The Darkest Unicorn Page 10

  “I hoped that they were searching properly for my little songbird – my pearl. Of course, I will never know now if I would have done a better job. Perhaps if I had been with them they might have found her.”

  “No – you did the right thing.” Thandie knew those feelings of helplessness and guilt. This man had been too old to search for his daughter. She had been too young to search for her mother.

  “When they came back from the search they brought these.” Yannick shuffled over to a wooden trunk at the side of the room. He carefully lifted the lid, and with shaking hands brought out a few items. First, some schoolbooks. History. “These were found abandoned by the side of an old fallen tree.” He placed them upon the table.

  Thandie picked up one of the books with the reverence such an item deserved and leafed through the yellowing pages. The book was familiar to her. It was probably a set text for all the young people in the kingdom. An embroidered bookmark was tucked inside, presumably at the point Linnell had last been reading. Thandie looked at the bookmark first. Linnell’s name, surrounded by birds and butterflies. The embroidery was untidy, the stitches large and coming undone. Linnell had presumably made it, and by the looks of things, she was not the sort of girl who enjoyed embroidery. Just like Thandie herself. Linnell had been fourteen when she disappeared – a year younger than Thandie was now. Would they have been friends? Linnell would be sixteen now, of course.

  Next, Thandie turned to the page that Linnell had been reading just before she disappeared. A beautiful queen, resplendent in dark blue velvet robes. What had Linnell been thinking when she read this page? And why had she abandoned it?

  “I let her go alone to the woods. I thought that she was safe.” The old man hung his head, ashamed. Thandie patted his hand. “You weren’t to know.”

  He nodded, as if he had heard these words before, and continued to remove items from the trunk. Another book. A pencil. And a circle of flowers. A flower crown. Brittle, dry and dusty now but five years ago it would have been bright and vibrant. Thandie held it briefly and resisted the urge to place it upon her head.

  “They found no other trace of her. They swam up and down the river and all around the lake. They sent out the hounds to take up her trail. But there was nothing. They looked for days. Then they stopped looking. They told me that she had probably run away of her own accord, taken up with a sweetheart. But I knew that my Linnell wouldn’t do that. She was … is … a good girl.”

  Sander remained silent, intent on the items on the table. He seemed so distracted and she guessed that his thoughts were at the castle in the clouds, the last time he had seen Linnell. He could not, of course, share this information with the old man.

  Thandie nodded at Yannick, encouraging him to continue.

  “She used to dream of better things, of course, but she would never have gone without telling me.”

  Thandie understood. She knew what it was like to have dreams of getting away.

  “I thought something must have happened. I kept thinking this way. Then a few months later, Piet brought back the news from Arvale about their missing children. I knew straightaway when I heard. Three more children, all different ages, vanished. It wasn’t just my Linnell any more. She was just the first.”

  THE LIST

  Thandie

  Thandie ran her fingers lightly over the flower crown and the books, objects which made Linnell seem real to her. She felt even surer now that Linnell was alive and that she would be the one to bring her back.

  “Would it be acceptable to you if we took these with us? I promise that I will return them safely to you.” Thandie did not say with your daughter but the unspoken words hung between them.

  Yannick nodded and Thandie carefully placed the things in her bag.

  “Is there anything more you can tell us about your daughter, Yannick? Any way that we would know her, or she would know us – so that we could show ourselves to be friends?”

  The old man ran a hand over his face wearily.

  “There was a song. A song she used to like. She would sing it all the time. I wrote it for her mother many years ago and then it became her own. Now that I have lost them both, it belongs only to me.”

  The man reached inside the trunk once again, and this time he pulled out a wooden fiddle. It looked basic, hand carved with four strings, but the moment he played a single note, Thandie could tell he was an expert. Even Sander came closer and looked as though he was finally listening. Yannick played a few experimental notes, tuning the instrument, then began a slow tune, to which he sang along.

  “To me you are a diamond,

  To me you are a pearl,

  To me you are an emerald,

  To me you are the world.

  “I’d give you a diamond to shine the whole day long,

  But I have no diamond, so I give to you this song.”

  Tears sprang up unexpectedly in Thandie’s eyes. Yannick’s voice was warm and rich with emotion, despite a few cracks due to his age. By the time he reached the second verse, the high-pitched, woody sound of Sander’s pipe joined the deeper tones of the fiddle.

  “To me you are the mountain,

  To me you are the sea,

  To me you are the forest,

  You’re everything to me.”

  Yannick looked sharply at Sander as they played. Then, when he had finished the tune, he lowered his fiddle and stared suspiciously at him. “You know this tune?”

  Sander shrugged and smiled his most charming smile. “I always pick up a tune quickly.”

  Linnell’s father kept staring as if he didn’t quite believe Sander, but Thandie broke the tension by resting her hand gently on the old man’s arm. “It’s true,” she said. The man’s eyes softened once more and the suspicion fell from his face. He played a couple more sad, lilting songs, Sander playing along too.

  When they had finished, there was silence. The absence of the music hung in the air.

