Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “I have rarely met a woman in such an excellent humourous balance as Your Majesty,” Nunez intoned.

  She smiled and wagged her finger at him coquettishly.

  “What, no physic, no bleedings, no emetics? You shall be drummed from the Physicians’ College.”

  Nunez bowed.

  “I would like to have sight and taste of Your Majesty’s water,” he said, “but with the proviso I had best pray that none of my other patients should fall so healthy.”

  “Save my lord of Leicester, of course.”

  Nunez bowed again and decided against flattery and euphemism.

  “Your Majesty knows he is not in good health.”

  She nodded. “Ay, he eats and drinks too much, shouts too much and is of choleric complection.”

  “If the disposition is too heated, the heart may be brought to spasm.”

  “And what makes the heart overheat the body?”

  Nunez shook his head. “All we can say is that an oversupply of blood and also of bile will greatly tire the heart’s furnace. I beg Your Majesty will urge him to be leeched more often, as I advised last month. His pulses are very fast. Perhaps he will obey his sovereign, if not his physician.”

  “He has not been my obedient servant recently,” said the Queen witheringly, “and the Netherlands did him no good at all, neither body nor soul. He was greatly distressed when that silly poet nephew of his died. Is your own nephew’s business to do with the business of Sidney’s?”

  “Your Majesty,” Nunez began uncertainly, “I am only a physician . . .”

  What was she talking about, “business of Sidney’s”? Sir Philip had never been involved in espionage. “. . . with a few commercial interests and . . .”

  “A network of spies throughout Europe and Turkey that Walsingham would covet if you did not put them at his disposal.”

  “Your Majesty is too kind. They are but friends and family who–”

  “Put their lives at risk to send me information. Come, Doctor, must we play veney sticks with words? What made your most wise and circumspect nephew desert my service? I would have rewarded him well for his actions in my defence. I was even considering a place on the Privy Council.”

  “His health was bad . . .”

  “Bah. I do not turn off the least of my door-keepers for ill-health. What was the reason?”

  Nunez took a deep breath, wishing wistfully that she were not so sharp. “He has said to me, very vehemently, that he will not return to his old work of inquisitor.”

  The Queen sniffed. “I shall see him. Bring him to me at this time tomorrow.” She held out her hand for him to kiss while she rang her bell. The ladies and maids-in-waiting, who had been banished to the Waiting Chamber, came filing in with their work, books, parrots and lap-dogs. One of the small fat furry creatures leapt from a pair of green velvet sleeves and galloped across the rush-matting, yapping excitedly. The Queen laughed and plucked it up, caressing it and feeding it little pieces of chicken from a silver dish brought by a dark-haired girl with extremely pale skin. The dog lapped deliriously at the Queen’s face, got a tongueful of white lead, and shook itself. The Queen patted it, coddled it with more chicken and then plumped it into Dr Nunez’s arms while she flicked her fingers at one of the younger girls standing about.

  “Fetch the velvet purse.”

  Whilst he waited, Nunez felt the little dog in his arms heave convulsively. He put it down on the floor and moved the edge of his robe so the dog could be sick out of sight of his mistress.

  Gimlet-eyed, the Queen saw.

  “Now what ails Eric, Doctor?” she asked.

  Nunez looked down gravely. “It has eaten something that disagreed with it,” he diagnosed.

  “But what?” demanded the Queen sharply, looking sideways at the plate of meat.

  Nunez was in a quandary. Clearly it was the face-paint the horrible little creature had slurped off his mistress’s face, but on the other hand it was never wise to mention the fact that the Queen painted her face, since this detracted from the notion of the Queen as a great and immortal beauty.

  He gave himself time to think by picking the dog Eric up and opening its jaw. It snapped at him irritably. Inspiration came.

  “A hairball, no doubt, Your Majesty. Any creature with fur that licks himself will suffer from them, and they are only upset until they have vomited it out.”

  “What of his humours?”

