The Flower Reader (14 page)

The Frenchmen acquitted themselves with style, clearly accustomed to taking female parts. The Scots gentlemen were more self-conscious, and tended to laugh when they should have been declaiming serious Latin epigrams. Just as young John Sempill of Beltrees made his entrance as Terpsichore, muse of the dance, wafting his draperies from side to side in a way that made all the ladies in the audience giggle, a short, compact gentleman in sober black silk stepped up beside me.

“Madame Rinette,” he said quietly, in a strongly French-accented voice. “A word, if I may.”

I did not remember seeing him before, and his appearance was oddly soldierly amid the rich clothes of the courtiers and the whimsies of the masque. His hair was cut short; his eyes were greenish-gray, so pale they looked as if they had been bleached by seeing too much for too long. “Forgive me, monsieur,” I said, “but if I have been introduced to you I do not remember.”

“I am Blaise Laurentin,
à votre service
,” he said. “You might say that I am in the French ambassador’s household, although I am not exactly in the employ of Monsieur Castelnau himself.”

“Very mysterious,” I said. I did not want to talk to him. I wanted to watch the masque.

“I would like to call upon you privately,” he said. “I understand you have already spoken with Master Wetheral, and before you pursue your…acquaintance…with him, I have a matter of some urgency to discuss with you as well.”

“I cannot imagine what urgent matter we might have to discuss.” The queen was declaiming in Latin again, her voice clear and pure as an angel’s. She looked like an angel, with the fantastic trailing wings and white silk tunic, all but for the endless legs in their flesh-colored taffeta. “I do not know you, monsieur, and I do not care for the implication that you are watching my visitors.”

“Anyone can watch men go in and out of Holyrood. I wish to speak with you about your husband, madame—I have met him, you know.”

I felt a hot flush in my cheeks and forehead. No, I thought. Not another one.

A little unsteadily I said, “I do not know how that can be so, monsieur. My husband never went to France. Perhaps you have confused him with another—”

“He was Alexander Gordon of Glenlithie, lord of Granmuir in the right of his young wife. You, madame, are Marina Leslie of Granmuir. There is no confusion.”

“Whatever it is you have to say, I do not wish to hear it.” My heart was thudding and my inwards had turned to liquid, and I felt a desperate desire to run away. “Please excuse me, monsieur; I do not feel well.”

He closed his hand around my wrist. His fingers were cold; they felt boneless and unnatural, like vines. An image of wild white bryony flashed in my mind, twining and curling, the flowers shriveling before my eyes to leave fetid berries the color of diluted blood.
Navet du diable
, they called it in France, the devil’s turnip, for its fleshy white root.

“Let go of me,” I said.

“I will speak with you, whether you will it or not.”

His words were startlingly loud, because the chamber had
suddenly fallen silent. The queen had broken off in the midst of her declamation to Terpsichore. Terpsichore herself, in the person of John Sempill, had stopped waving her—his—spangled pasteboard lyre and was staring openly. The musicians had lowered their instruments.

“You are interrupting the masque,” the queen said in a cold voice. She did not even call me by my name. “Is it not rather soon for you to be quarreling with a lover, you who wish so passionately to take vengeance for the murder of your so-beloved husband?”

Everyone turned to look at me. I felt a scalding flush of humiliation from my borrowed slippers to my hairline—I might have been on fire, and I knew they all would see it and read it wrongly. Even if I could have thought of anything to say, I do not think I could have controlled my throat and tongue and lips well enough to say it. The Frenchman, damn him to the deepest pit of hell, was still holding my wrist, apparently as frozen as I was by the queen’s sudden and open displeasure.

“It is Monsieur Laurentin who interrupts, madame.”

