Brand X

by Christianna Brand

  The unicorn stood stock still, gazing into her face; and as he stood, King Richard with a single thrust, plunged his sword through the undefended heart. The unicorn gave one terrible shudder and his glazing eyes fixed themselves reproachfully upon his mistress’s face; then, lowering his head, he allowed the garland to slip off his horn and lie, a circle of broken lilies, at the feet of the king. ‘The Lion beat the Unicorn, All round the town,’ sang Blondel, strolling towards them down the country lanes; but it was not Richard who had delivered the mortal blow. The little unicorn looked his last upon Melisande with stricken eyes; and then, turning sadly away, stumbled down the steps up which he had tripped so gaily less than an hour before. ‘Some gave them white bread,’ trilled Blondel, ‘Some gave them brown… Some gave them plum cake, And drummed them out of town.’ The unicorn pushed blindly by him and out into the green fields and there, among the buttercups and daisies, lay down to die.

  Melisande followed him. ‘They are asking what has happened,’ she said, sitting down beside him and essaying to take his head into her lap and sooth his silky brow; but he moved his head and laid it down again among the daisies in the grass. ‘Dear Unicorn!—all your race has been famed for its chivalry: won’t you put your head in my lap for the last time, and save my good name for me?’ But he moved it once more and laid it in the grass, and the blood from his breast welled up and stained the white petals of the daisies. ‘You are weary with fighting,’ said Melisande, ‘and perhaps a trifle sleepy. There was some morphia in the cake, but only just enough to make you stay with me—don’t think that I am so wicked as to have meant you any harm. It’s only just that—well, people are so uncharitable,’ insisted Melisande, beginning to gabble a little in her nervousness, ‘and after all I was sixteen and he was so attractive and, my dear, he’d had the darlingest little golden key cut and he gave it to me to hang round my—round my neck: and then after that, of course, well, the king was coming and I mean I do think it’s part of the national effort to do what one can for the king…’ She rambled on eagerly and after a little while lifted his head once more into her lap, and this time it rested there. ‘Hail to the Queen of Purity!’ cried the crowd respectfully, standing three deep around the edge of the field in a solemn ring. They could not see from that distance that the unicorn couldn’t help it. He was dead.

  And that is the story of how the unicorn became extinct; and the origin of the song about the plum cake and the white bread and the brown; and the reason why, more often than not, you will find the white petals of a daisy stained at the tips with red.

  The Kite

  BUZZARDS YOU MIGHT SEE a-plenty; but the kite, the majestic kite—ah!—he was rare; and being rare, was precious. Perhaps a dozen pairs left in the whole of Great Britain, no more; and she, Miss Bellingham, had actually had a pair nesting on her land.

  If a pair of kites nested on your land and reared their young, you were awarded a Bounty; and Miss Bellingham duly received her Bounty. Not that she needed an odd few pounds; she was well enough off and if she chose to live in a cottage in the deep heart of Wales, had made it as comfortable as a rather stout, elderly lady could require, and lived there solely because she preferred to. No, it was not the money: it was the pride—the pride and the feeling that from now on this kite belonged to her. She took to keeping an account of his movements, sending off innumerable postcards to the guardians of the kite, full of information, and confirmation or denial of information, already perfectly well known to them. The guardians threw the postcards into the wastepaper-basket: all they required of Miss Bellingham was that she should protect the nest.

  And she protected it. Not a soul was allowed near the cottage or surrounding woods; in sunshine or in rain she patrolled her few acres and drove away all who might disturb the great one and his queen. Not that visitors were many—the cottage was too remotely situated to be troubled by more than an occasional motoring tourist, probing into the lonely valleys in search of even more scenic delights; but the kindly farmers would every now and again jog over in their vans and Land-Rovers, up Miss Bellingham’s rutty lane ‘just to see that the old lady’s all right’—and by no means appreciated being turned back with brusque assurances that she lacked for nothing and would have to say goodbye now as she was very busy… For of course she said nothing of the nesting kites: above all, one must keep them secret against the curious, the predatory, the undisciplined ignorant: from the irreverent.

