The Flower Reader (39 page)

Sir William Maitland picked up one of the hazelnuts and crunched it. “Queen Elizabeth did say she could not be your friend, madame, if you married a connection of either imperial house. Perhaps the Duke of Norfolk? Or even Arran, which would bring together the Stewart and Hamilton claims to the throne? Of course, Arran is mad as a March hare, but Don Carlos is hardly—”

He broke off at the sound of heavy boots in the hall. David Riccio stopped singing. Nico de Clerac looked up from the notation he was sketching on a scrap of paper. All the ladies pressed closer to the queen.

To my astonishment Rannoch Hamilton appeared in the doorway, dressed in rough clothes for riding and reeking of brandywine. Behind him were five or six men-at-arms, their boots muddy and their hands on their sword hilts. All the gentlemen in the room came to their feet. David Riccio brandished his guitar like a weapon, with an Italianate flourish. Somewhat more practically, Nicolas de Clerac and the Earl of Moray stepped between the intruders and the queen.

“Madam, I have asked you more than once for an audience, and you have refused me,” Rannoch Hamilton said.

The queen rose; she had the Stuart gift of audacity in a crisis. She held out her hands and swept her brother and Nico to either side.

“It is our royal prerogative to give or refuse audiences as we please, Master Rannoch,” she said with hauteur. “How do you dare interrupt us like this?”

“I have a piece of news for you, madam. And I wish to remove my wife from the court.”

Everyone turned and looked at me. I felt the blood rush up into
my face, then drain away again to leave me light-headed. Seilie pressed close against my skirt, his hackles raised in a bristling line from his scruff to his tail.

“And why do you find it necessary to tramp in here with soldiers and swords to do that, Master Rannoch? Could you not simply direct your wife to go wherever you want her to go?”

Rannoch Hamilton shifted his gaze to me. His eyes were like pieces of black stone, hard and empty.

“She won’t obey me in anything,” he said, “unless I force her. And you, madam, have encouraged her in her defiance.”

“If Marianette will not obey you,” the queen said, “perhaps she has good cause. In any case, I will not allow you to carry her off to your estate, wherever it is—she is to remain here until I hold my mother’s silver casket in my own hands.”

“The queen is right.” The Earl of Rothes finally stepped forward. “It was our agreement that you would compel her to reveal the casket’s true hiding place, in exchange for the marriage and her estates. You have not fulfilled your part of the bargain.”

Rannoch Hamilton laughed. It had an ugly sound. “That I haven’t,” he said. “And I don’t intend to. Your promises aren’t worth a chip of dung, my lord Rothes, and I’m tired of being at your beck and call.”

The little room suddenly went very quiet. Moray and Rothes exchanged a look.

Rannoch Hamilton rocked back on his heels and stared at the queen as if she were a barmaid in the High Street. “I’ve found the hiding place where my wife was keeping your casket, madam, and I’ve burned it all—the French sorcerer’s papers, your mother’s memorandum book, all of it. Now you’ll never—”

“No!”

The queen and I cried out at the same time. She, of course, meant,
No, you cannot possibly have done such a thing, because I want those papers for myself
. I meant,
No, you cannot possibly have done such a thing, because there was no hiding place and no casket to find
.

I knew as clear as clear why he was lying. If the queen thought the casket was gone, she would let me go as well. Rannoch Hamilton would take me to Kinmeall, and there, with me entirely in his power, he intended to force me to give up the casket he still thought I had.

He had caught me in the net of my own lies.

“That cannot be true, Master Hamilton,” Nicolas de Clerac said. His voice was quiet and perfectly straightforward.

My husband grinned. “I watched the lot of it burn with my own eyes, Frenchman.”

“You are lying,” I said desperately. “Madame, he is lying.”

“Do you realize what those papers were worth, you fool?” Moray demanded. “Do you realize what value they might have had for Scotland, what power they might have given us with England and with France?”

“They were my mother’s papers,” the queen said. Her voice was shaking. “I have so few things left of my mother’s.”