  “Do you know anything about any of the others who went missing? From Arvale, or elsewhere?” asked Thandie.

  Yannick packed his fiddle away in its case. “You have all their names? Of the stolen ones?”

  “No,” said Thandie, surprised. “I don’t even know the exact number of people missing. Do you?”

  “Oh yes. I needed to know. Our farmhand, Piet, travels to all the nearby villages. He tells me what is going on and I take note. Would you like to hear their names?”

  “Yes,” said Thandie, excited at this new information. She expected Linnell’s father to rummage in the trunk as he had done with the flower crown, but instead he closed his eyes and began to recite the list of names.

  “Linnell Redfern, age fourteen, near Arvale.

  Posy Tweed, age thirteen, Arvale.

  John Fairton, age eleven, Arvale.

  Ivy Medway, age eleven, Arvale.

  Aldo Strood, age ten, from the Elithian circus camped near Essendor…”

  “Stop a moment – let me get my pencil,” said Thandie. She wrote down the names at the back of her book, scrawling them out as Linnell’s father recited the rest, like a poem, or a prayer.

  The old man, with his milky eyes and trembling hands, knew all forty-three names and ages by heart.

  Just hearing their names made it all the more real for Thandie. Each one of these names was a real person, with a home and a family just like Linnell. Each one of these children deserved to be found. She glanced over at Sander to see what his reaction was to the list, but he was looking down at the tabletop and it was hard to tell.

  When Thandie had finished writing, Yannick put his hand on her arm once again. “Just find her. If you can,” he said.

  Before meeting Yannick, Thandie had wanted desperately to find the stolen ones, but now she knew she had to. “If it’s not too much trouble, do you think you could write down those words for me? The words from the song?”

  Yannick obliged, using the pencil stub and a page torn from the old schoolbook. His writing was spidery an
d faint but legible, just. He folded the paper very small and tucked it into her palm. “Keep this safe, missy. Just for your eyes, you understand?”

  LINNELL’S ROOM

  Thandie

  When they announced their intention to leave, Yannick shook his head. “You must shelter here tonight.”

  They didn’t protest. They had already walked for a several days and it made sense to rest before continuing their journey. Thandie was surprised that he should extend his hospitality so generously. She supposed that in a remote place like this there were no inns or boarding houses, so people just naturally offered up their homes.

  Yannick directed Sander out to the barn, where he would have shelter and a warm hay bed. Thandie would have liked to have a private conversation with him, to ask him why he had been so withdrawn, but that would have to wait until they were on the road again.

  Then Yannick showed Thandie to Linnell’s old room and bid her goodnight. Her eyelids were heavy. The hour was still early and the sky not yet completely dark but, after her unsettled night under the stars, Thandie’s missed sleep and early starts were catching up with her.

  It was a tiny room, barely bigger than a cupboard, with the same wooden floors that ran throughout the cottage, a washstand and a single iron bedstead. There was a single shelf on the wall above the bed, which was empty, and a nightstand next to the bed which held a simple lamp. None of Linnell’s personal things were here; Thandie supposed the Redferns didn’t have many possessions in the first place and anything she did own was hidden away in the trunk that Yannick had shown them. Why had he locked them away like that? Maybe to preserve them, to keep them from dust, or maybe because he could not bear the constant reminders.

  There was one item of interest: a small framed picture hung above the bed head. Thandie inspected it more closely. It was a watercolour, in rosy tones, which showed a young woman cradling a girl on her lap. The woman, who was leaning in towards the child as if to plant a kiss on her head, had fair hair, wound around her head in a thick plait. The girl was also blonde and reached a small hand up towards her mother’s cheek. It was a pretty, touching painting, which Thandie assumed was of Linnell and her mother. Yannick had said that Linnell’s mother had died when she was a young child. Perhaps this image was painted just before her death. Thandie wasn’t sure if she would want such a reminder of her own mother hanging on the wall. She didn’t have any images of her mother, anyway, apart from those in her mind, which she kept locked tightly away.

  Thandie wanted to find out as much as she could about Linnell: to discover what had driven her away from her home on a whim. She felt that if she could understand that, then she would be a bit closer to being able to free her from the unicorn. She moved towards the washstand, in front of the oval wall-mirror. She slowly unbraided her hair, running her fingers through the crimped locks as they loosened. It sounded from Yannick’s description as though she and Linnell looked nothing alike. Linnell was fair and delicate; she was dark and strong. Yet there were similarities as well. They both braided their hair. They had both lost their mothers. Until Linnell’s disappearance, they were also both stuck in places with no clear route out; they both wanted, one way or another, to find a better life.

  Thandie took her brush and ran it through her hair repeatedly from root to tip, enjoying the tingling of her scalp. When her hair was brushed and shining, she stayed a little longer, looking at her own image in the mirror, and the framed picture on the wall behind.

  Thandie was literally treading in Linnell’s footsteps: looking in her mirror, sleeping in her bed. But how did their stories differ? And would the ending of Thandie’s story be different to Linnell’s?

  Those were the question that whirled around Thandie’s mind as she stepped across the creaking floorboards, between the cool sheets, and drifted into a deep sleep.

