Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “Hold still.”

  Becket’s hands moved and prodded; Simon fought back a cry.

  “Well, you are in luck,” he said, “some luck, anyway. It’s not a bullet wound. I think a halberd must have caught you in the scuffle.”

  “Oh.” There was a strange split inside Simon, stemming from the icy claw in his shoulder, one part overwhelmed with pain, the other part standing somewhere quiet and far off, observing. I have been wounded, said the distant part; how strange, this has never happened before. Simon was familiar with all sorts of illness, with the confused vividness of fever, the frightening treasonous pain of infected lungs, the weariness and cramping of thirst of the flux. Occasionally he had suffered a beating, but never had there been an actual hole made in his flesh. It was terrifyingly unfamiliar to have such a burning pain running through him, to be shaking so hard with cold. His teeth chattered and clacked and it took all his strength to hold them together, to keep quiet.

  Becket was swearing softly under his breath, making complicated stealthy movements and hampered at every one by the grabbing brambles around them. Simon lay with his face in the frozen leaves, wheezing, wondering what the Almighty thought He was doing and in what ineffable way He thought this was funny.

  “If I had a light and a needle and thread I could do better that this,” Becket said, cutting and ripping with his teeth at the bottom half of his shirt, “but it will have to do. Take your doublet off.”

  The struggle seemed endless – to undo a multiplicity of buttons, to pull his arms free. Becket helped him, freed him when he snagged cloth on thorns.

  Becket’s square fingers were gentle as they probed to find the ends of the slash, wadded up his bits of shirt and tied it tightly to Ames’s shoulder with strips he had torn from the tail. A little bottle of rough spirits clinked against his teeth and Ames gulped gratefully, felt fire answer fire and warm him a little.

  Becket was peering out of the thicket, squinting around in the starlight.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Why?” Ames was querulous, he wanted no more blundering about in brambles.

  “I told you. The pursuivants have gone for dogs. If you want to play the part of a stag in Lambeth Marsh, I do not.”

  Meekly Ames climbed out of the brambles and followed him, his body divided into three, with a head made of clouds, a shoulder made of fire and legs of butter.

  Again Becket seemed full of certainty and knew which way to go. Ames wondered how he could tell, with the trees and streams. Or no – rather these were drainage ditches, all frozen.

  Becket looked down at the icy ditch and cursed.

  “Generally I would walk up the ditch for a mile or so,” he said to himself. “Damn the weather.”

  They walked beside it for a little to a hedge and even Ames could have followed the trail they left in the frosty leaves.

  Becket scouted for a bit, found a weaker spot in the hedge and climbed through, helped Ames in after him.

  “Where are we?”

  “Hush.”

  They passed through an orchard, watched warily by a donkey in the corner, came to a little foot-bridge over the drainage ditch. Ames blinked around at the starlit silent houses and the light spilling from around the shutters.

  “B . . . but this is where we started, that is Pudding Mill.”

  “Certainly it is,” said Becket, with a grin. “I had a bet with myself that Ramme would not have the sense to leave a watch, and it seems he did not.”

  “He must have,” Ames said. “Not even Ramme could be so foolish.”

  A small neat shadow detached itself from other shadows and came towards them. Becket had his hand on his knife, but Ames put an arm out reassuringly.

  “Mrs Thomasina?” he called softly.

  Becket frowned at the sight of the child, looked doubtfully at Ames and back at the muliercula.

  “Ames, what is going –”

  “Quiet,” Ames wedged his clumsy feet against the cobbles, took deep breaths to steady himself. “Mistress Thomasina, can you bring us to the Queen?”

  There was a soft snort. “Not tonight. This way.”

  “But –”

  “Quiet,” Ames said again. “I will explain later. Where are we going?”

  “The water-steps. Come on.”

  “Ramme . . .”

  “There was a man waiting here, but he is safe now.”

  “Drinking?”

  “No,” said Thomasina, showing her teeth in exactly the way Becket did. “Dead.”

  Becket was shaking his head, laughing softly. Ames understood how he felt. Under the starlight it was all too strange, as if they were in a play. Only the fire in Ames’s shoulder and the palsy in all his flesh nailed him to reality.