From behind me, a man’s quiet voice with a razor edge of ruthlessness. At the same time, a hand in a silver glove closed itself around Blaise Laurentin’s forearm just so, and with a little grunt of pain the Frenchman let go of my wrist. I turned my head, and there I saw the queen’s adviser and secretary Nicolas de Clerac, costumed as Urania, the muse of astronomy, his white silk tunic and gathered mantle embroidered with scattered silver globes and compasses. There were blue and silver streaks of paint around his eyes. All the same, he did not look foolish or mischievous as the other gentlemen did; woman’s costume or no, if I had met him alone in a dark place I would have been afraid of him.

“It does not matter which one of them it was.” The queen sounded petulant, but at the same time her golden eyes feasted upon Nicolas de Clerac. “The masque is spoiled regardless.”

“With you as its centerpiece, madame, it cannot be spoiled no matter what happens,” Nico said. “I am sure Monsieur Laurentin will
make no more difficulties, and Mistress Rinette is entirely innocent in the matter. Is that not so, Monsieur Laurentin?”

His fingers tightened around the Frenchman’s arm again.

“Yes, of course,” Laurentin said in a tight voice. “I mistook her for someone else.”

Sieur Nico smiled and let go of his wrist. “And Mistress Rinette herself wants only to see the rest of the masque. Is that not true, mistress?”

“Yes,” I said. I did not look at him. I looked at the queen in her magnificent costume. “You are as beautiful as a dream, madame, and I have never seen such a masque before.”

Which was all perfectly true. Even so, I was saying it deliberately to flatter her, and I hated myself for falling into the same game with the rest of them.

“We shall continue, then,” the queen said. “Monsieur Laurentin—”

She meant to dismiss him; that was clear. But he was already gone.

“You broke off at the fourth couplet of the epigram to Terpsichore,” Nico de Clerac said. He stepped back into his place, paying no more attention to me. The queen smiled straight into his eyes and began to speak again. Terpsichore danced—quite gracefully for a man, although John Sempill was an agile fellow who was called “the dancer” for his nimble footwork, and had probably been chosen to play the part because of it—and the masque proceeded. I might have disappeared like a wisp of smoke, and I was glad of it.

I could not help but wonder, though, why Nicolas de Clerac had intervened when he did. Once—when he defended me from the unruly crowd on the High Street, with Alexander lying dead in my arms—might have been simple chance. Twice—when he materialized out of the darkness in Holyrood Abbey with his offers of help in finding Alexander’s murderer—was far less likely to have been chance. Three times…

Three times was not chance at all.

“I
t is so cold,” the queen said. “It is just so
cold
.”

She had been shivering and huddling on a stool in front of the fire since yesterday, when we had all arrived at Crichton Castle. I was at my wits’ end. Her half brother, Lord John Stewart of Coldingham, was to marry the Earl of Bothwell’s sister Janet Hepburn in just a few hours, and the whole point of the court coming to Crichton was for the queen to grace the wedding with her presence. Her presence in front of a fire in her bedchamber, wrapped in two fur-lined cloaks and an old wool plaid, was hardly what either Bothwell or her brother had in mind.

“This cold is
la morte
, madame, for anyone so fragile and beautiful as you.” Pierre de Chastelard was kneeling at the queen’s side. He had her hand pressed to his cheek, an outrageous bit of presumption for a ragtag French poet whose verse was nothing but an overembellished imitation of Ronsard’s. “Let us run away, back to the sweet Loire Valley, where Christmas is kept properly by proper Catholics.”

I wanted to crack him over the head with the queen’s gilded silver necessary-pot, which I had just carried into the chamber after
rinsing and polishing it at the stable trough. Since the debacle of my first appearance at court, at the masque of Apollo and the muses, I had been relegated to the most menial, least public tasks of the queen’s household. She was certainly not going to allow me to steal attention away from her at any more public events.

“Madame,” I said, keeping my voice soft and deferential, “your brother’s wedding is to be at four of the clock, in just two hours, and then a great banquet and celebration afterward. You must put on your gown and have your hair properly arranged. Allow me to call Fleming and Seton, at least, to attend you.”

