Olfert Dapper shrugged plaintively, if such a thing were possible. "The little ones can so rarely identify what I seek," he pointed out, "while their elders know, but cannot see. Mistress Remorse would be the perfect choice, as—ah—intimately acquainted with your intestinal needs as she is, and with the exact admixture and administration of my medicinal agents. Still, if you would prefer that I employ a stranger, which would require at least some inescapable discussion—"
What had worked in Amsterdam and Utrecht worked just as flawlessly in the Territory of Sagadahock. The Reverend hastily disavowed any such suggestion, assuring Dr. Dapper that he might borrow his good wife's assistance on whatever day suited him best, for all the world as though he were granting him the use of a favored spade or horse. Dr. Dapper suggested the following Monday, and Reverend Kirtley agreed eagerly. Mistress Remorse Kirtley's opinion was not solicited, which did not seem to distress her at all.
She was waiting, dressed as roughly and soberly as any farm laborer, when Dr. Dapper came to the minister's house at dawn on that Monday morning. They spoke little on setting off, making use of a route that kept them largely out of sight of anyone who might be working his fields early or slipping home from some wrongful enjoyment with a view to avoiding the village constable's eye. Mistress Kirtley was hardly the equal of Rain Coming in espying a half-hidden leaf in a patch of nettles, or a few wild berries among the weeds reclaiming a long-abandoned garden; but she did well enough, and she kept easy pace with Dr. Dapper, her stride suggesting longer legs than he had permitted himself to imagine. Once or twice, when he glanced sideways to see her lifting her pale face, eyes almost closed, to the warming sun, she would turn and show him a very small smile, such as he had never seen on her mouth before. He fancied that perhaps no one else ever had.
She appeared not to notice that Dr. Dapper was slowly, subtly bending their search in a wide curve back toward the little meadow where a greater wonder even than her smile had come upon him. But when they sat down together upon the ground just beyond the clearing—considerably dryer now than then—to eat the midday meal she had prepared of dried meat, cheese, barley bread and mild ale, Mistress Kirtley looked straight across the lunch into Dr. Dapper's eyes and said quietly, "I know this place. There are none of your herbs growing here."
"That is true, ma'am," Dr. Dapper replied, for he always knew when lying would not serve him. It was a skill that set him apart from most other practitioners of his silken art.
"Then why did you bring me here?" Mistress Kirtley neither raised her voice nor showed any sign of alarm. She might have been asking the question out of casual politeness, had it not been for the slightest dilation of her eyes.
"Because there is something I greatly wish you to see." Dr. Dapper nodded calmly toward the meal laid out on a kerchief between them. "Do enjoy, as I am enjoying it, the repast you have so clearly gone to a deal of trouble to prepare for us—and wait meanwhile. Only wait a little, dear Mistress Kirtley."
In fact, for all the assurance in his tone, he had no notion whether the unicorn would appear at all. He knew it had been no phantasm, no trick of the moon or of his mind—one look at Rain Coming's reaction to the vision had told him that—but whether or not it would return to the meadow, whether or not a certain legend might prove true…all that was pure gamble, and Olfert Dapper in his soul was as pure a gambler as had ever lived in Old World or New, in Utrecht or No Popery. He washed his meat and cheese down with his ale and smiled at Mistress Kirtley, and she smiled back at him. And they waited together.
But the day was warm, the ale excellent, and the early gnats' almost inaudible buzzing became a kind of lullaby for Dr. Dapper. He never admitted that he had been asleep when the unicorn came; but it was Remorse Kirtley's soft gasp that roused him, and he saw her on her feet with both hands pressed to her mouth and her dark Dutch-style cap fallen to the ground. He had never seen her rich brown hair loose before.
The unicorn was standing in the center of the meadow, facing her, plainly considering her, as surely as she was taking its truth into herself. By moonlight it had seemed more delicately made, almost fragile; today it appeared not only larger than he remembered, but quite possibly dangerous, with the sun glinting on the long spiral horn. Dr. Dapper, rising slowly to his feet, noticed for the first time the small curl of beard beneath its lower jaw, such as he had given to his depiction of a lion in his book on Africa. Did that mean the creature was male? Was it a sign of maturity? These and other questions tumbled roundabout through his mind, for Dr. Dapper had always possessed the passionate curiosity of the true scientist in his inmost nature. He had, however, always been careful not to let it get out of hand.
