Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “To be afraid in your situation is not madness, but sanity,” said the doctor judiciously. “Have you seen any strange things, things that should not be there?”

  Bitterly ashamed, he hung his head and nodded. “Will you tell me of them?”

  “I . . . I saw rainbows in the room, and smelt roses. And a woman was standing there, by the wall, smiling at me.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Fair and bright like a window in a church. She smiled and I fell down in blackness, in a kind of faint, and I woke again much later and she was gone.”

  The doctor sighed. “I am sorry to hear it.”

  Fear wrenched his heart again. He could hardly talk through the dryness of his mouth. “Then I am turning into a madman?”

  “No, I think not. I believe that you have contracted the falling sickness.”

  “What? That makes men foam at the mouth and kick and scream and they know nothing of it?”

  “Yes. It is not madness and I do not believe that it is possession by devils either, though some do. I have seen this before, often after one has been struck hard on the head. Is the back of your head still sore?”

  His hand came up to rub the place, which was ridged and tender. “Sometimes. But surely to fall down and know not what you do is madness?”

  “No. I would go so far as to say that if you are able to wonder whether you are mad, then your sanity is not in doubt. True madness seems to me to reside in being unable to know the different between what is real and what is in your mind. I have known one madman well enough to talk to him and this is what struck me about him: he spoke of devils and angels as his friends and looked at me pityingly when I said I could not see them.”

  “Ay, poor Tom,” he said absently. “One minute playing chess and the next minute doing desperate battle with devils of green and purple climbing into the cooking pot.”

  It was only the way the doctor looked at him so carefully that let him realise what he had said.

  “Do you remember him?”

  For a moment he thought he did, and then the memory fled once more.

  “No, no, it’s gone again.” He thumped his fist on his forehead and fought not to weep. “God damn it.”

  “Listen to me,” said the doctor. “Unlike the falling sickness, I am not experienced in this thing which has happened to your memory. You are the first I have seen. I have been consulting my books and they are as ignorant as I, and so I think we must devise our own answers. I believe that your brain has been hurt by the blows Mr Ramme gave you on the back of your head. I suspect that your phlegmatic humour which feeds your brain has been disarranged and no doubt unbalanced. And this is having its effect on your thinking, so much is plain. The falling sickness is one side of it. The other is your loss of memory, but I do not believe that your memory is truly destroyed, so much as lost, hidden away behind walls in your mind. If we could but break those walls, then I think your memory would return. Perhaps not all of it, but enough.”

  “If we both knew this madman, Doctor, then you know my true name.”

  “Are you sure it is not Ralph Strangways?” asked the doctor.

  “No, I am not sure, but Ralph does not feel . . . right.”

  “Excellent. I am more than ever sure that there is hope.”

  “My name, Doctor. Please, I beg of you, give me my name.”

  “You have no need to beg me, sir, I am not your tormentor. Your name is David Beckett.”

  It was like putting on a breastplate that had been made for him by a good armourer.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes, it is. I am David Beckett.”

  The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder. “I must go now . . .”

  “Wait.” He caught at the doctor with one hand and winced at the dull pain.

  “You know my name, we both knew the madman. Are you a friend?”

  The doctor hesitated. At last he said, “Yes, I am.”

  “Will you speak to the Queen for me?”

  “I already have, Mr Beckett, but there is more than your fate involved here. We are working in your behalf. Alas, I can tell you no more.”

  “Can you tell me who was Ralph Strangways?”

  “Yes, that I can. He was a madman that called himself Tom; it was his real name.”

  “Ohh. Now why did I use it? Did he not need it?”

  “I fear not. He is dead.”

  “Yes. I saw him die . . .” Beckett gripped his face again as the memory hid itself once more.

  Nunez waited a little then spoke softly.

  “There is great power in names, Mr Beckett. In names, according to Hermes Trismegistus, lies also the power of control. Rightly name a thing, and you have, as it were, put a bridle on it.”

