Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  After the Papist plotters had been safely executed, with such bloody adherence to the prescribed hanging, drawing and quartering for traitors that even the London mob had been revolted, Walsingham had seen fit to explain to his mistress how they had been caught. Far from approving his cleverness, the Queen had flown into a rage.

  “She said not one of the poor ninnies who were executed had the faintest notion of freeing the Queen of Scots or killing her until you and Mr Secretary Walsingham put the idea into their heads and that that was dirty dealing, to lead them on as weapons against an anointed Queen.”

  Davison was annoyed. “A Queen who was thrust from her kingdom by the outrage of Godly men at her behaviour, who is convict of adultery and petty treason and deserves to burn if only for those crimes, let alone what she has committed against Her Majesty.”

  He talks like a book, Bethany thought, every phrase and subphrase neatly rounded and stopped at the end. Also he has completely missed the point of why the Queen is angry.

  “Well, she is determined on it,” Bethany added. “She says she will not sign the warrant and that is the end of the matter.”

  Davison raised his eyes to Heaven, presently walled in by grey cloud. Where I sat watching at my ease upon their grey velvet cushion, he saw nothing at all.

  “And the unicorn?”

  Bethany’s cheeks had been flushed with walking in the cold, but now she paled. “What do you know about the unicorn?” she asked.

  It had been a guess, but a God-favoured one. Davison shrugged. At that time he still thought it might be a code-word for the Queen of Scots, although he was beginning to wonder about it. He smiled.

  Bethany fell silent.

  “Mistress Bethany, I require that you tell me what you know of this.”

  She pulled her cloak tight around her and looked at the ground. Francis came back importantly with the stick, followed by a circling of yaps from Felipe and Eric. Bethany took it and threw it again, and they were off once more, jumping and crashing through the short box-hedges of the knot-garden, running excited circles round the still fountain, and yelping continuously.

  “Cousin,” said Mr Davison, taking her arm. “Must I do my duty and tell the Queen of your dalliance with Mr Carey?”

  Her mouth dropped open and the cream of her complexion turned to grey.

  “Wh . . . what . . .”

  “You heard me.”

  She swallowed stickily and shut her mouth. “I have had no dalliance with Mr Carey; what are you talking about?” There was an ugly pause, broken by the voices of the dogs arguing. “I have had no dalliance with anyone.”

  “Oh,” said Davison. “Really?”

  She looked at the ground and nodded, while the blood rushing back to her cheeks gave her the lie.

  “At the Queen’s Birthday in September you danced with Mr Carey and in the masque you were a nymph to his centaur. At the banquet you were with him and the other gentlemen once the Queen had withdrawn and whereas your tiring-woman believes you were the Queen’s bedfellow that night, the Queen herself shared her bed with Susanna Broadbelt.”

  The dogs came back with the stick, Francis and Eric arguing over it and pulling it between them with many growls, whilst Felipe had uprooted a small rosebush and dragged it triumphantly in the rear.

  Sworn as he was to God’s service, tears had no power to move Mr Davison which was a pity since Bethany’s were likely to chap her skin in this wind. She had her hand clasped to her throat where some trinket hung under the embroidered Dutch linen. Grimly, he waited for her to bow to his will.

  “If you must tell the Queen,” Bethany said hopelessly at last, “could you not at least keep Robin Carey’s name out of it? Please? He has done nothing wrong and you would destroy him and he has no money, no means of living beyond the Court.”

  “I think your father would not like him for a son-in-law, for all his high blood.”

  She shook her head. Her father had some respect for blood, but far more for land and money, neither of which Carey possessed.

  “It is my duty to tell the Queen my suspicions,” Davison told her. “Nothing less would be honourable.”

  The wind had got up and the three dogs were now standing in an outraged circle, yapping at her. Eric sniffed the air and then turned and nipped Davison’s ankle through his boot. Davison kicked him and began to walk away down the path.

  “No, Cousin. Mr Davison, stop!”

  He turned courteously to her. Bethany breathed deep and coughed.

