Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “So the sphere must be crystalline or we would see it as the earth rotates.”

  “Do we not see dawn and dusk.”

  “Yes, that may be a solution, that the sphere is made of light; but then, think of the sun as it pours out light. Merely the shadowing of the earth by itself could explain dawn and dusk. And the sphere must surely be transparent or we could not see the outer planets through it, nor the stars. And it must be strong to carry the weight of the earth. But why then . . . Why then does it not shatter when the moon passes through?”

  Nunez nodded slowly. “Why indeed?”

  “I was greatly perplexed by this and then it came to me. The spheres themselves must be patterned in some way after the Almighty who made it. Therefore to understand the world we must seek the mind of the Almighty Himself. And vice versa.”

  Nunez nodded again. “Indeed a holy quest.”

  “But how may I make the enquiry if our chiefest teacher, Scripture, proves mistaken upon the very construction of the world?”

  “Aha.”

  “Precisely. I have considered the Hermetic knowledge, but am not satisfied. And so I return to the Cabbala, a very ancient knowledge, partly mathematical, partly verbal. Perhaps it gives a clue to the nature of the spheres.”

  “Are you sure they are spheres and not some other shape?”

  “Of course they are spheres. The sphere is the perfect shape. What other geometry could they be?”

  Nunez lifted his shoulders. “If we must use the world as if it were Holy Scripture, the Word of God, should we not observe it more? We know little enough about it.”

  “True. But I cannot help wondering. It is a question which hammers in my brain. If there were no moon, the question would not arise: each planet must be borne upon a sphere of crystal – simple. But with the moon – here is a riddle, a mystery made for us by the Almighty, as a good schoolmaster will give a conundrum to his children, that we might learn more about Him by the world He made.”

  “Amen,” said Nunez. “I wish you well of your study, Shimon. It seems you are happy in it.”

  Ames turned his face to Nunez. “Considering I am supposed to be dead these four years gone, I am extraordinarily happy,” he said seriously. “What more could I ask for?”

  “Hmm,” said Nunez, very unhappily.

  “Why did you want me here?”

  “If I had known the importance of your studies I might not have . . .”

  “You used our emergency code word, Uncle,” Ames said quietly. “And further that you dared not write of what had happened. May I ask what–”

  “I have found David Becket.”

  Ames sucked carefully on his clay pipe and waited.

  “The last I had heard of him myself,” Nunez went on, “was that he was in the Netherlands, as Sir Philip Sydney’s sword-master. After Sir Philip died last autumn, he disappeared. I had been making enquiries about him, quietly, in case he had chosen to drop from sight. It seems he did so choose and that he was engaged in some matter of intelligence.”

  “So where is he?”

  “At the moment he is in the Tower.”

  Ames blinked a little. “And?”

  Nunez told him the full tale. “. . . Snr Eraso and I have been attending him every day since then,” he finished. “Snr Eraso has successfully resolved a dislocated shoulder and has made some progress with the damage to his arms and hands. I have been treating a fever he has taken. He has had two episodes of the falling sickness, which I believe to be the result of the injury to the back of his head sustained when he was captured. The injury to his mind, however, is much worse.”

  “He genuinely has no memory?”

  “He recognised neither me not Snr Eraso, as I expected him to. Occasionally, in delirium, he makes references to the past, but he then denies that he understands them himself.”

  “He gave my name.”

  “In extremis, the first time he was tortured. Perhaps at that time his memory was still intact, I do not know. There are matters of mystery to any physician. I have known a similar case where a blow on the head rendered the patient like a baby, with no speech and no understanding even of dressing himself. This is the first time I have known a case where a man remained palpably sane and yet remembers nothing beyond a couple of weeks past. He does remember his tormentors and is afraid of them. He now knows me and Snr Eraso and has asked me if I will appeal to the Queen on his behalf.”

  “He knows his religion?”

  “Yes, though again that seems to have burst from him unknowing while he was in agony. He tells me now that until he began cursing Davison as a Spaniard and a Papist, he was not aware of it.”

