Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  “Are you saying that he has not in fact lost his memory/”

  “I do not deny that.”

  “Then presumably he no longer has this secret, whatever it may have been.”

  “He might remember.”

  “Then, as he is no traitor, he will no doubt tell it to the proper authorities.”

  “If we set him at liberty . . .”

  “Mr Davison, we are not setting him at liberty. We are putting him in the Fleet. He will not be in the Knights’ Commons, in any case, but in Eightpenny Ward, from which no one has escaped yet.”

  “No one has escaped from the Tower.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why –“

  “This is a fruitless discussion,” said Burghley. “He is going to the Fleet, and there is the end on it.”

  “You need a warrant to move him.”

  “I have a warrant,” said Burghley, and show him the paper, signed by the Queen, that took the prisoner out of Davison’s power and into his own. “The Queen said she will execute no more fools and cat’s-paws like Babington. She said, and I quote, that she does not trust you. She is afraid that you will invent some startling treason for the poor man, torture him into signing the confession and execute him, and that God will require it of her when she dies.”

  “The Queen said that?”

  “I am afraid she did. She was most vehement about it.”

  “Thus she requites faithful service.”

  “Faithful service she requites very well, as I have good cause to know,” said Burghley with the smugness of a cat. “To other manner of service, perhaps she is less kind.”

  “Are you insinuating, my lord, that I am not her faithful servant?”

  “Not at all,” Burghley was picking up his papers, shuffling them, tapping them straight and handing them to his silent and attentive son. “I am sure you believe that you are. And I am sure that the Queen believes you are not. At the moment. And I am also sure, Mr Davison, that the Queen is our Sovereign and you are not.”

  Too furious to say any more, Davison had left him there. It was madness to put the prisoner in the Fleet, a sink of corruption and uncleanliness, where no one could know whom he would meet or what he would say.

  Kneeling still in prayer in his house, truly believing that he directed his thoughts only to God, Davison turned devices of power in his mind. He needed a weapon as the shadowy play and counter-play of the Court tightened around him, all of it seemingly plotting to save the wicked Queen of Scots. Walsingham himself had taught him that the best weapon was knowledge, and so he had gone seeking it at the fountain, and found it.

  Who would have thought that the poet Sidney would have been so circumspect, he thought. At last he knew the prisoner’s true name, now it was too late to do anything about it. And there was the mention of the libel, the book against the Queen. Sidney called it that: a Book of the Unicorn, he said, and the repetition almost made Davison snuff the air like a dog following a hart. There was something, clearly something. Perhaps it was a code-book, perhaps a plan for the invasion of England; perhaps it gave information on the Queen of Scots’ affinity in England.

  It came to him as he knelt that he was wanting in faith. There could be no chance in the accident that had happened to Sidney’s agent. It was all in God’s plan, as all must be, in God’s service there could be no sin, nor was there blame to Davison, who was only a sincere seeker after truth. In some way the Book of the Unicorn would give him what God desired: the death of the Queen of Scots.

  Unheeding how far his mind had strayed as he knelt before the idol in his mind, Davison said, “Amen,” and rose to his feet again, his face a little less tight on its bones. He could see clear at last. God had put Davison on his path so that he should be able to serve the cause of the True Religion by bringing the Queen of Scots to the block at last. The Book of the Unicorn was also a weapon to that end. It was the only possibility: Becket was part of God’s plan to snuff out the viper of Scotland.

  Davison too was part of God’s plan and it was his task to circumvent Burghley.

  A moment’s thought brought a thin smile to his face. Burghley did not know all that took place; not even Walsingham knew of the other arrest Davison’s men had made a few days after Christmas, nor its results. There had been no need of the manacles that time.

  Snuffing out the candles with infinite care not to spill wax, Mr Davison locked and left his office.