  “She . . . she has been dreaming of the unicorn since December began, and every time it distresses her more. She dreamt that it stabbed her. That is all I know. I . . . share the Queen’s bed, not her skull, Mr Davison, that truly is all I know.” She clasped her hands together. “If I bring you news of the Queen, will you . . . will you not tell anyone your . . . your suspicions?”

  Davison looked at her for a moment. “I shall consider it,” he said, lifted his hat, and walked firmly away. The dogs yipped after him and returned happily to Bethany, convinced they had driven him off at last.

  XXII

  MR DAVISON TOOK HORSE in the Queen’s mews opposite Charing Cross, having a universal warrant for them, and rode from there along the deep frozen ruts of the Strand past the great midden at the border between the cities of Westminster and London, where lay the half-buried skeleton of a dead dog, and on through Fleet Street, over Fleet Bridge and through London Wall at Ludgate. From there he turned down to the bridge to take a boat for the second half of his journey. He was alone, since Mr Rackmaster Norton had gone straight from his gardening to visit Walsingham’s sick-bed at Seething Lane.

  Parallel to his journey, the Frost Fair bellowed along the Thames, a second eddying river of people above the true one turned to metal. The booths set up on the ice by shopkeepers who had abandoned their shops were selling orangeadoes of Seville and sugar candy, metal pomander balls to hold hot coals as hand-warmers. Dutch pattens with bone blades on them for sliding on the ice, and a vast variety of shoddy trinkets and ballads to mark the Frost Fair. A couple of bonfires were being piled on their old ashes on the ice ready for the night.

  Mr Davison glanced at the wrapped and merry folk and looked away in contempt: God had turned the river to a paved road as a sign of His power, as a warning against sin, as a similie of the heart of London being like unto ice for sin and lechery, as was Babylon’s. None of those who laughed and skidded and bought what they could not afford for the mere novelty of buying it a foot or two above the water, none of them could read what God’s Finger had written thereon: “Repent or be damned to the frozen pit of Hell.” Mr Davison could read it and he shivered at its clarity.

  Downstream of the bridge, ice met oily water in a slow war, the ice fretted to petrified foam and razored icicles by the water, and the water made to porridge by the particles that broke off. There the once-proud boatmen scuffled over Davison’s trade.

  In the boat, as the oars sculled through the low stinking waters, Mr Davison prayed devoutly to his Lord God of Hosts: firstly that the Queen might be brought to execute the Queen of Scots; secondly that the Dutch might prevail over the Spanish Antichrist; thirdly that the evil Papist in the Tower might repent and disgorge the secrets he was hoarding. He had no prayers for Bethany his cousin, since she was damned and so they would be wasted.

  At the Watergate of the Tower he paid off the hopefully servile waterman without a tip and climbed the slushy steps to meet Ramme and Munday at the top.

  Both bowed, Munday twice.

  “Well?”

  “He has been up for much of the day,” Ramme reported.

  “Flogged?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Any change?” The humiliation of being beaten like a child or a peasant often broke a gentleman’s pride better than the far worse pain of the manacles.

  They shook their heads, hunching away from the bitter wind off the Thames.

  Davison sighed and went ahead of them.


  Under the White Tower the man hung limp.

  “Wake him up,” said Davison, taking a stool brought for him by Munday. Thames water crashed against the man’s back, making him moan and shudder, dripped in rivulets of mud and blood from his limp feet.

  “Come, Ralph,” said Munday, looking up at his confidingly. “There is no need of this.”

  He was a big, broad, heavily built man, with shoulders like an ox and an ample gut on him, a little shrunken already. Black ringlets clung to his face from his sweat, and a beard that had been neatly trimmed now spread uncouthly across a square, ugly face. The river water made him smell no worse than he did already.

  “Mr Davison is here,” said Munday. “You should speak to him, he is the Queen’s councillor, an important man. You should not keep him waiting, it is not polite.”