  The moon had been buried in cloud, with only a patch of silver to show where it burned cold. They crept softly to the water-steps and saw the men-at-arms waiting there patiently, two at the steps and four on the ice, tried for Upper Ground and saw more men standing in shadow, waiting for them.

  Becket had lost his serenity now he had time to think. His voice shook with frustration and fear.

  “They know we are in this part of the South Bank,” he whispered. “When they bring their dogs, we’ll be taken.” Ames was too weary and cold to argue, though he watched Becket’s hands clasp and unclasp about each other, as if they were pale animals seeking comfort. Thomasina’s little black eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened at such a crumbling pillar of a man.

  “This way,” she hissed and led them, creeping one behind the other, into an alley between houses, then into the millstream, which the miller had broken many times to keep his mill working. More cold water, Ames thought sadly as he put his legs into it, and shivered across.

  Here at least there were no men-at-arms. Thomasina opened a door, then shut it behind them. They were surrounded by the choking smell of grain and flour, the mill store-room. Ames sat down on a sack and shivered. Matter-of-factly Becket put his own dank cloak around him and squatted down nearby. Thomasina’s voice came out of the darkness, soft, self-possessed and marked with London.

  “I am Thomasina de Paris, The Queen’s Fool and muliercula.” The soft dusty darkness flowed back around her words and Ames coughed. “I am Her Majesty’s most private informer in this matter.”

  “You both know me,” Ames said in turn, hearing his own voice flattened with weariness. When had he last had a night’s sleep? The night before yesterday. He had been in the stocks last night, had managed to doze off a couple of times during the hideous day tied to the bed, and now had a slash in his shoulder to keep him awake.

  “You are not a child?” Becket said.

  “No.” Thomasina’s voice was forbidding.

  “Forgive me,” Becket said, “I thought . . .”

  “No reason why you should think anything else, Mr Becket; others have made the same mistake and with less cause.”

  We are voices in the darkness, Simon thought; how strange. Is this how we shall be in the grave?

  Becket sighed gustily and swallowed a cough from the flour dust. “Did you know Mr Ames was wounded rescuing me from being arrested?” he rumbled.

  “No.” Thomasina spoke sharply. “Badly?”

  “Not too . . .”

  “It feels bad enough to me,” Ames said, aggrieved.

  “There is no reason in the world why that slash should kill you,” Becket told him. “It is down to the bone in one place, but if you can find a surgeon to sew it up, you will be better in a week or so.” Simon felt himself bridling inwardly at this dismissing of the terrible hole in his body, and then reminded himself that to Becket it was not very great thing. Becket dealt in a world where such things were as much a hazard of living as catching cold.

  “We must consider what we are to do,” said Thomasina.

  Ames found his voice dammed by a complete lack of inspiration. After a moment, Becket’s voice came muffled and utterly exhausted. “Why, what can we do? They have us sto
pped up like game. When they come to search the mill, we will be taken . . .” His words trailed away and the darkness and silence pressed down on their heads. Ames blinked at Becket: this was not the man he had known, to despair so quickly.

  Becket coughed again, seemed to be making some mighty effort. “In the meantime, I desire to know some answers.”

  “Why?” demanded Thomasina.

  “So that when Davison puts me to the question again, I shall have something to tell him.”

  Eyes glinted in the darkness; Ames and Thomasina exchanged looks. Instinctively, Ames felt that Becket’s despair was the worse danger to them. As he had been once, he would be capable of finding a way out; as he was now . . . he might even surrender to Ramme and Munday.

  Where to begin? “It concerns the Book of the Unicorn . . .” Ames began, heard the echo and realised Thomasina was saying the same thing.

  “Oh ay, the Queen’s book,” said Becket dully, “I know that. The thing with her will and testament in it, and a confession also, from the time when she was a fourteen-year-old slut and thought she was dying of childbed fever.”

  Thomasina gasped.

