Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “I think . . .” He had wrinkled up his eyes as if it hurt him to think at all. “I think, when we crossed the river . . . One of the others, Dyer, perhaps, let me hold his stirrup to help me through the water, seeing I had no horse. We got on the bank under cover of the arquebusiers, who had crossed first, and Greville and Norris were helping Sidney down from his horse onto a litter. I went with him.”

  “Why? Did he ask for you?”

  “No . . . I . . .There was blood. Yes. I was bleeding.”

  “You were wounded?”

  “Nothing bad. A sword-cut to the shoulder. One of the surgeons sewed me up when we got to Arnhem.”

  “You were with Sidney afterwards?”

  Becket stopped on the stairs, shut his eyes for a moment, wrestling inwardly until the sweat shone on his face. Simon reached over anxiously and touched his arm.

  “Please. Do not over-try yourself. If some came back, then surely the rest will. It is only a matter of patience.”

  “Mr Anriques, if you only knew how sick I am of patience,” said Becket sadly, staring at his feet as he jingled his way down to the courtyard.

  XLVII

  BETHANY SHOULD HAVE STAYED in bed for at least the next day, only the Queen summoned her and in terror of having a doctor sent to her sick-bed she dared not excuse herself. She put red cinnabar on her cheeks, plugged herself with rags and went to serve her mistress.

  All day she stood and sat and fetched and carried and held up her hands so Lady Bedford could wind wool. When they cleared the floor for dancing, she asked to be excused on account of a megrim and went early to her bed.

  But it was not her head that hurt.

  Mary saw her there still the next day when she went in to empty the chamber-pots. Did you think chamber-pots and stools empty themselves by magic? Even at Court, where the office of Third Clerk to the Poultry is highly sought after because of the money to be made in it, even there no one becomes a night-soil woman willingly. But Mary had been in fear of arrest.

  Young Julia had found her the place at Court through Dame Twiste and through my help. Ann Twiste gave young Pentecost a place in her laundry, and to Mary she gave the work of carrying covered buckets round the back corridors of the Court to collect up the effluvium of the great. It was hard on Mary’s old back and bony collar-bones to carry a yoke, but there again, she had no choice. All of Court within the Virge was out of any pursuivant’s jurisdiction. Pliny, or some such learned man, hath said that there are birds that make their dwelling even in the mouth of a crocodile and their nest in his teeth, to clean them, and are safe.

  Yes, there is a great house of easement at Court, near the woodyard, that drains into the Thames and plays no small part in colouring that river brown. But it is for the hordes of young men at Court. A woman would be shamefast to walk into such a place and lift her skirts to sit over a hole in a bench surrounded by untrussed men, all talking and smoking tobacco and telling each other evil and lying tales of women. And a Queen’s lady must void herself no less than a man, whereof her chamber-pot must in due course be emptied by some such as Mary.

  Wherefore should anyone bother to collect and keep night-soil? Well, sir (and I take pleasure in telling you this, which was known also in my day, in Palestine, but, as now, only to women), the finest whitener and cleanser of linen is to scrub it in ten-day-old piss, and accordingly there are barrels in the basement of the laundry, down by the water. So it be well-rinsed, it does not stain yellow but rather takes out stains.

  Therefore every two hours or so, in trudges Mary and tips her buckets into the cloth sieves and after much straining and sieving it passes into a barrel to mature. The rest goes down a chute into other large barrels in the foulest cellar in Christendom, by reason of the Queen’s niceness with regard to smells. The dung from the cart-horses that haul supplies in by the Court gate and through the woodyard likewise ends there, for the Queen will have no midden in her sight.

  Every week the barrels are taken downriver by boat to Essex, where the ordnance men pile it up in great heaps and after several years come and dig it over to find the white saltpetre below. There are other ways of making saltpetre, and none of them can make enough, for there is an endless crying need of it, whether for curing bacon or fixing dyes or making gunpowder. You find this distresses you? I cry you mercy for your delicate stomach. Perhaps you had best run and find yourself some pretty book of sonnets or some great lolloping description of an Arcadia where men have their pillicocks sewn up tight and their arses also and women likewise, and all is as delicate as can be.

