Wild Girl
Hunting the Unicorn
A dark tale set in the last years of the Duchy of Burgundy under Charles the Bold, a time of upheaval and savage unmaking
For older young adults, anyone who has experienced loss and taken a chance to find themselves
For anyone who believes in transformation…
Coming to a book store near you
available in print and ebook on Amazon.com & at Atmosphere Press
A Moment from the story
Abby Rockefeller is waiting for her husband to come home after the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929; she has infiltrated his study, where the tapestries The Hunt of the Unicorn are hung around the room…
Her attention was held hostage, each time, by the girl in a red dress, raising her hand to beckon—or to ward off some danger, it was hard to tell. She seemed young, inexperienced; guilty somehow.
Abby sensed the girl was trapped in a dilemma, as she herself had been before she married. John had courted her for five years before she acquiesced. She lifted her chin and straightened her spine and reminded herself she had made her choice. But sometimes, still, she wondered…if she were not held hostage by privilege.
The tapestry had been ripped away here, the only damage in the series; if Abby looked more closely, as she had so many times before, she could see two fingers on the unicorn’s mane, the hint of a sleeve, brocaded flowers. Someone was missing from the story, almost certainly a woman–an untouched girl had been given the task of luring the unicorn to his death.
And what did the sideways glance of the girl in red betray about her part in this? Abby felt her own glance slide away. She knew her virginity had been a silent prerequisite for her marriage into the Rockefeller family–those interminable walks on Sunday afternoons…five years.
She was aware of a long-buried resentment surging back to the surface again; only a man would have trumped up this myth, so he could change reality and leave the girl to blame. Despite her protected existence, she knew too well the sting of secret betrayal, had set it aside: but now it came roaring back. The hunt, for all its trappings, disguised as a pleasurable country pastime, was part of a darker ritual, criminal, a desecration. Was the girl in red angry too?
A Moment from the story
The unicorn leaned into her side. Helaine could feel his warm sweet breath on her shoulder like a summer breeze; and with it a sensation of expanding happiness. She had never felt so wild with joy. The Wild Boy lay sprawled on the ground, watching her through the splayed fingers of the hand he had put up against the glare of the watery new sun. He seemed dazzled too.
The unicorn pricked up his ears. The Wild Boy leaped to his feet, quivering with the urge to flee. Then Helaine heard it too, a brazen clamor calling out of another world, the baying of the hounds as the Hunt poured out from the main gate of the castle, craving the excitement of the chase and the brutal finality of the kill.
She looked round wildly. Were they in danger from the hounds? Would they scent, would they catch the unicorn? What would happen if the hunt caught up with them?
The Wild Boy put out a hand to her but held back from touching her.
“Stay here. We will draw them from thee, for they canna take us while we are together…we be safe from them.” He paused. “But say tha wilt come again. Wilt tha come, Helaine?”
“Yes. Oh yes.” She shivered…
She pulled her courage around her like a cloak, and turned to face the crashing in the trees...
Jehane Spicer’s debut novel is based on the tapestries The Hunt of the Unicorn. Before John Rockefeller Jr. built the Cloisters Museum to house them, the tapestries hung on the walls of his private study in his home on 54th St. NY. Jehane was so fascinated by a vintage photo of his secret indoor garden that she used the image to create bookends for this story, linking it through time into modern history. But the core of the action belongs to Helaine, the unicorn, and the Wild Boy…
For the past 40 years, Jehane has been haunted by the paradoxes the tapestries present; the story she dreamed up refused to die, and she found herself compelled to finish it. She has travelled widely in France, and researched the social and political mores and religious beliefs of the late Medieval Age–when unicorns were both revered and hunted. Today unicorns belong in the realm of fantasy; to counterbalance, Jehane set the story in a 1,000 year old castle, still entire in all its rugged glory. She has woven every detail of the tapestries into this dark tale of magical realism and the search for identity during a time of unmaking …
If you enjoy this book, please leave a review, because that’s how new authors become known. And Jehane hopes to expand this stand alone novel into a trilogy, The Wild Series.