Remorse Kirtley held out both of her open hands to the unicorn. It tossed its head once, like a horse, but did not whinny or nicker—indeed, Dr. Dapper had never heard it make a sound. It paced slowly toward the woman, its horn pointing at her heart. She did not flinch, but sank slowly into a sitting position, her legs folding under her as gracefully as those of the unicorn's as it lowered its head into her lap. The horn lay across her thighs.
Dr. Dapper could see her face now. It wore the dazed, foolishly transcendent expression he had seen and scorned in so many of the paintings of his homeland: Mary receiving the Annunciation, saints ravished by the converse of angels, holy hermits gazing up enraptured at golden clouds aswarm with cherubim…every one looking as gloriously vacant as Remorse Kirtley looked now. Dr. Dapper envied her, and made notes for another book.
He could not tell whether the unicorn was actually asleep. Remorse Kirtley stroked its neck and played timidly with the white feathers of its mane—she never touched the horn—but the unicorn's eyes remained closed, and its slow breathing never altered. Dr. Dapper thought, in a vague and distant way, This is the moment when the knights rush out from cover and spring on it, as it rouses a moment too late. I know what I should do, if I were a braver man, and a worse one. The unicorn smelled to him like new bread, and like new candles, and, strangely, like cool old wells in shadowy gardens.
How long the unicorn slept in Remorse Kirtley's lap, Dr. Dapper never knew. He stood where he was, while the sun moved and the ragged grass whispered, and the tiny insects danced in the sunlight. The unicorn's sides breathed in and out, like those of any other drowsing animal, and now and then it twitched its lion-tufted tail to brush away a fly. And Remorse Kirtley sat utterly motionless, her eyes fixed, as Dr. Dapper imagined, on the world the unicorn had come from. Now and then she turned her head toward him, but he knew that she never saw him at all.
Then, in time, the unicorn rose, and looked in Remorse Kirtley's face, and brushed its horn over her hair, and went away.
Neither Mistress Kirtley nor Dr. Dapper moved for a long while afterwards, not until she stood up in her turn and went to him, and he put his arms around her. They remained so, with nothing sinful or adulterous in their embrace; but by and by she asked him in a small voice, "How did you know?"
"I did not know," Olfert Dapper answered her candidly. "I guessed only."
"That the wife of the Reverend Giles Kirtley might yet be a virgin? A clever guess, wise Doctor." She leaned closer, pressing breasts not as childish as he had imagined against him. "And one deserving of some return, surely?" The sunflower eyes were soft and tender.
Strangely, it was Dr. Dapper who held back in that moment, actually putting away from himself the woman whose mysteries had tantalized his dreams all that winter. "Good mistress," he heard himself saying, to his own considerable amazement, "should we do this, you will—thou wilt—forfeit thy chance ever again to see a unicorn—to hold a unicorn in thy lap. I am not such a scoundrel as to wish to deprive thee of such a blessing." He was horrified by the sound of his own earnest pomposity, the more so because it was uttered with truly good intent. Some of us were not born for the generous gesture.
But Remorse Kirtley laughed at him, and stretched her arms stiffly out on his shoulders, so as to hold his head firmly while she looked into hi
s eyes. "One unicorn in a lifetime is a miracle beyond anyone's deserving, virgin or no. More than one…no, no, Doctor, that is for another life than mine." She kissed him then, with a force that would likely have knocked him down, had she not still been holding him upright. Still gripping his eyes with her own, she said, with as much gravity as he had spoken to her, "The unicorn set me free, can you understand me? Freed me from the world I have always been taught, and always believed, was the only world for a Christian soul. While I sat there and held him, he came into me—how else should I put it, dear Doctor?—he came into me, and showed me the magic beyond poor, crabbed No Popery, the beauty beyond the sour singsong God of my worship. And for that I will forever be more grateful to thee than anyone else is ever likely to be, my scoundrelly friend."
