Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “Here are riches indeed,” said Simon, staring at the bread.

  “Well, sir, help me put on my knife and I will be glad to share my breakfast with you.”

  The clerk had an unusually sweet and knowing smile. “Done, Mr Becket.”

  While the clerk’s thin fingers busied themselves with the strap about his neck, Becket wondered at their immediate intimacy, that he felt no qualms at allowing the stranger to do it.

  “If I put the buckle where it was before, it will be too loose,” Simon said after a moment. “How is it if I take it in a notch?”

  “Excellent,” Becket said. He had the feeling that he was properly dressed at last, now he could feel the cold knob of metal against the back of his neck and the sheath in the valley between his shoulder muscles. What was left of them. Evidently he had been a better-built man before he got into Davison’s clutches . . .

  The sudden piercing memory of Davison looking down on him while he wept like a baby with pain completely destroyed his happiness. He ducked his head to hide his expression from the clerk and tried to break the loaf in half. This time the clerk did not offer to help and it took several moments of struggle before he managed it.

  “You must excuse me, sir,” he said, ashamed at his weakness. “My hands still do not obey me properly, though they are a great deal better than they were.”

  “Indeed,” said the clerk politely, took the bread eagerly and chewed and swallowed.

  They shared half of what was in the bottle that contained beer quite companionably. The other had been filled up with rough aqua vitae, which was a blessed thing to find. Becket cautiously put that one inside his shirt for emergencies. The clerk accepted half the cheese but regretfully refused the smoked sausage.

  “I have a delicate stomach, sir,” he said. “Not all meats agree with it.”

  “Oh,” Becket said with his mouth full. “I knew a man like that once, almost sickened on a plain dish of bacon and peas.”

  The clerk nodded attentively. “Who was he?”

  “Why, he was the little inquisitor . . . the . . .” Becket stopped chewing and grunted with the effort of trying to remember. His hands fisted and ground into each other but mere effort would not bring it back. “God damn it.”

  “Please, sir, do not distress yourself. Eat.”

  Thinking ahead, Becket kept half of his share of the food back, though he was still hungry. “What is the food like here, sir?” he asked.

  “I have tasted better,” admitted the clerk. “And much of it disagrees with me.”

  “What are you in for, sir?”

  Simon shrugged, a gesture subtly foreign that seemed to come naturally to him. “Debt,” he said. “I owe five thousand pounds and my creditors caught me at last.”

  “Bad luck. Why did you not try hiding in the Liberties of Whitefriars?”

  “I did, only they lured me out of it. And you, sir? Do you know why you are here?”

  “Perhaps for treason,” Becket said casually, watching under his lashes to see how the clerk took it. “Only, thanks to the Devil taking my memory, I am not sure myself.”

  “Then why are you not in the Tower?”

  “Why indeed? Do you know, Simon?”

  The clerk looked away and patted the sorry fringing of beard around his mouth delicately with his fingers.

  “I think you do,” Becket said. “Are you a friend of mine?”

  Simon nodded. “I believe so.”

  “Then tell me what I have done to offend the Queen.”

  Simon shook his head and sighed. “That nobody knows but yourself, Mr Becket, alas. I may be your friend, but I do not know everything.”

  “Then tell me what you know. Tell me about myself.”

  “I dare not . . .”

  Frustration peaked the mountain of rage inside him. Becket growled like a dog, reached out double-handed and caught the front of the clerk’s doublet, pulled him close.

  “I may be chained,” he snarled, “but chains make good weapons, used right. Tell me.”

  With humiliating ease the clerk freed himself and moved away a little, swinging his legs to the floor.

  “Mr Becket, please,” he said. “Calm yourself.”

  Becket lunged for him in fury, was jerked short by the chains attached to his legs catching on the end of the bed and squashed what was left of the loaf as he came down hard on an elbow.

  “God damn you to Hell!”

  Something was wrong with Becket’s eyes. All about the clerk’s head were rainbows and dancing lights while the sombre tapestry of stenches about them melted suddenly into a sharp perfume of roses. Among them he saw me standing, smiling, crowned with stars and shaking my head. I would have spoken with him, comforted him and helped him, but the disorder of his brain that let him see me at all suddenly crested and broke. The rainbows engulfed all the room and blackness hammered through his mind.