  “God rot Mr Davison,” growled the man hoarsely. “God Almighty curse his Spanish bowels; Jesus Christ send he take a pox and leprosy, Spanish bastard . . .”

  Davison frowned uneasily. “I am no Spaniard,” he said.

  “You lie in your teeth, you fucking Papist, servant of the Antichrist, bastard Spaniard-loving idol-kisser . . .”

  Davison frowned more, an awful doubt beginning to gnaw at the roots of his perfection.

  “How long has he been saying things like that?”

  “Just now, sir,” said Munday hurriedly, glaring at Ramme. “He was cursing us before, but not like that. Is he delirious?”

  I hope so, thought Davison. “How was he captured, again?”

  Ramme had a nervous look about his mouth as well. “When we broke in on the Mass, there were recusants there, worshipping at the altar of idolatry.”

  “This man, was he present?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He was drinking while it went on?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, as we broke in he came running out, shouting orders for his men to shut the inward doors, which they did while he delayed us, cursing and yelling to the priest to escape. In the melee, by God’s help, I got behind him with my cudgel and brought him down.”

  “Clubbed him nicely on the back of the head a couple of times,” Munday put in helpfully. “And down he went foaming at the mouth and twitching like a dog.”

  “The first time you interrogated him, what happened?”

  The two looked at each other. “He . . . er . . . he seemed not to be in his right mind, sir,” said Munday awkwardly. “He spouted a lot of babble about fire-drakes and some Book of the Unicorn before he fainted. So we took him down, sir, as per your orders, and put him in Little Ease over Christmas to think about it.”

  Davison nodded. “And then?”

  Munday coughed. “Well, when we went to fetch him today, he seemed more sensible, you know sir, quite polite but . . . er . . . a mite confused. And then he told us this tale, sir, which I did not rightfully believe . . .”

  “He’s lying,” said Ramme.

  “Quiet, please, Mr Ramme,” said Davison coldly, “Go on, Mr Munday.”

  Monday put his hands behind his back and stood with his toes pointed outwards, like a grammar-school boy saying a lesson.

  “He told us he had no memory. He said he had forgotten everything before he woke in Little Ease and did not even know my name.”

  Davison sucked air through his teeth.

  “Said he did not even known his own name, and wanted me to tell it to him.”

  “But you did not believe him.”

  “Of course not, sir, why would I? It was a new story, but there again, why not say that if you were desperate, sir . . .”

  The man was gasping and wailing now, had run out of strength to curse.

  Davison went to the pillar, stood beside it with his head flung back to look at the man, whose eyes were shut.

  “Quiet,” he rapped out. “Stop that noise.”

  The man took a shallow breath and held it, turned his face to squint down at Davison. His eyes were grey and bloodshot, rimmed with startlingly long lashes, like a woman’s. Blood had oozed down his arms into his shirt, joining that which soaked the upper part of it, and his lips were bleeding where he had chewed on them earlier.

  “What religion are you?” Davison demanded.

  “I am an English Protestant, you Spanish catamite, you bastard –“

  “Do you swear it by the living God and your hope of salvation/”

  “Jesus Christ, yes, I do . . .” His voice was whittled down to a breathless croak. “And you can . . . shove your Pope and . . . and your fucking crucifix up your arse with your candles, you . . .”

  “Enough,” snapped Davison, full of horror. “Will you swear it on the Bible?”

  “Ay, and spit on your cocksucking . . . idols too, you boy-loving . . .”

  “Get him down from there.” Davison turned his back and paced to the end of the basement. He contemplated a pile of shields, the bright paint on them faded and flaked, and tried to ignore the cries as they put the steps under the man’s feet, unhitched his arms and supported him down. As if he heard them for the first time in his life, he winced at the sounds of pain. They laid the man on his side in the sawdust sprinkled on the cobbles to soak up ordure. He screamed and writhed as they forced his arms down slowly from where they had been frozen in place by his weight. Then he wept like a child as they took off the manacles and some blood began returning to his hands.