“You should have given me an audience when I asked you to,” Rannoch Hamilton said. He was beginning to sound less cocksure. “Blame yourself, madam, not me.”

“And so in a moment of drunken spite,” Rothes said, “you destroyed it all. Are you certain? All of it?”

“It’s gone; that’s all I know. And you’ll use Rannoch Hamilton as a pawn no more.” He stepped forward and grasped me roughly by the arm. “Come, wife. No more royal court for you.”

There is a plant called touch-me-not, which flowers from early summer to the first frost. It is pretty and innocuous-looking, sometimes white, sometimes pink, but it is called what it is because when its seed capsules are swollen they explode when they are touched.

I exploded.

I swung my arm wide and struck at my husband with all my strength; Seilie snarled and showed his teeth. Rannoch Hamilton drove his fist at my face and missed by a finger’s breadth. The ladies screamed. Nicolas de Clerac stepped forward, and with one neat,
vicious kick doubled Rannoch Hamilton over and dropped him to the floor.

“If you strike her,” he said in a voice I did not recognize, “I will kill you.”

Je t’aime, ma mie…

“Sieur Nico!” the queen cried. “Hold!”

Rannoch Hamilton scrambled to his feet, gasping for breath, and reached for his dagger. Nico’s blade flashed first in the firelight. That was enough to rouse the rest of the men into action, for to draw steel in the queen’s presence was the gravest of offenses.

“Both of you, enough,” the queen said. “Brother, take Sieur Nico into custody, if you please. Master Hamilton, you are dismissed. Take your wife with you, and do not come back.”

Rannoch Hamilton made an obscene gesture. Nico stepped forward, his own dagger still in his hand; what I saw in his eyes frightened me. Moray and Rothes caught him by the arms and dragged him back.

Je t’aime, ma mie…

“Nico,” I said. “Stop. It is too late.”

He wrenched his arms against Moray’s and Rothes’s hold. The queen stared at him in astonishment. My husband grasped my arm again, and this time I did not resist him.

“Seilie,” I said. “Seilie, come.”

Seilie followed me, his white-tipped tail tucked between his legs. Behind me I heard the queen say in a shaken voice, “Call the guard, brother, quickly—I want Monsieur de Clerac locked up at once. Signor Davy, play the rest of the song. Sing! Everyone sing!”

The Italian played a chord and began to sing again. His voice sounded thin.

An thou were my ain thing

I would love thee, I would love thee,

An thou were my ain thing

Sae dearly I would love thee.

“I am ill,” the queen said. “Oh, I am so ill—my mother’s papers, Monsieur de Nostredame’s prophecies, gone. I have such a headache, such a pain in my side.”

She began to cry. That was the last I heard.

“Get rid of that damned hound,” Rannoch Hamilton snarled at me. “If it bites me, I’ll drown it.”

I had a horrified flash of Seilie as a puppy, of Lady Huntly’s witch holding him over the holy well at Saint Mary’s of Stoneywood.

“Go, Seilie,” I said. “Go find Jennet. Quick, quick.”

He looked up at me, his dark eyes liquid with intelligence and fear. He whined and put one freckled paw on the hem of my skirt.

Rannoch Hamilton kicked at him, and he jumped. He looked at me one more time, then trotted back down the passageway, turned a corner, and disappeared.

My Seilie, my luck, was gone.

“W
hen he took Kitte away from me, I knew he was going to kill me.

My little Kitte. Her full name was Katharine Hamilton but I refused to call her that. She was not yet a year old—I had lost track of time, locked away in a tower at Kinmeall House, and so I knew only that she had been born in the early days of March and it was now hard winter. My second winter at Kinmeall.