  XL

  ON HER WAY BACK from chapel, the Queen received four petitions that she execute the wicked Queen of Scots. By the time she reached her Withdrawing Room her gracious smile was wearing very thin and her long hands had begun removing and replacing her rings. Bethany discovered that the spiced wine she had brought the Queen was too hot and too gingery and furthermore stale, and that she herself was a white-faced little fool who knew nothing of anything and snored like a sow in farrow. She was sent scurrying to fetch better. The Countess of Bedford found her in the Lesser Withdrawing Room, weeping helplessly. Lady Bedford, who had served the Queen for longer than Bethany had been alive, impatiently tipped the offending wine from one goblet into another, added a spoonful of powdered sugar-loaf. Then she sent Bethany to fetch the Queen’s Fool while she herself took the miraculously transformed wine back to the Queen.

  This the Queen pronounced bad but adequate and drank it, wincing as the sugary heat touched her teeth.

  By the time Thomasina arrived, Her Majesty had calmed herself by sarcastically shredding another maid of honour’s taste in clothes and ordering a third to quit her sight until she could wipe that miserable scowl off her face and furthermore do something about the pimple on her nose.

  Thomasina came with her fashion doll, prepared to prattle, but found that the Queen wanted to take her on her lap and pet her instead.

  She played a pretty game with one of the canaries in its cage, singing to it a song that teetered on the edge of the obscene about birds in bushes and shepherds finding satisfaction therein until at last the Queen laughed and the miasma of anxiety began to dissipate from the Withdrawing Room.

  As the maids of honour settled sighing to their embroidery, the Queen bore Thomasina off to a pile of cushions in the corner of the room to admire a book, gaudy in red and green velvet, which had been presented to her by a poet. They both laughed over the miserable straining of the man to get his rhymes properly in line and the Queen kindly corrected his grammar for him.

  “Thomasina,” she said quietly at last, “I have golden opinions of you from Mrs Twiste.”

  “She is very kind,” said Thomasina with mischief in her eyes.

  “She compliments me on your good manners and obedience, which she finds wonderful in one so young.”

  Thomasina tilted her head graciously. “Mrs Twiste tends to see only what she looks at.”

  “And so you have been playing a game with her.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Only a little game. I will tell her the truth if you want me to, next time I go.”

  “No need for that. She says you have been entertaining her little girls with your tumbling and asks if you would like a gift.”

  “Your Majesty’s kindness is payment enough.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What is it, Your Majesty? Have I offended you?”

  “No. I am thinking.”

  Thomasina had learnt the gift of repose when the gypsies had shown her in a cage to the peasants as A True Pygmy Queen of the Amazon, painted with walnut juice, tattooed with woad, decorated with beads and dyed chicken feathers. Now beautiful and clean in Lucca velvet and gold tissue, she sat neatly on her cushion with her hands folded and waited for the Queen to finish thinking. At last the Queen began to speak slowly. “I am in a quandary which I think you might solve for me, if you will. Only I fear to lose you.”

  “Lose me?”

  “Let me tell you a tale.”

  There followed a very strange account of a man who had been taken by Mr Davison in mistake for someone
else. His memory was somehow gone, yet he held a secret, vital to the Queen and the welfare of the kingdom. The Queen was in perplexity how to get it from him, but he had been moved to the Fleet prison to take him away from Davison and his men, and the Queen required to put someone to watch him whom neither he nor anyone else would suspect.

  At last light began to dawn. “Certainly there are children in the Fleet,” Thomasina said, casting her mind back to the days before she had been the Queen’s Fool. “Do you wish me to pass as one of them?”

  “I believe they carry messages in and out for those who have not been granted liberty. Could you do that?”

  Thomasina thought for a moment and then nodded. “Only . . .” she said hesitantly. “Only . . .”

  “What?”

  “I am . . . very small, and not powerful or strong. It is an ugly place, the Fleet, and I am afraid I might fail. Is there nobody better Your Majesty could ask?”

  A line appeared between the Queen’s plucked eyebrows. “If there were, be sure I would not trouble you, my dear,” she said sadly. “I am the Queen of a great realm and yet I have trouble finding those I can trust in this matter.”

  “What matter?”

