Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  She never stole. Yes, there was temptation wherever she looked; jewels and costly wrought doublets and bodices and billaments left lying carelessly; gowns and kirtles hanging on walls and folded in open chests that could feed her for a year; plate in plenty wherever she turned. With my help she touched none of it. As I told Mary when first she thought of thieving, if anything went missing after her round, then she would lose her invisibility and become the first they would accuse. Papers are different; papers may be misplaced – and why would an old hag want papers? – but jewels, well, even hags may desire jewels. Sometimes Mary would finish up scraps of food left on plates by lazy servants, and one she found a nibble marchpane fancy under a bed which she brought back for Pentecost; but that was not stealing, that was preventing waste. She took perks from the laundry, of course, everyone takes perks; shirts that have lost their marks, candle ends, firewood, rose-water and purveyance soap, to give to her granddaughter at the Falcon. Julia showed no gratitude for her gifts, though.

  In and out they went, leaving the wheelbarrow at the end of the Stone Gallery, where there is too great a flight of steps to bring it down. She had gone to it to change the pails once before she went into my lord Chamberlain’s rooms in the part of the palace called the Prince’s lodgings. There she saw a young gentleman pacing about by the window that looked on the Court Orchard. Robin Carey was still under house arrest and confined to his father’s apartments, where he was bored witless. He looked up at the noise of Pentecost’s prattle, smiled and then went back to his caged pacing. Both Pentecost and Mary thought he was a handsome gentleman with good legs, but Mary was an invisible to him as to all of them. His lute lay abandoned on the window-seat and from the number of screwed-up pieces of paper lying about, he was trying to write a letter, no doubt to the Queen, abasing himself and begging for forgiveness. These things are necessary at Court.

  Mary curtseyed to him and pushed Pentecost’s shoulder so she did the same; he nodded politely and turned his back as they did their business and shuffled out.

  At last they came by the Privy Gallery, where the Queen lives with her women. Mary was supposed to go down to the door of the Queen’s own bedchamber and scratch softly on it, so that the Queen’s chamberer could bring out Her Majesty’s slops. Yes, they go in the common bucket, although perhaps if Mary had thought to bottle them separately, she could have sold them to the besotted populace like saints’ relics or the once-numerous Sacred Drops of my Milk. Perhaps she should have done so, although that would have been to risk an accusation of witchcraft and necromancy against the Queen. “Who knows how powerful a poison could be made against her from her own waste?” the physicians would have said. Unicorn’s horn would scarcely prevail against it, they would agree, rubbing their beards importantly.

  On this morning Mary hurried, pails and all, down the sacred Privy Gallery, past the red-clad men-at-arms who nodded her through. Courtiers pay fortunes to be allowed therein: Mary went there every morning and sometimes ventured farther than her remit. Beyond the Queen’s bedchamber were record rooms and the Library, and it was to the Library that Mary took Pentecost, praying devoutly to me that there would be no one in it.

  There was not, other than myself, the Blessed Virgin, standing smiling by the shelves, to show my approval. Mary put the pails by the door, so she would have warning if anyone came in, and took Pentecost by the hand. She knew her way in there. Occasionally she borrowed books – no, sir, not stole, for she brought them back after she had read them. Reading is a hard habit to shake, once learned.

  Pentecost and she went along the shelves looking for a book that was dusty enough from disuse and low enough that Pentecost could find it. I pointed with my silver finger to help them. There was one, beautifully bound in red leather, with craggy old-fashioned letters that in Latin proclaimed it a Dissertation upon the Blessed Sacrament, by Henricus Rex. That made me smile; it could not have been a better choice if she had searched the whole library for it. The nuns of Mary’s girlhood had loyally bought one of those books for their convent library early in the Queen’s father’s reign, though I doubt a single one of them had taken the trouble to read it. To own one was enough then, for King Henry wrote his Defense of the Blessed Sacrament in contraversion of the heretic Luther, and in gratitude was made Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith, by the Pope.

