Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “Good morning, Your Majesty. Merry Christmas,” they chorused.

  The Queen set her teeth and glared at them, sitting bolt upright and rubbing her arms.

  “Did you sleep well, Your Majesty?” asked Mary Ratcliffe, who had the unfortunate gift of morning perkiness.

  “No, I did not,” the Queen growled. “And I am perishing with the cold.”

  All three exchanged glances. Lady Bedford rose to put the dressing-gown around the Queen’s shoulders, while Ratcliffe knelt to put on her slippers, also lined with sable and embroidered with gold esses.

  “Ratcliffe,” said the Queen, “I have told you before: tawny does not become you.”

  Mary Ratcliffe tilted her head, not at all concerned by Her Majesty’s normal ill-temper. She rose gracefully and offered the Queen her arm to rise from the bed. Behind the Queen, Bethany turned and muttered and let out a bulldog snore, at odds with her beauty.

  “Christ’s guts, Bethany,” snarled the Queen, punching her shoulder, “enough of those foul noises. You kept me awake half the night with them.”

  Bethany sat up looking confused. “I am sorry, Your Majesty,” she said.

  “God save me from a bedmate that snores; I might as well have a husband,” said the Queen as she ignored Mary Ratcliffe, jumped out of bed and went to warm her hands at the brazier. Behind her she could feel the glances weaving through the air, could predict how she had set in motion an army of warnings, rumours and assessments that would run through the Court and be in the woodyard and the laundry before she had gone to chapel.

  When she sat down in her carved chair, Parry knelt before her and asked how she would be pleased to dress this day. At the snap of her fingers, Ratcliffe produced the Wardrobe Book, which gave her a choice of five gowns, five kirtles and five bodices, newly brought up from the Great Wardrobe in Blackfriars, plus a vast variety of linen.

  “Black,” she decided, to match her mood, and the fashion for mourning which had swept the Court since the death of Sir Philip Sidney. “With silver and pearls-the French gown will do well enough, and the French wig to go with it.”

  This set in motion another hushed flurry as Parry called the orders to the chamberers waiting in the Lesser Withdrawing room beyond the second bolted door.

  Silently Lady Bedford brought up the red leather boxes to the side of her chair by the fire. The Queen opened their seals, took out sheaves of paper, warmed her hands and bit carefully into the white manchet bread with butter and cheese. The crust was too stiff, but at least it was still warm.

  As she ate she read through the papers in the boxes, skimming through the Italic and Secretary hands and muttering to herself. She was currently caught in a vice of Mr Secretary Walsingham’s making: he had begun its construction a year ago and she had found it out in the summer with the revelation of the Babington plot, in which Mary Queen of Scots was at last clearly implicated by her own letters in treasonable plotting against Queen Elizabeth.

  In the autumn Elizabeth had made what she now knew to have been a deadly mistake. From sheer weariness and fright she had permitted her cousin Queen to be put on trial. The proceeding had filled Elizabeth with dread: put one regnant Queen on trial and God knew where it would end. Try one, you could try them all. But she had found it impossible to prevent; she had chosen men of ability and determination to surround her and in their loyalty to her and their bloody Pure Religion, they had nagged and reasoned and manoeuvred her into it.

  Naturally the Queen of Scots had been found guilty. Naturally she had been condemned to die for treason against Elizabeth. Would that content them? It would not. God damn them for all half-wits, purblind fanatical . . .

  The Queen put down the last paper and breathed deeply. She would not permit her anger to govern her. Anger came easily to her, as it had to her Royal father, but she had been forced to bridle it, to put harness on it and make it pull a kingdom.

  The door to the Privy Gallery, guarded by two gentlemen who slept there at night fully-clad, was still bolted. Ratcliffe had unlocked and unbolted the second door to the Lesser Withdrawing Room where the wardrobe closets were. One of the maids of honour was pouring hot water into a bowl, and a second was standing my modestly holding a towel of Holland linen. Chamberers filed in carrying her clothes for the morning. The Queen rose, went behind the screen to the Stool. Parry was there waiting to lift the lid and hand her a book of Latin verse to entertain her. She withdrew tactfully.