  He woke exhausted and sore with a strange taste about all his thoughts and saw again the face of the clerk and believed it to be a ghost. He could have wept. Once more his heart was clenched inside a great fist of fear, retransformed from more comfortable rage.

  “For God’s sake, Simon,” he whispered. “Get me out of this.”

  The clerk put a bottle against his lips and he drank a little of the aqua vitae mixed with bad-tasting water. Simon’s face was drawn with distress.

  “David, David,” he said softly. “What have they done to you?” There was more, but Becket could not understand it since it was in a foreign language. The words sounded gentle enough.

  He knew he had to wait patiently for the world to return to its right moorings. Patience came hard to him, but every time he lifted his head he was not entirely sure where it was. The light was stronger and the ward was now empty of all but one man, who lay tossing in some fever by the door. Eventually the strangeness faded like the tide.

  It took great effort, but he dug coherence out of the depths. “I am not mad,” he told the clerk anxiously. “Do not believe that I am mad, for all I look it. The . . . the doctor said I have taken the falling sickness from being hit on the head.”

  Simon nodded. “So he told me, but I had not realised how gravely. Do you know me now?”

  I am too tired for this, Becket thought as he shook his head; too tired, too afraid. It was misery to look inside his heart and find there such weakness that it took much of his strength to hold his voice steady. He preferred the times when he was full of black murderous fury; it felt cleaner, more like himself. His hands were prickling and burning and his wrists throbbed; he must have jerked them about while he was . . . wherever he went when he fell down.

  “I know you as Simon because you told me,” he said, his voice stopped down to a mutter because his Adam’s apple ached. “For a moment I thought you were a ghost, but I seen now you are solid. That’s all I know. I wish you would tell me of myself so I am not so empty.”

  “Well, when the doctor spoke with me we talked of this at length. He is against any of your old friends’ telling you what you should remember. Rather he feels it would be better for your reason that you remember by yourself, for he is convinced that your memory has not flown away but only hides chained in some . . . some dungeon of your mind. If I tell you, then you might never be sure what you remember and what you have only been told.”

  It was cruel to hear that there would be no easy refilling of his empty chambers. Even so he could see the sense in what the doctor said. He sat up with difficulty, jerking his wrists again and bit his lip to stop the cry. Simon was kneeling on the bed beside him, took his hands and turned them over, examining them as Nunez had.

  “It is imperative we have you out of these chains, Mr Becket. I am afraid of the damage they are doing to you.”

  Becket tried to smile. “They’ll never free me until they know what I have forgotten, and once they know that, then I expect they will hang me.”

  “Your legs, I fear, must remain in irons, as you say,” Simon answered. “B
ut I see no reason why your manacles should not come off if we can find the money to do it. Come, sir, what will you sell of your possessions?”

  He spread out what there was on the mattress. Becket was touched to see he had gathered all that remained of the food, every crumb, and put it back in its cloth. There were the shirt, the falling band, the pipe and a small pouch of tobacco and the Bible. Neither mentioned the bottle of aqua vitae, which Simon had put back inside Becket’s shirt-front once he had taken a little to cleanse the river water he brought.

  “Can we sell the Bible?” Becket asked, extremely unwilling to part with his tobacco, though he suspected it might gain a better price.

  “We can but try. Are you able to walk?”

  With effort he could sit up, put on his shoes and swing his legs to the floor. He jingled down the narrow passageway between the beds. The clerk had taken it upon himself to carry the bundle.

  Only for a second, Becket hesitated, wondering if he could trust the clerk. And then he shrugged mentally. To be sure, if Simon planned to rob him there was nothing he could personally do about it. After they had each used the jakes they went down the narrow stairs and out into the courtyard.

  It buzzed and writhed like a hive, was as full of activity as Gresham’s more famous Exchange in the City. There were craftsmen working wherever the light was good and a sewing circle of women sat under one of the awnings, feverishly make new ruffs.