  Mary took the folded sheets of paper she had cut from the Book of the Unicorn, slipped them between the pages of argument, and put the book back in its gap. Where to hide paper? In a library, of course. Mary knew there would be men combing London for her and if they caught her they would find anything she had on her and no doubt could make her tell where she had hidden everything else, including the gold of Pentecost’s dowry. This was the best place she could think of; a place impossible for a mere man to enter unless he were a councillor of the Queen, but clear and open to a mere night-soil woman.

  Why should she know that it was a Queen’s Privy Councillor who was her worst enemy? I had said nothing of it. She was in terror of pursuivants, and also afraid of the men she had coney-catched and could think of nowhere else that could not be searched. For if pursuivants search, be quiet sure they will find what they seek.

  “Do you see it?” she asked Pentecost. “Can you remember the book?”

  The little girl’s eyes were round and wide, her mouth an O. She nodded, reverent at being in such a place with so many books. As pointlessly as she had with Magdalen and her children, Mary had taught the child her alphabet and she could spell out words, but was not a reader and certainly did not know Latin.

  “Those papers carry the Queen’s honour, like a chick in an egg,” Mary said to her. “Remember where they are. If I should die you must find a way to come back here and fetch the papers. Then keep them until you can find a Catholic priest and sell them to him for the most you can get. They are worth thousands of pounds. Do you understand?”

  Pentecost nodded again, wonder stopping her usual mill-race of words. Mary told her the name of the book and made her repeat it, then she made the child look at the shelf where it was and pinched her arm hard enough to hurt, so she would remember it well.

  They hurried out and back along the corridor, where they found the Queen’s chamberer waiting impatiently with her silver pot. Mary mumbled incoherently when she wanted to know where they had been and after she had lifted her skirts to reassure the woman that she had nothing stolen under them, they hurried on, careful with the pails, always careful with the pails, although God knows the lazy young gentlemen sneak into corners and water them plentifully like dogs. Mary finished her round as swiftly as she could, afraid that the Queen would be back from chapel before she ended and might even recognise her across the decades.

  And then there was the hardest part: to trundle the heavy wheelbarrow back down steps and up steps and along through the Preaching Place, around the kitchens, through the woodyard and so in at the back of the laundry, and there Mary could catch her breath and sit down while the burning in her chest settled, before the work of emptying out the pails into the strainers.

  She longed to sleep, had been up all night. But she showed Pentecost the packet in its wet hiding place and told her it was hers, to take when her grandam was dead.

  The child’s eyes filled with tears, though it cannot be a blessing to have an old witch for a grandam, and she asked tremulously why Mary might die. So she told her what she already knew, that we all must die and Mary’s time was surely near, seeing how long she had lived and how old she was. Pentecost came to put her arms around Mary and declare that she loved her.

  How could Mary tell her that she loved a cesspit of wickedness, a witch damned by her sins, one so evil a priest had refused her absolution? No, she was a coward and let her continue to love, asking me for forgiveness for it.

  When Pentecost had gone skipping to see what job Mrs Twiste might have for her, Mary sat a long while and drank. Then she went on her knees to pray to the Queen of Heaven that Pentecost might live, th
at she might find all the things Mary had hidden for her, that she might prosper, that he children might be raised up to be virtuous and no whores and footpads like her own. If only Pentecost could climb out of the gutter, Mary’s life would not be a complete ruin. Mary did not pray to Almighty God, not yet to her wayward husband, Christ Jesus my Son, for she felt both were too great to hear her prayers. Certainly, they had shown no signs of hearing them before. She prayed to me, the Queen of Heaven, as she always did, and Saint Mary Magdalen, who might better understand her, that we intercede with Our Lord. Perhaps we heard her. She began saying a rosary, from the string of beads she kept around her neck, all that remained to her of her former marriage, her jointure, if you like. I have many faces, many guises: as the Queen of Heaven, and as Theotokos and Saint Sophia, the God-Bearer and Holy Wisdom. Since the Protestants rose up and drove me from religion, they have had a less kindly belief, I think, a more intemperate and demanding God. When Mary was a child, barren women and women whose babies forever died at birth could go on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Walsingham and leave gifts for me, pointless pretty things such as bracelets and rings and necklaces, lengths of blue and white cloth, whatever they could afford. Now the Divines laugh at it and call it superstition. So? Some of those women bore children that lived – who cares what they did to gain them, and who are the Divines to laugh at them? Once there was a time when men too reverenced the Queen of Heaven and were gentler for it, I think. Is it so very ill to pray to Holy Wisdom? What they call the reformed religion, besides being a wicked heresy, is also bereft of humanity in its black-and-white simplicity. They approve of simplicity in faith. Why?

