Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “Which is, furthermore, a worse insult in itself.”

  “But–”

  “You ask me, a doctor, a physician, one who has sworn oath to the Almighty – blessed be He – that wherever I go, I do no harm, I hurt no one save to cure them, you ask me to go and treat some poor creature in your dungeons that you may better torment him next time? No, no, no, I will not do it. How dare you, sir? How dare you?”

  “How if I tell Sir Francis you would not help?” hissed Davison.

  Nunez’s eyes narrowed and he muttered something ugly in Portuguese as he drew himself up.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Let us go and speak with him at once. I have never done this, no, and I never shall. Sir Francis is an honourable man and he is well aware I am a physician.”

  Cynically Davison thought the Jew’s anger overdone. Nunez was known to dabble in intelligence. On the other hand, he was also known to be well-thought-of by Walsingham. He and his people were under the protection of the Queen on that account, if no other.

  “Sir, Doctor,” said Davison more temperately, “wait. This prisoner is not . . . he is not a Papist, he may be something else. We may have mistaken him for something he is not.”

  Nunez looked amused. “What, he is a pursuivant, a creature put among the Catholics to tempt them to rebellion, the better to accuse them and arrest them and steal their lands?” Davison nodded. “And you tortured him by mistake?”

  Davison nodded again, annoyed. Nunez’s big laugh boomed out through the Guard Chamber, until the card-players looked up wondering what the joke was.

  “Serve him right,” said Nunez. “It is a dirty business. Why should I help?”

  “Because he let slip the name of a Jew,” said Davison coldly. “And since you are the chief of the Jews in London, I thought you might know the man himself.”

  Now Nunez’s black eyebrows had come down over his nose. “Hmm,” he said. “What was the name he gave you?”

  “Ames, Simon Ames, although he died four years gone.”

  The broad-ringed hand went up to stroke Nunez’s beard again.

  “What is this man called?”

  “We know him as Ralph Strangways.” Davison saw Nunez’s face become intent. “But that is never his real name, be sure of it.”

  “And what is? No doubt on the rack he told you it.”

  “We do not use the rack now,” said Davidson disdainfully. “It bursts the joints and makes the traitor unable to stand for his hanging. Which gives the crown mistaken cause to pity him.

  “Mistaken, eh? His name, Mr Davison?”

  “We do not know. He has not given it. He says he has lost his memory. I desire a physician to examine him and treat him and bring his memory back. Which is why I have come to you.”

  The doctor was nodding very slowly. “Very well,” he said. “I shall send for my surgeon colleague, and on this one occasion, I shall come and treat your victim.”

  XXIV

  FROM MY THRONE IN the clouds, I may see all the busy scurrying of God’s creatures, and angels bring petitions to me, prayers and beseeching and flowers of gratitude. I am the merciful, the benevolent Queen, and no matter what the sinner, those who come to me are never wholly unsatisfied.

  And so that night in another part of the Tower a man knelt in prayer and promised me the most extravagant presents if I would see to it that he was not tortured. He feared it extremely, for he is honourable and brave but did not believe he could remain true if tested. Slyly Munday had allowed him a view of his friend in the manacles – to edify him, as Munday said. Although Munday never told him so, he believes that is how he was betrayed and arrested. In fact, Munday happened to see and recognise him by the most ordinary bad luck while he was waiting in a queue at a pie-shop.

  While he prays, an idea of Machiavellian cunning occurs to him, as it were, a gift from me. If he can but coney-catch Her Majesty’s pursuivants, perhaps he could rescue all of them, and their enterprise as well. The hope of it tickles his arrogance and offers him a relatively honourable way out.

  Accordingly, when Munday comes for the preliminary interrogation, he finds to his astonishment that his Jesuit prize is quite co-operative.

  XXV

  UPON THE FEAST OF the Circumcision of Our Lord, the first of January, many months of anxiety for the courtiers and servants of the Queen come to their consummation. In the September previous had begun whisperings and worryings – what gift to give Her Majesty, of how much worth, of what kind, and with what allegorical and symbolical meaning.

