Unicorn's Blood

by Patricia Finney

  It is all talk, Ames thought with pathetic relief; he has no intention of putting me to the question, he cannot afford to. If he were planning to slit my throat, he would have done it by now. He has some other plan, the Almighty send he has some other plan. Perhaps he is still my friend.

  Becket was still looking down at him, shadowed now because the taper was on the shelf over the bed. His long-lashed grey eyes were incongruous in his square black-bearded face. On a woman they would have been her greatest weapon, she would have darkened the rims with kohl, hidden any burgeoning circles of shadow with a cream of white lead. On Becket they made the upper and lower halves of his face disagree, and the Almighty knew he was no oil painting to start with.

  Wishing that eyes could speak as the poets said they did, Ames tried to communicate by the intensity of his stare, tried to reassure Becket that he would be very careful always to call him by mad Tom’s old name; he would not break his cover with the priest.

  Becket looked over his shoulder. The priest had brought out a little folding metal crucifix and a breviary, was saying his evening prayers as he knelt before the figure of my Son in His agony. Becket squatted down so that his face was close to Ames, his breath garlic-laden.

  Perhaps something had been transferred from one pair of eyes to the other. Ames stayed still as Becket’s face became huge, his lips brushed his ear.

  I had no choice, Ames wanted to say in his defence, feeling Becket was right to be angry. No one could know I was alive save Walsingham and my family, if the operation was to work. Certainly I dared not tell you; how soon would you have let it out in some drunken boast? You have to think me dead. But he could say none of it; he no longer knew where the cloth stuffed in his mouth ended and his dry tongue began. He turned his face away, but Becket turned it back, fingers digging painfully in Simon’s neck. “You fooled me once, bastard, but not twice,” Becket hissed. “Not twice.”

  The fingers gripped tighter until Ames could not breathe, until blood roared in his eyes and ears. He jerked and threshed helplessly, trying to writhe away until Father Hart came and pulled Becket’s hands off and he could gasp air through his nose and see again.

  “No,” said the priest. “Do you truly want him dead?”

  Becket seemed to be considering this seriously. “No,” he said at last. “I want to talk to him.”

  The priest nodded. “Christ also forgave Judas,” he said cryptically. “Be very sure he cannot escape.” Becket checked the ropes, retied one where it had been loosened by Ames’ struggles.

  Again they put hats and cloaks on, preparing to leave him alone. Ames hoped they would leave him at least one light; he was afraid of the rats who had feasted on the chicken during the day, but Father Hart thriftily blew out all the taper flames. The key turned in the lock behind them.

  LXIV

  FOR A WHILE AMES lay listening in the tantalising smell of mutton fat, his heart still hammering for lack of air and fear and helplessness. And then he lost the calmness that had preserved him during the day. Panic was a hot flood inside him, blotting out pain and thirst. If he had been able he would have screamed. He wrenched angrily at the ropes, wrenched again, stupidly, uselessly, hurting himself like an animal in a trap and then moaned when cramp conquered rage again.

  There was a sound on the window shutters. Ames lay like a stone, listening to the rats and his own muffled gasping. Another soft rattle. Ames rolled his eyes, craned his head sideways to peer at the shuttered window. There was a knife poking between them, jiggling patiently at the hook holding them shut. Slowly it pushed the hook out of its eye, the shutters swung quietly open.

  Expecting anything – Becket, a thief, even Francis, who was the boldest and wildest of his brothers – Ames gasped to see a child in a dirty biggin cap and indistinct rags swing herself over the sill and drop inside. She breathed hard as she checked all round the room. The last rat squeaked defiantly at her and then skittered away down its hole. She came over to the bed.

  Ames lifted his head and shouted at her through the gag, but she put her finger on her lips.

  “Mr Ames, I am come to free you, but you must swear to keep quiet, please.”

  He nodded frantically, willing to promise her the world, his body, his fortune, comic in his desperation. Her small cold fingers worked busily at the knots behind his head, she tutted and told him to hold still and then she slipped her knife carefully between his cheek and the cloth, slit through, pulled out the wad. Ames could still not speak, his mouth would not close, he could not move his tongue.