  If Elizabeth Tudor had been born a boy – apart from many other things being different, including perhaps the religion of her kingdom – she would have had a Groom of the Stool to attend her there. Sir Anthony Denny, who had been her father’s Groom of the Stool, had directed much of the King’s palace-building for the reason that His Majesty was pleased to overlook architects’ plans while sitting. Elizabeth preferred poetry. Parry did the office of the Stool, as well as overseeing the Queen’s robes, and drew income from half a dozen separate sources for a daily bulletin on the state of the Queen’s bowels. It was a wry joke between them.

  The Queen coughed and took the napkin handed to her. She stood and Parry came immediately to drop the lid and assess the results.

  “You may tell them that I am utterly constipated,” the Queen told her tartly.

  “Again, Your Majesty?” Parry asked, amused.

  “Ay, again. Tell them I am stopped up with bile and may well take purge.”

  Parry smiled and shook her head. “You are cruel, Madam.”

  “By God, if they will not heed me, let them fear me.” The Queen’s bowels were as healthy as ever, but only she, Parry and the chamberer who did the emptying knew that. Meanwhile Parry would pass the word of an unsuccessful Stool and the councillors would tremble, the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber walk softly and the cooks in the Privy Kitchen prepare further messes of prunes and dried rhubarb, which she would send back untouched. It cheered her to think of the ripples of consternation spreading from her humble (although velvet-covered) Stool throughout the Court and thence perhaps even into London.

  She dropped her dressing-gown behind her for Bedford to catch, and washed her hands and face in the warm tincture of rose-water. Gingerly she rubbed her teeth with a salted paste of almonds and a cloth and winced when it hurt. Another tooth on the left side was twingeing her. Not badly yet, only when she ate comfits, but she had been down that road before and could see at the end of it, sometime in the summer, the tooth-drawer waiting for her with his pliers and the sweat of fear on his face. She had threatened him with hanging every time he came in the past, but had paid him instead once the pain had died down.

  They had a fresh smock ready for her as she dropped her soiled one at her feet and put up her arms and slid into its warmth. There was always the sense of falsity about warmed linen, whose heat dissipated so quickly, like the smiles of courtiers, she thought. The black damask stays with their fencing of whalebone went about her and she straightened her back and stood still while she thought of the letters she had read. Most were petitions that she sign the Queen of Scots’ death warrant.

  Ratcliffe had long slender fingers and a face that sat upon her neck like a lily on a stem. Deftly she wove the silk laces through the holes and pulled firmly to tighten the stays. Elizabeth squared her shoulders and settled herself into the reassuring women’s armour, as she had nearly every morning of her life since she had turned eight. In her youth she had had them cut narrow and pointed, and suffered for it. Sometimes after a long day’s hunting she had found blood on the lining and her smock, but since she had put on weight after the Alençon courtship, she had been less insistent on fashionable shaping that made it hard to breathe. She would never be stout, but she no longer looked as if a man could pick her up and snap her in two, as the Earl of Leicester had said recently. She had laughed at him and punched his paunch and he had winced and bowed satisfactorily.

  They brought a rose plush petticoat for warmth and fastened the straps over her shoulders so it would hang well. Ratcliff
e knelt again as the Queen sat and slid her linen socks on over her feet, followed by her silk stockings, and gartered them.

  “Which shoes will you have, Madam?” asked Ratcliffe.

  Elizabeth pulled the dressing-gown round her shoulders again.

  “What’s the weather?”

  “Cold, grey, perhaps the promise of snow?”

  “Thames still frozen?”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  “God damn it. Well, my fur-lined Spanish boots then. And they had better be clean.”

  They were, shining with wax. Parry wrapped a combing cloth about her shoulders and combed out her short hair. Then she brought up the trays of face-paint, broke and separated an egg neatly before dabbing her brush in egg white and then in the white lead.

  Lady Bedford stood behind her while she held her face stiff to be coloured, and read her the list of likely petitioners to the especial Privy Council meeting at noon on the morrow, Saint Stephen’s Day, and reminded her that she would be receiving the Treasurer of the Board of Greencloth after the Council Meeting.