  By November the better goldsmiths had ceased taking orders and those maids of honour who had begun in time were beginning to look smug. Others dashed about asking what was the fashion and what had Her Majesty disliked last year. By December the goldsmiths and broiderers that had been fully booked before were taking rush-commissions for triple the usual price and desperate men were visiting the money-lenders and pawnbrokers in the City.

  The Queen likes to receive presents. They should be elegant, expensive and appropriate to the giver’s station and calling, and if they make her laugh, so much the better.

  James Ramme had spent more than he could afford on a jewelled stomacher. Last year Munday had used his father’s old contacts to present Her Majesty with a sixteen-yard dress-length of strangely painted silk, blue and while with delicate interlacing cranes that he was told had come from the mythical island of Cipangu. It had disappeared into her Great Wardrobe, never to be seen again.

  This year he had written and caused to be printed a book of sonnets praising Her Majesty’s glory and beauty, of which he was quite modestly proud, and had it specially bound in red and green velvet with gold tooling, and had handwritten in his best script a dedication in the front.

  By eight of the clock on the first of January he was standing in line waiting to pass into the Presence Chamber, where the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, stood massively in black Lucca velvet and gold before the blazing allegories of the Queen’s best tapestries. Gentlemen shuttled to and fro from the chests lined up in rows on the left, carrying a magpie’s festival of painfully considered and worked gifts, and clerks wrote lists and issued tickets at folding tables behind him.

  Not all the largesse went into the chests. Some, like the Clerk of the Pastry’s elaborate palace of a raised pie, filled with sparrows and figs, must be carried to a sideboard for tasting and later unheeding consumption at a banquet.

  Two hours later, Munday reached the head of the line and bent the knee to Lord Hunsdon, whose eyes were glazed with tedium.

  “Mr Anthony Munday,” Munday dictated to the plump clerk. “A book of his own devising, by name A Pithy Basket of Verse to the Praise of England’s Eliza and richly bound in red and green velvet with gold.”

  “. . . green velvet with gold,” muttered the clerk.

  Munday genuflected again and held out the book in its wrapping of silk. Hunsdon nodded wearily.

  “Her Majesty thanks Mr Munday right heartily for his generous gift,” he rumbled, “and wishes him, with God’s grace, all honour and prosperity in the New Year.”

  The Gentleman of the Presence Chamber hurried up to take the package and Munday drew his aside slightly.

  “An extra small present for yourself here,” said Munday quietly, and the gentleman nodded without showing notable gratitude, since courtiers commonly bribed them to draw the Queen’s attention to their gifts. “No, do not trouble the Queen, I have no doubt the merits of my poor verse will be sufficient. Only I would be grateful if you could hand the letter beneath it to my lord Burghley.”

  Nicely shaped eyebrows rose, and the starched ruff creaked as the gentleman tilted his head.

  “It concerns Her Majesty’s safety and is information my lord Treasurer will wish to have,” Munday hissed urgently. “I shall pay the same again to you if I receive any reply from his lordship.”

  Quite a friendly smile broke out on the gentleman’s face and he nodded gravely, took the package, a
nd they flourished bows at each other.

  “Your ticket, sir,” snapped the plump clerk as Munday made to pass by the table. “Do not forget your ticket.”

  Munday had been so concentrated upon the necessity of getting his ciphered letter into Burghley’s hands without using any usual channels which might be known to Mr Davison, he had quite forgot that the Queen always gave a present in return.

  “Oh. Ah. Yes. Thank you,” he stuttered, feeling hot and foolish while the elegant creature behind him in the line smiled patronisingly at him for a country bumpkin.

  Ticket clutched in his hand, he followed the steady stream of people to the Jewel House to pick up his carefully weighed-out twenty-ounce piece of silver plate.

  XXVI

  A WEEK LATER A small man rode into London late in the afternoon, accompanied by a consignment of cloth from Bristol and guarded by six outriders. They knew him as Mr Simon Anriques, which had only been his name for the past four years. Before that, while he served Sir Francis Walsingham, he had been called Simon Ames.

