The Flower Reader (11 page)

I would say I was my old self again, but I was not. That hard place like a bubble of stone inside me? It had been growing. I felt as if the stone were taking me over, bit by bit.

The queen received me in an antechamber at the base of Holyrood’s northwest tower; it had been furnished with carpets and hangings figured with the arms of Scotland and of France. Another room
opened to the left, and in the right corner there was an opening to a stone spiral staircase, half-hidden by a millefleur tapestry showing the three Fates spinning, drawing out, and cutting the thread of life. Lord James Stewart was present, and Monsieur Nicolas de Clerac; the queen’s other close adviser, Sir William Maitland, had already been sent hotfoot to London to sweeten the temper of Queen Elizabeth there. Mary Livingston fluttered her fingers to me surreptitiously from beside the queen’s chair, where she stood with another lady I did not know.

And, of course, there was the queen herself. I curtsied deeply. I had been practicing, because curtsies are not easy when one’s legs are still weak and shaky, and I did not want to make a fool of myself by falling over. I straightened, and for the first time since we were children I looked straight into Mary Stuart’s eyes.

How to describe her, this girl my own age who was twice a queen, who was called the most beautiful woman in Europe, who was educated and polished to an exquisite sheen by the sophistication of the French court? She was tall—which was perfectly clear even though she was seated—and willow-slender. She had bright golden-russet hair, sleeked back in a French hood of black velvet heavily embroidered with pearls, diamonds, jet, and silver thread. Her almond-shaped eyes were virtually the same color as her hair, amber-gold, with heavy half-lowered eyelids and long glinting golden lashes. Of her face, though, I was struck mostly by the height of her forehead, a smooth rounded curve of white, white skin. It gave her a look of archaic dignity, like the queens in old portraits and illuminations.

Sensuality shimmered around her, so intense it was almost visible. Her perfume—was it perfume, or was it her natural scent?—was a heady distillation of lilies and roses, musk and honey and seaweed. I had smelled it before, and after a moment I placed it: peonies. She was a peony, glorious but fragile, its petals scattered by the least wind or rain. A white-and-pale-pink peony with its black seeds symbolizing melancholy and nightmares. I would have expected something grander, a crimson rose or a lily the color of fire.

You are out of your place with crowns and thrones, madame, I thought. You would have been happier with a simpler life—a pretty château in Touraine, a fine young husband to adore you, babes of your own to ride their ponies round and round in the garden. But simplicity you have never had, nor will you ever, until later, much later. And I do not think you know or understand the effect you have on men who breathe your scent.

“My Marianette,” she said.

It was her childhood nickname for me. That year in France—the year I was eight years old, the year that had changed everything for me—she had stubbornly refused to call me Rinette. It was too like
la reinette
, the little queen, which she herself was sometimes called. So she ran the two versions of my name together—Marina and Rinette—and came up with Marianette. I did not like it because it sounded like
marionetta
, which is what Queen Catherine de Médicis called her grotesque Italian puppets.
La reinette
, the little queen, just laughed and used it all the more.

“Circumstances have delayed our reunion until now,” she went on. Her Scots was perfectly serviceable despite the throaty softness of a French accent. “I condole with you upon the death of your husband—I too am a recent widow.”

“Thank you, madame,” I said. “I condole with you also.”

“I have known Marianette since the year my mother came to visit me in France, the year 1550 when I was eight,” the queen said to the others in the room. “Sir Patrick Leslie of Granmuir was in my mother’s household, with his wife, Blanche, called Blanche of Orléans because she was an illegitimate daughter of the old Duke of Longueville. She was a half sister to my mother’s first husband, and my mother was kind enough to call her sister.”

I stood like a stone. I did not want to hear her tell the story of my mother.

“Just as my own mother was preparing to go back to Scotland the following year, a terrible thing happened—a fever struck the court, and Sir Patrick Leslie died. That in itself was bad enough, but
Lady Blanche proceeded to go mad with grief. She was attached to her husband to an excessive degree.”

“Madame,” said Mary Livingston. “Perhaps this is not the best—”

“She was taken in by the Benedictine sisters of Montmartre outside Paris, and to everyone’s astonishment refused to leave. She is there to this day, to the best of my knowledge. Does she write to you, Marianette?”