  “I want you to take particular note of anything this man says regarding the Book of the Unicorn. If he has it, steal it from him as soon as you can and bring it straight to me.”

  “Oh? Do you think he took the book you lost?”

  “No. But I greatly fear he knows the person who did. In particular, if you see him speaking to any old women, tell me at once. I shall arrange for you to pass messages through the Earl of Leicester’s household, in their linen.”

  Thomasina knelt and quietly straightened her doll’s petticoat.

  “Will you do it?” the Queen asked anxiously.

  “I still have my old clothes,” Thomasina said distantly. “I take them out sometimes to remind myself how blessed I am.” She smiled up at the Queen radiantly. “But this is only play-acting. Is it not, Your Majesty?”

  “Thomasina,” the Queen answered very seriously, “I do not require this of you, nor do I order it. It is too dangerous. If you refuse, you will still be my Fool and I will love you none the less.”

  Thomasina paused, wondering if she dared ask. Yes, she must. “Please, Your Majesty, has this anything to do with the Queen of Scots?”

  She waited for the storm to break, but it did not come. “Only I do not want to end like Babington, nor yet be mistaken for a traitor like your poor prisoner,” she added.

  “I do not know. Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  “Why will you not sign her death warrant, Your Majesty?”

  “These are matters of state, Thomasina, and I do not permit any one of my women to dabble in such matters. It is not fitting.”

  “Your Majesty, I am too small to be one of your women.”

  “How much less fitting for you, then.”

  “And yet I am large enough in your esteem for you to ask me to spy for you, like a man.”

  “It has nothing to do with this.”

  “But it might.”

  “Has someone put you up to this?”

  “No, Your Majesty. I am only a Fool who is curious.”

  There was a long ugly pause while Thomasina wondered if she had forfeited the Queen’s love so simply and so easily.

  At last the Queen spoke slowly and softly as if to herself.

  “Walsingham, Burghley, Davison, they all want me to execute an anointed Queen, as if she were no more than any other woman.”

  “But she encompassed your death?”

  “Of course she did. What else could she do? It was her duty. I have held her here for twenty years, since she threw herself so stupidly on my mercy. I have been deaf to her pleas that I release her even to go to retirement in France. I have helped her rebels and made alliance with her most unfilial son, James. I have shown myself her enemy again and again. If she wishes to return to her kingdom – as she should because God gave it to her – then she must escape from me, and since I hold the key so tight, then in all duty she should try to kill her gaoler. She has been a great deal more restrained in her plotting than I would have been in a like position. Though, perhaps,” she said, with a small snort of conceit, “I would have fared better at it.”

  “But is her plotting not treason?”

  “How could it be? This is what Walsingham and his cohorts will not see. The Queen of Scots cannot commit treason against me because she is a sovereign Queen, chosen and anointed of God. This is not her realm, she is not my subject, she owes me no duty of loyalty – therefore she cannot commit treason. All she is doing, all she has ever done is try to win back her throne.”

  “Does she not desire yours as well?”

  “In vengeance for her imprisonment, in zeal for her religion, yes. And she is in fact my successor; she must be, her blood dictates it. And you see, here is another reason why she must not be executed and should not be killed. She inherits the throne of England before Philip of Spain. Why would he wish to bring Parma across from Flanders and send his ships up through the Bay of Biscay in order to bring a Guise Queen to the throne? The Hapsburgs hate the Guises, and always have. No, he never would.”

  “But they are both Catholics.”

  “Philip is Hapsburg first, Catholic second. So you see, imprimis the Queen of Scots cannot commit treason against me because she is not my subject; secundus, she is placed squarely in the path of an invasion from Spain.”

  “You sound as if you are sorry for her.”

  “I was sorry for her; she was a fool and still is, she has less political sense than a flea. She had everything and she threw it away; she could not even assassinate her husband sensibly. The stupidity of it! Blowing him up with gunpowder.”

  “What should she have done?”

  “Get him blind drunk and put a pillow over his face. And then scream.”

  Thomasina hid a smile. She did not ask if the Queen could have done it if necessary.