She kissed him again, and then she stood back from him a little and slowly began to unlace her drab dark bodice, never taking her eyes from his. She said, "Now it is for thee to complete my liberation. Help me here.…"
And he did help her, his usually deft fingers as clumsy as those of an ignorant youth, and they did indeed cleave together, and were one flesh, as the Bible recommends and approves.
Later, drowsy in the dappled shade, his herb-gathering bag pillowing both of their heads, he said, "It grieves me yet that you tossed away so lightly your chance to ever again call a unicorn. Truly, I never brought you here for that—" which was only half a lie—"but because I wanted to see the creature a second time. I cannot help feeling at fault."
Propped on one elbow, her own eyes heavy, she made severe reply. "I tossed nothing away—and certainly never for you, vain man, but for myself. What I have lost, I gave away freely. Even the God of No Popery would understand that difference. The unicorn understood."
Whereupon, and without explanation, Remorse Kirtley began to cry. Deciding for perhaps the hundreth time in his life that he knew nothing about women, Dr. Dapper let her tears dry on his chest and throat; and somewhere in the middle of that they were one flesh once again, and she was giggling like a girl about something she wouldn't share. When he asked she only laughed harder, her hair a twisting whip across his face, and he became fascinated then by other things, like the little pink mole between her shoulder blades, a miniature fleur-de-lys that he suspected the Reverend Kirtley had never seen.
They walked back side by side, just as they had set out; but when Dr. Dapper reached to take her hand, like any village swain, Mistress Kirtley shook her head and pulled away. Hair invisible again under the Dutch cap, bodice laced to near-constriction, long brown dress respectably free of any telltale grass stains, she had reassumed the role of meek Puritan goodwife, playing it with the passionate attention to detail of the actress she had spent her life becoming. Even when she glanced sideways at him and smiled just a trifle, it was not the smile of Remorse Kirtley. Dr. Dapper knew that smile well.
They parted at the outskirts of the village: he to his mortar and pestle and improvised scales, she to tend her husband, and to prepare a full dinner after a full day. When, at Reverend Kirtley's next visceral complaint, Dr. Dapper hurried to him with his potions already prepared, there was never the smallest suggestion that anything ignoble might have passed between anyone and anyone else; nor did Mistress Kirtley do more than nod attentively at her family physician's instructions and notate them without quite looking at him. Dr. Dapper stayed longer than he might have, constantly attempting surreptitiously to catch her eye, but he had no luck.
News of the colonists' various homelands came infrequently at the best of times—and not at all during the winter months—and was delivered haphazardly, most often by traveling peddlers, tinkers and circuit-riding preachers who chanced through No Popery. Olfert Dapper had received no messages at all from the Netherlands since his arrival, and had almost resigned himself, not only to the probability of spending at least another year in this drearily savage New World, but also to the worse horror of realizing that he was gradually adapting to his life here. He liked and respected the Abenaki of his acquaintance, and he very nearly liked two or three of the settlers, and he was even developing a certain taste for succotash.
Oh, whatever might be waiting for him back in Utrecht, he had to get out of this place!
Mistress Remorse Kirtley went on about her business as a dutiful No Popery wife, cooking and gardening and praying and keeping a proper house, never allowing herself to be alone in Dr. Dapper's company for more than the few minutes it might take him to hand her his newest medication for her husband's ever-truculent stomach and instruct her in its application. She kept her eyes cast down at all times, her hair completely covered, and her modest bearing an example for all Puritan women. Dr. Dapper, thinking about it, could never say whether he actually loved her—love, as it is generally used, being an emotion as honestly foreign to him as the Turkish language, or the finer points of infralapsarianism. Neither could he call it plain sinful lust anymore: it was, perhaps, that, having glimpsed the mysterious heart of the minister's wife, he simply wanted to see it again, more than he had ever wanted to see the unicorn a second time. It has been mentioned that Olfert Dapper had more than a little of the romantic in his nature.
