The Flower Reader (20 page)

I started to cry, and I could not stop.

B
Y THE NEXT AFTERNOON
I had cried myself out at last. My eyes were swollen and my throat was raw and my nose was red as fire, but for the first time since Alexander’s death and Màiri’s birth I felt…I am not sure…as if I were no longer crammed full of grief and anger and vengefulness. I ate an oatcake and drank a cup of buttermilk and went out into the gardens, my beloved gardens by the sea. The windflowers were blowing, my own flowers—the ancient stone walls
protected them from the salt air of the sea, and they always blossomed from Annunciation Day to Michaelmas, unlike ordinary windflowers, which bloomed only in the spring. The scents of thyme and honey-sweet woodbine, the glowing color of sea pinks and masses of red campion, brought back my childhood with Grannie and Gran’auntie, and the endless summer days when Gran’auntie sat with me in the garden and told me the flowers’ stories and taught me how to listen to their voices.

I leaned on the wall and breathed, taking in the scents of the sea, the living stones and the flowers. I said a prayer for Gran’auntie, who had been Marina Leslie like me. After a while I knew the moment was right. The flowers would speak to me, and tell me what I should do.

I crouched down beside the mass of windflowers, each with seven white petals, a heart of green velvet, and stamens like threads of golden silk. The flowers themselves were scentless but I could smell the distinctive foxy scent of the leaves. I did not have to say anything—only listen.

You cannot stay here, not yet,
the windflowers whispered.
Go back, go back—there is danger at the court but you must face it there or it will follow you here.

“I do not want to go back,” I whispered.

You began this. You wanted vengeance.

“I do not want it anymore. It is too much for me to bear.”

You wanted vengeance and you will have it. But you must pay the price.

“What price?”

The flowers did not answer. I was never entirely sure whether what I heard was truly the flowers, or just my own secret thoughts and hopes and fears rising up out of my heart when I stilled myself to listen. Perhaps I was only arguing with myself.

After a while I said, “What must I do?”

Go back. Take care. In the end you must put the silver casket into the young queen’s hands, whatever it costs
.

“Will Màiri be safe here?”

She will be safe while she is here, but only if you go back to the court and lead the danger away from her.

I felt a chill. “I will go, I swear it—I would go to hell itself to keep her safe. What is the danger; can you tell me? Is it a person?”

It is two men and a woman. Beware, beware
.

“Which two men? What woman? Tell me. Help me.”

You will marry again, not once but twice, and you will know despair.

I crouched there, holding my breath, waiting. I did not want to marry again, and I hoped these marriages were far in the future. Two? Why two? Were the two men I would marry the same two men I was to beware of?

The windflowers blew gently in the breeze. It came in from the east, over the sea, over the walls, and swirled gently in the walled space of the garden. Time passed, and the flowers said nothing more.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “I will go back. I will be careful.”

I stood up. In the southeast corner of the garden there had been a stand of yellow irises, Alexander’s flower, their ruffled golden flags traced with a diamond shape of reddish-brown veins. The veins had been the color of blood—why had I never seen that before? I had planted the irises when I first fell in love with Alexander, as a willful child of twelve. Grannie had told me I was being silly, that a twelve-year-old girl could know nothing of love. But I knew. He was like a young golden god to me. When Grannie shut me up in the Mermaid Tower I found a way to squeeze out onto the window ledge and creep down, using the ancient stones as handholds and footholds. What a fool I had been—I could have fallen into the sea, and if I had no one would ever have known what had become of me.

Last spring, when Alexander and I had been so happy together, the yellow irises had flourished. In the fall there had been no one to cut them back and tend them, and this past spring no one to weed them or cut the flowers when they had finished their blooming time. I wondered whether they had bloomed at all. There was nothing left but dried and spotted leaves.

I bent close and listened.

The irises were silent. All I could read, very faintly, was the earth itself telling me they would not bloom again.

“May God go with you,” I said softly. “May the Green Lady of Granmuir watch over you, my dear love, even as far away as you are in Glenlithie.”

I stood up. I felt tired and drained of life, like an old woman. Would I ever be a girl again? I was making my way to the gate when I heard footsteps on the graveled path outside the garden wall.

I did not want to talk to anyone. I knew who it was and I particularly did not want to talk to him.

It is two men and a woman. Beware, beware
.

Was Nicolas de Clerac one of the two men?

H
e stepped into the garden and bowed to me as if he were in a great salon full of blazing candles, rich tapestries, queens and kings, and not a simple garden with an old stone wall, looking out over the sea.

“Mistress Rinette,” he said, with grave courtesy.

It had been four months since I had stood face-to-face with him, and he looked different. Older? No, not really, although there were shadows in the hollows of his eyes. Something he had seen or heard or done, in France or wherever it was he had been, had changed him profoundly.

He was dressed for riding, in plain breeches and hose of russet-colored leather, a white shirt, and a black doublet. His head was bare and he wore no jewels, no earrings or maquillage. I had never seen him dressed so simply; it fit the strange streak of austerity I always sensed in him, even when he was outrageously costumed as the Greek muse of astronomy. Outwardly, I thought, he seems as changeable as the queen, but at his heart he is as fixed as the North Star. The queen is like one of Master Copernicus’s planets, brighter than the
other stars but wandering, always wandering, from place to place in the sky.

I said, “Monsieur de Clerac.”

“I am sure you have guessed that I asked the queen to send me with your escort.”

“I have.” I walked along the garden wall again, back to the patch of windflowers among the campion and thyme. I wanted to be among my own flowers, for whatever strength they might give me. “I hope you found your family well in France.”