  “And yet . . . I fear I am not the same man that David Becket was.”

  “How could you be Heraclitus made it clear that we are none of us the same as we were even last week. Who can step twice into precisely the same river?”

  “No, but I think David Becket was not so . . . so afraid.”

  “Perhaps he had less to fear. And he was yourself, only an earlier, less-abused self. Do not be afraid to use the name David Becket. Only I would advise against giving Munday or Ramme, or indeed Mr Secretary Davison, any hint that I have told you it. They know you as Ralph Strangways.”

  Becket smiled humourlessly. “The only think I will give any one of them willingly is six feet of land and a box to house them.”

  “Well said, sir.”

  The doctor rose in his customary rustle of brocade and the faint scents of blood and tobacco. That reminded Becket of something that might mend his mood.

  “God, what I would give for a pipe,” he said wistfully.

  Nunez nodded gravely. “Rightly is it said that the patient often knows his own physic. I could not have prescribed better myself. It is a drug sovereign for the rebalancing of phlegm. I shall at once ask that tobacco be brought you. Good day, Mr Becket.”

  XXXVI

  SO FAR THEY DID not suspect her; thank God, Bethany had not been troubled with morning sickness, although she sometimes felt ill in the evenings, and still her woman’s trouble had not come back. She had gone out in her velvet mask and a borrowed gown and cloak once to an apothecary’s shop by Charing Cross to buy dried tansy and pennyroyal mint. Nothing came of the tisane she made with them, neither frog nor babe, although she had stomach cramps and diarrhoea for a day that kept her away from the Queen’s bed. She was relieved at that: the Queen was in a bad mood much of the time and often paced half the night in some strange anxiety. No matter what Bethany did, no matter how she stroked and massaged and caressed, the Queen would not be mollified and took out her temper on whoever happened to be near.

  She was worst of all after Privy Council meetings, when they could often hear her shouting that she would not be badgered about the Queen of Scots and she would have every man jack of them in the Tower if she hear another word on the subject.

  So Bethany made the most of her illness and kept to her bed for another day before she decided she could bear the tension no more. But how could she talk to Kate? She did not know her surname, far less where she lived. She certainly could not send her tiring-woman for her, nor could she ask Alicia Broadbelt or Jane Drury, her room-mates, for any one of them would tattle of her and word would inevitably reach the Queen, wasting all her care. She had been very careful. She had even pricked her thumb with a needle at the times when her courses should have come and smeared blood on her smocks, to fool the laundresses.

  And still her courses refused to come and every day her stays were more of a struggle to lace. When she pressed herself between her hip-bones she found a small hard ball there, like a canker, instead of softness.

  She dreamt she staggered into the Queen’s Privy Chamber with her belly swollen out before her and gave birth in front of the Queen and all her Privy Council. She dreamt it several times, each time waking in the Queen’s cloth-of-silver bed, crying with remo
rse and humiliation, until the Queen lost patience with her and took another bedfellow. Her room-mates sympathised with her delightedly, but she was relieved. She missed the Queen’s caresses and those she gave the Queen, but she was in terror lest she talk of her trouble in her sleep and the Queen dismissed her from Court.

  Being so favoured of the Queen, being her nightly bedfellow with the opportunities that offered of bribery and influence, had made her no friends at Court. The other maids of honour were the more jealous because they could not tattle to the Queen of her accepting over-extravagant gifts from office-seekers in exchange for a kind word behind the bedcurtains. All she had accepted were small precautionary presents to keep her sweet, which the Queen cynically winked at as being unpreventable. She was not outgoing in any case, one of the things that had first endeared her to the Queen. She had always preferred to watch than speak. Before her catastrophe it had not mattered to her that she had no confidante.

