Unicorn's Blood
Page 15
“Everyone will think it’s yours.”
Carey shrugged. “They do already, it seems.”
“The Queen would be . . .”
He waved a long hand dismissively. “Ah, the Queen is always enraged when one of her bedfellows marries. Envy that they have a man in their bed and she has not, no doubt, poor lady.” Bethany smiled inexplicably at that. “I expect she’ll banish us from Court for a while, but after that she’ll surely . . .”
“She will call it treason and put us in the Tower, Robin,” Bethany said, “You’re too closely related to her to marry without permission. She would never receive you at Court again. How will we live?”
Carey waved his arms. “The Lord will provide. Behold the lilies of the fields, they toil not, neither do they spin . . .”
Her face twisted as though she was still laughing at him.
“This is impossible, Robin. If either of us had any money or any land or even if you were a lawyer or a physician, but . . . but . . .”
“Then I’ll go and fight in the Netherlands, sack a city or two and come back rich as Croesus.”
She watched him from a mountainous distance as he tried to convince her of his excellence as a match. From the dark-red curls on his head, the hooded blue eyes and the arrogant Tudor nose, past the broad shoulders, narrow waist and long legs, he was the very picture of a romantic suitor, and one day he would make a woman very happy.
He was now burbling about shepherds and shepherdesses being happy in Arcadia. She thought of breaking the news to him that neither of them lived in Arcadia and that the shepherds she knew at home were taciturn, weary men who stank of sheep and dogs and went out in February snowstorms to help their ewes to lamb.
He does not understand and he cannot be serious about it, Bethany thought. He thinks this is a game, something to gamble over. Suddenly she felt very much older than him, although he was her senior by seven years. And tempting though she found him, she could not bring herself to let him ruin his life out of kindness.
She turned away from him and walked on to the water-steps where Kate was waiting for her, she hoped.
He followed her, talking about the Queen’s liking for him and how he could always talk to his father, who would understand. Hiding a shudder, Bethany stopped him.
“Tell no one,” she said, fumbling with her mask to put it on again. “Keep your mouth shut, Robin, please.”
“Of course, sweetheart,” he said, patting her shoulder familiarly. “I am not a fool.”
Kate was still there, leaning against the wall by the stairs, her hands stroking the velvet and silk of Bethany’s cloak. She straightened and smiled when she was who was with her.
“Now then, Mr Carey. What’s your desire today? Is it you or Mr Gage Michael brought me for?”
Carey kissed her on the mouth in greeting. “I have no time, sweeting,” he said. “I’m late for the Queen already.”
He kissed Bethany as well, on the cheek while she stood like Lot’s wife, and then hurried away. Kate stared at Bethany insolently.
Not knowing anything she could say, Bethany pulled off the striped cloak and gave it back to Kate, who parted with the velvet very reluctantly.
I can ask her, thought Bethany, she knows. “What do you do when you fall with child?” she asked in a rush, feeling her face heat up under the black velvet. Kate’s expression became even more knowing and more insolent. She tutted.
“Been careless, have we, dear?”
I am standing here talking to a whore who patronises me because there is no one else, Bethany thought. She thinks I am a fool too, look at her. She was too desperate for hauteur and nodded.
Kate shrugged. “Get rid of it, what else?”
“How?”
“It depends,” said Kate hintingly and waited.
Bethany understood and fumbled in her purse, pulled out another crown and gave it to Kate.
“How long is it?” Kate asked with an attempt at delicacy.
“Since I . . . ?”
“No, dear. Since your last woman’s trouble.”
Trouble, thought Bethany, so distant from herself that phrases she had heard all her life became suddenly alien. For all the mess and inconvenience and the little bags of rags that had to be washed, it was much less a curse than a blessing, more of an old friend who had suddenly gone missing.
“I . . . Before the Queen’s Birthday.”
Kate tutted again. “Always the same,” she said. “Well, it’s too late for the easy way.”
“What is that?”
“Our witch says there’s two kinds. Either you’re with child of a frog or a babe. When you miss the first time, then you drink a tea of tansy and pennyroyal mint to bring on your courses and keep drinking it every day until the frog comes out. If it doesn’t, what’s in your belly is a babe. So then you go back to the witch and she does it for you.”
“Does what?”
“Kills the babe inside. With a knitting needle.”
Bethany felt sick and swallowed hard. “Does it . . . does it hurt?”
The contempt in Kate’s stare hurt her. “Of course it does,” she said. “Sometimes you die, just like in childbed. But if you live and the babe comes out dead, then you can lace your stays tight again and nobody the wiser.”
“Do you . . . can you . . . ?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “There’s a price.”
“How much?”
“Ten pounds,” she said, obviously naming the largest sum she dared. Bethany simply nodded.
“Can you ask your witch for me?”
Kate sucked her teeth. “I’m not sure. I mean, it’s a crime, it’s dangerous for her too. If anyone finds her out, she burns for it. And you hang.”
Bethany could not move her feet, she felt she was in a nightmare and her feet had frozen to the ground.
“Will Mr Carey not marry you then?” Kate asked solicitously. “I would have thought better of him . . .”