“No,” I said.

“Then perhaps she has died, as my own mother died. I am told you have a gift for me, a token from my mother.”

She smiled. She knew the tales would be all over the court by suppertime—my mother, a French duke’s bastard, had gone mad and abandoned me. That, her expression said, would put me in my place. Lord James and Nicolas de Clerac, on the other hand, standing behind her where she could not see their faces, had the expressions of men who knew there was a prize to be had and were straining every nerve and sinew to snatch it up first, out of the other’s very hands.

They knew about the casket. Lady Margaret Erskine had known. It was impossible, but here it was. And, of course, if Lady Margaret and Lord James and Monsieur de Clerac knew I had the casket and knew there was something valuable inside it, who else knew?

How had they found out?

The only person who did not know, it seemed, was the queen herself.

“I do not have it with me, madame,” I said. “Please, may we speak privately?”

“I have no secrets from my brother and my most special adviser.” She gestured to the two men. “Beaton, you and Livingston may go.”

The two ladies curtsied and went out.

“Now,” the queen said. “Tell me of this so-mysterious object.”

I hesitated. I had promised Mary of Guise I would not unlock the silver casket; should I tell the queen what I had seen inside? Or
better to pretend I had kept my promise and knew nothing of the contents?

The old queen is dead and the French queen will never know
. Alexander’s voice, sweet with honey and kisses.
Open it. I want to see
.

Alexander had known. He had seen the contents of the casket, and he had seen me hide it in the niche under the window of the Mermaid Tower.

I wanted to run away and find a quiet garden where I could be alone with the flowers and the sky and sort out what all this meant. But of course I could not do that. The best thing I could think of to do was to pretend I knew as little as possible.

“It is a locked silver casket,” I said slowly. “What is inside I do not know, but your mother, may God keep her…” I crossed myself, and the queen and Monsieur de Clerac did the same. I think I was as much asking absolution for my lie as wishing rest to Mary of Guise. Lord James, being a Protestant, did not make the gesture. “Your mother wished you to have it, from the first moment you touched your foot to Scottish soil. She required me to promise. That is why I asked for an audience on the day you arrived.”

“Comment intrigante,”
the queen said. For the first time she opened her eyes completely. They shone like topazes. “I wish to see it at once. Is it in your chamber? Have you a key?”

“It is put away safely,” I said. “And yes, I have a key. I—”

“I will send men-at-arms to take possession of it immediately.” It was Lord James, with his king-in-all-but-name voice. “This is business of state, Mistress Rinette, and not something for a girl like you to be meddling in.”

“Perhaps we should send royal men-at-arms,” Nicolas de Clerac said in a mild voice. “We would not want the contents of the casket to end anywhere but in the queen’s own hands.”

Lord James, not surprisingly, bristled at that. “Do you imply, monsieur, that I myself would take anything from this casket before presenting it to my sister?”

“James, James.” The queen laughed. Her eyes glinted with her
pleasure—she was enjoying it, the conflict between the two men and her own power to stop it or encourage it as she pleased. “Sieur Nico, you are terribly improper to make such an implication. Apologize at once.”

Nicolas de Clerac bowed, his face expressionless. “As you wish, madame,” he said. “My lord, I beg your pardon for my…impropriety.”

The queen rose. She was tall—strikingly tall—even taller than I had guessed. She overtopped me by a hand’s width at least, and her brother by two or three fingers. Monsieur de Clerac kept his head bowed, disguising the fact that he was the only one who could have looked her straight in the eyes. I wondered whether he was doing it deliberately.

“Let us go and find this casket at once,” she said. “Perhaps my mother left jewels in it. Perhaps she wrote me letters to assure me of her love. We will find it and open it together, and it will be an amusement for the day.”

“No,” I said.

They all looked at me. The queen’s expression was quizzical—she was thinking, plain as day, that she must have misunderstood me, as no one ever refused her what she desired. Lord James looked angry and offended. Monsieur de Clerac—Sieur Nico, the queen called him, with such charming intimacy—looked curious and at the same time apprehensive. He was the only one, then, who really believed I would refuse to give up the casket to the queen.