  The years passed, the kites moved elsewhere to nest; but his lordship still visited Miss Bellingham’s land—sailing over, high, serene, majestical, when the whim seized him, and always to Miss Bellingham’s delight. ‘Kite visited today, twelve noon,’ she would write on a postcard to the kite guardians, perhaps once a week; in a life almost totally devoid of other incident, this was a red letter day. Others must watch for the long forked tail, for the glint of russet, for the crook of the wing-tips, to distinguish him from the blunt-tailed buzzards: but not Miss Bellingham. She knew him for himself—for his lazy sweep of the air he owned, for the swift, controlled swoop, the calm, unhurried return, slowly upward circling, into the blue remoteness of his kingdom. The buzzard might be hustled and harried by raven flocks; the lord of the air sailed on through the scruffy ranks, unruffled, and the foe fell back…

  The seasons came and went and a new spring arrived; and in February, surprisingly in those parts where, even in the heart of winter a bitter cold is unusual—came the snow. At the first sign of it, while the country was still but an exquisite pearly green, not yet blotted out with white, came the farmers, bucketing and sliding up and down the steep hills with chains on their wheels. ‘Better get out, Miss Bellingham, while you can. You know what it’s like here when the snow drifts: this road will be impassable, it always is. And who knows how long it will last? Better get out.’

  Miss Bellingham had no intention of getting out. Every winter her relatives came and forced her away, took her to homes where, long used to her solitudes, she felt cramped and harassed, ill at ease. But they would not discover before it was too late to reach her, the news of February snow in these far-away valleys: she would escape them this time. On the other hand, she could not have the farmers struggling over—she had no telephone—fighting their way through to her, just because she chose to be obstinate and remain. ‘It’s all arranged for,’ she lied. ‘My nephew will be coming for me later today. You know they never leave me here in hard weather. He’s coming today.’

  They went away, thankful, and passed the word round the tiny community. No need to worry about Miss Bellingham: her friends were taking her to safety till the snow was gone. Miss Bellingham sighed happily and settled down to her self-created besiegement.

  The small birds were grateful for her presence, poor little things: the sparrow, the robin, the tiny Jenny Wren and of course the sly jackdaw with his monastic grey cowl… And seeing them all feeding there as the bitter weather went on, the buzzards swooped down also, to see what might be going. And then one day—one day, royalty itself: the kite.

  Who said the wild creatures couldn’t be taught by man? The buzzards, consistently driven off by flapping arms and screeching voice, soon enough learned to come no more. The kite, on the other hand, enticed with lumps of meat from the deep-freeze, as soon knew he was welcome. At first she must go far afield to tempt him down, slipping and stumbling over the frozen paths, over the fields when the paths became indistinguishable from the rest of the land—to place the offerings only as near as his wary aloofness would admit. But soon, because her legs were growing weak under the unaccustomed exercise, she must place them closer; and still he came, and still he came nearer, starved into daring, until one day he took meat from the wooden table set up just outside her door, where in summer time she would sit and take her own meals—took meat from the very table where Miss Bellingham herself would eat. From within her small, deep-set cottage window, she watched him and could have cried for joy. She had taken the King’s Bounty: now she would earn it and place
him for ever in her debt.

  In these days she could send no postcards: the post-woman came no more, crawling like a bug in her little green van, up the twisty lane; but she started a diary in an old exercise book: ‘Today, Feb. 6th, kite approached within two yards of house. Quite true that rim of eye is pronounced yellow. Eye very bright and proud.’