He walked along the opposite wall. There was an ancient bittersweet vine clinging to the stone, covered with hanging clusters of purple flowers; it was still too early for the scarlet berries the birds loved so dearly. He seemed to belong where he stood, which puzzled me at first. Then I realized that the bittersweet and the trailing nightshade were closely related. He might as well have been surrounded by his own flowers, as I was surrounded by mine.

Bittersweet stood for truth, which was always both bitter and sweet.

“They are well enough.” The tone of his voice made it clear—
I do not wish to talk about that
. “And you? I have feared for you, partly that you would put yourself in danger with your inquiries, and partly that Lord James and Lady Margaret and their faction would have their way and I would come back to find you married, whether you wished it or not.”

“I am as well as I can be,” I said. I was grateful, at least, that he made no comment on the state of my face after all my tears. “And no, I am not married, although Lady Margaret Erskine would have me so if she could. She will do anything, I think, to put the silver casket into Lord James’s hands.”

“She believes it will put the queen into his power, and make him regent in the end.”

The thyme had crept up into the niches and crumbled mortar of the stone wall. I broke off a few stems and breathed the smoky-sweet,
slightly astringent scent. Thyme gave one heart and courage. I said, “I am so tired of the court. I am glad to be home.”

Neither one of us said anything for a while. The seabirds wheeled and called on the wind, gulls and guillemots and terns. The slow, rhythmic wash of the sea waves swept back and forth below them, like the heartbeat of Granmuir. I felt as if we were outside time, the two of us together. I had never felt that way with Alexander. How strange that I would feel it now.

“I feel as if I have come home as well,” he said at last. “I grew up in a place very like this—ancient and silent but for the sound of the sea.”

It was not what I had expected him to say, but Granmuir affected people that way. It stripped them down. It changed them. I asked, “Is that where you went, in France? Your home?”

“No. I have no home to speak of, although I have a small estate at Clerac that supplies my material needs. The place I grew up—it is a great Benedictine monastery called Mont-Saint-Michel, on the coast of Normandy. From my birth I was intended for the Church.”

So that was what I had been seeing—the shadow of the monk under the extravagant affectations of the courtier. If he had been placed in a monastery as a baby, he was either an orphan or a great man’s bastard. “Obviously,” I said, “the intention was not fulfilled.”

He turned his head and looked at the bittersweet thoughtfully. Again I was struck by the fact that his face was different, pared down to its essentials, its surprisingly beautiful bones, wide-set eye sockets, and elegant angles of jaw. What had happened to him in France?

“Oh, I ran away from the monastery when I was twelve or so, and after that I was put into the charge of more worldly tutors. Even so, the monks had imprinted me so deeply with their Benedictine rule that I have never wholly escaped it.”

“Why did you run away?”

He broke a branch of the bittersweet and began stripping it of its leaves. He did not seem to want to go on, but with the bittersweet
branch in his hands and the scent of its leaves on his skin, what could he do but tell the truth?

“I wanted to save a beautiful princess from a terrible fate.”

“You were only twelve, and a novice monk, and you had a princess for a lover?”

“You are too literal.” He tore a bittersweet leaf in half. “The beautiful princess was my mother. As you might have guessed, I am a bastard.”

The word
mother
hurt me. It always did. “My own mother is a natural daughter of the Duke of Longueville,” I said, making an effort to keep my voice steady. “Such things are not uncommon. What was the terrible fate?”

“She had been forced to marry a man she hated and feared. I managed to find my way to Rouffignac, where he had taken her, and confronted him—needless to say, I received nothing more than a beating for my pains. I was not allowed to return to the monastery, and within the year my mother was dead of her husband’s mistreatment.”

What could I say to that? If his mother was dead and he did not know who his father was, what were the family matters he claimed to have gone to France to attend to? Whom had his worldly tutors been? How had he come by his name and estate of Clerac?

“Do you understand now?” He threw down the bittersweet branch and looked at me directly, his gaze suddenly and shockingly angry. “That is my experience with forced marriages. I have tried to forget it, but it was brought home to me again in France, whether I wished to think of it or not—I learned who my father is, Rinette, and why my mother was forced to marry.”

“Why?”

“My father wished to marry a great man’s daughter. Because of my mother’s refusal to take a husband, a tale had grown up that she and my father had been married secretly. To demonstrate that this was not so, she was forced to marry another man.”

I learned who my father is…

Do not ask him,
the bittersweet whispered.
It is too hard for him now. Later, perhaps later he will tell you. Later he will tell you other things as well, things you may or may not wish to hear
.

“The Earl of Rothes is privy to Lady Margaret’s marriage plots.” His voice had changed. There would be no more revelations. “Did you know that?”

“The queen has promised to protect me.”

“Do not trust the queen. She means well but she is as inconstant as mercury, and she is entirely subject to Lord James at the moment. It is not my place to advise you, Rinette, but if it were, I would urge you to stay here with your household, and let the queen and her progress go on their way.”

He had thrown down the bittersweet branch and so I no longer knew whether he was telling the truth or not. Was he truly concerned for my safety? Had he made such a point of coming to Granmuir to speak with me out of pure selflessness? Or was he an agent of Duchess Antoinette of Guise, as Rothes had suggested, and was that why he had gone to France?

“I have pursued my inquiries,” I said. “No one has threatened me openly, although the court has been full of dangers and intrigues of its own. I can tell you one thing: Sir John Gordon does not have a dagger set with faceted rubies.”