  So it was that Sister Mary came in upon Mistress Bethany, not knowing her, nor who she was at the time, save that she was a maid of honour and in her truckle-bed at an unseasonable hour. She was curled up there with the great curtains of her kirtles hanging up on either side, her face flushed and her forehead dry as a bone.

  Mary was not so drunk as usual. She saw the child and recognised her at last and something from forty years before rose up inside her. Mary went to her, hearing her moan, and touched her to find her burning. Bethany woke then but was disordered by the heat, and pulled away. Or perhaps she found Mary as frightening and foul as a witch in a fairy-tale. Or perhaps she knew her as the witch that attended her.

  “No,” she said, and muttered.

  “Shall I fetch your tiring-woman?” Mary asked her.

  “No,” Bethany said, forcing her eyes to focus. “Thank you, I need nothing.”

  Mary liked her for a polite child that did not tell her to begone with her stinking buckets. She found her pot and saw what was in it, which could not be put with the rest, but must be tipped quietly onto the fire instead. And whose fault was it she was in such a state? Mary knew she had been drunk the night before last, sin piled on sin, and a beautiful girl that might have been her own granddaughter destroyed by it.

  “My dear,” Mary said, pity and shame blocking her throat, “young mistress,” she added lest she offend, “you must see a doctor. I fear you are distempered with fever.”

  Bethany shrugged and tossed herself over.

  “Please leave me alone; I shall be well enough.”

  Mary brought her a cup of wine from the flagon by the fire. She drank, being made thirsty by fever, and then huddled the blankets up over her shoulders. So Mary put a cloak across the bed to keep her warm, made up the fire. Then she hesitated before she took her buckets on the yoke across her shoulders again. It was only a kindly thought, but she must still have had her thinking disordered with booze or she would never have been so foolish. Certainly it was no command of mine.

  All she did to bring her doom was to write a note for Bethany’s tiring-woman, that the girl needed a doctor and quickly and must be tended and not left alone in a poky airless little back room of the palace. There were pens and paper on a table, scented for sending to lovers and rejecting sonnets therefrom, all part of that ardent complex lying foolery they call Courtly Love. It pleased Sister Mary’s vanity to be able to write as fair a hand as she wished still, for all the arthritis knotting her joints and the long time since she last had anything to turn into writing. She thought to herself that if only she had been a man, she could have been a good screever, better than some of the old monks that did such work. So it was self-indulgence. But what could she do, guilty as she was? Either she left ill alone, or she tried to help the poor maid what way she could, and that was all she could do. She had no gardens to pluck feverfew, no willow-bark nor garlic to give. Certainly she could not wait there for someone to come since she was late on her round as it was, and had to make a journey to the wheelbarrow with full buckets to replace them with empty ones before she could continue. Still, she should have known better. What did it matter to Mary if the silly bitch died?

  The children of Eve help each other to ease their own hearts, I think. That night Mary sat in a boozing ken by Charing Cross, refusing to look at me or speak to me, smoking her pipe and drinking the world to softness, bright lights and a whirlpool of blesse
d forgetfulness.

  XLVIII

  THERE ARE SHOPS AND stalls in London where you may buy ruffs to wear at court; some starched with blue or yellow starch, some plain white. Those who wear them or admire them never know how painful thing it is to make a ruff: yard upon yard of white Holland linen drawn up and stitched to the compass of a neckband. What you have then is a flabby thing, not the glory of fashion that it will become. After making, it must be dipped in starch and part-dried carefully upon a line. Tubes of metal must be put in each fold to tease it out evenly with the help of a metal rod hot from the fire. And at last comes wax to seal the open ends, alternately, to make a multiplicity of figures of eight. And then it can be worn at most for a few days or a week, if you are not serving the Queen herself, and then it must be washed and starched and ironed and sealed with wax again. In every single ruff around every single courtly neck is a week’s work for a woman.