  The days passed, the snow fell no longer but still lay deep, wind-swept into drifts along the lane, levelling the fields into flat white sheets, damming up, icing-over, the sluggish stream. No thaw came. The resources of the deepfreeze began to get low. Miss Bellingham cut down the kite’s ration and her own. He came now regularly to the table: had seen her watching from the window and after the first shock and swift, evading flight, took no more heed of her. But more and more it was becoming an effort for her to get out to the table; the snow, iced over into a piste by the back and forth passing of her feet on her errands of mercy, had grown skiddy and treacherous. Once or twice she slipped and fell and the effort of raising herself again to her feet, made her heart thump and her mind grow grey and blurred. One day, standing at the table with the meat in her hand, she felt suddenly strangely ill and was obliged to sit down abruptly in the old wooden armchair and let the world swim round her in a sudden swirling of darkness and light. And her hand dropped the meat without volition on her part and somehow—somehow it came to her that time had passed without her knowing anything of it. The kite was wheeling close above her head; he had not been there when she first began to feel ill. ‘I have had a little faint,’ she said to herself. But she knew it was more than that.

  The kite hardly waited for her slow, stumbling return to the cottage before he swooped down upon the meat. ‘Kite came within five feet,’ she wrote in the diary. ‘True that bill is strongly hooked.’ Next day she waited, very, very quiet, only halfway to the door—and again down he came, and that afternoon she stayed nearer the table still: and still he came. It was very cold waiting there, but worth it—worth it! One day, she thought, if the cold lasts long enough, if I am patient enough, he will take it from my hand.

  She ate very little now. The other birds had finished up her store of frozen fruit and vegetables and nowadays sought elsewhere—or sought no more, poor little things, clamped frozen to the frozen twigs. And the bread was all gone and even such meat as she allowed herself, she begrudged for the kite’s sake. And there came another little fainting spell and this time a numbness of her left arm and leg; and Miss Bellingham recognised in a mind growing increasingly woolly and vague, that she could not go on for very much longer. And if she were to die—who then was going to feed the kite? She feared that she would have the strength for but a few more journeys out to the table. Fortunately, she had, while she still could, removed what was left of the meat from the depths of the refrigerator: the weather was sufficiently cold to keep it wholesome and the kite could not have eaten it solid frozen. She looked at it despairingly: so little left that she must somehow eke it out day by day: if she were to place it all out on the table in one last great effort, would he not take it all at once and then have none left for the rest of the time until the thaw came? Might not—worse and worse—the buzzards return and seeing the meat there, unguarded, swoop down and help themselves? And…‘I would have liked before I die,’ she confided to the diary, painfully scrawling with her stub of pencil, ‘to have had him take the meat from my hand, just once.’

  And that day—that very day—so he did. Limping and struggling, dragging herself by slow, painful inches, she had got out to the table and there collapsed again into the chair and for a long time lay sprawled there, the meat still held in her outstretched hand. So long, indeed, that the kite grew weary of circling unobserved about the old, grey tumbled head and came down closer—closer—closer: and, since the enemy made no move, swooped at last and with a wild snatch tore the food from her lax fingers and with two great, thrashing flaps of dappled brown wings, soared up again into the whiteness of the sky. The violence of his up-winging awakened and startled her. She felt very ill and the halting journey back to the house took longer than ever. But that night she scrawled triumphantly in the book: ‘Not true that kite will not feed from human hand.’

  Next day she retained her consciousness but lay as she had before, across the table; only this time she watched him. The cold was bitter but, wrapped in her old winter coat, she seemed, strangely, hardly to suffer from it, sitting there hour after hour, waiting for his coming, the meat held out temptingly; waiting, when the meat was gone, to gather strength to make the slow, creeping journey indoors again. By night she did not undress, just lay down by the warm oil radiator and there slept her oddly untroubled sleep, building up courage again for the next day’s effort. But again that evening she was able to record faithfully in the diary: ‘Kite alighted on table, took food from hand, ate it close by. Beak very fierce and strong, True that crown of head is almost white.’

  But still the freeze held; and now there was meat for only one more day.