“Madame,” whispered Monsieur de Chastelard, in his feather-soft French-accented Scots, “allow me to throw the clock out the window into the snow.”

The queen lifted her head. Her cheeks were pinkened from the heat of the fire, and her eyes sparked with sudden annoyance. Her whole expression came alive for the first time since we had arrived at Crichton. “Do not be ridiculous, Pierre,” she said. “The king of France, my father-in-law, gave me that clock, and it is far too beautiful and valuable to be cast out the window.”

She stood up. The plaid fell away from her shoulders into a multicolored pile of rough wool behind her; her height and ethereal slenderness made her seem not quite human. Her hair was loose and shining, the very color of the fire, falling away from the rosy-white height of her forehead. I had learned not to be surprised by her sudden changes in mood, but I would never understand how she managed it, changed herself from light to dark, dark to light, in the space of a breath.

“You may go, Pierre,” she said with hauteur. “I must be dressed.”

“I will serve as your valet de chambre,” the poet said. “I will kiss your feet and roll your stockings oh-so-deliciously up the glorious length of your legs.”

“I will call my brother and have him stab you
à l’Ecossais
,” the queen said coldly. “Through and through, Scots-style, a thousand times. Do not presume too far, Monsieur de Chastelard.”

The poor poet looked confused and hurt; he seemed even less able than I was to follow her quicksilver changes in temper. But people said he was mad with love for her, which I was not.

“I beg your pardon, madame,” he said with exaggerated formality. “I beg your permission to withdraw from your royal presence.”

“Go.” She had already lost interest in him. She walked over to the table before the window—the iciest spot in the room, and yet suddenly she did not seem to feel the cold at all—and put one hand upon the clock. “I remember the day King Henri gave this clock to me, the day of my betrothal in the grand new
Salle des Caryatides
in the Louvre. We danced afterward—oh, how we danced.”

The poet crept away unnoticed.

“There will be dancing tonight as well, madame,” I said. “The Earl of Bothwell has spared no expense in lighting or firewood, so it will be warm and bright. There will be music and every kind of wonderful delicacy to eat and drink—after all, it is not every day that an earl’s sister marries a king’s son.”

“Just look,” the queen said, as if I had not spoken at all. “‘A fair striking clock,’ that is what he called it when it was presented to me. See how it stands upon a silver base, chased with flowers and garnished with gilt and aquamarines and pearls. The crystal in the top is as clear as the clearest glass. I have seen nothing like it in Scotland.”

“We have clockmakers here,” I said. I had never met one, but certainly there must be at least one.

“Oh, yes, I am sure there are clockmakers here, but never such artists as created my
horloge fleurie
.” She began to shiver again. She had come back from her reverie of France to the cold southwest tower of Crichton Castle. “Nothing is the same here. It is so cold. Sometimes I wish I had never come back to Scotland.”

“Do not say that, madame. You are queen of Scots. You were born here. You belong here.”

“I do not want to be queen tonight. Go and tell the Earl of Bothwell to carry on with his sister’s wedding—I am not well. I will stay here.”

She pulled the plaid up around her shoulders, flung herself down on the stool, and stared moodily into the fire.

“Remember the fire at Stirling,” I said. I had to change her mood again, and I knew how the business at Stirling had affected her. “Remember the prophecy. You are the queen of Scots who was foretold a thousand years ago.”

She straightened a little and looked up at me through the shining web of her hair. “Prophecies,” she said. “There are prophecies in my mother’s silver casket, too, or so James tells me. Your husband sent him a letter, offering to sell him the casket.”

“I did not know what Alexander was doing. I was wrong to show him the casket, madame; I know that now.”

“But you have it safe? The casket?”

“I do.”

“There are secrets in it, James says. Things my mother knew, and no one else. I am sure there are some evil-starred secrets about James himself, which, of course, will be the first thing he will destroy if he gets the chance.”