  “Christ’s guts,” hissed the Queen through stiff lips, while Parry dabbed red onto her cheeks. “Is the man mad? Cancel it and put it back to next week. If I see him after the Council, I shall likely skin him alive.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” said Bedford, not smiling.

  She sneezed as Parry set her maquillage with powder. The business of dressing went to its next stage: Bedford unpacked a fresh Flanders partlet of finely pleated and smocked linen, which she passed about Elizabeth’s neck, buttoned at the back and tied under her arms. Ratcliffe was tying on a bum-roll and bringing her a farthingale, collapsed like a fan into a round wheel of linen. Over that went the second petticoat, with its red damask false-front, and finally the square-necked French gown of black Lucca velvet, laced bodice-wise all down the back, crossed with silver couching, spangles and pearls and garded with black satin embroidered in silver cobwebs. It took both Ratcliffe and Bedford to lift it so that she could dive in, arms first. Its weight settled about her shoulders like plate-armour as her women industriously laced and buttoned and hooked it on. As Ratcliffe set herself to pull out the little puffs of linen in the sleeves with a buttonhook, and Bedford stitched rapidly to settle the neckline properly, Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at the wire-stiffened rebato-veil they brought her.

  “No,” she said, not realising – because she did not remember – how her dream had dressed her in clothes like these, “I shall have a small ruff today.”

  They brought her the ruff and tied it against the high lace-edged collar of the partlet and then at last Parry fitted the wig Ratcliffe brought, with its crowning freight of jewels and pearls already attached. It amused her now to think how she had endured anguish over her red hair all through her twenties and thirties – the washing, combing, setting with curl-papers and all the other tedious falderals. Finally one morning, tried beyond endurance, she had thrown an entire tray of pins, combs and unguents at Blanche Parry and ordered her to cut off the whole damned mop. It had been one of her best decisions: hairdressing now took place in one of the anterooms of the Privy Wardrobe and the result was brought to her and tied with tapes behind her head in a minute or two. Bedford was kneeling again to attach her gold belt with its hanging fan and case of scissors, needles, keys, penknife, bodkin and seal.

  “God’s death,” she sniffed, “take the fan away; what do I want with a fan in this weather? Bring me a muff instead.”

  Eight rings slipped onto her fingers, alongside the Coronation Ring, which she wore as a wedding band on the third finger of her left hand. A jewel of a Phoenix was pinned by Ratcliffe on the breast of the velvet bodice, another hung from the rope of pearls and gold esses that Parry brought. Finally they held up a full-length mirror between them while Bethany arranged the train and Elizabeth frowned at herself.

  “Hmf,” she said, and her women visibly relaxed a little.

  It was half past eight of the clock. Beyond the closed door of her Chamber lay the Privy Gallery where her gentlemen should be lined up by now, waiting to conduct her to chapel for the high ceremonies of Christmas Day.

  She took another look in her mirror: the Queen was ready, although far, far beneath was still the young girl that all women carry locked within their maturity. That girl wanted to go back to bed, draw the curtains and hide from the world.

  The Queen squared her shoulders, glanced at her women to be sure they looked as they should: why in Heaven’s name did the fawn-coloured Ratcliffe, with her mouse hair and sallow skin, insist on black garded with tawny? – she looked liverish . . . And Bethany too was in black, which in all honesty did not become her either . . . This was a mourning Christmas, to be sure.

  “Come,” she said and swept to the door, which was being held open by one of her gentlemen – at least he was pleasing to look on, being one of her chestnut-haired Carey cousins, one of Lady Bedford’s multitude of younger brothers, and immaculately turned out in forest-green velvet and black damask. She smiled at him as she went by, for the pleasure of seeing the broad shoulders bow to her, and passed on to the Privy Gallery where the rest of her gentlemen awaited. The brazen cries of trumpets echoed through the Gallery and beyond; deep voices rang forth in counterpoint to announce her:

  “Make way for the Queen’s Majesty.”

  “Make way for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.”

  “Make way.”

  “The Queen! The Queen!”