  Well, Mary was also drunk on aqua vitae, which always makes her mutter to myself, and pray, sometimes entire offices at the wrong time, and in Latin, so the women in the laundry believe she is making spells. Eventually she forgot where she was in her rosary and lay down on the sawdust, huddled in my mantle, and went to sleep.

  LXXIV

  BECKET MEANWHILE LEFT MUCH of his gold at a goldsmith’s in Cheapside. He kept back some, and bought a new sword at an armourer’s. Then he walked brazenly through the City to Old Jewry. Dr Nunez found him waiting in his hall and examining the costly hangings that told the story of King David’s life from the killing of Goliath to his problems with Absalom.

  “Mr Becket,” croaked Nunez, awful suspicion instantly flying to his breast. “How . . . how are you? And . . . where is Simon?”

  “I am completely recovered, Doctor,” Becket said with a polite bow. “Simon, however, is in desperate danger.”

  Nunez hurried him into his study and sent the servant for wine and wafers. There Becket told him most of what had happened, and in particular what Simon Ames had done for him.

  “You do not know whether he survived the chase?” Nunez asked him, appalled at his nephew’s foolhardiness and also proud of his courage.

  Becket shook his head. “If he did as I advised him, he should have been living at the end of it,” he said. “Whether he still is . . .” He shrugged massively.

  “Why in the Almighty’s name did he not stay with you . . .?”

  “He was wounded in the shoulder, Doctor, by a halberd. Not badly, but enough to bleed copiously and bring the dogs after him. It was he who thought he should play the decoy, not I. I did not force him, indeed I was against it for I should be sorry to have his death on my conscience as well. But he insisted it was the only rational choice.”

  Nunez nodded, a faraway expression on his face. He sat at his desk, cleared away a pig’s thigh-bone, a dead pigeon and a scalpel, and drew paper and pen towards him.

  “You do not know where Ramme and Munday might have taken him/”

  “At a guess, to the Tower.”

  Nunez nodded gain, and his left hand rubbed his beard. He was looking very worried. “And his mission?”

  Becket spread his hands. “We are at a stand,” he said. “I know the witch must still have the papers, but where she might have gone with them, God only knows.”

  “She must have a good bolt-hole to be so elusive.”

  “Certainly. I believe I should start at the Falcon, but I dare not go there now, for there might be men watching the place to see if I do precisely that. The pursuivants are out in force to search the City; I saw them turning out the Fant household as I passed by. Davison wants me, no doubt believing that I was the one who cut out Her Majesty’s confession.”

  “Confession?”

  Becket explained and Nunez showed no sign of shock, only nodded again.

  “I knew that all was not as it seemed,” he said distantly, “when I examined her with the other doctors during the Alençon courtship.”

  “Good God,” said Becket, shocked and a little sickened to think that Dr Nunez had seen the Queen’s privy parts.

  “We reported that she was intact and had all that pertained to a woman, that was all. It was sufficient. I have never mentioned it. But this explains a great deal, a great deal. I shall be better able to treat her, knowing that it is an old wound that causes her stomach cramps.” He wrote some notes to himself, not in Latin but in Hebrew which would be better hidden from prying eyes. Then he began writing a letter. Becket shifted restlessly.

  “I had best be going,” he said.

  “Why can you not stay here?” Nunez asked. “You need a place to sleep, and as ever my house is your house.”

  “You honour me, sir, but I dare not stay. Think on it. When Mr Davison knows Simon’s name, he will immediately search here.”

  “Ah. Yes. Yes, he will.” Nunez range a silver bell on his desk, and wrote faster. He seemed to be encrypting from memory as he went. “We had best prepare for him.”

  When the servant came, he was told to fetch Mrs Nunez and their steward. Becket stood decisively. “I shall return tomorrow,” he said. “If a child that is not a child, but a tiny woman, comes here, let her in and ask her to wait for me. If it is safe for me to enter when I come, put a candle in the window by your door, as you do on Saturdays.”

  Dr Nunez nodded abstractedly. As Becket went to the door, he saw Mrs Nunez and the steward going into Nunez’s study and hear the rapid fire of urgent Portuguese. By the time he had passed through Aldgate, the Nunez household was boiling like a copper. He walked swiftly along Houndsditch, by the long wall where the London fullers have their tenter-frames for stretching new cloth in summer. At the Dolphin Inn on Bishopsgate he hired a horse and joined the people faring out of London into the countryside: messengers and merchants, pack-trains, coaches, common carriers, men with their arquebuses going out to Artillery Yard to practise shooting, men with bows going to the Spital Field to do the same, women with dogs; and, against the flow for a mile, a large baaing herd of sheep coming into the City to be eaten. Becket is stronger than many, but he had not slept for two nights and he noticed hardly any of this, dozing on his horse as he rode. As is often the way, if he had skulked out of the City on foot, the two pursuivants set to watch Aldgate for him would have seen him. Being as he was on horseback and half asleep, they let him through. Mary would say that it was the protection of my mantle again.

  Behind him, letters flowed out of Dr Nunez’s study like autumn leaves on a stream: to Sir Francis Walsingham, to Mr Davison, to Sir Horatio Palavicino in the Netherlands, to the Earl of Leicester, to the Queen; the physician mustering his very considerable influence to find his nephew in the clutches of the State. Half-way thought, the pursuivants arrived, Mr Ramme commanding and looking harassed and exhausted, with rings around his eyes.

  It was typical of Nunez that he invited Mr Ramme into his house courteously, offered him food which Ramme refused, gave him spiced wine which Ramme only drank after Dr Nunez had tasted it. The pursuivants worked methodically through the house, while Leonora Nunez fluttered after them wringing her hands and beseeching them to be careful.

  They found nothing, of course. Nothing of Nunez’s correspondence with half of Europe, nothing of his merchant ventures, nothing of the Queen’s Gr
eat Matter, only many evidences of the Queen’s high respect for Dr Nunez, and letters from Sir Francis Walsingham thanking Nunez for his assistance in the Queen’s defence. Even Ramme, who had been quite certain he would find evidence of treason, began to wonder if it had been quite politic to search the house of so prominent a servant of the Queen, even if he was only a Jew and in England on sufferance. When the Purveyor of Her Majesty’s Grocery, Mr Dunstan Ames, arrived with a retinue of six servants and began to question him as to his son Simon’s health and whereabouts, Ramme became even more worried. Davison seemed not to be concerned about how he offended powerful men about the Court, saying he was as sure of the Queen’s favour as the Earl of Leicester – had he not persuaded her to sign the Queen of Scots’ death warrant? – but Ramme knew only too well how fickle was Her Majesty’s fancy.

  The pursuivants left late in the afternoon. By evening the servants, supervised by a furious Leonora, were cleaning and scrubbing every inch of the house to remove their traces, while Nunez and his brother-in-law wrote more letters and considered how they would approach the Queen.

  That was when a beggarmaid with a grim dirty face approached the back door and asked humbly if she could speak with Dr Nunez. Nunez went out to her, preoccupied with something else, he stopped and stared.

  “Mistress Thomasina?” he asked. “It is you?”

  She looked up at him and her face screwed up in a monkey-like squint, which was the outward sign of her longing and refusal to burst into tears.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Aha, the child that is not a child. Please, mistress, come in, we have been waiting for you.”

  She came and although she refused to sit down, she drank two gobletfuls of spiced wine and ate some pheasant pie. She seemed very weary, and so Leonora Nunez put her to bed in the best guest-room, after she had washed in a hip-bath and shucked her gaudy rags. Leonora had no children, to her bitter sorrow and regret, but her brother Dunstan had fourteen, five of them maidens. A servant was sent running to the Ames household and came back with a fine smock and embroidered velvet bodice and blue embroidered kirtle so Thomasina could dress herself as more befitted her station.