The Flower Reader (27 page)

“What do you intend to do with it?”

“That is my affair. Come now. Walk with me and act as if you are willing, or I will slide this dagger between your ribs and be gone before anyone realizes what has happened.”

Would he do it?

“Run, Seilie!” I cried out suddenly. “Guards! To the queen’s chamber!”

He froze, as I had gambled he would. I jerked my arm away and ran after Seilie, who had begun to howl with a full-throated hound baying. The guards stormed in, blades drawn.

“He was under the bed!” I cried. “He was lying in wait to ravish the queen!”

They took rough hold of him. His dagger clattered to the floor. I was coolheaded enough to take a good look at it—no wings or falcon’s head, no eye missing its ruby—before I scooped Seilie up in my arms.

“He was under the bed,” I said again. I had begun to shake. Now that it was over I was more frightened than I had been with Chastelard’s dagger against my side. One thing, however, I was certain of. If I told the guards the poet had secreted himself in the queen’s bedchamber to abduct me, I would instantly fall under suspicion myself. Better to let them think the queen was his object.

Chastelard himself would say nothing. I was certain of that.

T
HE POET WAS TAKEN INTO THE
queen’s presence the next day, but it was a private meeting and no one knew for certain what they said to each other. When he came out of the queen’s inner chamber, he left Holyrood without a word to anyone. The palace hummed with whispers. The queen herself was in one of her dark humors, and by ten o’clock she had decided to ride to Queensferry and cross the Firth of Forth to Fife. She took Moray with her, and Mary Livingston and Moray’s wife, Agnes Keith, as attendants, and that was all. The rest of us were left scrambling to pack up her household goods and
clothing and follow her. I kept close to Wat and Jennet and saw nothing of Chastelard. If he had any sense at all, he was already on his way south to England, and from there to France.

Once across the firth the queen galloped on along the Fifeshire coast to Rossend Castle. We struggled after her, slowed by packhorses and carts, swearing under our breaths at the frozen roads. I carried Seilie in a blanket-lined basket tied to Lilidh’s saddle. It was past dinnertime when we at last arrived at Rossend, and we were stiff with cold, sore and hungry.

The queen, who had arrived some hours before, had been warmed before the fire by Rossend’s laird, Sir John Melville, and his astonished wife. Once dressed in clean clothes, the queen was served a leisurely hot supper of capon in rosewater-scented almond milk and a pear-and-custard pie. We followers barely had time to snatch a piece of bread and dip it in the leftover juices of the chicken before we had to go up to the bedchamber set aside for the queen, to prepare it.

It was a well-proportioned wainscoted room in an old square tower, with walls thicker than the height of a man, a window covered with a tapestry, two small adjoining closets, and—what we wanted most of all—a fine fireplace. One of the grooms set to work at once to build up the fire. Fortunately there was already a suitable bed, and I checked underneath it carefully before Mary Seton spread it with the queen’s favorite feather bolsters, sheets, and thick quilted coverlets. I filled the queen’s warming pan with coals and set about warming the bed; the fire crackling in the fireplace warmed my own hands as well.

Around midnight the queen came in, followed by Mary Livingston and Lady Moray. Her dark humor had passed; she was in high spirits again and full of plans for a further journey on to Saint Andrews and a visit to the university there. The groom went out; we ladies undressed the queen and helped her into a clean shift with long sleeves. She took Seilie up into her lap to pet him as Mary Seton took her hair down preparatory to brushing it. I turned to pick up the warming pan again and jumped back with a cry.

There in the doorway of one of the closets, like a recurring nightmare, stood Pierre de Chastelard.

The four of us—Mary Seton, Mary Livingston, Lady Moray, and me—jumped as one to form a barrier between the poet and the queen. Lady Moray said in a voice icier than the sea outside, “Monsieur de Chastelard, are you mad? The queen has been undressed for the night. Get you out of this room at once, or we shall call the guards.”

The queen put Seilie down and rose. Tall as she was, she looked over all our heads; I saw Chastelard’s face flush and then go pale as he met her eyes. She put out her hands and pushed Lady Moray and Mary Seton aside. Her night shift was perfectly modest, being full and thick for warmth’s sake and tied at her neck and wrists with strings. Still, it was a night shift. She wore it as if it were a robe of state.