  She was cutting the ropes holding his down; quietly efficient, she fetched beer from the flagon on the table, poured him a beaker. His hands were too numb to hold it, she did that for him, he gulped greedily, slopping it because his jaw was still frozen.

  “I could not come earlier because I was fetching this,” she said coolly, and found the tinder-box by the fireplace, lit one of the tapers. Ames was contorting himself to stretch his muscles, pull against the cramps of release. She unfolded a piece of thick official paper with two seals on it, spread it on the table. Ames put a useless paw on it to hold it down, digging and circling his knuckles into the angle of his jaw and squinting to read the italic.

  It was a Royal warrant, a general warrant, signed by the Queen, identifying him as her servant and giving him all of her Royal power that could be held by a single man.

  Ames stared from it to the child in the taper-light. Astonishing that one so young could be so . . . His eyes narrowed and he stared harder at her, still speechless. He reached out and clumsily untied the strings of her biggin cap so it slipped back, then turned her face one way and that so that the pale smoky light fell on it. She let him do it. The lines were faint, crinkling at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  “You are the Queen’s muliercula,” he croaked flatly, after another gulp of beer. “The Queen’s Fool.”

  She curtseyed to him and smiled. “And you are the first man with eyes to see that I am no child.”

  Staggering like a drunk, Ames went to the window and looked out. She had come along a narrow ledge from a meeting of roofs farther along. To be sure, mad Tom had stepped along such ledges and from roof to roof with confidence, knowing his angels would bear him up. Ames had not the madness nor the courage. Even looking out made him dizzy; he was too short-sighted to see more than a blur where the little courtyard lay below.

  “Key,” he said to himself. “Perhaps there is a key.”

  He searched the room methodically, his stomach too clenched with fear and excitement to consider the remains of Becket’s and Hart’s meal. Besides, he could not bring himself to eat what the rats had left. There was a small chest under the bed that was not locked. Ames found the file that had broken Becket’s leg-irons and used it to break the lock, opened it up. Inside, under a false bottom, were Mass things – a chalice, a paten, a little metal box to carry the Eucharist. Underneath them was a surprising quantity of gold, a bottle of excellent aqua vitae, from which Ames took a much-needed gulp. Next to it was a little leather-bound notebook. From sheer habit, he picked it up and flipped through the pages, then froze. Perhaps no other man could have understood what he saw.

  “What is it?” asked Thomasina, busy checking for key hooks by the door. “What’s wrong?”

  “This . . . This is Phelippes’ writing,” Ames stuttered, staring down at the code book.

  “Phelippes?”

  “Sir Francis Walsingham’s code-breaker.”

  “But it was in the priest’s box.”

  They exchanged a long slow look and then something snapped inside Ames. He sat down on the bed with the book in his hands and giggled helplessly, hooted with spreading hysteria and had to wipe tears from his eyes with his sleeve.

  Thomasina brought him another cup of beer.

  “Here,” she said drily. “It is said to be good for madness also.”

  “No, I am . . . I am certainly not mad.” Ames had an attack of the hiccups and sniggered again. “
I am only thinking of poetic justice.”

  “Hm,” said Thomasina, looking comically wise. “In my experience there is no such thing.”

  “Oh, but there is, there is,” Ames assured her, struggling with hilarity. “You could make a whole heretical theology of it.”

  “Mr Ames,” said Thomasina witheringly. “When you have finished, shall we consider what to do?”

  Ames ducked his head and got a grip on himself. “Forgive me,” he said more quietly. “I am tired and overwrought and not used to all this. Give me a moment.”

  “How long do we have before Mr Becket and his friend come back?”

  “All night,” said Ames. “And longer, I think.”

  He stood up, went to the window and looked out again. The beer was working on him now, clarifying his mind, giving him some counterfeit boldness. If I got drunk enough, could I be a soldier? Some part of him wondered, and then he shook his head at the idiocy of the thought. He looked at the door, at the hinges of it. They had found no key.