  Damn it, she thought as she paced behind the red-velveted ranks and saw the double door to the Privy Chamber flung wide, the mob of petitioners and Christmas gawkers waiting beyond. I am a prisoner of silks and trumpets; nothing I do is what I want and now those God-besotted fools of my Council will make me execute my cousin. Christ rot them all for cowards, why will not one of them do his duty and assassinate the Scotch bitch for me?

  V

  NOW I MYSELF HAVE awoken in fields and under haystacks on the way to Egypt, and also in a cold barn to the sound of angels singing and my Babe gurgling and laughing up at their brightness, which was outshone by His own shining.

  And this other Mary, my poor daughter-in-law, once woke every morning in her stone cell to the sound of bell-ringing. More recently she has generally been under the table in boozing kens with a ragged skinny child curled against her body for warmth and the fumes of aqua vitae rocking their heads.

  And latterly, of course, she has been prone to waking in the watches of the night to attend some woman in labour, since she has been a midwife and a witch.

  This is inevitable, oh your pure and scandalised gentleman: to be old, poor and not witless; and worse still, a woman in such adamant times, is ipso facto to be a witch.

  ۩

  MARY’S FACE TOO is made gentle by sleep, for our souls do not age as our bodies do. But there the similarity to the Queen ends. The Queen’s bed is curtained in tapestry, with a winter coverlet of sable fur. Mary’s is a truckle-bed with a straw pallet and sheetless blankets and herds of lice and fleas. The Queen’s breakfast is decorous compared with Mary’s, which is aqua vitae, neat. The Queen’s toilette is the final shining peak of a vast mountain of complicated effort. Mary’s involves sitting up, scratching, pulling her part-laced stays shut and hooking her bodice across. She pauses to stroke her hands on the silk pile; even witches rejoice in blue velvet gowns. This one had been given to her long ago by a lover. Although it was not new when she got it, velvet is near as hard-wearing as canvas and she has it still, tattered at the hem and with new sleeves of brown homespun, darned, patched and darned again. It has become to her a second skin, since she never takes it off.

  Ill-fitting shoes on feet innocent of stockings, a cap over her populated white hair, and a shawl over all, and there you have the completed picture of a witch. Change her round about by means of a miracle, give her the Queen’s robes and the Queen hers . . . No doubt she could make shift to look Queenly and dignified.

  She has no costly glass to admire herself in, only
a rickety window backed with black night. Sinfully she rejoiced in mirrors when she first took her vows and desired to see her young face framed in white wimple and black veil. She used a window then too and did penance for it. She was a picture of piety once, it could make you weep.

  Through the planks of the wall by her bed she can hear rhythmic thumping of some early-rising Court ram tupping one of the whores. At this time she is living in a little cubbyhole at the back of the Falcon bawdy-house, on sufferance. Very much on sufferance. They suffered from her and she is suffered on the unspoken condition that she should very soon suffer and die of something quick-acting. Julia, one of her granddaughters, is a junior-madam there, and excuses Mary when she drinks too much aqua vitae and swears at the customers and falls over in the common room and farts and so on. Sometimes she appeals to Mary to behave herself, but Mary remembers her as a snotty-faced five-year-old, running her poor mother ragged as they begged their way up and down the road to Plymouth, and tells her so.

  Julia thinks she is well off at the Falcon and preens and prinks it the fine lady in velvet trimmings and cheap satins, and finds Mary an embarrassment, who saved her life when she took the plague at nine years old, by poulticing her buboes until they burst.

  Julia prefers it if Mary does not remind her of these things. She prefers it if the witch does not speak to her. She prefers it, although she will not admit this, if she can pretend she does not know her own grandma: “Oh yes, the witch, to be sure, sir, we must have a witch for the girls . . . Yes, to attend them. Yes, to be sure, sir, would sir like another flagon of wine? And the blonde girl in red? Of course, sir, she costs fifteen shillings for the hour, or three pounds the night . . . Oh yes, sir, very clean, almost a virgin . . .”

  Mary spits and snarls and then she remembers her duty, as she has every morning for three score years and more, no matter what the hangover. Creaking and groaning, she kneels in the musty straw and crosses herself, begins to make her morning devotions with words printed in her bones: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . .