Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  She slept until Becket arrived refreshed at noon the next day, having lain at the Angel Inn at Islington overnight and slept solidly from before sun-down.

  They conferred in her bedroom once she was properly dressed and then went purposefully to Dr Nunez in his study.

  “Doctor,” said Thomasina, sitting down very gently on a cushion, “whence come the soap-cakes you use?”

  “The soap?” repeated Nunez. Thomasina was a woman, but he had not expected interest in huswifery from the Queen’s Fool.

  “Yes,” said Thomasina flintily, evidently enraged at someone and having trouble being civil, “the soap.”

  Nunez was also having trouble, being more concerned about his nephew than he liked to admit. Walsingham had not yet responded to his letters, neither had the Earl, whereas Davison had written only to deny he had any such man in his keeping.

  “Er . . . from Seville,” he said, willing to humour her. “I import from Spain, where they make the finest soap.”

  “What does this stamp upon it mean?” She produced the bar of soap that Leonora had given her for her toilet, rose-scented and now well-used. Nunez blinked at the stamp and then coughed.

  “Ah,” he said, “well, the stamp indicates that these are . . . er . . . intended for purveyance to the Court. My brother-in-law supplies the Court with grocery.”

  “And soap?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the soap?”

  What was this with soap, in the name of the Almighty (Blessed be He)? How could it possibly be important?

  “Yes.”

  Thomasina put down the bar on his desk and looked significantly at Becket, who seemed embarrassed, as if he agreed with Nunez, not Thomasina. He did not seem included to speak and so Thomasina made an irritable tchah noise and continued.

  “Forgive me, Doctor, all will be clear in a minute. Does your brother-in-law supply the Falcon Inn at Southwark as well?”

  Nunez frowned. “No, why should he? He supplies the Court.”

  She smiled in triumph, the first he had seen from her.

  “Tell the Doctor what you saw at the Falcon, Mr Becket.”

  Becket shrugged. “Only the same stamp on the soap there, in the whores’ wash-house when I was looking for the witch. It was coarser than this, though, grey and grained and smelling less sweet.”

  Nunez still had no idea why they were interested.

  “The Falcon Inn has been buying embezzled purveyance soap,” he said, “wherefore is this . . .”

  “Where would they be getting this from?” asked Thomasina.

  Nunez shook his head, bewildered. “I am not a woman, I know nothing of varieties of . . . soap.”

  “Nor do I, for before I was the Queen’s Fool I knew nothing of the stuff, and since then I have needed to know only that it cleanses,” said Thomasina. “May we ask your wife?”

  Leonora came when she was sent for, looked as puzzled as her husband, and pronounced that she thought it must be laundry soap from the description and that it was a scandal and a shame how the Queen was cheated throughout the Court by dishonest servants and –

  “By God, that’s it!” shouted Thomasina.

  Leonora gave her an old-fashioned look that implied a person who looked like a child should not blaspheme in her house. Nunez swore under his breath in Portuguese and received the same look.

  Thomasina was on her feet, waving a small fist over her head.

  “That’s it, that’s where I saw her. She’s the old hag at the laundry, Pentecost’s grandam. I knew I had seen her.”

  By the time she had calmed down enough to explain, Leonora had left to oversee her grumbling maidservants at their pre-Sabbath cleaning.

  “You say,” Becket rumbled slowly, “that the old hag who had the Book of the Unicorn and who coney-catched us the other night, she works at the Court laundry? Good . . . good heavens.” He thought for a moment and then grinned. “Ay, it would make a fine bolt-hole. Where better? I think Davison and his previous pursuivants would scarcely dare to search within the Virge of the Court.”

  “The old woman that you have been seeking has been all this time at Court?” asked Nunez, catching up fast. “I thought she was a witch at the Falcon?”

  “Ay, why not both? She is a witch, to be sure, and we met her at the Falcon, but she scuttled away from there once she had her money. I have been racking my brains where she could have gone to hide. It makes sense. And certainly the whores at the Falcon wash in the same soap as the Queen, near enough.”

  He grinned again. “So we have her,” he said. “Now all we need is to catch her and talk to her.”

  “You do so,” said Thomasina. “I must go back to the Queen at once.”

  It was only Leonora Nunez’s hospitality that prevented disaster then, for she insisted she could not allow friends of her dear nephew (may the Almighty preserve him as Daniel was preserved in the lion’s den) to leave her house still hungry, and so they sat down to a dinner of bread and rabbit and beef and salt-fish and pheasant and a sparrow pie, and a tart of preserved gooseberries and wafers made with honey.

  Just as they rose, the Queen’s Grocer, Dunstan Ames, arrived in haste with news of the Court. The Queen, he said, had retired to bed with her old complaint in her stomach, but when he had enquired if Dr Nunez would be needed, he had been told roundly that they would bring in a doctor who was not a Jew. Burghley was suffering another attack of gout and had retired to his own house. There had been generalised remove to Fotheringay now that the Queen of Scots’ death warrant was signed. Walsingham had not been seen for days, but his deputy, Mr William Davison, was very busy about the place, as were his servants. Oddly enough, since he had been one of the Queen of Scots’ worst enemies, Davison was not going to gloat at her beheading. He had made changes in the gentlemen guarding the Queen. Further, the rumours were flying that the Queen’s Fool Mistress Thomasina de Paris, had been plotting against her life and that there was a warrant out for her arrest.

  Nunez sighed, stroked his beard and sat down heavily.

  “So it has begun,” he said.

  Becket sat down as well, looking at his hands which were now only braceleted with purple scars, and chafed them as if they had suddenly turned to ice.

  “Christ have mercy,” he whispered. “Poor Simon.”

  “Mr Ames has told Davison about me?” Thomasina asked, not following their sudden depression, being too angry and distressed for herself. “Why did he betray me?”

  She felt ashamed of her naivety when Becket looked at her as if she were mad.

  “Davison has had time to break him by now,” he said. “God knows, I had hoped we could bail him before then, but on a charge of treason . . .”

  Dunstan Ames had his head in his hands. Nunez went to him and patted his shoulder, spoke in rumbling Portuguese. After a moment Dunstan lifted his head and nodded.

  Nunez cleared his throat. “I was saying, Mr Becket, that it seems likely the Queen will order our expulsion within a few days,” he said. “We will prepare for this, of course, and we will send to Simon’s wife that she should remove immediately with the children to the Netherlands.”

  “In the meantime,” put in Dunstan, “it seems that the only hope of saving my son and all of us is for you to find the pages that were cut from the Book of the Unicorn.”

  “Yes, but I do not understand,” Becket protested. “To be sure, Davison has the book, but it contains nothing incriminating. Why is the Queen obeying him?”

  “He does not need to show her, does he?” said Dunstan. “If he knows what is in it, that is all he needs.”

  “Oh, poor lady,” said Thomasina, with her hand to her mouth. “This is terrible. Terrible. God rot Davison’s bowels. God curse him with the pox and the plague and leprosy; may his cock bleed and his-“

  “My dear Mistress Thomasina,” said Nunez, “please. Do not curse in my house.”

  Thomasina fell silent, abashed.

  “It is clear to me,” Nunez continue
d, “that we are at the cusp of power here. Davison is bidding to be the Queen’s First Councillor, her puppet-master, and it is a gamble in which there is no going back. For as long as either one of you is loose, he is not secure in his hold on the Queen. He is not secure in any case because she is not at all the foolish woman he thinks her, but while he makes his base stable, he is liable to kill all that are not his creatures.”

  “I must warn her, but how can I do it?” said Thomasina.

  “How had you planned to do it?”

  “I would go to the Earl of Leicester’s palace and fetch my carriage and return to the Court as I left it.”

  “I think you would not go further than the Court gate,” said Simon’s father soberly. “After that you would be in the Tower.”

  “How did you get in to fetch Simon’s warrant, the one that Ramme tore up?” asked Becket.

