Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  Silly bastards, that they thought so little of her. They had no men to back them yet and had not even bothered to lay hands on their prey before they began their pompous speeches about the Queen’s name. Mary picked up the bucket of lye for scrubbing the floor and threw it at both of them, causing one of them to scream when the stuff stung his eyes and the other to wail at the damage done to yet another expensive suit.

  Then she clutched up her skirts and ran. As there was no point in going to Mrs Twiste’s office, who must have permitted this and would be more than likely to knock her over the head with a candle-stick to prevent trouble, Mary charged straight at them in their disarray and punched one of them shrewdly in the gut as she passed. They fell against each other. As she fled along the passage, she cannoned into the beefy Mr Becket, hurrying from his subterfuge of work in the woodyard to grab her as well. He held her fast.

  “Sister Mary,” he hissed, “let me help you . . .”

  It was a pity, but she had no reason to let him. More reason to fear him since she had coney-catched him and his friend and he had no doubt come for a reckoning. So Mary kneed him in the cods and left him leaning against the wall moaning and shaking his head while she scuttled away.

  She went down the narrow stairs skipping like a lamb, fear and triumph and a great deal of booze softening her aches and pains like a drink from the fountain of immortality. She did not feel the burning in her chest which usually came when she ran, indeed she felt strong and fleet.

  There in the basement, where the Court slops come, she saw the lids on the barrels had been lifted. They had found Pentecost’s dowry, damn their eyes. Anger and the stench of it brought tears to her Mary’s eyes and made her cough, and she could hear the clatter of hobnails behind her on the stairs.

  There is a trap-door, and she went to it. Nothing was wasted of the Court slops and perhaps you may have wondered what happens to the stuff they filter out.

  It goes into huge old barrels under the floor where it drains and hardens further. Nowhere else but at the Court of such a pernickety Queen would anyone use valuable barrels for such a thing, even if they are at the end of their lives, black with age and some of them stamped with Henry VIII’s monogram. Not only the human waste goes there, but in through a chute from the woodyard go mountains of dung from the horses and oxen serving the Court because the Queen is a delicate lady who has bathed at risk of her health every month since she was a child, and she cannot abide bad smells. No muck-heap may sully any yard she passes through or glances at. Naughty stenches must be caught and imprisoned before she can smell them.

  Therefore, under the floor of the laundry basement lie barrels of shite, human and animal, all commingled. Some clever divine that has addled his brains with reading and righteousness might wish to make a pretty parable of that, but I will not. Generally speaking, they roll the barrels out, nailed shut, at night, when the wind is in the right direction, load them one at a time onto boats, cover them with tarpaulin and bring them downstream to the mouth of the Thames where gunpowder-makers pile the stuff up, the better to grow saltpetre underneath. Every week, at least while the Court is in residence at Whitehall, a boat goes downstream with the tide carrying ominous barrels, and once one was wrecked going under the bridge and upset the burghers of London Tower very much indeed.

  But for three months and more the Thames had been frozen and no one had dared to do anything other than store the barrels and pray for the thaw, since no wagon could move fast enough to escape Her Majesty’s sharp nose, and then there would be the devil of a row.

  Some of the stench could escape from the chute and from little barred windows that gave on the Thames, but not all of it. Above, the little girls whisper of the cellar to each other, and grab each other and squeal in horror at the thought, and they believe that if they make Mrs Twiste very angry, she might force them to go down there. Mrs Twiste would never dream of such a thing, believing firmly that birch twigs answer far better, but so the legend runs and no doubt supports her authority.

  Nor had Mary been there, since no person of any sense would wish to try it, and even she pitied the poor men that so needed the money they were paid for conveying the barrels downriver. But she also knew that at the end of the place farthest from the Court was a door to the river, for the barrels to pass through onto the boats.

  All this took but the blink of an eye to think of. So Mary went to the trapdoor, drew back the bolts and coughed at the smell. She kirtled up her skirts and climbed down gingerly onto the lid of the barrel that was under the chute, into the darkness and stench of hell. There was I also, Empress of Hell. She tried to be silent and drop the trapdoor quietly, but she could not help coughing and choking as she climbed down and felt her way between the close-packed barrels. The bad airs were making her head spin, it was already turning like a top from booze, bad airs worse than any diseased breath from a marsh. She had to pause to puke behind a barrel and add to the nameless slime on the floor. When she get to the door that led down a slope to the river, she shot the bolt on this side and found it would not open. It was bolted on both sides.

  Ramme and Munday flung back the trapdoor, letting evening light into hell, and there was a moment’s silence as their noses told them what was below.

  “She wouldn’t . . .” said Ramme’s voice.

  “She has. Look at her boot-prints there.”

  “Oh, Christ. Why does this always happen when I have new clothes on.”

  “Yours are wrecked already. You go first.”

  “After you, Mr Munday.”

  There was another short pause.

  “Get him to do it,” said Munday and Ramme laughed and called up the stairs.

  She heard the stamp of three pairs of feet, and then the soft hiss of slow match on a hand pistol.

  “You,” said Ramme, with such a load of contempt in his voice that surely any true man would have struck him.

  “Yes, sir,” came an answering rumble from Becket, and that voice was fairly quivering with fear and submission, Mary had never heard the like. He sounded like a whipped dog.

  “Go down there and fetch out the old bitch.”

  The boots came to the edge of the trapdoor and there was a sigh and the sound of swallowing.

  “Down there?”

  “Get on with it, man; we have other things to do this day. Find her and bring her up.”

  “Get me a ladder; I’m too heavy for this rope.”

  Well, that gave Mary a little time. She found one barrel that was free of its fellows and near enough to the wall, leaned her back against the rough wet wall and pushed with her feet. It was immovable. She gasped and sweated, then tried another, and that must have been older and rotted down more, for it at least toppled. The lid came off, letting a genie of rottenness escape and making her puke again.

  The ladder poked down to the floor from the trapdoor and then creaked with Becket’s bulk. He had tied a handkerchief round his face to try to protect himself from the plague and jail-fever and all the other diseases that come from bad airs.

  Mary took her knife in her hand and ducked behind a barrel. Becket came, swordless, large and ugly as a troll. She scuttled from barrel to barrel where, for all the reduction Ramme had caused in him, Becket was still too wide to pass. He knocked over another one has he tried to catch her, and he too was overcome and had to puke.

  Mary crept up behind him, muttering to herself and stabbed at him with her dagger. She did it badly and the knife grated on the bone fencing of his chest. He shouted with anger and surprise, spun and pounced with a lightness she never expected, caught her wrists, hurting them, nearly breaking them, and she screamed.

  With an easy twist of one paw he took her knife, but did not cut her throat as she expected, as she would have done; indeed, as she had done once to the upright man who first raped her little girl. He drew her close, so the doglike smell of his breath made a welcome change to the air she was breathing, and growled.

  “Where is the door?” />
  Mary spat and tried to head-butt him and he shook her until her teeth rattled and her eyes blurred.

  “The door, you stupid old bitch.”

  She pointed with her head. “It’s bolted outside.”

  “Fuck,” he muttered. Then she saw his teeth and realised he had grinned. “Come on. No doubt I can kick it out.”

  “What’s happening down there?” came Ramme’s voice, impatient and rightly suspicious.

  “Aaaah,” said Becket, unconvincingly, “the witch stabbed me. I cannot . . . aarghh.”

  There was a muttering above while Becket half-carried, half-shoved Mary between the barrels, knocking over yet another one that barred his path.

  Feet appeared on the ladder. Becket moved faster, still hurting Mary’s thin old arm while she beat at him with her fist. His boots skidded on the slope to the opening. The trapdoor boomed as he kicked it. Alas, it held firm.

  Ramme was at the foot of the ladder, lit from above by dusk-light and torches, his sword glittering.

  “Hand her over, you fat fool,” said Ramme in a bored and irritated tone of voice.

  Becket made a soft growl in his throat and shoved the witch so she fell into the corner just by the door. Then he turned and moved back towards Ramme.

  “When will you learn to obey?” Ramme sneered at him. “You’re caught like a sewer rat. Or do you want to spend another day hanging next to your friend, the little Jew?”

  Becket roared and charged him, leaping a barrel. How he expected to get anywhere with nothing but a four-inch blade against a man holding a rapier I do not know, but as Mary’s dagger in his great hand lifted and clashed in a shower of sparks with Ramme’s long steel, God Almighty Himself leaned down from Heaven.

  It was a thunderbolt. You ask, how could there be a thunderbolt in a cellar? Well, is the Lord God who made the stars and sea to be bound by a mere cellar? And there are more ways than one that a flame can be lit – have you never seen marsh-lights dancing over a bog? This bolt had the same green colour.

  First, in the instant after the sparks, there was a huge flash of light, of searing heavenly fire that began in all places and reached all places, a tiny second of heat which shrivelled eyebrows and set brief light to both men’s beards. Then a great whoomfing bellow of air, which burst open the bolted door to the river and nearly broke their rib-cages, and then a wild sucking wind which brought the door slamming back against the stones and shattered its sturdy planks to kindling. Daylight shone through, like a beacon. Mary could not get air in her lungs, she had fallen down at God’s thunderbolt, more terrified than she had ever been, for surely now she through Christ Jesus her lost husband would come to her and beat her.

  Ramme and Becket gaped and smouldered at each other for a second, rocking where they stood, and Ramme dropped his rapier for sheer fright. Terror was printed all over his face. Then broad shoulders hid him from view as Becket grappled the front of his wrecked red doublet, jerked him close and stabbed him once in the chest under his breastbone, and once, up to the hilt, in the side of his throat so the blood spurted. Ramme staggered and fell in the splattering, his limbs drumming as they learnt last of all that all was lost. Becket bent to him, twitched out the blade.

  Mary turned, scrabbled on hands and knees, terror transmuted to animal instinct by the killing. She slithered on her haunches down the cobbled barrel-slope and stepped onto the ice. Becket could follow if he liked, Mary cared nothing for him, only she must escape, she must run from my Son’s coming in wrath and vengeance, never mind the pursuivants who had stolen her darling’s dowry, never mind Becket himself to whom she had caused trouble by coney-catching him; she thought only of escaping, of running away from her death and the eternity of Hell.

  Besides, she thought she saw someone on the ice ahead of her. Her disordered brain made the shape of Our Lady the Queen of Heaven, Star of the Morning, Gate of the Sea, made me out of mists and ice-reflections and wishful thinking, as she always had. It was to her dream of me she ran with arms spread like a child, longing for comfort.

  So Mary ran out, heedless, onto the ice of the Thames and behind her she heard Becket shouting that the ice was not safe, that the thaw was come, it was too thin, that she should stop . . . Too thin for you, you fat lummock, she thought triumphantly as she scuttled, and then one of her feet went down through cold shards into colder water, and the other smashed a hole as well and she was running slowly in mingled broken glass and icy water and she screamed and screamed as she toppled and fell and struggled, and even if they had wanted to, no one could have saved her. Nor am I my Son, to walk on water.

  Dimly she heard shouting from the bank, and a thin sorrowful cry from a higher window that she knew was Pentecost. Her skirts billowed and supported her for a long agonised second as she gasped icy air into her lungs.

  Then the fiery cold of the tide’s ebb grabbed hold of Mary in its black arms and sucked her under the breaking ice, turned her over, rolled her down, black cold that paradoxically numbed her heart and eased her pain, bowled her along the riverbed, all spiked with London’s waste, faster and faster down a hard rough tunnel. In an eddy her kirtle ripped and broke from her back and another whirlpool caught her, turned her again. Her petticoats were gone, she was in her stays and smock, and the ancient steel boning protecting her chest as she curled around the hard lump of herself and was taken along and along, until her chest was burning and sparkles burnt her eyelids. As she was in Hell, she thought it might be safe to breathe, her mind disordered with ice and whirling, and yet she was too afraid of Judgement unshriven to breathe, still clutched her little life clawlike to her chest.