  Simon hurried over to one of the trestle-tables set up by the prison gate, covered with books, cards, bales of dice, candles, meat pies, shoes, leather laces, leather scraps, a purse, sewing gear, articles of clothing, a chafing dish and a lump of iron pyrites labelled as gold ore from the New World which could be bought for a trifling sum of money by anyone interested in financing an expedition to find the rest.

  After a moment’s thought, Becket jangled his way over to stand behind Simon, who was looking frustrated.

  “How can you suggest a mere one shilling for a brand-new-“

  “T’aint new, neither, Mr Anriques; look, it has plain marks of reading on it and a gravy stain at Genesis Chapter One, what’s more.”

  “How can we put mere money to the value of the Almighty’s Word, Mr Arpent?” demanded Simon rhetorically. The plump man shrugged.

  “Well, Mr Anriques, it’s in the matter of what the market will bear, not the value, as you might say. And the price of that Bible, which I will venture to say I doubt I can sell inside a week, is a shilling, take it or leave it. Though if the gentleman was thinking of selling his buttons to gain garnish for striking off of his irons . . .”

  Mr Arpent left the suggestion dangling. Becket looked down at the numerous buttons decorating his velvet doublet and noticed that they had purple and red gems set into the jet there were carved from and were in fact very fine indeed.

  “Ah,” he said. Simon looked at them closely and let out a soft whistle of admiration. “I must have been living high on the hog when I got these,” said Becket self-deprecatingly. There were twenty-four of them, alternating garnet and amethyst, all down his peascod-bellied doublet. No doubt about it, that had been a fine and fashionable suit before Ramme and Munday got to work on him.

  “What will he close his doublet with, if he sells them to you?”

  Arpent squinted up his eyes. “Well, I’ll only take six of the garnet ones, see, because I happen to know a tailor that is looking for work like that, and I’ll pay . . . ah . . . fifteen shillings for them, seeing as it’s to free the poor gentleman from the manacles.”

  “Forty shillings,” said Simon instantly. “See how finely they are carved, and how deep-red are the garnets.”

  “How do you know they are only garnets?” put in Becket. “They might be rubies.”

  “Or they might be glass,” said Arpent. “I am taking a risk as it is; my friend might have found what he seeks elsewhere. Twenty shillings and it’s my last word, sirs.”

  “Twenty-five and you shall have them,” said Simon.

  “Wait a bit,” said Becket, driven by a half-understood instinct, “I might find someone else to buy them off me. And I want some trade as well.”

  Arpent rolled his eyes. “Do you think I am in the Fleet for my health, sir? I have need of money too . . .”

  “I only want some of those leather laces, Mr Arpent, and I also want you to tell Mr Gaoler Newton that you gave fifteen shillings for the buttons.”

  Arpent lifted his chin and looked sideways at Becket. “Why would I do that?”

  Becket kept his smile stuck to his face, although his heart had gone cold and weary. “If he should ask you, sir, only if he should ask you.”

  There was a strained pause. “I pay my protection,” said Arpent. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  Becket leaned over, making the most of his small advantage. “No trouble Mr Arpent,” he said softly. “But do you think I got these buttons and my velvet doublet for the beauty of my face?”

  Arpent made no answer and Simon wondered how it was that Becket managed to convey menace simply by the way he stood. Nobody had ever feared Simon because he leaned over them.

  “Done at twenty shillings,” said Arpent after a moment.

  “Twenty-five,” Becket reminded him, still gently. “I shall remember you kindly, Mr Arpent; indeed I shall.”

  Arpent looked as if he might cry. “Twenty-five then,” he said sadly, “and the laces.”

  “Splendid, Mr Arpent. I shall remember you in my prayers. May I borrow your snips?”

  They accomplished the trade simply, leaving Arpent with the six buttons which he tied up in a scrap of leather, and while Simon took ostentatious delivery of fifteen shillings, Becket received an extra ten by sleight of hand. They tipped their hats to Arpent and moved away to stand in the cold sunlight.

  “Now we had better hope that Mr Newton comes soon to rob the charity box,” said Simon Anriques.

  Becket leaned against the wall and scratched his head.

  “He takes the lot, does he?” Becket asked. “Where there is money there will be robbery, so they say.”