  He had made a good journey from Bristol, if you did not count two falls from his horse and an attack of the flux, from which he still suffered. His wife, ominously pregnant with their third child, had wept on his neck when he left and given him a package of pasties she had made with her own hands. They were excellent pasties, of lamb mixed with currants and spiced with ginger and cinnamon, but unfortunately he had forgotten about them after the first day and they had gone mouldy.

  His small cavalcade joined the stream of folk passing down Fleet Street to Ludgate. Ames had his cloak round his ears and his new black beaver hat pulled down nearly to his nose. There was no sign of anyone he knew well, although Eliza Fumey’s linen-shop was still there and doing a brisk trade, if its new shutters and awnings were any guide. The name over the top had changed but he was too short-sighted to read it without his spectacles.

  Ames sent one of the men ahead through the crowds to warn his uncle of his arrival, and jostled his way through the City throngs while the Bristol men with him gawked happily at the displays of the Cheapside goldsmiths.

  “Remember,” he said to them, “London has more coney-catchers, footpads and thieves than any place else in the world.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said to him, their ears stoppered by greed.

  Ames sighed and eased forward in the saddle. Only a little farther to go, thank the Almighty (blessed be He); he was sure the journey had given him piles. No doubt his uncle would recommend some awful medicine for them as well.

  Hector Nunez and his wife, Ames’s Aunt Leonora, were waiting at the gate of their house in Poor Jewry, the five servants of the house in attendance behind them. Hector came over with a cry of welcome in Portuguese to embrace his nephew as he dismounted slowly and painfully from his horse and hobbled over. Leonora embraced him as well, weeping over the long time since she had seen him, insisting that marriage agreed with him and furthermore he had put on weight; how did she do with the babe? Did he not think it was too soon after the last one? And furthermore, blessed be the Almighty to have given him two strong children so quickly, when she had quite despaired of it, and perhaps this one would be a son like the first one, and furthermore . . .

  “Leonora,” said Nunez gently in Portuguese, “shall we let him into our house?”

  They dined on partridges, salt-beef, mutton in mustard, fried cakes of salt-cod and a spit-roasted chicken. Over the pippin fool and saffron bisket-bread Leonora cross-examined her nephew about his children, how they had fared with the dangerous business of teething, and picked over every detail Ames could remember of Rebecca’s symptoms, appearance, appetite and sleeping habits, until two hot spots burnt in his cheeks. At last Leonora withdrew so the men could drink tobacco smoke.

  Nunez surveyed his nephew critically, with a physician’s eye. He seemed to have put on some weight at last and his cheeks had filled out. There was even a small encouraging potbelly under his belt, although his hose wrinkled around his calves as before. He now dyed black what was left of his hair, whose natural shade was straw, and he also dyed the beard he sported, which did nothing for his looks, since it grew in an awkward frill around his mouth and on the margin of his chin. Rebecca had evidently taken control of his wardrobe, since he was very well dressed in a sober dark-red brocade suit and the long black velvet gown appropriate to a married man of substance, topped with a small white ruff.

  “Marriage agrees with you, Shimon,” Nunez commented genially in Portuguese. “How is Rebecca?”

  “As well as any woman in her sixth month.” Ames was wary after Leonora’s questions and Nunez smiled.

  “Is she a good wife?”

  “The Almighty (blessed be He) has truly blessed me with a wife more valuable than pearls,” said Ames, and then tempered the formality of his praise with a shy smile. “She is . . . she is a very comfortable woman. I had not realised . . .” His voice trailed away with embarrassment.

  Nunez leaned over and patted his hand. “How have you been occupying yourself in Bristol, Shimon? Do you not find yourself dull after your work here in London?”

  “My father-in-law is kind to me and asks of me only that I cast up his accounts for him at the end of the month, and encipher his sensitive business correspondence,” Ames explained. “I keep track of his money in the Exchange in London and Amsterdam.”

  “No more intelligence work at all?”