  “If you are sorry for her, why have you kept her prisoner for so long?” she asked instead.

  “Well,” said the Queen with a slow smile, “first, for policy. Wherever she went as a Queen, there was uproar. She could not govern Scotland, she could not even govern herself. I cannot have such madness on my northern border, it would canker half the kingdom and leave an open door to France. Furthermore, while she is here as my captive I have a leash to use on the Scots and on King James. And second, also for policy. There she sits, the sad romantic Queen, and every Catholic hothead in the country thinks of her first in his plotting. Watching her, I can watch all of them at the same time.”

  “So she is in the nature of bait.”

  “Lord, Thomasina, I wish you were a man so I could appoint you Privy Councillor. You are the first to have seen that. She is bait, she is a sword to hold over the Scots, and she shields us from Spain, all in the one royal person. Wherefore in God’s name should I execute so useful a creature?”

  “Does Davison not understand this?”

  “God alone knows what Davison understands. He is a man besotted by the Apocalypse; he believes Armageddon is near. He is convinced that the Queen of Scots’ death will bring closer the day he hotly desires, when the Antichrist of Spain and God’s English soldiers face each other across, no doubt, a wasted blasted land such as they enjoy in the Netherlands. He expects the English to win.”

  “Would they not?”

  The Queen laughed. “No one who had read the accounts of our doings in the Netherlands could believe that. We have neither the money, the men nor the experience to do it.”

  “But with God’s help . . .”

  “God’s help comes to the better soldiers, depend upon it, Thomasina. I, who have never been near a battlefield, know that. However, Davison . . . Davison believes in the Lord God of Hosts.”

  “So you will never sign the death warrant?”

  “More problems solve themselves if only you can content yourself in patience and wait
. No, I will never sign the death warrant. Not willingly. Not in my right mind. Not unforced. In the last resort, I may yet manage to have her assassinated.”

  “But how is that better?”

  “It is unofficial. It is doubtful. She dies of a sickness. A tragic loss, a sad story. She is unwell already. Men will mutter all over Europe that I poisoned her, but I shall go into mourning and lament her with great lamentations and keep them all in doubt a little longer.”

  “But is not assassination immoral?”

  The Queen shrugged. “The Queen of Scots fears it, I know. God send that the fear of it is enough to kill her, though unfortunately she seems as tough as I am. If she must die for policy’s sake, then let it be quietly, let there be no song and dance, no martyr’s scene. Lord, how she would love to be a martyr and wipe out all her sins, the silly incontinent bitch.”

  “But, Davison . . .”

  “Davison is made blind and deaf by his religion. I, the Protestant champion, must not stoop to poison. All must be open and above-board and beyond doubt. But if I were to sign the death warrant, then all that men will remember of me beyond doubt is that I killed a sister Queen.”

  The Queen sighed heavily. “He has been pressing me hard and he has convinced most of my councillors to back him, so I cannot simply dismiss him and make an end of his idiocy. It may be . . . if he lays hands on the Book of the Unicorn that he could force me to it, and worse besides. I believe he is searching for it as we speak. So yes, Thomasina, in a way, your quest has to do with the Queen of Scots.”

  “What is in the book?”

  The silence this time was too strained to pass unnoticed by the other ladies. They were casting anxious glances across at the Queen and her muliercula.

  “No doubt you will read it if you find it,” said the Queen bleakly. “And then you will know. If you will do this thing I ask of you.”

  Thomasina stood and kissed the Queen on her stiffly plated pink-and white cheek.

  “Of course I will do it, Your Majesty,” she said.

  XLI

  THEY HAD LEFT THEIR boat at the bridge and marched strangely on the ice, past the night-time remains of the winter fair – empty booths and piles of offal and market rubbish that no one could be bothered to move because once the thaw came they would be carried out by the tide. Behind them the Queen’s boatmen returned to the Tower, unable to pass the bridge where the great frothing curlicues, pillars and daggers of ice marked how the frost had come down like a thunderclap at slack water, to dam the river and make of it a playground.