  “Mistress Thomasina,” he said politely to her. “It must be a great burden to you to be so wise and yet so small.”

  Her neat little head came up and she looked shocked. “Yes,” she said, truth surprised out of her, “it is.”

  He picked up the warrant, folded it, hid it in the front of his doublet, and put on his hat.

  “The Queen knows you, though,” he said. “She has sent you to find the Book of the Unicorn as well.”

  She nodded. “And to watch you,” she added.

  “Of course. Well, Becket and his cunning friend Father Hart are even now paying gold to an old witch for the book. Knowing Becket, I expect he plans to cut Hart’s throat once they are clear of the Falcon Inn.”

  “And Hart?”

  “Hart knows it and has certainly laid plans. I make no doubt he is a true priest, but I suspect he hardly cares if Davison lays hands on the book and it is quite possible he knows Becket for a double-dealer as well. Some time while Becket was in the Tower, the pursuivants must have caught Hart and turned him.”

  She nodded. “What shall we do?”

  “Do you think the ledge will support my weight?”

  She nodded again hesitantly. “It is not an easy climb, even for me.”

  Ames smiled, suddenly buoyed up with strange confidence. The priest had talked of Becket’s being in the hands of the Almighty. Well, that applied to him as well. Even a traitor could speak the truth. Either what he was doing was the Almighty’s will or it was not: if it was, he would not fall; if it was not, then he would not succeed anyway. “If I fall, take the warrant to Dr Nunez in Poor Jewry. Tell him what happened to me, what is happening now and ask him to use it as he sees fit.”

  Becket had hung Ames’s knife-belt on a nail by the door. Ames retrieved it, strapped it on and wished he had a sword and better clothes. Curiously, it was the weight of his penner on his hip that comforted him, not his dagger.

  “You go ahead,” he told the muliercula. “Show me which way to go.”

  She climbed out onto the ledge, began moving slowly along it, facing outwards. Ames peered down into the street. I am not a brave man, he thought to himself; I am nothing like Becket and yet I do these things. For a moment he was frozen with fear again, thinking of the long way down, the stiffness and unreadiness of his joints. In his mind’s eye were his brothers – tall, handsome, effective, outmatching him in everything bodily that he did, somehow making him more clumsy by their aptitude.

  One way or another I have to do it, he thought. I have done it before, when the fire burnt us out of Becket’s lodgings. The Almighty held me up then and also later, under London Bridge. He will do so again if I call, as the priest said.

  Praying incoherently under his breath, he climbed slowly through the narrow window, barely big enough even for his meagre shoulders, and stood on the ledge. Sickness rushed spit to his mouth, and the ground seemed to be swooping up to catch him. Gasping, he turned and faced the wall with its cracked plaster and faint iron smell, inched shakily along it, guided by Thomasina, who was sitting like a small gargoyle by a chimney whispering instructions to him.

  He reached the other roof, clung to it and vibrated there for a few moments, blinking sweat out of his eyes. The thatch was cold and slick, as if the house had wet hair.

  Thomasina was lying full-length on it and she slid and slithered around the curve of the roof, to another roof, this one made of shingles. There was lead guttering; she reached down and caught hold of it, shinned down and stood in Hanging Sword Court, her head tilted to look up at him.

  Simon followed, reached the lead guttering, began climbing down it painfully.

  A squeak of alarm made him look up. The staples holding it to the wall were coming out, the whole lead pipe was pulling away.

  Simon slid the rest of the way, bruising his hands, and jumped to the ground. Above them the guttering quivered but stayed where it was, frozen in mid-disaster. He had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself giggling again.

  They were in a woodyard, Hanging Sword Court Woodyard, where Richard Broom’s son-in-law carried on his carpentry trade. The gate was locked, but there was plenty of wood and a ladder stood by some scaffolding.

  In the street Ames took Thomasina’s hand.