  “Through the Lord Chamberlain’s lodgings, my lord Hunsdon. He is her half-brother and he knows me.”

  Becket and Nunez looked at each other significantly. Thomasina was not slower than they.

  “Ah,” she said, “yes, indeed. But if he is her brother, will Davison not remove him?”

  “My lord Hunsdon is not a councillor but a courtier, a well-known Knight of the Carpet,” said Nunez. “I suspect Davison will not think him dangerous immediately.”

  “Well then, that is what I must do. Not now, not in daylight, but as soon as night falls.”

  “What about the hag that caused all this trouble?” said Dunstan. “Will you find her, Becket?”

  “Oh ay,” said Becket. “Certainly I will find her now.”

  LXXV

  ROBERT CAREY WAS HAVING trouble sleeping well. His father, deliberately, he thought, had given him a truckle-bed in his own Court bedchamber, and relegated the manservant to a straw palliasse. The three of them trumpeted through the night, but Robert Carey could not be comfortable since his legs stuck out over the end of the bed. Even now that Lord Hunsdon had gone north, leaving dire warnings of what he would do to his youngest son if he got into any further trouble while he was away, Robert spent hours each night watching moonlight stripes slide across the walls. Every four hours he heard the men-at-arms standing guard at the Queen’s door into the Privy Garden change over with a cautious scrape of boots and grounding of halberds, muffled by the intervening Stone Gallery.

  He was lonely and bored and worried by reports brought to him by his father’s servant of changes at Court. They had not been obvious until many of the most important men had gone north to the Queen of Scots’ execution. He wished with all his heart that his father had stayed, for his father could speak to the Queen whenever he wished and the word was that it was hard to come near her now without Mr Davison’s favour. The manservants that Hunsdon had ordered to guard Carey and keep him out of trouble were openly considering taking horse north to bring back the Lord Chamberlain, in case the Queen has urgent need of him. But as was commonly the case at Court, everything was shadowy, a great deal of rumour and movement and no hard facts.

  There as a very soft scratching sound at the end of the room, where the windows looked on the Whitehall orchard. A soft puffing noise, another scrape.

  He got up and went to open the window-shutter to look out, his poignard in his hand, wondering at an assassin who would choose so very roundabout a way of reach the Queen, but cynically suspecting a roving courtier.

  Below him, clinging to a drain-pipe, was what looked like a child, her kirtle kilted up in her belt.

  “Good God, Mistress Thomasina,” he blurted. She looked up at him, scowled and nearly slipped.

  “Help me up,” she hissed. “Quick, before I fall. And shut up.”

  He had heard that Thomasina had fallen from favour for desertion, but . . .

  He could not resist his desire to know what was happening, and further he thought he could cope with Thomasina if she had suddenly run wood-wild and come to kill the Queen.

  He opened the shutter cautiously, and the window, and leaned down to clasp her hand. She was heavier than she looked but he gripped her and she walked up the wall and eeled through the window to land gasping softly on the floor.

  “I am out of practice at this,” she said. “Where is my lord Hunsdon?”

  “Gone to watch the Queen of Scots’ beheading . . .”

  “Damn him,” said Thomasina, very unladylike, standing straight and unkilting her kirtle, which was a pretty velvet. “Is there no one loyal in all the Court?”

  Carey frowned. “Why, what’s afoot?”

  “There is a bloody palace revolution afoot, you ninny; how can you live here and not know it?”

  “Mistress, I have been in disgrace and under arrest in these rooms for a week; I know only what my servant tell me. Hush.”

  He looked cautiously at his man, who had turned on his back and was rattling the painted rafters.

  In a fast, ferocious whisper, Thomasina told him exactly what was happening, leaving out the precise nature of Davison’s hold on the Queen.

  “Now, get me in to see the Queen,” she said.

  Carey was appalled. “But Mistress Thomasina, I have been forbidden her Presence for days. She would never admit me.”

  “Who is guarding her tonight?”