He went on occasion, when he had the time free (his fraudulent medical practice having gradually approached the genuine), to the meadow where he and Remorse Kirtley and the unicorn had once been together. He had no expectation of finding either one of them there, but it comforted him strangely to stand exactly where he had watched in numbed wonder as the unicorn lowered its head into her lap; and where, a world afterward, he had helped her unlace her bodice, while she never took her eyes from his.
Once he encountered his old Abenaki companion Rain Coming standing in the same place, his black eyes watching everything, yet seeing nothing that Olfert Dapper could see. They greeted each other briefly and soberly, and Dr. Dapper said gently, after a while, "It will never come here again. I cannot say how I know that, but I do."
Rain Coming nodded a very little. He said only two words. "She come."
Dr. Dapper stared at him. " She ? Whom do you…do you mean Mistress Kirtley?" A squirrel observing them from a branch abruptly dashed away at the sound of his voice.
The Abenaki met his eyes calmly, taking a long time before he answered. "When you go home. She come then."
"When I go home.…" A sudden immense sadness filled Dr. Dapper's chest, and the words came out almost in a whisper, in contrast to his earlier cry. He said, "But I may never go home, my friend. There are some very angry people waiting there for me, and they might even put me in prison. Prison. " He repeated the word, emphasizing it carefully, knowing that the Abenaki, like the other Algonquian tribes in general, had no real equivalent for such a word, such a concept. He said again, "I do not know whether I will ever go home."
"You go home soon." Rain Coming's own voice was slow and certain. "She come to Abenaki when you go."
"Why then?" Olfert Dapper demanded. "There is no connection between us anymore—we barely speak, except about her husband's medicines. Why would she run off to your people when I am gone?"
But Rain Coming himself was gone, in that particularly disturbing way of being gone that he had, which the Reverend Kirtley always said plainly showed the infernal origins of all his folk. Dr. Dapper stared into the silent woods after him for a time, and then wandered back to No Popery.
He knew that the Abenaki had taken in runaways and exiles from the various Sagadahock colonies; and he knew further that the Algonquins had no God-given laws concerning the properly submissive status of women. An Abenaki, Micmac or Passamaquoddy woman might, in his undeniably limited experience, look away from a man, or past him, or through him, but never down at the ground. A woman of spirit and resource, such as Mistress Remorse Kirtley had shown herself to be, might well rise higher in Indian society than would ever be possible for her in Puritan surroundings. He wondered less how Rain Coming had learned of her decision than whether she herself knew of it yet.
The weather was war
m still, but close to turning—after more than a year in Maine, even Dr. Dapper could tell this by the changes in the birds' behavior and the taste of the dawn wind—when he was roused from an evening doze by a rapping at his door. Peering through a crack in the wall which no amount of caulking would ever patch for long, he recognized, to his astonishment and immediate anxiety, the Reverend Kirtley. The minister had never once been to visit him at home, and their occasional conversations in church usually involved either the state of Dr. Dapper's immortal soul or Reverend Kirtley's highly mortal stomach. Could he know? Could someone have…could she have confessed all? The question was heightened by the fact that the Reverend was carrying a musket. It was a very large musket, with a mouth like a tulip.
But Olfert Dapper had not gained the rank and respect that he enjoyed in his mendacious art without learning (always with the exception of Margot Zeldenthuis) when to put his faith in a woman's eyes. His panic left him as swiftly as it had come, and he opened the door to welcome Giles Kirtley.
The minister entered with an oddly furtive air, looking over his shoulder as though he were the one well-acquainted with thief-takers and persons bearing heavy sticks and unreasonable grudges. Offered the one good chair, he leaned his musket gingerly against the wall, accepted a mug of somewhat dubious jenever —a thing Dr. Dapper could never remember having seen him do—and began the conversation by saying abruptly, as though the fact had just come to his attention, "Brother Dapper, you're a Dutchman."
Dr. Dapper raised his eyebrows and spread his hands. "I cannot deny it, sir."
"Ah." Reverend Kirtley cleared his throat several times. "Perhaps that is why I find it easier to confide in you, even though we have not been—ah—close? Warm? Intimate…?" His voice wandered away into the random corners where his glance had gone.
"My loss, certainly," Dr. Dapper said graciously. "What can I do for you, Reverend?"
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