  “Did you not know that was what was in it?” Becket asked, a little roused by her surprise. “To be sure, that is why she cannot have Walsingham search for it. Even Sidney could understand that. She was with child of the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour in her fifteenth year and brought on a miscarriage. She thought she was dying and wrote a will and also, I think, a confession to assoil her soul.”

  “Never,” said Thomasina positively. “She would never do that.”

  “She did,” said Becket as positively, “I have read it. She was a girl, frightened, vengeful and also feverish, not the politic Queen you know now. The witch that attended her, must have stolen it from her and kept it all this time.”

  “Good God,” said Thomasina, clearly shaken to the core. “No wonder . . .”

  No wonder what, she did not say. Sitting in the thick darkness as they were, Thomasina’ voice was high but mature, Ames thought. You would not mistake her for a child if you only listened to her voice.

  “Now your turn, Ames.”

  “Where shall I begin?”

  “With your death.” Becket’s voice was cold and hard.

  Ames swallowed and put his freezing hands under his armpits. He could not get warm, though the shaking had eased.

  “David,” he said, “I . . . I cannot say how sorry I am to have fooled you. It was done for policy, for reasons of state, and when we have more time I will break the whole matter to you, but not now. I did not realise . . . I had no idea you would be so grieved by it.”

  Becket sniffed.

  “Will you accept my apology?” Simon said humbly, “I wronged you by not trusting you and it was ill-done, but . . .”

  “You pretended to be my friend in the Fleet when I was still wounded in my wits.” Harshness still crackled in Becket’s voice. “That was why I was so angry. That you should play the informer against me.”

  “Yes,” said Simon, “though there I think I am less at fault. After my Uncle Hector attended you in the Tower, he sent for me and I came back to London from Bristol where I have been living, and my whole intent was to see you released from there. But when I spoke to the Queen, it turned out that you were engaged on a quest for her Book of the Unicorn and she forced me to work upon you as I did in the Fleet.”

  “How?”

  “She threatened to expel us from England.”

  “Your family?”

  “All of us, all the Jews here. My intention was to stay close to you and as soon as you showed signs that you were remembering your past, I would have revealed myself to you and we would have conceived a plan to pursue the matter.”

  “Why did you not do it?”

  “David, you were very careful to keep it secret that you had remembered. I know now it was after you saw Father Hart, but I did not know it then or I would have spoken to you at once.”

  There was a small sound of acknowledgement from Becket.

  “The Queen set me to watch you also,” said Thomasina. “She asked me because I am her Fool and answer only to her, because I am no creature of Burghley’s or Walsingham’s, and because I can pass as a child and so be more secret. She wanted me to watch both of you, Mr Becket, and Mr Ames, since she did not entirely trust him either.”

  “Despite holding so many hostages against his good behaviour?” Becket asked.

  “Certainly, Mr Becket.” Thomasina’s voice held the ghost of amusement along with its worldliness. “If you were the Queen and placed as she is, would you trust anyone at all?”

  Becket snorted. “No.”

  “She could hardly search for the witch herself, she could trust none of her usual intelligencers, and so here we are – a dead man, a midget and yourself, Mr Becket, and yet it seems we have succeeded. Will you give me the book now, or would you prefer to present it to the Queen yourself?”

  There was a short regretful pause. Becket sighed.

  “To be sure, Mistress Thomasina, I do not have it. Father Hart had it.”

  If the darkness had been a lake, Becket’s words would have crashed into it and made it fountain. There was a rippling of silence, in which Ames could hear faint bubbles of sharp sound in the distance.

  “What?” Thomasina’s voice was strangled down to a croak.

  “Well, what could I do? After all, he had the Spanish gold. My plan was to . . . er . . . take it off him afterwards.”

  “And Father Hart is . . .” Thomasina asked, still breathless with dismay.

  “Who knows? He fought when I was struck to stone, he made the chance for us to get away when I could not. God knows, I had thought him no more than an ordinary traitor, but . . . perhaps he is dead, perhaps captured, perhaps he escaped. I have no idea . . .”

  “And you left the book with him.”