  “How should I know? I have not left these rooms. If it was Drury or the Earl of Cumberland or another of my friends, I could likely talk my way through, but if Davison is taking power as you say he is, I have no doubt he has put his own men about her.”

  “Get me through them.”

  “But – ”

  “Can you not see what is happening? What I tell the Queen will stop Davison in his tracks, but I must tell her face to face. If I go there openly, Davison will arrest me. I must break in secretly.”

  Carey blew his cheeks out. “Break into the Queen’s chamber . . . Good God, woman, do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Yes,” she said, staring him straight in the eyes. “If it goes wrong badly enough, they will hang, draw and quarter you, and me they will burn.”

  Carey swallowed hard. “Well, but . . . in God’s name, can we not wait until Father returns . . .?”

  “In God’s name,” sneered Thomasina, “do you think once Davison has entrenched himself, do you think he will let the Queen see any one of her relatives, any one of her former friends again? Your family will be out on its ear, and no doubt winnowed with treason trials as well. I expect Davison has a troop on hungry relatives he wishes to enrich for all his bloody virtue.”

  Carey blinked. He had served Court for seven years and learnt to keep his feet as all about him men moved and counter-moved against each other, swirling in the feverish glittering greed of the place, where the Queen’s smile weighs as heavy as gold and a great fortune may be made in an instant from nothing more substantial than charm and elegance and intelligence, as Sir Walter Raleigh had proved. But through it all sailed the Queen, A galleon among wherries, the undisputed mistress of all and as biddable as the wind. The thought of one man being able to force her to do his will . . . it was so alien, he was having a hard time making his mind encompass it.

  “Are you sure this is no game of the Queen’s, to give him enough rope to hang himself?” he asked.

  “If it is a game, I doubt the Queen is enjoying it. He has her in a vice. That is why she signed the Queen of Scots’ death warrant, when she had determined not to do so.”

  “How do you know she was determined?”

  “She told me. She has many polite reasons for keeping her cousin alive. If he had not coerced her, she would never have signed.”

  Carey was silent again, trying to think how he should decide.

  Thomasina mistook him. She stood up and kilted her kirtle again. “I was truly a Fool,” she said wearily. “I thought the Queen’s own family would help me in this quest, but I had hoped to find her brother, not a popinjay cousin with a sword as soft as a boiled bean-pod. If you are too frightened to help me, at least give me an hour before you c
all Davison’s guard.”

  She was half-way to the door when he caught up with her in long strides and turned her, with his fingers nipping her shoulder more tightly than he meant.

  For a moment he was too choked with anger to say anything, but at last he managed to whisper, “Give me a chance to dress. If I break into the Queen’s chamber barelegged in my shirt, she will hang me.”

  Thomasina shook his fingers off her shoulder and stood with her fists on her small hips as he scrambled into his black velvet doublet and hose. It amused her that he took the time to put on a small ruff and his rings, and to run a comb through his curly dark-red hair. By the time he had finished he looked as trim as if he were going to attend upon her as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, rather than to try a desperate break-in.

  He hesitated over his sword-belt, then shrugged it on with an angry growl.

  “If it comes to swords, we may as well surrender,” she said sourly.

  “I know that, mistress,” he said. “But you may need time to speak to her, which a sword can provide.”

  And then he grinned like a boy on an apple-scrumping expedition. “Lord, mistress, this is a fine night,” he said. “Will you be guided by me?”

  For a moment she hesitated and then nodded.

  LXXVI

  IN ALL HIS MANY affairs, Mr William Davison had a very keen eye for the niceties of life. His sinful young cousin had not been buried yet, but was lying in the crypt of St Mary Rounceval by Charing Cross. Her parents and uncle had not yet arrived from the countryside. Despite his overpress of business, he made time to go and pay his respects to her corpse, although of course he had no intention of praying for her soul, because he believed she had already been judged and sent to Hell. Poor child, I would have shown her some mercy, but Davison’s stern God knew nothing of the term. However, he could bend his head and offer praise to God for His justice and thank God likewise, as did the Pharisee in the Temple, that he himself was not so sinful and foolish.