  “Precisely,” said the clerk, looking nervously around. It occurred to Becket that they were being beadily watched by a number of skinny ragged men who were not hobbled as he was. “It all depends how soon he comes.”

  He came soon, perhaps to take a look at his important prisoner, for he did not go directly to the box bolted to the wall where charitable passers-by in Fleet Lane might put money or food through a small hole in the bricks. Instead, he came over to them as they sat on a stone step that led up to Eightpenny Ward.

  “I hear you have a garnish for me, Anriques,” he said without preamble to the clerk. “Where is it?”

  “It is a garnish to strike off these irons,” said Simon, pointing at Becket.

  Newton bent down to him and leered, and Becket enviously caught the smell of old aqua vitae on his breath.

  “What makes you think I won’t take the garnish and leave the irons?”

  “I know you have the power to do that, Mr Newton,” said Simon Anriques humbly. “But I hope that consideration for your future will prevent you.”

  “Consideration for my future, eh? Why?”

  “This man is here on a Privy Council warrant. It is not unknown for such a man to be released and even to return to favour at Court.” Simon was steepling his fingers and examining the shape, while the sunlight fell on the tuft of hair in the middle of his head, moated by baldness. Becket let him get on with it, since he felt he was not good enough at play-acting to treat Newton with the respect he wanted, and menace would hardly help him with the gaoler, who never went anywhere without his cudgel and three bully boys at his back. “Once the Queen held him high in her esteem. Now he is fallen to the depths. But he may rise again. Others have.”

  Newton breathed hard and stared at Becket, who stared back as blankly as he could, heart beating fast, fear again unmanning him.

  “He may not.”

  “Then you will have lost n
othing.”

  “Doesn’t look like a courtier.”

  “Looks may be deceptive, Mr Newton. Though it is true he is less of a courtier than a soldier.”

  “Better keep him chained then.”

  “Better to have him remember you with kindness, Mr Newton, as I will.”

  Newton laughed. “Give me the fifteen shillings before I beat it out of you and put you in irons too.”

  “Think on what I have said, Mr Newton.”

  “Give.”

  Simon handed over the money and Newton slid it into his purse and laughed at both of them, spat close to Becket’s boot and marched over to the charity box, fastened to the wall with a marvellous number of irons bars and padlocks. He unlocked it, took it down, gathered up the pennies and shillings in it and threw the stale loaves and legs of chicken at random at some of the prisoners who had gathered like ravens at an execution. Then he put it back while a couple of fights broke out over the food.

  “I am sorry,” said Simon to Becket. “I mishandled that as well. I am not used to being so utterly without power.”

  For a moment Becket was puzzled to know what Simon was apologising for, since he had been more steadfast than Becket.

  “Newton only wants us to understand we are at his whim,” he said wisely after a moment. “If he were too easily bought, he would lose much of his terror.”

  The bell rang at noon for dinner and caused a rush to the greasy-walled refectory and a struggle amongst the benches to be nearest the serving hatch where Newton’s servants stood with platters. Simon had disappeared on some errand of his own and Becket as a newcomer found himself in an end-mess. The platters slammed down in front of them, meagrely piled with meat in a universal anonymous brown sauce, followed by grubby baskets of coarse bread cut into thick trenchers with the cinders still on. Becket found as mess-junior that he was supposed to divide the dishes, but when he held up his hands to show the manacles, another man took the office.

  The chicken was stringy in its brown sauce, the beef salted, imperfectly soaked and boiled just enough to make it solid, there was pease pudding of wonderful vintage and a hunk of bacon, also anointed with brown. Simon arrived in a hurry just as one of Newton’s deputies said grace, with a look of tight-mouthed satisfaction on his face. He stepped over the bench and sat down, then looked at the bread trencher in front of him and shook his head in wonderment. Becket was already stoically doing his best, chewing patiently through the gristle. Out of kindness he swapped some of his chicken and beef for Simon’s bacon and pease pottage, washed it down with as much of the thin ale as he could decently lay hands on, and finished the meal with his belly full enough. Simon found the going much harder and only ate half of his portion.