  The recusant Catholic gentlewoman in the Fleet had never needed to win a living before, but the expenses of the prison and recusancy fines are such that they would soon be destitute if they did nothing. All the skills they had, apart from the efficient running of large manors and many servants, were their needles, and perhaps the making of banqueting stuff, for which there is scarcely any need in the Fleet. And so they sat in a circle, every day including Sundays, and stitched frantically at one part or another of the ruffs. Those they finished were sent in their flabby state to a nearby starching-house to be finished off and then sold throughout London. Each woman was paid a penny for each ruff finished in a day, and so, by working all the hours of daylight, they could just keep pace with the costs of shared beds and bad food without resorting to the other profession of womankind. It is a poor trade and an invitation to immorality for any girl who thinks herself too fair to stitch linen until her eyes squint.

  The gentlewomen making their ruffs were sitting where they could watch the great inner gate of the Fleet Prison yard. At ten of the clock, it opened to admit friends and relatives of the prisoners who could pay Newton the right garnish. Their eyes silently sorted among the new faces and at last there was a rustle and shift among them, for some of them saw the man they awaited.

  He was not tall, though he was strongly built and walked with a swordsman’s swagger. His hair was black and his square face had a sharp canny look. This time he was not wearing homespun, but a good gentleman’s suit of berry-brown wool. He strolled as if he were not on the list of every pursuivant in London, to be captured dead or alive, and tipped his hat coolly to Newton. Then he began by examining the trestle-tables and bought several of the things thereon, before sauntering over to speak to one of the ruff-making ladies as she unpicked the stitches that had mysteriously gone crooked. Intent on them, he had not noticed who else was in the busy yard, over by the steps up to the Eightpenny Ward.

  That was the moment when Simon, who had been artistically forging the signature on a counterfeit Bedlam begging licence, looked up and saw Becket staring at a visitor talking to the gentlewoman making ruffs like a rabbit at a stoat.

  He came to his feet, almost upsetting his ink-bottle, and took the shillings from the beggar without even noticing the man had underpaid him. Becket had gone the colour of old putty and was shaking.

  “What is it?” Simon asked, taking his elbow. “What has happened?”

  Becket’s mouth opened, worked; no sound came out. He looked at Simon and swayed.

  “Come,” said Simon briskly. “Let us fetch you upstairs now and lay you down.”

  Becket was resistless and his cumbered feet stumbled on the worn steps. Clucking him along like a child, Simon got him into Eightpenny Ward and all the way to the end, where he sat down on the side of the bed and put his head in his hands.

  “Lie down now, sir; perhaps we may avoid another fit if you rest.”

  Obediently Becket hefted his feet up and lay straight, looking at the stained ceiling where some flakes of paint still clung. The man with fever was still in his bed by the door, but seemed to be sleeping. Simon sat down next to Becket.

  “Go and . . . go and stop anyone from coming,” said Becket slowly, “especially the . . . the man that was talking to the . . . ladies. Keep him away from me. Please.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Becket looked at him for the first time. His eyes were terrible.

  “For Christ’s sake, go.”

  Worried and puzzled, Simon got up and went to the end of the ward. He paused by the bed of the man with fever, concerned at his ominous stillness, then shrugged and carried on.

  The Eightpenny Ward was silent and dim, smelling of unwashed men and worse linen, mouldy straw and damp plaster, of rats and fish and the foul jakes.

  Becket turned on his stomach and pressed his fists into his eyes. After all his agonising and straining, the thing when it happened had been simple enough. He had looked at a man across the courtyard and known him as Father Hart. He had known . . . Somehow a petard had been laid against the gates of his locked memory and blasted them open and knowledge was boiling round his mind like a battle.

  All the weight of what he had been doing since Zutphen had come slamming down around him and it terrified him no less than ever. No wonder his memory had gone a-wandering; a man might well run witless at the thought. If the Queen knew what he knew, she would . . . Well, to be sure she would hang, draw and quarter him, but she would also cut his tongue out and probably his eyes to make certain he could not pass it on. And to be fair to her, he would have done the same if he had been in a like position, for reasons of state.

  I am a dead man, he thought. Oh Christ.

  Other lumps of knowledge came swirling to him in the melee. He knew now that Simon Anriques was in fact Simon Ames and he had thought the man dead four years gone.