  But now there was no one to turn to, no one to ask. Once she took out her steel knitting needle and went into a closet with it, but it hurt to poke herself and she had no idea what to do, and so she stopped. She rated herself for cowardice. Once as she stood in the chapel on a Sunday she wondered if anyone could help her there, but one glance at the round pale faces of the Clerks of the Choir, satisfied and pleased with themselves and their God, working their mouths above their white surplices, told her she was a fool to think it. Certainly she could not pray to God, who would be as angry as her father and the queen at her unchastity – worse, since her father would only beat her, whereas God would send her to Hell.

  Once girls in her predicament might have prayed to me for help, might have gone and hidden away in a nunnery until the babe was born – no easy thing, with the nuns tutting over her and dropping catty hints while she wore haircloth and scrubbed floors in penance, but less wounding than to be so alone, so utterly condemned, so escapeless.

  At last she could bear it no longer, and on the Sunday she decided to lie in wait for Robin Carey and ask him where she could find Kate. She caught him on his way to play primero with the Queen, dashing and fine in black velvet and crimson taffeta, polished from head to toe.

  He bowed to her lavishly while her curtsey was a mere automatic dip.

  “They say that if we could hear the speech of the swans on the Thames and understand what they were saying,” Carey told her, “it would all be a discourse of how they could outrival the whiteness of Mistress Bethany’s skin with their feathers.” She struggled to smile and match his flourish, not wanting to annoy him when she needed him. Pleased with himself, he paid out more elaboration. “And the crows are likewise jealous of you, for they would delight in it could their plumage be as black as your hair. And the –“

  “You should try that compliment on the Queen,” she interrupted him, “but you will need to find another bird than crows for her hair.”

  “It is good,” he said, smiling complacently. “I got it from a horse-holder at the Curtain Theatre. But it needs polishing before I can put it to its true use; what kind of bird would be the colour of the Queen’s hair?”

  It was a ridiculous thing to be thinking of. More and more Bethany felt as if she had been turned into twins; one behaved as it should at Court and even managed to return elaborate Court courtesy; the other, hiding behind its sister, tore its figurative hair and wrung its invisible hands and wept tears that scalded down the inside of her face.

  “I cannot think of one bright enough,” she said after a moment. “Could you not say sunbeams?”

  “Well, but the Queen is tired of being compared to sunbeams; I heard her snip at Drury for tediously comparing her yet again to the damned sun that none of us have seen in days. And besides, it is yellow and she is red and she hopes he is not so ill-mannered as to compare her with the setting sun, and so now what will Drury say?”

  Carey had a gift for mimicry and could almost bring a ghost of the Queen into the passageway with them. Despite herself, Bethany laughed.

  “You had better never let her hear you doing that. She would put you in the Tower.”

  “Too late, Mistress Bethany. Last week she caught me imitating my father and my Lord Burghley arguing over the costs of the Court and said afterwards that if I ever needed a trade, I should straightaway go to Burbage at the Theatre and be a player.”

  “How rude of her. You are no mountebank.”

  Carey shrugged his beautifully tailored shoulders. “They would never have me, in any case, and my father would . . . Lord knows what my father would do, once he had finished beating my brains out, though he likes players well enough. Otherwise I would go today to find honest work – well, nearly honest work – and then marry you.”

  She managed to keep her countenance. “I shall away my father’s pleasure,” she said, even achieving demureness.

  He smiled. “Are you better of your . . . your sickness, then, sweeting?”

  The lie was so longed-for, it almost seemed true. “Oh yes,” she said, “I can take my time over marrying now.”

  “Thank God,” said Carey, very heartfelt, and kissed her cheek. “What was it you wanted? I dare not keep the Queen waiting.”

  “Only . . . only the place where Kate lives.”

  “Why would you want to know that?”

  “She . . . I know she is a whore, but she was . . . she was kind to me when I was distressed and I wanted to send her a gift. That was all.”

  He smiled again approvingly. “She works out of the Falcon Inn, by Paris Garden Stairs. I have no idea where she lives. She would like any one of your old kirtles, and the red-and-white velvet would suit her extremely.”