If I gave it up, I would be no one again—just Rinette Leslie, eighteen years old, so unfortunately widowed and with a baby girl, prey to either the Earl of Huntly or the Earl of Rothes, whichever could fight off the other. My royal charter had died with Mary of Guise; I would be pressed hard to marry some stranger, so as to give one of the earls the overlordship of Granmuir. Oh, Granmuir, my home, my gardens by the sea. They would take it and fortify it, and with it they would control the sea-lanes to the low countries, the ancient drovers’ roads down through the Mounths. I might be
allowed to live there and I might not. All because I would be no one, with no power to stop them.

But I had the casket.

If I kept the casket, I could bargain with them.

I could say,
No marriage, not now, not ever
.

I could say,
Granmuir is mine and mine alone, a royal fief as it has always been
.

I could say,
When the murderer of Alexander Gordon hangs in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, I will put the silver casket into your hands
.

I had broken my promise to Mary of Guise already. If I did this I would shatter it to splinters. I would be doing a wrong I had never thought I, Rinette Leslie, could do. A deliberate mortal wrong.

Very well. I would do penance. I had done it before, after I’d faced down Rannoch Hamilton and his men at Saint Ninian’s. I would do it again, whatever it was, for Granmuir and for justice.

“No,” I said again. My voice did not sound like my own, but of course I was not myself. It felt strange—terrifying and at the same time exhilarating. “I will give you the casket, madame, only when you give me what I ask in exchange.”

“But it is mine,” the queen said. “My mother wished me to have it; you have said so yourself.”

“You are playing a dangerous game, Mistress Rinette,” said Lord James. His voice was sharp and harsh as a cheese grater, and I could see he was expending considerable effort to keep from grasping me by the neck and shaking my secret out of me. He knew what was in the casket. He had to know.

“It is not a game. It is a simple exchange.”

“What is it, then,” said the queen’s Sieur Nico, soft as silk and practical as iron nails, “that you wish the queen to give you in exchange for the casket?”

“Two things,” I said. “First, protection from the Earl of Huntly and the Earl of Rothes. I do not wish to marry again, and only the queen has the power to hold the earls off and confirm Granmuir to me and to my daughter as a royal fief. I would have my estates for
my own and the queen’s promise that I will not be compelled to marry.”

“That is not so unreasonable,” Nico said. “What do you think, madame?”

“I think Marianette should give me my mother’s casket first, and ask her favors afterward.” The amusement had gone from the queen’s eyes, and her lower lip had thrust out. It was astonishing—for a moment she looked exactly as I remembered her in France so long ago, when we were both eight years old and had hated each other for no particular reason, as children will do. “I do not understand why you think it is worth bargaining over, as if we are all fishwives in the marketplace.”

Nico and Lord James looked at each other sideways. The queen did not see. I did. There was a whole conversation in that single look.

“The casket is more than a simple heirloom, madame,” Nico said. “There are reasons your mother told this girl to give it to you the moment you touched your foot to the soil of Scotland. Reasons she went to such lengths to preserve it from the Lords of the Congregation.”

“The regent was a fool,” Lord James said. “And Mistress Rinette would be better off to give us the casket now, then keep her tongue in her teeth and marry as her betters command her.”

“If my dearest mother wished me to have this casket and what it contains, then have it I will.” The queen’s voice shook. “You will not prevent me, brother James.”

Lord James made an exasperated sound, like a man at cards who has overplayed his hand too early in the game. “I do not wish to prevent you, sister.”

Nico turned back to me and said, in his silk-and-nails voice again, “Your first wish is not unreasonable, Mistress Rinette. What is your second?”

They were both calling me
Mistress Rinette
now, as if I had no surname at all.

“I wish to see the person who murdered Alexander Gordon
brought to justice,” I said. “Both the assassin himself and, if he was paid, the person who ordered it done. I wish to have a place here at court where I can see for myself that inquiries are being made, and even take part in the inquiries if I wish to do so. When these persons, whoever they are, have been tried and hanged and are in their graves, madame, then I will give you your casket and go home to Granmuir.”