  “Well, I have been building a network of correspondents to warn me of happenings at Court and in Holland.”

  “Do you pass on this information to Walsingham?”

  “I would like to, but have no safe way to do it.”

  “Why not through me? You may rely on my discretion.”

  “Perhaps. If we could devise a safe enough cipher and find trustworthy messengers to carry the letters.”

  Nunez sucked on his pipe.

  “And what else?”

  Ames’s face took on the strained modesty of someone who is actually proud of what he does, but will not admit it.

  “I am studying the Cabbala a little, in my own fashion. Joshua Anriques has a Rabbi who visits from Amsterdam sometimes. He has been instructing me.”

  Nunez raised his eyebrows. “Are you not a little young for such studies?”

  Ames flushed with irritation. “I am above the age of thirty and married. I think there is no danger. Besides, my study is different from most.”

  “How?”

  Ames squirmed in his seat and picked up a piece of bisket-bread, began breaking it apart, mathematically, into halves, quarters, eights, sixteenths.

  “Only it seems to me that as the Almighty created the world (blessed be He), so the world must reflect His thought.”

  “Of course. Though not all of it.”

  “Naturally not. But some of it. Now I know you have heard of Thomas Digges and the calculations of Copernicus that he describes, for I have expounded them to you . . .”

  “Many times,” rumbled Nunez, a little sadly, tamping his pipe.

  “. . . and I am attempting to reconcile the Cabbala with those thoughts.”

  Nunez blinked. “Why?”

  Having failed to produce exactly equal thirty-seconds of bisket-bread, Ames now absently drew concentric circles in some slopped wine with his finger.

  “There are so many riddles to be answered,” he said. “First, the problem of Holy Scripture.”

  “What problem?”

  “Either Copernicus speaks the truth or the Bible does.”

  “Why cannot they both be true?”

  “Unlikely. Genesis describes Creation beginning with the earth and continuing with the sun and moon as lights in the sky. Which is as it should be if the sun and moon alike circle the earth, as Aristotle has it.”

  “Yes,” Nunez admitted cautiously.

  “However, if Copernicus be true, then Genesis cannot be. The sun must have been God’s first Creation, as the centre, then Mercury, then Venus; then, and only then, the earth and moo
n.”

  “Oh. Why must it be so?”

  “It would seem logical.”

  “Surely the Infinite is not bound by logic?”

  Ames sighed. “Of course not. I have had this argument many times with the Rabbi and I am still confused. But you see, Copernicus’s calculations are beautiful. They so clearly account for all the observed strange behaviour of the planets – the checks and retrograde movements and occlusions which anyone with patience and good eyesight can observe and Ptolemy cannot explain. Unless you begin multiplying cycles and epicycles and end up with an ugly unbalanced thing that makes no sense.”

  “No human sense.”

  “No mathematical sense either, which is what offends me. Besides being beautiful mathematically, Copernicus’s world has a fitness about it.”

  For perhaps the hundredth time at that table, the candlestick became and miniature sun and round about it went further pieces of bisket-bread.

  “You see: here we have the sun at the centre, a fitting figure for the Almighty, and then around it the planets on their spheres, with the earth at the midpoint of the planets. It is . . . it is beautiful.”

  “I find it hard to imagine.”

  “One of the beauties of it is that we can know for certain: if, as saith Aristotle, all beyond the sphere of the moon is perfect, then the slightest imperfection will show that not to be true.”

  Nunez nodded.

  “Therefore if one of the planets were found to have moons or perhaps even creatures upon it . . .”

  Nunez laughed. “That is fantasy.”

  Ames smiled nervously. “True, it is speculation, perhaps worthless at that. But my query is simpler, more founded on logic. I wish to know what the spheres are made of.”

  “The spheres?”

  “The crystal spheres whereon the earth and other planets must travel. Copernicus’s theory does nothing to these, only creates a new one, perforce that the earth hangs on and so is carried around the sun.”

  Nunez’s mouth fell open. It had never occurred to him to wonder about such a thing.