  “Thank you, Robin,” said Bethany, her heart pounding with triumph. “Good luck in your game.”

  He bowed to her again and walked away whistling like a bird. Which he is, she thought, a very long-legged bird with about as many worries: seeing he was wearing cramoisie hose, a red shank, perhaps, which thought made her giggle a little hysterically as she hurried away.

  While he waited to be admitted to the Queen’s presence for the game, Carey thought vaguely that Bethany was a kind girl to think of giving a gift to a whore. He was glad she had not asked about the duel he had pending with Gage, which was looking more and more likely to happen. He didn’t want to worry her. Of course, he was not afraid; well, no more than was right and proper, but he could see no good come of it. If he won and wounded Gage, he would be in deep trouble with the Queen, who abhorred duelling. If he won and killed his man, he might have to flee the country or face a charge of murder. If he lost he might be wounded, and certainly in trouble again. Or alternatively, and worst of all, if he lost badly enough, he might be dead.

  Morbidly, he had been thinking that perhaps the best solution for the pair of them would have been if he married Bethany and then got himself killed on Gage’s sword: then she would be a widow, her child would have a name and she could remarry someone better. But he only thought that late at night while he was wondering whether he should choose guns or swords and whom he should pick for his seconds. He had heard that his friend George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, had opened a book on it and that he was not getting good odds at all.

  Still, there was no help for it. He had to fight Gage or be laughed out of Court.

  At least he had his little room to himself now, since his father rented it for him, although he needed to find another room-mate soon because he always needed money. He neither knew nor cared where Gage had moved to, although rumour said he was spending two hours a day learning sword-play from Rocco Bonetti at his sword-school in Blackfriars. Carey had enquired after Sir Philip Sidney’s sword-master Mr Becket, who was reckoned the better man and had tutored him before. He had been very fashionable a year or two before, but now he had disappeared.

  The door was opened for him by a maid of honour. He walked forward, carefully avoiding one of the Queen’s small dogs asleep on the rush-matting. As he swept his best bow, he took in Her Majesty and the
Earl of Leicester, already at the card-table. Then his heart sank, because there, magnificent in pearl-grey damask and diamonds, his black beard and moustache curled and scented, stood Sir Walter Raleigh.

  Carey knew the man and had no illusions about his ability to shine in such company. It was the pity of the world that the Queen was so much older than Raleigh, for it was he, not the pompous and conscientiously arrogant Leicester, who could have been a proper match for her.

  Carey knelt reverently to the Queen and mentally said goodbye to the fat purse he had brought with him.

  XXXVII

  THE DAY AFTER HE had spoken to the doctor, they brought Becket a pipe and tobacco and he found that his fingers were clumsy about filling the bowl and lighting it, but that nonetheless they knew what to do. As the smoke bit its way down his throat, he coughed and then sighed, feeling a little of his fear depart. Only a little, perhaps a pebble off the back of a black mountain.

  But two nights later the nightmare became real again. They woke him as they entered his cell, carrying lanterns and wearing cloaks. Becket started up in bed, wildly staring and plucking for something that was not under his pillow.

  There was Ramme, there was Munday, and behind them were three large Yeoman of the guard with the dogged disgruntled expressions of men who see no earthly point is rising so long before sun-up but must bear the whim of their betters.

  “Dress yourself and gather your belongings,” ordered Ramme and stood with his arms folded whilst Becket struggled with the points of his hose and doublet. It took him an hour to dress himself in the morning, like a great lady, which was another reason besides the cold for sleeping in his clothes, although it had done the wrecked velvet suit no good at all. Watching them out of the corners of his eyes, Becket gathered up his pipe and tobacco pouch and the Bible, leaving the Book of Sermons because they had miraculously combined the incomprehensible with the stupidly banal. One of the yeomen handed him a lumpy package tied in a cloth. He wrapped it and his few belongings with a cheap falling band in the other shirt they had given him.