I had almost died bearing her; I knew that. When we first arrived at Kinmeall in September of 1563 I had been Rannoch Hamilton’s wife, however much we had hated each other.
Grudgingly—whether he wanted my baby or not, a son would be a sign of his virility—he had provided warmth, food, clean water to wash with, the services of a laundress, and clean linens for my bed. There was a girl to wait upon me and be my companion. Her name was Nan, and she had no surname, or at least none that I could ever find out. We sewed and sewed, making clothes and clouts for the baby. I taught her to do simple tapestry work. Every so often I would look out and see the boy Gill exercising the horses.
He would ride Lilidh under my window, and I knew he knew I was watching.

All through that first winter I was reasonably comfortable, although I was sick with sadness and longed so much for Granmuir and Màiri and my own people that I thought I might die of it. Little did I know then of what I might die.

When my pains started in the spring, there was no one but an old herb-woman to assist me. I could not help thinking of the queen’s fine French physician, who had attended Màiri’s birth; I could remember his face but not his name. The old woman did more harm than good with her leaves and poultices and bitter teas, although I managed to keep my wits about me and nurse Kitte once she was born. No priest came to christen her, nor even a Protestant minister. I named her myself, and prayed to the Green Lady to bless her.

By that time Rannoch Hamilton had sunk deep into drink and black melancholy. Had I wounded him as terribly as he wounded me? Sometimes I wondered, and wondered what he might have been like if he had never broken into Saint Ninian’s Chapel to stop my wedding. If I had never flung the curse of the Green Lady at him. Since Kitte’s birth the curse had taken hold of him with a vengeance, it seemed, and when he tried to bed me he was incapable. He tried twice, and then shut Kitte and me up like prisoners in these two bare tower rooms.

He tried to take the girl Nan as his mistress and apparently failed her as well—she came to the door and railed at me through the barred wicket, demanding I set him free from the Green Lady’s spell—and drank himself into insensibility every night. A different girl brought me food twice a day and took away the slops, all through the wicket in the door. I thought she was deaf and mute—she never spoke or acknowledged anything I said. To myself I called her Mousie, for her shy ways and quivering pink nose.

Did I go mad, a little, shut up like that? I think I did. I had one window, which looked out over a boggy moorland. In the distance I could see the waters of a loch. I did not see Gill so often, although
once in a while he managed to ride Lilidh along the path skirting the treacherous peat. I dreamed of Granmuir and the sea, Màiri and Alexander, Jennet and Tante-Mar and Wat. I dreamed of Seilie and prayed someone had him safe. Sometimes I dreamed of Nicolas de Clerac. I heard him say,
If you strike her I will kill you.
I heard him say,
Je t’aime, ma mie.

I hoped, at first, he would come to rescue me. I prayed for him to come.

He never did. After a while I stopped praying.

They were like ghosts, all of them. Nico himself. The queen and her four Marys. Moray and Lady Margaret Erskine, Huntly and Bothwell, Maitland and Rothes. The
Escadron Volant
assassins—who? Blaise Laurentin, Pierre de Chastelard, David Riccio, Richard Wetheral? Were there others, shadowy figures I had never identified? Had I ever actually held Mary of Guise’s silver casket in my hands?

It was all just a dream.

Kitte did not know she was a prisoner. She learned to lift her head, and turn over, and sit up. She captured her own waving feet with her tiny hands, and played with the sunbeams through the window as summer passed. Mousie was enchanted with her, and began to smile at me sometimes; she would stand outside the door and watch through the bars. Kitte started to crawl, and to pull herself up against my knee when I sat in my one chair.

And then one day Nan came with two men and took her. I screamed and fought but the men held me, and Nan dragged my sobbing baby out of my arms and carried her away.

From that day on, my food tasted bitter. I began to feel sick and weak.

Rannoch Hamilton was poisoning me; I was sure of it. What good was I to him? Kitte he would keep alive, as she was coheiress to Granmuir. Perhaps he thought when I was dead he would be a whole man again.

If it had been me alone, I think I would have eaten the poisoned oatcakes and haggis and gristly stews, drunk deep of the poisoned
sour milk and ale, and escaped that way. But I could not leave Kitte behind, tiny and helpless, at her father’s mercy.