  “Who were his inquisitors?”

  “A Mr Anthony Munday and a Mr James Ramme.”

  Ames nearly dropped his pipe and swore in Portuguese.

  “Mr Ramme at least should have known him,” he said angrily. “The last time he and Beckett met, Becket knocked him down and ruined his clothes and further broke his new rapier. He complained to me of it.”

  “Perhaps Mr Ramme did know him.”

  They exchanged glances. Ames’s jaw set. “And what does Mr Davison say? How was he captured? How was the mistake made?”

  “Mr Davison refuses to tell me. No doubt he feels I am not to be trusted, seeing I am a foreigner.”

  “Walsingham?”

  “Sir Francis is unwell again. Partly it is grief for the death of his son-in-law but I very much fear he has another attack of the stone on the way as well. Whatever the matter was, he has left it in Davison’s hands and will not overrule his deputy.”

  “Surely Becket will be released?”

  Nunez sighed and helped himself to more tobacco from the little box on the table. He puffed for a few moments. “Myself, I very much doubt it. I think that Davison believes Beckett knows something of vital importance and he will not let his man go until he has it from him. Beckett of course denies any such thing, but admits that he might not know if he did. It seems that the first time he was tortured, be babbled matters such as the fire-drake and also of something else, whereof I have not officially been told. However, Beckett himself remembers them discussing it while he was ‘up,’ as he puts it. He says it was something about a Book of the Unicorn which he does not rightly remember now, except that it fills him with fear.”

  “What papers were captured with him?”

  “None. I understand, by implication, of course, that the arrest went wrong.”

  “Hah,” said Ames. “With Ramme running it, of course it did.”

  “Do you know Mr Munday also?”

  “I have never met him, but we had one A. Munday in place in the English Seminary in Rome, which I assume is that same man.”

  “No doubt.”

  Simon sat in silent thought for a while. “I am in a very awkward position, Uncle,” he said at last. “By my pretence at being dead, Sir Francis has been planting some wonderfully wrong information with the Spaniards through the Reverend Hunnicutt in his dispatch office. Hunnicutt still believes he is undiscovered. As with all Sir Francis’s operations, it is being run with artistry. Not even Davison is aware of the deception. And yet, if I am to use my influence to save Becket, I must come back, as it were, from the grave.”

  Unconsciously, Nunez made an avert gesture with his hand.

  “Have you spoken to the Queen about him?”

  “No, Shimon, I wanted to consult with you first. I know there are a number of delicate considerations in this business.”

  Ames took his pipe from his mouth and tapped out the dottle into the bowl for the purpose. The tapestry-lined room was graceful with candles, and the blue smoke hung in the air; with approval Nunez noted that he handled his pipe as if he had become accustomed to tobacco, which was certainly doing him good for he had not coughed or blown his nose once since he arrived.

  “Further, my influence may not be what it once was. I have been away from intelligence matters for four years. Moreover, I do not know Dav
ison personally but I have decoded letters from him while he was in the Netherlands, and he strikes me as being a clever, subtle man, utterly loyal to their Protestant religion. I have no knowledge at all of his operations against the Catholics and I dare not endanger them. Davison has been appointed to the Privy Council. Walsingham is ill; if he were to die, then Davison . . .”

  Nunez nodded. He did not need to finish the sentence. There was silence for a while and then Simon’s fist came down on the table, causing Nunez to start.

  “We cannot leave Becket in the Tower. I owe him my life several times over; no matter what he has been up to, we must help him.”

  “Of course,” murmured Nunez. “I had no doubt of that, Shimon. My doubts are simply over how we are to proceed.”

  “Davison will not release him and Walsingham will not interfere?”

  Nunez nodded once. Simon smiled at him, his rather cold pale-brown eyes glittering in the candle-light.

  “Then we go above both their heads. We talk to the Queen.”

  XXVII

  MARY NEVER CHOSE TO be a witch, nor made a pact with the Devil. In a way, the witchery chose her.