  “The bastard,” he muttered, writhing with rage. “That bastard bloody Jew, I wept for him.”

  Simon had been an inquisitor for Walsingham. Once an inquisitor, always an inquisitor, and there could be no coincidence in his being in the Fleet, none at all. Kin as rich as the Ames and Nunez families would have bailed him out and paid his mere five thousand pounds of debt before Newton so much as clapped eyes on him. And Nunez had treated Becket in the Tower when he was helpless as a child . . . God damn them for their cunning kindness, God damn them all. They were working for the Queen, they were trying to find out how much he knew . . .

  He was panting now with fear. If they knew his memory had come back, they would . . . The least of it would be a return to the Tower. Little Ease, no doubt, and then into the basement of King William’s Tower and hanging by his arms again, now they were better. God knew what else they would do if they thought it worthwhile, or rather he did know, too well, and had no false expectations that he would now be able to keep his mouth shut if they did them.

  What could he do? How could he save himself? Part of it was obvious enough: he must give no sign to anyone that he had remembered. On the other hand, Father Hart would want to talk to him, to make contact and perhaps even tell what he had found. Presumably he had not caught up with the witch or the Book of the Unicorn because he was still in England and not on a boat to France.

  Becket could admit to a partial remembrance and perhaps learn how much Father Hart had discovered. Father Hart believed Becket to be a repenting Catholic called Ralph Strangways who was helping Father Hart to find out the holder of the Queen’s deadly secret so it could be used against her by Parma. Only Becket had known what he planned to do if they found the Book of the Unicorn, if it contained what it was said to contain. Which he must not admit to knowing.

  “If I stay in the Fleet, I’ll let it slip somehow,” he said to himself. “I must get out.”

  And then where?

  “The Netherlands, of course,” he muttered. “Not even Davison could find me there.”

  Davison’s name alone had the power to cause his throat to stop with fright. If Davison every laid hands on him again . . .

  “No,” he said to hi
mself with finality, “not alive. Never again.”

  But he could not go back to the Netherlands immediately. He had given his word to a dying man that he would find the Queen’s Book of the Unicorn.

  IL

  IN THE TWO WEEKS after the battle of Zutphen Sir Philip Sidney went from being a lanky, elegant man with a face a little like a sheep to a skeleton with great bruised eyes. Becket had pitied him, for Sidney had never been wounded before, was inexperienced in pain, and his leg was about as bad as it could be and still be attached to his body. By one of the strange miracles of musketry, the ball which shattered his thigh-bone had not touched the great leg artery and so he had not bled to death, although he had bled a great deal. Sidney would not be separated from Becket, refusing to let him be treated in the main camp by the trenches of Zutphen, clinging to him surprisingly. Becket could not remember much about their journey by barge to the house of Mlle Gruithuissen, since he too had lost blood copiously from his shoulder slash and the surgeon had bled both of them a further four ounces on the way, to guard against infection.

  Becket did remember trying to talk some sense into Sidney, who turned out to have a surprisingly degree of obstinacy in him, despite his loss of sanguine humour.

  “Have them take your leg off,” he remembered saying gruffly, while they lay side by side on their pallets and the barge wallowed its painful way behind the plodding horse on the tow-path, though the rocking and scraping of innumerable locks, to the little town of Arnhem. “Have them cut at the mid-thigh where the bone is sound, and good riddance.”

  “No,” Sidney had said through his clamped teeth. “I will not be a cripple.”

  “Christ’s guts, man,” Becket had said brutally. “You are crippled. No more tournaments for you, no more battles. The only choice is to be a dead cripple or a live one.”

  “No.”

  Becket was the stronger, had not in fact wanted to go to Arnhem at all, only Sidney had insisted on it. He was weak with blood-loss and his shoulder burned monstrously, but it had only been a long sword-cut from above, easily washed with aqua vitae and sewn up. There had been no need for boiling oil in the wound to sear out the poison of gunpowder, no need for the surgeon’s fingers, nails in mourning with old blood, to go probing about in it looking for a ball and wad. To be sure he was weak, but beef and beer three times a day and a week’s rest, and he knew from experience he would be well enough, providing the wound did not go sick.