  She sat for a long time that morning, huddled against the warm radiator—thinking. No more food for the kite; and if the cold lasted much longer—already it must be unprecedented for this time of year—what would become of him: what would become of him her love, her lord, her king of the air? No man in all her life had claimed an ascendancy over the heart of Miss Bellingham: mind and body she had remained all too free of the dominance of the male over feminine frailty; in her youth much longed for, in age deeply regretted—the sweet, the easeful submission to a strength superior to her own. Now into her blurred mind, shot through with fantasies of that long-ago, starved youth, had come a hazy recognition that here at last he was: the over-lord, to be submitted to, sacrificed to, body and soul…

  Body and soul.

  Her soul in a very short while would be with God; but was it not woman’s duty—should it not be her delight—to give up her body to the dominant male?

  ‘Alive I have served him,’ she wrote, the letters straggling crazily across the page of her diary, ‘why shouldn’t I, dead, serve him still? In life I have suffered in serving him. I shan’t suffer when I am dead.’

  And she struggled out of the old coat and, thinly clad, carrying only the diary and stub of pencil, with the small remains of the meat, for the last time she made the painful journey, crawling now on hands and knees, out to the table; and hoisted herself up somehow and once again, exhausted by the effort, fell back unconscious in the wooden armchair. And this time when she awoke to sensibility, sensibility was indeed almost all that remained to her. In the right hand a little strength, in the leg also, perhaps; but not enough any longer to move the dead weight of the left. Willing or not—now there was no more possibility of changing her mind. The die was cast: at this sacrificial altar the victim had tethered itself without hope of escape. Painfully she wrote: ‘Do not be distressed. It is what I have chosen to do.’

  The whirr of his wings was like thunder as he swooped, the beat of them fanned the grey hair back from the balding crown. Proud as a king, an emperor, proud as a god—scornful of danger now, he strutted with a click of curved talons, the bleached silver of the birchwood boards. Fierce was the yellow-rimmed brilliance of his pale eye, sizing her up. When he had gone she feebly added her note in the diary: ‘He is only waiting till…’ The writing tailed off.

  And she wrote once more: how much later, how many hours or even days later, who could tell? They found the words, almost indecipherable, straggling across the blotted and blood-stained page, off on to the boards of the table itself. ‘Not true…’

  Not true that the bird of prey waits to feed until the victim is dead.

  Charm Farm

  IT WASN’T ENTIRELY COINCIDENCE that they should have come to share the same room. Both had rung up on a common impulsion. Everything else at all the other health farms had long been booked up and Jenina, for one, couldn’t possibly afford full fees for the double room that was all that was left. Elizabeth might have, but…‘If you would consider sha
ring, Mrs.—er—Smith…?’

  ‘Oh, lord!’ said Elizabeth. Anxious, unhappy, longing only to be alone with her thoughts, this was the very last thing she had wanted. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘She sounds a very charming girl, a young actress. And of course it would cut down the cost—forty-five guineas each—’

  ‘And quite enough too,’ said Elizabeth to the charming girl when at last they met in the big, comfortable room looking over the gardens and the swimming bath. ‘Considering that what we’ll eat won’t set them back a penny. Have you had your consultation yet?’

  ‘Yes and I simply don’t believe it. Hot water for breakfast, apple juice at night and a little bit of fruit in the middle of the day.’

  ‘Sheer, disgusting indulgence,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Lemon and water for me, night and morning, and the apple juice for lunch.’ She added ruefully: ‘But then I’ve got to lose weight.’

  The charming girl’s name was Jenina Frome and clearly she had not got to lose weight. ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting too thin?’

  ‘Well, no, it seems they sort of clear you out, all the poisons out of your system and a lot of double talk like that; and then, mysteriously, you put back the weight again. I just want to get toned up, you know; I’ve got a terrible lot of worries and my hair and skin are simply awful and as for tensions, the back of my neck’s absolutely stiff with tensions, “You’re like cardboard,” the chap said to me.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Elizabeth; and wondered what troubles this pretty, dizzy, rather sweet young creature could have compared with her own.