  Consider the sorrows of a land without the Queen of Heaven. When King Henry’s clerks and pursuivants destroyed the monasteries fifty years ago, all they did was cast into the world a number of men who knew no trade but writing and reading and singing. To be sure, they gave them pensions and then some became schoolmasters and some married and they all did well enough save the inevitable few who turned to drink and vice.

  But when they destroyed the nunneries – ah, then they did a far different thing, for then they stole from women our very last redoubt from men. If a woman cannot be sacrificed by Christ as a nun and if she further cannot marry or is not married – until she is too old, she is every man’s prey, and when she has at last become old she is likewise prey. Then they call her a witch, the better to justify their cruelty.

  When the men came to break up the convent and take their lands, Mary was thirty-five, an Infirmerar and Mistress of Novices. Hers was a good nunnery, a quiet place with blossoming cloisters and lay-sisters who took good care of the vowed Religious. They treated the sick of Clerkenwell and their granaries were opened when the harvest failed. Their Mother Superior was not like those traduced in Cromwell’s reports; she managed the convent as she would have run her husband’s estate, well and firmly, if a little unimaginatively. They say the nunneries were rife with vice and with nuns giving birth to bastard babes. Perhaps there were some like that and there certainly were many that were badly managed, but riotous vice was not their sin. Mary and her sisters in Christ carried on the old comfortable sins of carping and sarcasm, gossip and sulking; of over-nicety and fussiness; of unspoken hurt and the little prickles that women make for each other. No man came to riot with them, because they did not want him. This was a matter of great disappointment to some of the inspectors sent out by the King, who had convinced themselves that houses full of manless women would be desperate for the starved red meat that flourished between the honourable inspectors’ thighs.

  In their chapel they sang right beautifully to me, their Gracious Lady, and Mary sings it still. Listen: “Salve regina, mater misericordia, vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve . . .”

  “Help us, Queen, mother of Mercy, our sweetness of life and our hope, save us . . .” “Ad te clamamus, exules filii Hevae, ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle . . .” “To you we cry, exiled children of Even, to you we sigh, groaning and weeping, in this valley of tears . . .”

  Well, it was gracious singing but they knew nothing of which they sang, God knows. Beyond a romantical wistfulness, Mary had no notion of exile, nor of weeping then. The greatest threat to her soul came from complacency.

  It was no liberation for Mary, to be told at the age of thirty-five by a greedy-eyed clerk to make her own way in the world. She was given a small pension barely enough to live on that in any case was not paid. How could she marry? She had no dowry, she was old as men reckon their bedmates, and if she married or fell with child, they said, the pension would be withdrawn (if it had ever been paid, which it was not). So she must be chaste but could no longer be a nun; must have no man, but could find no women either. This they called liberation. Mary called it robbery.

  What could she do? Dame Mary Dormer, Infirmerar, Mistress of Novices – no one had need of her. By spinning she could only starve more slowly, by needlework the same. Some nuns became nurses and cared for the children of others; some went home to their families to be resented and pitied as a thing out of place, out of time, useless, tolerated. She was too proud for that.

  Why should I wonder at her rage? Think on it. She had known one Bridegroom that never took her maidenhead, that had promised her pure eternal love and protection from the world. And then, to her mind, He cast her out, spurned her. Even her prayers to me boiled with her corrosive anger at my Son. “Speak not to me of the love of Christ,” she would hiss, “what love did He show me?”

  Ay, poor lady, give her a hammer and nails and she would crucify Him again for what He did to her. Bang! You gave me no children and the name you gave me, you took away again. Bang! You put me on the road and gave me no means to help myself. Bang! bang! (for the feet) You made me a laughing-stock and you made me a whore.

  XXVIII

  THOMASINA BEGAN HER QUEST for the Book of the Unicorn by realising that although she had spent ten years in the Queen’s service, she knew almost nothing about the Queen’s past. After some thought she went to Blanche Parry and asked her about the Book of the Unicorn.