  “I had no choice.” Becket’s voice was as icy as the drainage ditches. “I was more concerned to keep out of Ramme’s clutches myself, having been in them once too often, and Ames and Hart between them had made me a little tiny chance which I had needs take at once, without sparing time to go searching about in any man’s doublet for some God-damned Book of the Unicorn. What would you have me do, woman, say to Ramme, ‘Ah, excuse me, your honour, give me a minute before I run like a rabbit; let me just take this book from the priest who is fighting three men at once in my behalf . . .’”

  Thomasina did not answer his sarcasm. And Ames could bear to listen to Becket’s self-contempt no longer.

  “Shh. I know what we can do. Listen.”

  The calling of dogs sounded in the distance, deer-hounds giving tongue.

  LXVII

  DAVISON SAT ON A stool and looked down at the book in his hands. The velvet was worn down to the nap from being carried, with a long scrape scarring it on the back. The embroidered unicorn had partly come unravelled so that the padding drooled out, the ruby for its eye and the golden thread of its horn had long ago been sold, some of the pages were stained and others stuck together. Others had been cut out.

  He looked at the man on the bed whose breath bubbled and caught harshly in his throat.

  “Well, Mr Hart,” he said softly. “What have we here?”

  “You know I am a priest,” said the Papist.

  Davison inclined his head. “I know,” he said. “I do not regard you as my father.”

  There was a flicker of humour in the priest’s eyes.

  “Nevertheless,” he whispered, “I regard you as my son, prodigal though you are.”

  Davison’s lip lifted with distaste. The priest was going to die because no man can survive a halberd thrust squarely through the middle of his back. They had had to saw off the shaft to let him lie down, and the end of the blade poked out through his belly where his fingers plucked at it unconsciously. He could not live long enough to betray any of his associates, nor could he meet his death properly in public, as an edification to the foolish multitu
des. Davison would not be taken in by him again.

  “Tell me what is in the book,” suggested Davison.

  “Read it yourself.”

  “Some of the writing is . . . damaged. Tell me.”

  The priest’s eyes considered him for a moment, and he smiled.

  “Recommendations to the holy state of virginity.”

  “And?”

  “And? The Queen’s sin. Your precious Virgin Queen is no such thing.”

  Davison’s face remained as smooth and calm as an effigy.

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Her own hand. Her . . . will when she was a chit of a girl . . . her confession.”

  “Confession?”

  “Her admission that she was dying . . . or thought she was . . . because she fell with child by . . . Thomas Seymour and did away with . . . the babe herself.”

  Davison was silent for a long time.

  “I have it now,” he said.

  “Of course,” said the priest. “As . . . I intended.”

  “Why? Why have you helped me lay hands on it?”

  “Nothing . . . I could do . . . with a spear in my back.”

  “No, Mr Hart. Without your message, we might not have been at the Falcon at all. Why did you help us?”

  “Why does . . . it matter?”

  “I am curious.” Davison was also uneasy. If the Queen’s reaction had not made it so obvious the bill was true, he might have suspected the Jesuits of cooking the whole thing up and forging the book, the better to turn the Queen’s men from their allegiance. The priest shifted. Like many clever men, he liked to boast of his cleverness, even if it hurt him.

  “Think about it. We of the True Faith know the Queen is a wicked immoral Jezebel . . . but she has enchanted all of you with her witchcraft. Yes . . . I could have taken the book . . . to Rheims and printed it and made it public, and . . . you would have ignored it as a manifest forgery.”

  Davison tilted his head because this was incontrovertibly true.

  “Now . . . you, Mr Davison, and Walsingham and Burghley . . . are misguided Protestants, but even at Rheims we know you are honest men. I knew that . . . if you could but see what a . . . whited sepulchre she is . . . how she is a witch on a throne of lies, you would take steps to control her. Also I was sure Becket, bless his heart, would . . . cut my throat once we had it. A recusant told me that he is the Queen’s man, through and through . . . He was working, I believe . . . originally for Sidney. He would have burnt or returned it . . . to the Queen. I was happy for you or Walsingham to have the book . . . I had not expected a halberd.” The priest sighed.