“No, it’s not his,” Bethany said sharply. “And if you must know, he offered and I refused him. He has no money.”
“Can’t see why you did that.” Kate grinned knowingly. “I’d have him in his shirt, or nothing at all. Nothing at all for preference,” she added and elbowed Bethany in the ribs.
“It is impossible,” she said distantly. “Will you ask your witch for me?”
Kate laughed. “Not the first time she’ll have helped a maid of honour,” she said. “All the same, you courtiers are all the same. You always think you’re the first to love a man and the first ever to lie with him unwed and then you think you’re the first and only maid that fell with child.”
She climbed down the water-steps and set off across the dirty ice, slipping and sliding occasionally on her worn pattens and laughing.
Bethany pulled her own cloak tight around her and ran to the worn place in the orchard wall where she had climbed over. It was hard, but she had found a fruit-picking ladder to help her, and if she was very very careful and gathered up her skirts and farthingale and tied them in place with a hair ribbon, she could manage it with streaks of earth on her under-petticoat and shift that only she and her tiring-woman would know about.
At last she dropped down, to be greeted by the little dogs she was supposed to exercise, who bounced throttling themselves on the ends of their leads tied to an apple-tree root. She put away her mask in the pocket of her petticoat, then untied them and threw sticks for them on the way back.
XXXV
THE MAN WHO THOUGHT his name might be Ralph Strangways lay in his bed in the Tower and looked up at the sharp sunlight cutting between the bars on his high window. The floor was warmly covered with straw, he had three covers to his bed, though no sheets, and they had given him a new shirt to replace the foul one. He was wearing all his clothes because the room was bitter cold; the man who had been assigned to tend him was filching his firewood and the fires he made rarely lasted until dusk. At least someone had mended the sleeves to his doublet so they no lon
ger hung down like clothes in an ancient arras.
I am . . . he thought wearily. My name is . . .
It did no good, had never done any good. The first time the Jewish physician and his surgeon had come, he had been raving with pain and fever and in terror and rage lest they hurt him again. The physician had told him that his name was Dr Hector Nunez and said it with a kind of significance as if he thought perhaps he would recognise it. He did not, though something in the way the doctor pulled at his beard was familiar. The doctor has reassured him that they had come to help, had reassured him many times that he would not be put to the question again, but that it was necessary to hurt him to make him better.
The pain Snr Eraso then caused in his shoulder to put it back almost made him pass out, but afterwards it did feel better so he was more inclined to trust them with his arms and hands. His back and legs they left alone, since they were healing well.
Occasionally he could stand away from himself and know that once he had not been so fearful. He could look at his hands and know that once they had been pale and strong, not helpless moles’ paws of raw meat. Nunez and Eraso had put leeches to the two swollen rings about each wrist to bleed the bruises of bad blood. They had put maggots on the places where iron and weakness had made ulcers in the swelling. Nunez then poultice and bandaged his wrists with care and spoke to him at length of the sanguine humour; how flesh that was without it died and became blackened with gangrene and so must be cut off. If he would keep his hands, he was told, he must move them continually and suffer them to be rubbed and massaged by Snr Eraso.
And so they came every day and forced him to work his hands and made him drink draughts so foul that very often he puked them straight up again, which seemed to sorry them not at all, for then they made him drink more. For a long time he had no appetite to his meat, and they tutted over the way he lost weight. It had been days before he could pick up anything with his hands at all, but must be tended to and fed by an old man with foul breath and a wall-eye, who rammed the spoon into his mouth carelessly, almost knocking out his teeth. God save him, he was afraid of the old man too and asked him with pathetic politeness not to spoon so fast, to be rewarded with a loud “Eh? Can’t hear ye,” and another spoonful of pap.
He was slow to recover, for loneliness wore him down like a whetstone. He would sit for long hours staring at the sunlight or the dull greyness at the window, listening to the clanging from the mint and the sounds from the Queen’s beasts down by the Lion Gate. He was afraid to be alone because without other men to watch and talk to, he felt like a wisp of thought that might blow away in the wind. Once perhaps he might have thought of his past and remembered the good times therein to cheer himself, but that was forbidden him too. As in Little Ease, a black mood came often upon him, latching down the dark lid of his mind and whispering that he deserved to be in Hell for his many forgotten crimes. In truth, he would rather have been a slave in the French galleys, heaving an oar to the crack of a lash than idle, fed and rested as he was in the glacial isolation of the Tower.
Sometimes as he lay and watched the barred sky darken from pewter through iron to lead, a kind of horror would whelp itself from his fear and expand like smoke to fill the whole room with its bulk, squeezing him tighter against the stones, as if he were being invisibly pressed to death. Death seemed his only friend then; he would wonder for hours together how much it would hurt to take a run at the wall and ram his head on it, but was always too paralysed by self-hatred to do it. If there had been hemlock in his cell then, he would have drunk it gladly.