  I came in my guise as the black Madonna, Queen of Hell. I lifted her up on another eddy, her head smashed through ice thin as cast sugar at a banquet, and she gasped and breathed and choked and gasped again.

  I took my daughter-in-law once more, bowled her on down through the river, down into the muddy depths, lungs aching, throat full of rocks, up again, beaten and flogged by ice and iron rubbish, her poor head bruised and bleeding from the ice, but given another space to breathe, and then another. At last she heard the roaring of the freed river at the bridge, where the ice queued and ground itself to diamond shards at the constrictions of the piers, where she also would have been ground to a forcemeat stuffing. No, she thought, no, first I must be absolved of my sins, oh, Lady, help me. Of course I came, the sweet Drop of the Ocean, even the Empress of Hell had mercy, and a swirling eddy of the tide thrust her through breaking mirrors of ice to the place where three cranes rise above the Vintry steps. The tide washed her up to those steps and left her there to cling and crawl, and even as she lay gasping and shuddering in the light of day, her poor worn heart burst a string and burnt out the inside of her chest, burnt tracks of fire down her left arm and the blue surcease of my mantle came down over her face at last.

  LXXIXX

  POOR PENTECOST, WHO WAS peering out of the window to see the thunderbolt, one of many curious faces making an audience. She screamed and wept to see her grandam fall helplessly through the ice and hid her face in the shoulder of Mrs Twiste’s bodice, where Mrs Twiste was keeping her safe in her office. Mrs Twiste was a good woman, although Mary had cursed her often enough for trying to keep her away from booze. She let Pentecost smear snot all over her clean shoulder as the child wept and trembled, and stroked her hair and told he “There, there, sweeting.”

  Down in the cellar, Becket was well and truly trapped. If the river had been water he would have tried swimming, so afraid was he of the Tower. Had the witch not just proved to him beyond doubt that the ice would not bear him, he might have tried to run for it, even knowing of the thaw. But he was not cowardly enough to seek his death deliberately, for all his boasting to himself that Ramme would never capture him alive. Now all he could do was stare at Ramme’s corpse and shake. After a moment to nerve himself, Mr Munday came climbing down the ladder with the pistol, the slow match in its lock hissing and sparking and flaring green and blue fr
om the bad airs.

  Becket looked sideways at Munday, who was holding his handkerchief over his face with his free hand.

  “Mr Munday,” he whispered, “I beg you will shoot me now rather than take me back to the Tower.”

  “Why should I shoot you, sir?” Munday’s voice was flat and muffled.

  “To be merciful to me, Mr Munday. Take the pistol in both hands, or your aim might be spoilt, and pull the trigger. I will not move.” Becket was panting now, not troubling to try and hide the terror and despair in his voice.

  “She had the papers?” said Munday.

  Becket nodded.

  “What about your friend the Jew?”

  Becket sagged slightly. “You do have him?”

  “Of course.”

  “I would have thought he had died.”

  Munday was silent for a second, not inclined to explain about Ames’s fever.

  “He is stronger than he looks,” he said reflectively.

  Moving by instinct because he could not see, Becket stuck the little knife in his belt, leaned his broad back against the wall and hid his face in his hands. His shoulders shook as he worked to control himself.

  Munday watched him, not unkindly, but without pity. He found it interesting how men behaved in extremity, perhaps one reason why he chose to find his fortune the way he did. To be sure, he had never loved anybody and he found the emotion curious in others. He recognised Becket’s concern for his friend, knew it for a weapon in his hand far better than a gun. And he could use words well enough when he tried. He thought and then placed them carefully.

  “If I shoot you, sir, or if you try to run over the ice and drown, then on whom do you think Mr Secretary Davison’s anger will vent?”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Becket, almost inaudibly. A moment later he was upright, his own man again. He fumbled the knife from his belt and handed it over to Munday. “Well,” he said, bleak as a child in a famine, “let us get on with it then.”

  He went up the ladder in front of Munday, looking up and blinking as if he very much wished he were climbing a scaffold to be hanged, followed by the impassive pursuivant with his sparkling dag.