“Sieur Pierre,” she said. “How come you to be in that closet?”

“There is a stair,” he said. He was white-faced and his voice shook. What demands had been made upon him, and by whom, that he would dare a second entrance into a bedchamber occupied by the queen? “It leads down to the seashore. I followed you from Edinburgh and paid one of Melville’s men a silver penny to show me the way.”

“I told you this morning to leave Scotland,” the queen said. Her voice was soft. She had her head tilted to one side in her favorite beguiling posture. Modest night shift or no, she radiated sensuality. “I told you I would overlook your presumption and give you freedom to go. You break my heart, Sieur Pierre, that you desire me so much you will disobey me.”

“Do you think I am here because I desire you?” His voice was hoarse. “I assure you that is not the case. It is Madame Leslie I want.”

I did not see the queen’s immediate reaction to that, and it was probably just as well. Chastelard stepped straight up to me, grasped my wrist, and dragged me into the closet. He had no weapons;
presumably the queen’s guard had stripped him of his dagger and sword the night before. I struggled with him grimly, kicking him, stamping his feet, trying to reach his eyes with my nails. He pushed me, and I would have fallen into the tiny stone stair if I had not managed to catch myself with my hands on either side of the door. He pushed me again, and I stumbled down a few steps. I was still weak from my long siege with the New Acquaintance and I did not know how long I could keep fighting him.

“I know who murdered your husband,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Come with me, give me the casket, and I will tell you the name.”

“What?”

“I know the murderer. I will tell you.”

“I do not believe you.”

“Nevertheless—” He grunted when I thrust an elbow into his side. “It is true. Did you see the dagger he used? It is made with the head of a falcon.”

I stopped struggling. Mary Livingston was screaming. Lady Moray was shrieking for her husband. Mary Seton was sobbing. Even Seilie was howling like a mad thing. The queen—I did not hear the queen’s voice at all.

I said fiercely, “Then tell me.”

“Only when I have the casket in my hands.”

“I will show you,” I said. “But you must tell me—”

Two guards crashed into the stair. They grasped Chastelard by the arms and neck and dragged him back up to the closet. No, no—I could not lose it, not when I was so close. I scrambled after them, crying, “Tell me! Tell me quickly!”

The poet, manhandled by the guards, probably did not even hear me. Back in the queen’s chamber, the Earl of Moray was taking charge.

“In the name of God,” he said. “What broil is this?”

I stood there helplessly, panting and disheveled. I did not dare look at the queen. She had not called out for help. She would happily
have seen me dragged away; she had shown softness to Chastelard and he had rejected her to take me instead.

“This man,” the queen said, her voice quite different than it had been before, “has trespassed in my private bedchamber. It does not matter what his reason was. Kill him, brother—stab him straight to his heart for his presumption.”

“Are you safe?” Moray said.

By now Maitland had come in, and Sir John Melville and his wife. The room was suddenly full of people.

Moray took the queen by the shoulders and shook her.
“Are you safe?”

“We are all safe.” Mary Livingston spoke up stoutly. “Chastelard is mad; that is all. There is a secret stair up into that closet there, and he found his way here because he is madly in love with the queen. Is that not right, Rinette?”

Seilie had found his way to me and I picked him up, holding him close. I was shaking. “Yes,” I said. I knew she was trying to help, trying to soothe, publicly at least, the queen’s wounded vanity. “He is madly in love with the queen.”

“Kill him,” the queen said again. She had begun to cry with her anger.

“Have you anything to say for yourself, poet?” Moray demanded.

I hugged Seilie tight and held my breath.

Perhaps Chastelard thought he would be treated with leniency if he were considered mad. Perhaps he thought he could soften the queen’s outrage. In any case he said, “Yes, I love her. She is more beautiful than any goddess. I am out of my senses with love.”

Moray made a scornful sound. “Lock him up securely,” he said. “We will take him to Saint Andrews in the morning, and put him in the prison there. No, I will hear no more talk of killing him now, sister. He will be tried.”

The guards took him away.

At that moment I began plotting a way to speak to him again.