  “Mistress Thomasina,” he said, “I am clumsy and unhandy and you are very patient. Do you know where the Falcon Inn is?”

  Something old and ugly crossed her face. She nodded.

  “We will go there across the river, not by Paris Garden Stairs but by Barge House Stairs and then along Upper Ground. I want you to go ahead and see what is there. I’ll wait for you in the alley by Pudding Mill.”

  Again she nodded and led the way through the narrow alley, past the sorrowing Christ in the whore’s beautiful salvaged window, still there against all the odds, through the tiny gate and into Temple Lane.

  They stood a few minutes later on Whitefriars Steps where there were no boats, only the roughly frozen Thames.

  It took as much courage to do it as it had taken him to dare the roof-tops, but Ames went down the steps and trod the ice. It creaked a little but held firm. Surely the thaw would come soon; London had tired of the Frost Fair; they had stopped lighting bonfires on the ice.

  He felt naked and strange on the ice, could almost see himself from afar, a solitary figure crossing a false river dry-shod with a strange false child at his side.

  Tension broke inside him. He ran the last few hundred yards, climbed the Barge House Steps and crept along Upper Ground, past the fair bawdy-houses and their gardens, and then ducked into the alley by Pudding Mill. Thence Thomasina crept on ahead of him, flitting from shadow to shadow with a surefootedness he envied.

  A few moments later she was back, her face monkey-like it its fury.

  “Yes,” she breathed in his ear, “Davison’s pursuivants are there. I saw a dozen men around the inn, four to each doorway, commanded by a short round man and a tall elegant one.”

  “Munday and Ramme. Where is Ramme, the tall elegant one?”

  “Next to the Falcon Stairs.”

  “What about Becket and Hart? They have not come out yet?”

  Thomasina looked prim. “From the sound of it, they are enjoying the Falcon Inn’s hospitality.”

  Ames grinned; it was endearingly typical of Becket that in the middle of a dangerous piece of business he would stop to get drunk and whore. Certainly the house was rocking with music and a frantic number of lights. “Both of them?”

  Thomasina shrugged.

  “Where is Munday, the other one?”

  She gestured. Ames squatted down in the shadows, frightened at what he planned to do, and yet oddly exhilarated. The Almighty had held him up, kept him from falling off the ledge, brought him here. Perhaps it would work . . . Thomasina slipped aware again. He took the warrant out from under his shirt, read it to give him courage.

  LXV

  AT THE TOP OF the Falcon is a room rarely used except by the co
urtiers who can afford to pay for it and who like the effect of it, being as near to a metaphor of the Court as a physical thing could be. Upon the floor are decent rush-mats, which are covered by Turkey rugs and cushions for festivals, and there is a sideboard which can be arrayed with newly redeemed plate if necessary, to give an illusion of gracious living.

  But to walk into the place is like entering a crystal, like becoming the flaw in a diamond. Its walls and ceilings are crusted and crowded with mirrors, giving back in multiplicities of blue reflections whatsoever enters. When not in use it is a storage place for benches and tables and old broken beds and the out-of-fashion finery of long-poxed whores, waiting to be remodelled. So to walk into the room and pick your way among the furniture is to enter upon a kind of dusty, cluttered infinity.

  They say magic may be done in such a place. To be sure, if Becket and Hart had been able to look with the right eyes, they would have seen me watching them from within the congruence of light made in the corners, but they could not, and besides the light of the rush-dips they carried was too little.

  Sister Mary was waiting for them there, sitting on a scorched bench, staring at the reflected wreck of herself. The cruellest pain of becoming old is to look in the glass and always to be surprised at the time-slashed face of a stranger that looks back.

  It had been a fearful wait for Mary, small ghosts and great regrets had whispered to her out of the fumes of aqua vitae, the contraband she carried in her petticoat seemed to be burning through her skirts. Only her determination to gain Pentecost’s dowry kept her there. Worst for her, she could see me where I watched from the mirror-maze, but could not meet my eyes. Once again she was horror-struck at what she had done.