  Davison had paced back by then and stood looking at the wreckage on the floor with his fingers clasped tight over his mouth. After the sobbing had died a little, he fumbled in his penner and brought out a little fat book, bound in black leather and tooled with gold. He went down on one knee.

  “This is the Word of God, the Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Psalms in English,” he said to the main when he thought he could understand. “In English, not Latin; do you hear me?”

  Now the man nodded once, his eyes half-shut.

  “The Word of God, in English. Do you swear on this that you abjure the Pope of Rome and all his unclean works and hold to the True and Pure Religion?”

  The man could not move his arms, so delicately, distastefully, Davison lifted one of the swollen purpling hands and slipped his book under it.

  “I swear,” croaked the man.

  “Do you accept the Queen as the rightful and only Governor of the Church of England and as your lawful Sovereign?”

  “Christ, yes, always . . . have. I think,” said the man, panting a little.

  Davison took his book of Scriptures back, finding one edge soaked with blood and wiping at it abstractedly with his handkerchief. He looked bleakly at Munday. “No Papist would endanger his soul like that,” he said. “This man must be one of ours.”

  “Never,” hissed the man, “never one of yours, you . . . Spanish bum-licker, cocksucker . . .”

  His eyes were rolling and although Davison said urgently that he was English too, it seemed the prisoner could no longer hear.

  Davison stood straight with one hand on his sword and the other on his hip, looking down, while Munday dry-washed his hands nervously.

  “It seems he was telling the truth that his memory is lost,” Davison said. “Evidently he was a pursuivant himself, and would have reported to us immediately save for the accident to his wits. It is . . . he has been . . . This is a terrible mistake. A terrible mistake.”

  “What shall we do with him, sir?” asked Munday. “Release him?” Munday was too tactful to make the suggestion in the forefront of his mind, which was to slit the man’s throat and slip him in the Thames before Burghley or Leicester found out what they had done to his agent.

  “No. Not like that. Put him in a clean comfortable room, in a bed. Change his shirt. Keep him locked up lest he wander, but not chained. I shall send a physician to him.”

  “Might need a bone-setter,” said Munday. “One of his arms looks to be out at the shoulder.”

  “The physician may judge of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”


  “Has he said anything of his mission that might make sense?”

  “Well, no, sir, we never thought he could be . . . what he seemingly is, sir. Except early on, about the Book of the Unicorn that could break the Queen. But that was babbling, sir.”

  “Quite so,” said Davison, “babbling. Any names?”

  “Only one, but it made no sense, for the man is dead.”

  “What was the name?”

  “Simon Ames, sir. Ramme said he was a Jew in Mr Secretary Walsingham’s service about four years ago, sir, but it meant nothing, since he died in ’83.”

  Davison’s eyes narrowed. “A Jew? Hmm.”

  The man was too big and heavy to be dragged now they had some concern for his health, and so they put him face-down on a litter and carried him to the Lanthorne Tower, to one of the round rooms. Davison saw him into his bed and the fire lit, but he was still unconscious, though he woke enough to swallow the tincture of laudanum they forced into his mouth. Then, still frowning deeply, Davison left the Tower by the Lion Gate and walked to Old Jewry in the City.

  XXIII

  FINDING THAT DR NUNEZ was not at home, Davison immediately returned to Court. There he waited in the Presence Chamber until Dr Nunez came out after his evening consultation with the Queen, and approached him.

  Dr Nunez was courteous and willing to have a private interview with Sir Francis Walsingham’s deputy. They went into the Guard Chamber and stood in the corner, away from the gentlemen who sat playing cards while they waited to be summoned to assist the Queen.

  Dr Nunez listened courteously, his hand on his beard and his chin on his ruff. When Davison had finished his peremptory request that Nunez come with him instantly to the Tower and treat a prisoner they had been interrogating, his dark eyes flashed with anger.

  “Absolutely not!” he snapped.

  Davison was nonplussed. “I beg your pardon, Doctor?”

  “So you should, sir. What you ask is an insult.”

  Davison frowned with puzzlement. “I had no intention of–”