The Flower Reader (21 page)

He smiled. Did he realize I was offering him one tiny crumb of what I knew, in hopes he would give me anything that he knew in return? Apparently he did, because he said, “I can tell you two things. First, Monsieur Blaise Laurentin is not connected to the French royal family by blood or conviction—he is a mercenary, and follows wherever gold leads him.”

You might say that I am in the French ambassador’s household,
he had said,
although I am not exactly in the employ of Monsieur Castelnau himself
.

“So he could be working for anyone.”

“And the person he is working for today might not be the person he is working for tomorrow.”

“And yet the assassin has been consistent. He murdered
Alexander to stop him from selling the casket. He murdered Master Wetheral to warn me not to sell the casket.”

“True. Although there are a good number of people with that same aim—stopping you from selling or giving the casket to anyone but themselves. He could be serving two masters with the same desire.”

I picked at the thyme again as I thought about that. The stems were as tangled as the mystery of the assassin. At last I said, “What is the second thing?”

“I spoke with Monsieur de Nostredame.”

“You
what
?”

He smiled. “It is not so difficult as you might think. He does not spend all his time at court—he has a house in Salon-de-Provence, with a rich Salonaise wife and six children. And I had a letter from Queen Mary to serve as my introduction. She is deep in marriage negotiations with the king of Spain, as you know, and she is desperate to know what the
quatre maris
prophecies predict for her.”

It had never occurred to me that someone might go to France and simply ask Nostradamus what the prophecies were. If he had told Nico, and Nico had told the queen, the value of the silver casket had suddenly dropped precipitously.

My mouth dry, I asked, “Did he tell you what they were?”

“He claimed he himself did not know—that he writes his predictions in a sort of reverie, and seals them up and sends them off without making copies. It is part of his mystique. As long as the seals on that packet are not broken, no one knows what is inside.”

“Why did Mary of Guise write
les quatre maris
on the outside, then?”

“There would have been a covering letter. He gives cryptic hints. It is hard to say what is real and what is false about him, but for the moment he is the most famous seer in Europe, and kings and queens believe whatever he says. Queen Catherine de Médicis—”

He broke off. I also could hear voices calling in the courtyard, the whinnies of horses and striking of iron-shod hooves against stone. I went to the garden gate and looked out.

It was the queen, with a little company of ladies and men-at-arms. Clearly she had ridden ahead of her own progress, looking for amusement and distraction. Wat Cairnie and Norman More were helping them all dismount, and poor Bessie More was curtsying as if her life depended on it.

“Nico,” I said. “Please go down to greet her. I do not want her to come upon us like this, alone together in the garden.”

He bowed. It effectively hid his expression, and when he straightened again he was smiling pleasantly. I recognized that smile. It was his court mask. I could almost see the jewels and the kohl reappearing.

“Of course. Prepare yourself—she will demand you read your flowers for her. She said as much before we even left Edinburgh.”

“I cannot promise the flowers will speak.”

He laughed. “Create something. She wishes to hear that she will prevail against the Earl of Huntly, marry Don Carlos of Spain, and with him add the crown of England to the crowns of Spain and Scotland when Elizabeth Tudor dies—oh, say, in a fall from a horse. Tell her that.”

“I am not a tinker at a fair who makes up tales for pieces of gold.” It angered me that he would make such a light thing of the flowers. “If the flowers speak, I will tell her what they say. If they do not, I will tell her nothing.”

“Peace, peace,
ma mie
. I am sorry. I will bring her back with all due solemnity.”

“I am not your
mie
,” I called after him.

He only laughed.

“B
UT HOW DO YOU DO IT
?” the queen demanded. “Do you hear voices? See visions? It is a very serious thing, you know, to read the future for a queen.”

“Yes, madame, I know,” I said. “But I cannot tell you exactly how I do it. Sometimes it is simply that a certain flower presents itself
in answer to a question. Sometimes it is a sympathetic flower—a correspondent—that seems to speak to me. Everyone has a correspondent flower of their own.”

Even as I said it I remembered the black emptiness I felt when I looked at Rannoch Hamilton. I knew he was part of the progress, but fortunately he was in the Earl of Rothes’s train and not one of the queen’s personal party.

“Almost everyone,” I amended. “If I were to see—”

“What is my flower?” the queen said.

I hesitated. Should I tell her the truth—that she was a peony, a country-garden flower that did not belong in palaces and throne rooms, and was easily damaged by wind or rain or too much sun?

Nicolas de Clerac had suggested I lie, and I had been angry. I could not lie now.

“You are a peony, madame,” I said. “Gorgeous and delicate.”

“But I love them,
les pivoines
,” she said. “They are much cultivated in the gardens of Touraine. That is my jointure, you know—in France I am Duchess of Touraine in my own right.”

“Perhaps that is why I see them so vividly surrounding you, madame.”

“Well, there are certainly no peonies here,” she said. Her little court laughed like a chittering flock of sandpipers. “These other flowers—I do not recognize them all—what can they tell you about me?”

“Choose one, madame, and we shall see.”

She smiled and began to walk around the inside of the wall. With her long legs and long graceful neck she called to mind a silver heron; I had seen herons tilt their heads at just the angle the queen liked to affect. Her women watched her breathlessly. In the background Nicolas de Clerac stood with the two gentlemen-at-arms who had ridden with the queen to protect her. I had a strong impression of wrongness—none of the women believed the flowers had any force or virtue, and they were simply amusing themselves at my expense.

The queen crouched down. Her back was to me. “This one,” she said.