The queen cried and cried. The men, discomfited by her tears
and suddenly realizing they were in her bedchamber and she was dressed in nothing but a night shift, fell over one another to get out. Mary Seton began to say her rosary, and even the Protestant Lady Moray did not stop her. Mary Livingston plied the queen with scented handkerchiefs and hot wine mulled with sugar and spices.

I stood there, and held Seilie, and plotted.

“Marianette,” the queen said at last.

Everyone froze. The room became deathly quiet.

“Yes, madame?” I said.

“Get out. Do not come into our presence again unless you are bidden.”

I said again, “Yes, madame.”

I left the room without another word.

T
HE QUEEN AND HER PARTY WENT
on to Saint Andrews the next day after she broke her fast. Chastelard had been taken away earlier—in chains, it was whispered—and I followed separately with the baggage train, with Jennet, Wat, and Seilie. From the height of favor I had fallen into the deepest disgrace; even the grooms avoided speaking to me. At Saint Andrews the queen was warmly welcomed and lodged in a large and comfortable merchant’s house on South Street.

I managed to find pallets for Jennet and myself in a tiny room next to the kitchen; Wat and Seilie slept in the stables. Mary Livingston, bless her, was the only one who searched me out; she told me the queen’s moods changed from hour to hour, from black despair to an almost euphoric energy. With Chastelard gone she had transferred her mercurial affections almost entirely to Nicolas de Clerac, who had returned from Austria as abruptly as he had gone. I felt a twinge of…well, it could not be jealousy, now, could it? But he had come home to Scotland and he had gone straight to the queen, without so much as
a word to me.

Chastelard was sentenced to death. It seemed an excessive punishment for entering the queen’s bedchamber without so much as laying a finger upon her, and I wondered whether he had been tortured, whether he had confessed the truth about his mysterious master in France and his secret mission in Scotland. There were whispers that he was a papal agent, and other whispers that he was a tool of Admiral Coligny and the Huguenots. I had to speak to him before they cut off his head, and I would have to hurry. His execution was set for the twenty-second, which was only a day away.

“You cannae just walk into a prison and confabulate with a condemned man, Rinette,” Wat said. “And even if you could, ’tis dangerous.”

“Surely gold will buy us a few minutes,” I said. “I am not such a fool as to try to go alone, Wat. Come with me. Please.”

“So far, all the clack’s been about the queen,” Jennet said. “The ladies who were in the room will never breathe a word about Chastelard wanting you instead, not after seeing what she’s done to you. Leave it alone. In a month everyone will believe what everyone else is saying, good as gospel, and no one will recollect what really happened.”

“The queen will.”

“The queen’s changeable as the moon. Just wait. She’ll remember soon enough that she wants her mother’s casket, and that to get it she needs to find Sir Alexander’s murderer for you.”

“Chastelard already knows. He said he would trade the name for the casket, and if the queen does not remember her promise, why should I? I will do whatever I have to do to learn the name of Alexander’s assassin. I will swear to Chastelard that I will give the casket to his master in France if he tells me now—at least he will know that his mission has been successful. If Wat comes with me, I’ll be safe enough.”

“We’ll both go with you,” Jennet said with resignation. “The cook will watch over Seilie for an hour or so. I’ve got a dirk, and I can fight good as Wat here.”

“Fight snaikie, you mean. That’s the only way I’ll do it, Rinette—if
we all go. You put your boy’s breeches on, and a dirk up your own sleeve same as Jennet.”

So once it was dark we made our way up to Saint Andrews Castle on its headland, which served as both the bishop’s palace and the prison for the town. I had dressed myself in the boy’s clothes I had worn at Corrichie, and had my face well muffled up with a scarf; I had one dagger at my belt and another in my sleeve. Each time we encountered a guard, Wat spoke with him first and pressed a coin into his hand. Each guard seemed amused rather than indignant, and took the money readily.

We were directed to the seaward tower, where there was a sort of vaulted inner courtyard. A short man in a dark cloak and hood stood in front of a heavy wooden door banded with iron; he was speaking into an angled hole in the wall next to the door. The way he was leaning forward with his hands pressed flat against the wall gave me a sense of longing—there was love and sorrow, held back by a will of iron, in every line of his figure. At the sound of our steps he looked up and I recognized the Frenchman Blaise Laurentin.