and Alexandria laughed at him until he joined in.

  In other words, Alexandria made learning fun, something tutors never understood.

  “Alexandria,” he said earnestly, “I want to know the names of everything. I want to know where dogs go when they die, and who built the first Castle Callander — the one that’s now only bits of crumbled walls. And why there is no dragon in our moat.”

  And she answered, “Dogs go to dog heaven where they course through the endless green fields. Mother says the Picts built the first Castle Callander, and Father says the Angles did. Which means they don’t know. But when you are older, I bet you will find out.”

  “I bet I will, too,” James said. And he smiled.

  “As for dragons in the moat, they are long gone. Like chimera, and mermaids, and unicorns.”

  “Oh, I hope you’re wrong about mermaids and unicorns,” said James, looking up at her with his brilliant eyes.

  “I hope so, too, little brother.”

  James knew this was not the kind of conversation he could ever have with Cumbersome. Cumbersome just recited figures and facts in a voice so dry, it made dust scraping on the cobbles sound wet. In fact, an hour with Cumbersome and his droning voice sounded so like one of Nanny’s Caldonian bagpipes that James was ready either for a nap or for a scramble with the hounds on the trail of a rabbit.

  James felt bad about this view of Cumbersome, but not so bad that he didn’t still call him “a dried-up stick of a man,” which made Alexandria smile.

  “Cumbersome,” she said carefully, “is only thirty years old. Younger than Father. Or Mother.”

  “That can’t be so,” James said.

  “But it is.”

  “Some things are simply too difficult to believe,” James told her. “Do you want to hear a rhyme I made up about him?”

  She put her fingers in her ears. “I shouldn’t.”

  But when he started to recite it, she took her fingers out and laughed till she hiccupped.

  His laugh is like Cook’s grater,

  His snort is like a sigh,

  Yet once he was the apple

  In his old dear mama’s eye.

  But apples all get eaten up,

  And served at every course.

  He so reminds me of the mush

  That we call applesauce.

  Alexandria stopped giggling and said, “Really, though, I know you can rhyme better than that!”

  “It’s how Uncle Archibald would say it,” James pointed out, pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger and pronouncing course in his uncle’s old-fashioned, high-pitched, toffee voice so that it did, indeed, rhyme with sauce. And that made the two of them become convulsed again until they were limp with all the laughing.

  If Cumbersome had been there to hear them, James would have had to write a long and flowery apology to his uncle and read it aloud at the dinner table. And go without the library for a week or two.

  Or even, James thought, forever.

  But Alexandria didn’t care. She dared more than James ever dreamed of. And goodness knows what she got up to when on visits to their Great-Aunt Alice, who was called “Aunt Danger” by those who knew her, and “The Duke’s Odd Sister What Never Took a Husband or a Bath” by those who’d only ever heard stories about her.

  Even Cumbersome mentioned her quietly when trying to make sure James didn’t stray from the path of righteous study. Only he never really understood how much James truly longed for knowledge of all kinds, not just the “Right Kind.” It might have made Cumbersome’s stay at Castle Callander easier had he tried to understand.

  But Alexandria understood. “If you tried one question at a time, James,” she said, “you might get more answers.”

  “But I might forget the other questions,” James protested, adding, “Why does autumn always follow summer and not winter? And why do male birds sing and not the females?”

  “Let’s go to the library,” Alexandria said, taking his hand.

  Even as their footsteps echoed on the marble floors, he had a final question. Looking up at her, he said, “What is the full moon full of?”

  Alexandria looked at him seriously. “Green cheese,” she said.

  “Really? What kind of green cheese? Is it moldy? Is it —”

  She shook her head. “Joke questions get a joke answer, James.”

  But James only looked confused. “I meant no joke.”

  6

  IN WHICH UNCLE ARCHIBALD MAKES A FATEFUL DECISION

  At last, exhausted by James and his questions, Uncle Archibald told them at dinner one night that James was to be sent to Cranford Abbey to study.

  “As Cranford has lo
ng lived on the charity of the Callander dukes,” Uncle Archibald said, “and the Callander heirs all go to be educated there, and as your father is not here to make that decision, I am making it now.”

  There was a hush around the table. Even Cook, who was serving the meal, looked startled.

  “But,” Alexandria said to him, “usually they don’t go till they turn ten or eleven.”

  Uncle Archibald gave her a look that should have crushed her spirit but did not. And Mother gave a clicking sound rather like a cricket in the hearth.

  “James has much to learn,” Uncle Archibald said slowly, as if picking his words like coins out of a jeweled box. “In case he becomes the duke sooner than expected.”

  Mother’s hand went to her mouth as if she might pull out a single syllable of rebuke. But no sound emerged.

  James was equally stunned into silence.

  They all knew he meant in case the duke was dead on the road somewhere in the Holy Land.

  “How . . . long?” Alexandria asked. She had a scowl on her face and her chin jutted out, like a shield ready to protect James in this battle.

  “Just a little while,” Archibald explained, “so we can all get some quiet, and James can learn everything he wishes. And if he does not follow their rules of silence, he will certainly be put on bread and water as a punishment.”

  Though “learn control” was what Uncle Archibald actually said, all James heard was the word learn, and his heart filled in the rest. Which is why he hadn’t made a fuss about leaving at the table.