  “I have never seen such a thing,” said Mrs Parry, very positively.

  “She lost it during her brother’s reign, she says.”

  Parry’s plucked eyebrows went up neatly to her hair-line.

  “But she was only a girl, only the Princess Elizabeth. Mrs Kat Ashley was her chief gentlewoman then.”

  “She does not expect me to find it, Mrs Parry, but I thought I would try.”

  “Hmm.” Parry thought hard. “You could look at Mr Parry’s account books – they are in the Library here, along with some other record books.”

  Thomasina thanked her and went to the Library at the end of the Privy Gallery nearest the Holbein Gate. She had been in there sometimes to find a book, but had never had the run of the place. She found it wonderful to think of all the books and papers stored there, although it was hard to find anything if you did not already know where it was. And so she began methodically looking at the books on the bottom shelves, and then the second shelves and there she was lucky, for she found a whole group of leather-bound volumes that had never before been taken out, from the dust on them.

  Coughing and struggling with the weight of the ledgers, she drew them out and found her way back to Edward VI’s reign. Strange to think that the Queen had once been a fourteen-year-old girl, with a penchant for rose-coloured damask and cloth of gold, badly served by Thomas Parry, a cofferer who could not, it seemed, add up. There amongst the other entries was one for the spring of 1548, an order for blue velvet, another for white silk and silver threads, and a pattern-drawer’s fee for the outline of the work. Then, nothing.

  Carefully Thomasina checked through the rest of the ledgers, until the light coming through the window from the Privy Garden began to change and she realised it was past noon. She put them back and hurried off to attend Her Majesty at dinner.

  As she arrived she found the Queen closeted with Mary Ratcliffe, who was carrying the Wardrobe books. When they had finished, the Queen turned to her and smiled.

  “My dear,” she said. “Will you run me an errand?”

  Thomasina curtsied and smiled. “Whatever Your Majesty desires.”

  Thomasina was to go down to the laundry, the long building facing the Thames in the woodyard, and speak to Mrs Ann Twiste, the Queen’s laundress, taking with her the small blue seal ring of Her Majesty’s and a purse of money. She would have one of the chamberers to g
o with her, carrying the laundry bags.

  Thomasina hardly ever went outside the central part of the Court where the Queen lived, nor usually desired to. She had seen enough of the world. But she put on pattens and a cloak to preserve her from the ugly wind and the snow and went meekly with the chamberer.

  The chamberer delivered the bags of linen to a harassed red-faced woman standing at a desk by the door to the place. She noted down the bag in her ledger and took the laundry list, checked it through and separated out the sheets and Holland towels from the underlinen, and the partlets and ruffs from the smocks.

  They passed through the passage and Thomasina found it strange to find so many women bustling about, most of them in their bodice and petticoats, with their smock sleeves rolled up and cloths around their heads. At Court almost all of the servants of the domus providenciae were young men, except for tiring-women and maids for the Queen’s gentlewoman. Wherever you went in the whitewashed corridors and passages behind the outward show of magnificence, there were men of all sizes, ages and conditions milling here and there, a shocking contrast to the cloistered femininity of the Queen’s Privy Chambers. At the laundry the case was opposite. Small girls also ran about in their petticoats, carrying bags of grated soap or scrubbing brushes. There were many rooms in the long building: one, labelled the Ewery, dealt with table-linen for the Court; the largest was for the household linen, where two vast coppers boiled clouds of steam into the air; the next for the smocks; and the smallest room – though still large and airy – for the partlets and ruff-starching. The Queen’s silk-woman was in charge there and personally washed the Queen’s linen, although there was never-ending demand for her services from the rest of the Court.

  The heat and noise of boiling, scrubbing, flapping and wringing was outrageous, but it was almost drowned out by the continuous babble of talk. In the ruff-laundry, the women standing by the fire dipping the ruffs in the warm starch suddenly broke into shrieks of laughter.

  The chamberer was still talking to the woman at the desk. Thomasina reached up to twitch her sleeve.