  SUNBEAM

  Thandie

  It was just Thandie and Yannick at the breakfast table. They sat outside, on the wooden veranda. Thandie guessed that Sander would be awake and ready by this time, but he chose to stay away in the solitude of the barn, no doubt still avoiding any conversation. Thandie and Yannick each had a morning bowl of oats and creamy milk brought to them by the farmhand, Piet.

  An old birdcage hung on a chain from the beam above. Thandie hadn’t noticed it when they had approached the house the day before. It looked as though it had once been painted white, but the paint had chipped away in most places, and it was speckled with the beginnings of rust. The cage door was open; Thandie absent-mindedly gazed at it.

  Yannick put down his spoon. “She had a pet canary she called Sunbeam. A sweet little thing he was – bright yellow with black beady eyes – and the singing! He used to chirp and whistle all day long. I used to say that they were a good pair and I didn’t know who sang more – her or that bird.”

  “He sounds lovely.”

  “He was. She would let him fly around the place and he would land back on her hand.” Yannick smiled, remembering.

  Thandie brought a spoonful of oats to her mouth and chewed. “It must have been sad for you when he died.”

  “Oh, but he didn’t die, you see. The night that Linnell,” he paused, “left, the bird stopped singing. All his trills and happy whistles just came to an end. He wouldn’t come out of the cage, wouldn’t do anything. I couldn’t bear to see him sitting silently in his cage. It made everything worse, somehow.”

  Thandie continued chewing and nodded. She had been right that the reminders of Linnell were too painful for Yannick.

  “I let the bird out and I shooed him away. He fluttered back a couple of times but I wouldn’t let him back in the cage. I just kept on shooing. After a while, he took the hint and flew off. The last I saw of him, he was headed towards the mountains in that direction.”

  Thandie looked in the direction the old man was pointing as if she expected to see a pair of little yellow wings beating in the sky. “Maybe he went to find her,” she said.

  Yannick patted her hand. “Maybe.”

  They finished eating, then Thandie gathered her belongings and they waited for Sander on the porch. The days had been so hot but right now, the early morning air was fresh and the view was spectacular.

  Yannick suddenly spoke, breaking the silence of the morning. “You are cleverer than my daughter, you know.”

  It was such a surprising thing for the old man to say, that Thandie didn’t quite know how to respond. She waited quietly for him to explain.

  “Linnell was … is … many things. Beautiful. Practical. Honest. Gifted: such a voice, you wouldn’t believe. But … when she was here… I did sometimes worry that she didn’t have the ability to think things through as she should. She accepted things at face value and was perhaps a little … gullible.”

  What exactly was he telling her?

  Yannick looked at Thandie with his kind blue eyes. “I see that you are different. You have a spark about you. That is why I don’t think that you will make the same mistakes.”

  He stopped and stared at the Grey Mountain.

  “Go on,” prompted Thandie, softly.

  “Piet was working high up in the fields the day that Linnell went missing…”

  “Yes?”

  “…And he says he heard something strange coming from the woods.”

  “What was it?” asked Thandie, in a whisper, although she already knew.

  “He heard someone playing a pipe. Beautiful music, he said, not like anything he’d ever heard before.”

  Thandie nodded. She understood.

  She hoped that he was right and that she was cleverer than Linnell. She sensed that she might need to be, to stay ahead in this game. Just as when she played Merels with Tib, she should think about her own strategy, but she should never take her eyes off what the other person was doing, or there might be a nasty surprise ahead.

  Sander appeared then, from around the corner, looking all ready for the journey in his patchwork jacket, bags slung over his shoulder. He
waved from a distance, not looking as if he was going to come back and thank Farmer Redfern for the hospitability. Thandie raised her hand in response, although the sight of him made her skin tighten. She made her way to the porch steps, but Yannick caught her elbow.

  “They’re out there somewhere, you know. Linnell and all those others. There’s something special about you, child. You’ll find my little songbird, won’t you?”

  Thandie nodded. “I will do my very best.”

  Impulsively, she kissed Yannick lightly on his cold, wrinkled cheek and then followed Sander out into the sun.

  CONFESSION

  Thandie

  As they left the Redfern’s property, Thandie couldn’t look at Sander. Yannick could have been wrong about the pipe playing – Piet might have heard something or someone else – but deep down she knew that he was guilty. There was no other explanation for the way he acted. He had left without saying a proper farewell to Farmer Redfern and had acted so strangely in the cottage last night.

  She wanted his side of the story – she wanted him to tell the truth – but at the moment he was barely talking at all. She decided to start with a less challenging question.

  “How was the barn?”

  “Luxurious compared to what I’m used to. And your bed for the night?”

  “Very comfortable. I feel ready for the next part of the journey.”

  They walked a few more paces, in the opposite direction from which they had approached the houses, towards the woods and the mountains.

  “So, which way now? How does one reach a castle in the clouds?”

  Her voice sounded strange, even to her. Sander kept walking. He seemed keen to leave Linnell’s home behind him.