She straightened, turned, and thrust it toward me—a single long stem, spotted purplish-black, with slender, deeply notched leaves and a tassel of yellow flowers at the top. I recoiled—for a moment I saw a wasp, yellow and lacy-winged, poised to pierce us all and suck us dry. Then I realized the flower was yellow cockscomb, which some people called rattle grass. Beautiful in its way, as all the flowers were, but it was an incubus plant—its roots sucked the life from the roots of grasses and other flowers unlucky enough to intertwine with it.

“What is it?” the queen asked. “What does it mean?”

“It is yellow cockscomb,” I said slowly. “You should take care if you meet a tall, slender, fair-haired person. It could be a woman or it could be a man, I am not sure, but the cockscomb represents a person who feeds on others for life and power, and it appears to have called to you.”

“Well, it certainly cannot be the Earl of Huntly, as he is short, fat, and grizzle-haired,” the queen said. All the ladies tittered again. “I would like to know what Huntly is planning to do. Will he submit himself to my royal command?”

“Please walk around the garden again, madame,” I said. “Walk close to the wall, so you are actually stepping through the flowers.”

The rest of us pressed back against the gate. The queen paced slowly around the garden, as if she were dancing a pavane. She was positively glowing with satisfaction at being the cynosure of everyone’s attention. When she had made a complete circuit she performed a
révérence
.

“There,” she said. “Now what do the flowers say?”

I went out into the garden again. Scrambling over the south wall with vines of germander and woodbine was an ancient mass of rock ivy, and rock ivy was part of Huntly’s Gordon badge. I looked at where the queen’s foot had pressed. There were two ivy leaves there, both of them already lifting themselves defiantly from the flattened
undergrowth. I crouched down and closed my eyes, focusing all my senses on listening.

Women’s voices. Three—no, four. Some sort of chanting, faint as the wind, with the smoky scent of black witchcraft.

Attack, my lord, attack. You will prevail. You will lie safe in bed afterward, in Aberdeen city, without so much as a scratch upon your body.

Lady Huntly’s voice.

I straightened and returned to the queen.

“Well?” she said.

“The Earl of Huntly will not submit himself or his son to your judgment, madame,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed and her golden brows slanted down over her eyes. “We shall see about that,” she said. “Huntly may call himself the Cock of the North, but even he must obey his sovereign.”

“There is more, madame.”

She was angry, and it was clear as clear that suddenly she was tired of flower readings. “What more could there be?” she said.

“Beware of Lady Huntly. She is encouraging him to attack you. She is using black witchcraft, and she is also looking into the future.”

“Lady Huntly? But she was a friend of my mother’s.”

“Nevertheless, madame, take care.”

“Madame.” It was Nicolas de Clerac, who had stood by silently as I read the flowers. The queen turned to him with a sudden smile, like a sunflower turning to the sun.

“Lady Huntly is known to have tame witches in her household,” he said. He glanced at me—the tiniest flick of his eyes—and then smiled back at the queen. She stepped up to him and put one long white hand possessively on his arm.

“I care not for witches, tame or wild,” she said. “And it is the Earl of Huntly, not the countess, whom I intend to bring to heel. Come, let us go back to the progress, Sieur Nico. Ride with me. Tomorrow we will be in Aberdeen.”

They went away, laughing and talking. No one spoke to me or wished me a farewell. I stood in the garden alone, and I wondered
whether Nicolas de Clerac thought I was a tame witch. If he did, he was wrong. When the flowers spoke to me it was not witchcraft at all but something much older—old, perhaps, like the magic bubble in the living rock under Saint Margaret’s Chapel. In those days the earth itself had a voice; the rock had a voice; the flowers had voices. Anyone could hear them if they knew how to be silent and listen.

I had listened to the windflowers and they had whispered,
Go back, go back. Lead the danger away
.

I brushed the bits of grass and soil from my skirt; then I left the garden and went down into the courtyard. Wat would saddle Lilidh for me; only he and Jennet would accompany me back to the progress with the queen and her party. Màiri and her nurse and Tante-Mar would stay here, where they would be safe, and one day, God willing, all of us would come home from our exile and be happy at Granmuir forever.

L
ady Huntly was a friend of my mother’s,” the queen said. “She would never wish me harm.”

“Sister,” Lord James said. “You caused one of her sons to be hanged at Inverness. You outlawed her husband and another of her sons just five days ago. She has every reason to wish you harm.”

We had been on progress now for almost two months. From Granmuir we had gone to Aberdeen, then after a few days started for Inverness. Sir John Gordon and a troop of cavalry followed us all along the way, occasionally showing themselves and performing great feats of horsemanship. The queen was convinced Sir John meant to abduct her; she swore she would have vengeance on all the Gordons for their outlawry, but I could see the spark of exhilaration in her eyes. In her mind she was making a romantic
conte-de-fée
of it all, and she loved being the heroine, the object of a wild Highlander’s passionate desire.

At Darnaway Castle on the road to Inverness, Lord James Stewart was publicly invested with the great earldom of Moray, the revenues of which had long been a Gordon perquisite. This was clearly
as much to punish Huntly and the Gordons as it was to elevate Lord James himself; the result was not unexpected. The sheriff of Inverness, another of Huntly’s sons, refused us entry to Inverness Castle. More excitement, although it ended tamely enough; the sheriff changed his mind, opened the gates, and was promptly hanged from the battlements for his pains.

At Inverness we rested for a while; the queen hunted, feasted, dressed herself in plaids, and received representatives of the Highland clans. She would have remained there forever, I think, but after a week or so the real world of duty and politics overcame the rustic delights of the Highlanders, and we started back to Aberdeen along the seacoast. With every step the new Earl of Moray grew in self-importance, and spoke with more familiarity to the queen. Once we had settled in Aberdeen again, Lady Huntly had sent a messenger begging for an audience.