Worst of all was the way he could not stop himself from searching endlessly in his mind for some traces of what he was. He begged for something to read to help pass the hours, but it seemed the request must pass up through layers of command and back down again. Nothing happened and he watched himself whirling down and round in the evil whirlpool of his mind until he was so drowned in it he could not even weep. There was no bottom to it, no end. He was nothing, hanging by his fingertips over an abyss of black nothingness. He cursed God for his abandonment, but if my Son heard, He gave no sign, for to the man it seemed He had taken on the form of Davison. That made him angry, and anger brought him to such a pitch that in his dreams he faced God and rated Him for His wickedness and demanded to know where was this Grace they heard so much about in church. Perhaps God in His ambiguity took that as a prayer. Certainly, the next day, the old man brought him a Bible and a book of sermons.
Sullenly rebelling against the triteness of it, he would not look at it for a while. When he did, it was only to confirm his opinion that God was nothing but a foul inquisitor with a whip for his wit. But when he opened the Bible, it was as if for the first time. He thought vaguely that if he had read it before, it had not been with any great attention, and if he had heard the stories he had not been listening. Only the shorter tales of Jonah and the Whale and Tobit and Daniel in the Lion’s Den were familiar to him. It struck him how strange it was to read of the Lord God of Israel and come to him afresh. Considered dispassionately, as a general, even as a man, the Lord God of Israel had many serious faults. The Book of Job brought him no comfort at all.
But the tales of David fascinated him. Here was a soldier, someone he could understand, perhaps even like: from his fight against Goliath to the battles against Absalom, David was a man of his own mettle. Half-shamefacedly, for fear of being made, half-pleasurably in his desperate need, he made King David a friend to talk to, and sympathised with him over his woman troubles – and even cracked a joke or two that he personally would delight in such troubles, having forgotten completely the last time he lay with a woman.
Perhaps that is as I was, he thought, smiling as he reread the story of David coming on Saul while he slept and disdaining to kill him, and then thinking with shame of his shrinking from the old man with his spoon.
Still, as he felt better and it was less painful for him to move about, he grew tired of reading. By that time he had come to the end of God’s Word in any case, since he passed quickly over the accounts of the Passion because he could not bear to read them and found the Apocalypse as incomprehensible as a fever dream. Angry restlessness burnt in his bones, until he must rise and pace about the little room in his nether-stocks, since they had not seen fit to give him his boots. He would pick up bits of wood and juggle with them and drop them because he was so clumsy. By careful stretching and bending he could unkink the stiffness in his much-scarred back, but his damaged shoulder ached when it rained and quivered with weakness when he tried to lever himself up by it. To be so weak frightened and enraged him; he sought heavy things to life and push until the sweat came.
Once he thought he remembered something about fighting: he took a position that seemed familiar and tried sword-passes with his spoon and dropped it because he had no strength in his hands. The deaf old man no longer came to feed him, since he could do it himself and they were giving him proper food now, meat and bread and cheese, which he could chew. Gradually his appetite came back.
And then a thing happened that frightened him greatly. He had been pacing and straining to remember his true name, not the one Munday had given him. He was determined on it, for his name had become a kind of Grail to him. But none of the names he tried seemed right and nothing came up from his drowned memory and he filled up with frustrated rage until he cursed and kicked the bed and hurt his toes.
Then he saw that the room had filled with haloes and rainbows, as if the sunlight from the window were passing through a great many crystals and he smelt roses, as if a garden were growing invisibly from the flagstones of his cell. He saw me standing under the window, with the roses growing about my gown and my hands full of the serpent Wisdom, but knew me not and was afraid. I smiled at him kindly, but then all his world went black and he fell to the straw. By the time he woke, the sunlight was gone and so were the rainbows, he could see me no more. He was bewildered like a child and so exhausted he wondered if he had been in a ghostly battle.
Now there was someone . . . He tried to seize the thought as it went by, tried so hard he unknowingly reach out with his hands, but the memory slipped away from his again. By the time the Jewish doctor and surgeon came in the afternoon, he was too low for speech. He held out his hands meekly like a boy and waited for them to do what they did.
Snr Eraso the surgeon unwrapped the bandages and turned his arms this way and that. The swellings were much reduced and had stopped sloughing black skin. The sores were scabbed over while his hands were almost their normal size, though still weak and poor to grip. Eraso told him to make a fist and to point and he managed these things. Then the surgeon knocked for the Yeoman to let him out and Doctor Nunez sat beside him on the bed.
“How is it with you?” the doctor asked.
He shook his head and shrugged. “If you mean my memory, I can tell you nothing.”
“No, I meant generally. You seem melancholy again.”
“I think I have reason.”
“No question that you do. Has something else occurred?”
He was too ashamed to admit that he had fallen down and dirtied himself like a baby, but he had none of the reserves that might have let him brazen it out.
“I . . . I was wondering how a man might know he was mad? If he was becoming mad? Would he know it?”
Nunez stroked his beard. “Hm. Why do you think you are becoming mad?”
He shrugged again, unwilling to reveal himself. But then his loneliness and the doctor’s kindness conspired to unlock the gates of his shame and the words tumbled out. “I do not know my name, I . . . I am afraid of . . . everything, of shadows. My heart pounds when I hear the Yeoman’s keys in the locks, even though I know that he is bringing my food. I was afraid of the old man that was set to feed me. I’m afraid of nothing and everything; sometimes I’m afraid that I will drown in fear.”