  Did dogs have humours? If dogs, why not horses or cattle? But surely mere dumb animals could not be complected as men were – though, on the other hand, presumably they were complected somehow, and in which case, of what? There was no question that animals had blood, the sanguine humour. It was a fascinating question, and Nunez had never considered it before.

  “Good, for a dog,” he said gravely, not for the first time making it up as he went along. Eric snapped again and nipped his wrist. “Perhaps a little choleric.”

  The girl sent for the purse and puffed towards the Queen with it, who handed it to him magnanimously. Nunez took it, found his arms too full of dog to look inside, but gathered that it contained his fee. Lackadaisical about paying her courtiers, the Queen was punctilious about paying her servants. Paying him personally meant she was very pleased with his service to her when she was ill. Nunez suppressed a shudder. The Almighty forfend that she take it into her head to appoint him her Chief Physician; the last thing he wanted was a dangerous office like that.

  Having repented of nipping him, the dog licked his face, blasting him with its breath. The Queen stood up impatiently, causing a tumble and creaking among the older ladies who had sat down on stools and cushions, as they got hastily to their own feet.

  “You have our leave to depart, Doctor,” was thrown over an imperious shoulder as the Queen walked briskly to the door, trailing two more little dogs who had apparently been taking refuge amongst her petticoats. Eric left a pattern of nail scratches as he jumped down from Nunez’s arms and yelped after his mistress.

  XXX

  LORD BURGHLEY STOOD SHIFTING from foot to foot uneasily while he waited for his mistress to admit him to her presence. Generally speaking, she had mercy on his gouty knees and saw him at once, but now she was furious with him for siding with Walsingham, Hatton and the Earl of Leicester on the question of the Queen of Scots. Behind him his son carried a cushion and a large sheaf of papers. He was a skinny hunchbacked youth with a dark, unhappy face livened by intelligence and a surprising wit.

  At last a gentleman opened the door and they went into the Council Chamber where the Queen already sat at the head of the long table under her Cloth of State.

  Burghley shuffled forwards, wincing at the pain in his big toe and ankle, and slowly unfolded himself down on the cushion Robert placed in front of Her Majesty. Unusually she left him there for a while, hammering the point home that she was the Queen whilst he, however rich, however powerful, was the servant.

  “How are you today, my lord?” she asked kindly enough after a while. “How is your gout?”

  “The cold weather does not agree with it, Your Majesty,” said Burghley. “I am taking a new physic which I hope will be more efficacious.”

  “Pray God that it is,” said the Queen distantly. There was a pause, a distinct gap in the conversation into which her command to rise would usually have fitted. The absence was marked. So that is the way of it, Burghley thought wearily and decided to get the unpleasantness over with. If she threw her inkpot at him and told him to get out of her sight, at least he would be off his knees. But no, he had to sort out the business of the prisoner first.

  “Your Majesty, we have a number of matters to deal with,” he said. “First is a petition from a Mr Coulson to have the Clerkship of the Ewery revert to his son when he dies.”

  “Granted,” said the Queen, who preferred continuity even though Mr Coulson was hardly ever seen near the laundry-house.

  “Second is a matter of a man that was taken in a raid on a house in London two weeks
ago.”

  “A Papist?”

  “A complex matter, Your Majesty. I would have consulted Sir Francis if he had been well-enough, since it concerns his deputy.”

  “Mr Davison.” The Queen’s lip curled in distaste. “What has he done now?”

  “Has there been a warrant granted for putting to the question?”

  “No.” The Queen signed dozens of documents a day, and somehow seemed to read every one. “No such thing.”

  “I have here a letter from one of Mr Davison’s pursuivants, a Mr Munday, who questioned the man in the Tower. He is concerned because they have discovered this man was a Protestant and not a Papist. They had not realised it before because he has somehow lost his memory. Mr Munday thought perhaps he might have been working for me and so wrote to me secretly.”

  “Wise of him.”

  “Yes,” said Burghley, “very wise. I do not in general employ pursuivants against the Catholics, leaving that to my learned colleague Sir Francis. I fear I do not know this man, but it occurred to me that perhaps Your Majesty . . .”

  She leaned forward and twitched the paper out of his hand. He shifted his weight to his less painful knee and wondered how long he could last. Lord, she was in a temper with him.

  Her eyes scanned the writing describing Munday’s prisoner – very clear and well-formed. Burghley had thought – and the decipherment of the code-words. Her eyes narrowed. “Hm,” she said, took breath to speak and then stopped. “Hm,” she said again and looked at him. “And what is this operation of Davison’s?”

  “Extremely secret,” Burghley said. “I have not yet been fully appraised. I am told by Sir Francis that the matter is of such delicacy –“

  “Like that damnable and wicked charade, the Babington plot?”

  Burghley, who had not been involved in it, coughed modestly and looked down. He shifted to his other knee.

  “As far as I know,” he hazarded cautiously, “it does not directly concern the Queen of Scots.”

  “What then?”

  Burghley made a small moue of embarrassment. “I take very little part in such things now, I prefer to–”

  “Oh, God’s bowels, Cecil,” shouted the Queen. “Will you cease from fencing with me and tell me what you know?”

  Burghley bowed. “The rumour is that it has to do with a wicked libel against Your Majesty, known as the Book of the Unicorn. That is all, I fear.”

  “A libel. Worse than before?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And Davison is investigating?”

  “So I understand.”

  “And why have I received no report on the operation’s progress?”

  “Your Majesty, I can only answer that I have received no report either. Perhaps we had best ask Mr Davison.”

  “And have the long-nosed po-faced Calvinist read me another impertinent lecture upon the necessity for executing the Queen of Scots? I think not, my lord.”

  “It is necessary, Your Majesty–”

  Thank God, she threw a slipper, not an ink-pot. Burghley ducked just in time, but it hit his son, who squeaked inelegantly.

  “Necessary, by Christ? Necessary? Execute an anointed Queen – necessary? God-cursed tomfoolery and half-wittery, that’s what it is, Cecil, and I will have no more speech of her before me . . . Get out, get out!”

  With his son’s inadequate arm to help, Burghley got to his feet just in time and bowed with as much dignity as he could muster while another slipper, a muff and a book whizzed by his ears. Fortunately, rage made the Queen’s aim bad. They bowed again at the door, and slid past as the gentleman opened it.

  She still looked magnificent in a temper, Burghley thought fondly, and her roar had exactly the timbre of her father’s, only two octaves up. He bent and rubbed his knees, wincing at the shooting pains lancing up to his hip. They had left the cushion behind in their hurry.

  “Go back for the cushion, Robert,” he said to his son. “And leave the papers on the table.”

  “Ah . . .” Robert looked nervously in the direction of the closed door and the sound of swearing seeping through it.

  “The more often you bow, the less likely it is she will hit you. Off you go.”

  Looking like a man on the way to the scaffold, Robert scurried over the floor and slid round the door. Moments later he scrambled back, looking frightened and upset.

  “She said she will have me in the Tower by morning and treat my hunchback with stretching,” Robert said.

  Burghley nodded. “She has threatened me with the same many hundreds of times; it is to her like a hobgoblin to frighten children. I have yet to see the inside of the place unwillingly.”

  “But she has committed others . . .”

  Burghley put his hand on his son’s arm. “Robert,” he said, “get no maids of honour with child and serve her faithfully and honestly and she will never desert you.”

  XXXI

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING SIMON Ames knelt before the Queen in the Privy Chamber and quailed inwardly at her wrath. He had begun badly by telling her the news of his wife and then made his position worse by informing her without prompting that he could no longer act as her inquisitor. Nunez knelt behind him and winced.

  “How dare you!” roared the Queen in peroration. “Viper, son of Belial, damned puling little clerk, how dare you tell me what you will or will not do?”

  “Your Majesty, if I may have leave to speak my mind–”

  “Leave, by God? When did I ever give you leave to snivel that you have not the stomach to find out traitors to the State, and me, damn you, when I am surrounded by fools and pompous Puritans that think themselves full of God-given wisdom when all they are fat with is bile, choler, arrogance and ignorance!”

  “Nonetheless, Your Majesty, it is true,” said Ames, when the tirade had slackened. “I have neither the stomach for it, nor the body.”

  “Walsingham is tortured by the stone and he serves me.”

  “I would not compare myself to His Honour.”

  “Yet your father finds he can act as my Controller for Groceries without any of this lily-livered niceness.”

  “I believe the offices are not comparable, Your Majesty. And alas, I am a very ill son to him.”

  “My favour is not imperishable.”

  “Your Majesty is a most just, patient and gracious Prince, the Nation’s jewel and our only Shield from Spain,” said Ames steadily, while Nunez wished to put his head in his hands and moan. He shut his eyes.

  “Are you bargaining with me, Ames?” The voice was a dangerous hiss. “Are you jewing with me for a price?”

  Nunez’s eyes snapped open at the insult. To his astonishment, Ames said nothing, kneeling before the Queen and watching her steadily. Only the flush climbing up the back of his neck told of his anger. He continued to say nothing and it was the Queen who spoke first.

  “Well?”

  “Your most gracious Majesty is aware of my religion,” Ames said, with an unsuspected flintiness. “It is for us a sin to persecute for religion’s sake.”

  Oh my God, thought Nunez and began to wonder if there was any way he could get a message to Leonora to dig up the gold and get herself and the Ames children out of the country. Their family had brought land in Constantinople just in case.

  Ames seemed not to be aware that he was dancing on the lip of a volcano.

  “Are you daring to insinuate that I persecute for religion’s sake?” The hissing was softer and more frightening now.

  “I would not dare to presume upon Your Majesty’s sacred mind, nor is it a subject’s place to guess as what may lie therein,” said Ames, still steadily. “It is further a tenet of our religion that we must serve faithfully the land wherein we dwell. I am Your Majesty’s liegeman and whatever you order me to do I will do, save that I may not imperil my immortal soul.”

  Expecting a further roar of fury, Nunez was even more alarmed when it failed to erupt. The air crackled with the Queen’s dangerous silence.

&nb
sp; After a decent pause, Ames continued firmly.

  “Your Majesty is well aware that there is no prohibition in Christianity against persecution; indeed, there are many injunctions to extirpate heretics and unbelievers wheresoever they may be found. What a Christian may do with a clear conscience, I may not.”

  More silence. Nunez risked a glance under his eyelashes at the Queen, who was studying Ames carefully.

  “What reason of State?” she enquired with curiosity, as if they were carrying on a philosophical conversation.

  Ames gestured apologetically. “I had thought . . . I had excused my former work with that reason, but I fear that, thanks mainly to the Pope’s Bill of Excommunication against Your Majesty, I find the politics impossible to distinguish from religion. It is a nice distinction and I ask your forgiveness if I have distinguished wrongly, but in all conscience –"

  “Yes, yes,” said the Queen, flapping an ostrich-feather fan hanging from her belt, “I understand your discourse. Though I had thought we worshipped the same God.”

  “So had I, Your Majesty.”

  Shimon, Shimon, you have ruined us, thought Nunez.

  There was a further desert of silence. Nunez’s knees were paining him but Simon now seemed relaxed, the hat he held under his arm not even slightly crushed.

  The Queen rose from her seat under her Cloth of State and rustled towards them. Nunez looked warily for dogs but they must have been banished with the Queen’s women.

  She stood before Ames, who seemed to be examining a magnificent jewel hanging from her golden belt, or an ermine made in white enamel with rubies for eyes. Rebecca has certainly steadied him, Nunez thought, a pity she will be a widow.

  The Queen was extending her hand to Ames. He blinked at it, confused for a moment, and then took it and kissed it.

  “Up, Mr Ames,” she said quite calmly. “I desire you to attend me in my Withdrawing Room, where I will expound to you the difference between religious persecution and reasons of State.”