The Flower Reader (43 page)

I
f I had turned into a countrywoman over my month and a half at Granmuir, Nicolas de Clerac turned into a countryman overnight, with a little help from Wat Cairnie and Norman More. The next day he appeared with a laced linsey-woolsey shirt over his brown leather breeches, and a plaid over his shoulder like a herdsman. That chameleonlike changeability—well, now I knew why he was so like the queen in that. Where he was different was in his inner steadfastness, trained into him by the Benedictines, evidenced by his keeping faith with his mysterious vow. What would the queen have been like, I wondered, if she had been brought up with such discipline?

I wanted to touch the coarse fabric of his shirt, rest my cheek against the checkered wool. It would smell of the sheep’s own lanolin, of soap and heather, and under that the scent of Nico’s own skin, warm and clean—

But no. I could not let myself think these thoughts, not yet. I was not ready.

Bessie More put out oatcakes and buttermilk and he ate his share
without complaint. I thought of him breaking his fast with the queen on fine sweet wine and spiced manchet bread, and could not help but smile. We might have been lord and lady of the castle, sitting at each end of the trestle table with our household on either side: on the women’s side Bessie More and Jennet and Libbet, who had blossomed almost as much as Kitte; Annis Cairnie with Kitte on her lap and Tante-Mar spooning a bit of honey on Màiri’s oatcake. On the men’s side were Norman More and Wat Cairnie and the boy Gill, with Robinet Loury and Père Guillaume sitting next to each other and talking about the old days. Davy More had ridden off to Edinburgh with Nico’s letter the night before.

No, there were no servants’ tables at Granmuir. Nico laughed and talked with them all as if he had lived at Granmuir all his life. For the first time since Alexander’s death, I felt safe. I could pretend, in my secret heart, that Nico and I were indeed the lord and lady. We could sit together in the solar and look out at the sea and talk to each other, and I could pretend we would never have to leave Granmuir. Once again, a secret bubble of time and space, like the ancient vault under Saint Margaret’s. Like the stone bubble within my heart. Were the bubbles all I would ever have?

I would not think of that.

“Nico,” I said. Somehow it was easy to call him by his Christian name here, with all of us sitting around the table. “As you are going to stay here at Granmuir for a few days, there is something I would ask you to do for me.”

“Nico!” Màiri cried. “Nico, Nico, Nico.”

“Shush,
ma petite
,” Tante-Mar said. “You must call him Monsieur de Clerac.”

“I will do whatever you like,” Nico said. He was smiling. “Carry water? Chop wood? Muck out the stables?”

I could not help but smile as well. “No, nothing so demanding,” I said. “I have an old book of my mother’s, and Père Guillaume, I am sure, has a stock of fine paper and ink and colors.”

“I do indeed, my daughter,” Père Guillaume said. He looked
interested. “I have been saving the paper to make a copy of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin for you.”

“This is only a book of
contes-de-fées
,” I said. “But I will buy you new paper and colors in Edinburgh. Nico, I remember how skillfully you drew the…how skillfully you draw. I would like you to copy my mother’s book, and reproduce the illustrations if you can. My mother’s original book is too fragile for everyday reading, and I would like to begin reading the tales to Màiri as my mother read them to me.”

Père Guillaume looked at Nico. “I mean no offense, monsieur,” he said with courtesy. “But the paper is very fine, and the ink and colors costly. Have you the skills to copy a book properly?”

“I am not as useless as I look,” Nico said. There was a glint of humor in his eyes. “I was, in fact, trained up as a Benedictine at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel in France, and would be there still were it not for a…youthful indiscretion. In any case, I will take every care with your paper and inks,
mon père
, and endeavor to give satisfaction to Madame Rinette.”

That afternoon I brought my mother’s book downstairs and laid it out on the table in the solar. Père Guillaume brought out his hoard of paper, pots of ink, a rule and a pointed stick for laying out lines, and quills of various sizes. Most amazing of all was a box of colors like a treasure trove: cinnabar and cochineal for reds, saffron for yellows, powders of malachite and lapis lazuli for greens and blues, flake white and chalk, lampblack, fine strips of gold and silver leaf.

“I had no idea you had these beautiful things,
mon père
,” I said.

“Your dear mother gave them to me,” he said. His eyes filled with tears. “I have kept them carefully ever since.”

Nico was turning the pages of the original book very carefully. “Some of these stories I have heard before,” he said to me. “Some I have not. Did your mother write them herself?”

“She wrote them from memory,” I said, “from tales her own mother told her. She made the drawings herself. Look at the
expression on the face of this little squirrel. I always loved him when I was Màiri’s age.”

“I will copy it all as exactly as I can,” he said. “It will be a
travail passionné
for me.”

I drew back. I could not help myself.

“A labor of love for your daughter, your mother, and yourself,” he said gently. “That is all.”

And it was a labor of love for him. I could see the ghost of the boy he had been, the care he had been taught, in the way he marked out straight lines almost invisibly on the paper with the rule and pointed stick, arranged the spaces for the illustrations, and then copied the letters of my mother’s handwriting with eerie perfection. We sat together in the solar and looked at the sea, and I read my mother’s stories aloud as he worked. There was always a beautiful girl—sometimes a peasant girl, sometimes a princess. She always faced dangers and monsters. She always won out, by cleverness and honesty and grace, and was always happy in the end. Sometimes she was happy as a queen and sometimes as a farmer’s wife. Sometimes she was happy alone.

Would I be happy one day? Would I be the wife of—I was afraid to even think his name—or would I be alone?

Every day Màiri came in and looked at the pages. I cautioned her not to touch them, not yet, and I told her the stories. She was rapt with delight.

I cautioned myself not to touch Nico as well. It was not fair. But I too was rapt with a strange and uncertain delight at his presence, and for all my caution I did find my hand resting on his shoulder or his arm from time to time, as if by accident.

Sometimes I talked about my childhood, growing up wild at Granmuir. I told him about my father and mother, Sir Patrick Leslie of Granmuir and beautiful Lady Blanche, how they were like a fairy-tale prince and princess to me, spending their time at the court of King James V and Queen Mary of Guise, and descending on Granmuir for holidays and quarter days, with gifts of sweets and pretty
dresses. I told him about dear strict Grannie, who had raised me, and half-fey Gran’auntie, who had taught me about the flowers. I told him about the year I was eight, when Mary of Guise went back to France and my father and mother and I went with her, about how it had cut my life cleanly in two with my father’s death and my mother’s self-immurement in her Parisian convent. I told him about Tante-Mar, my mother’s legitimate half sister, who had bravely left her French farmhouse behind to return to Granmuir with me.

I told him about Alexander Gordon, my golden archangel boy who had been part of a hunting party passing through Granmuir, and how he had fallen from his horse and broken his arm. How he had been left at Granmuir to recuperate. How I, twelve years old to his sixteen, precocious and fierce, had fallen so much in love with him I could think of nothing else.

“Did he stay at Granmuir after his arm had healed?” Nico asked. He was copying a sketch of a princess and a prince in a garden; he had laid out threads over the original page in a grid pattern and drawn a matching grid on the paper with his rule and pointed stick. I could see how it made it easier to copy each marked square and thus reproduce the whole. Although Nico’s version was identical to the original in every detail, somehow there seemed to be more longing, more intensity, more suppressed desire between the two figures.

Or perhaps I saw only what I myself was feeling.

“He did,” I said. “His own father and mother were dead. He was a ward of the Earl of Huntly, and the earl had pots of his own to stir. Tante-Mar was beside herself, trying to keep us apart. I think that is why Mary of Guise had me taken to Edinburgh when I was fourteen—to separate us while we were still so young.”

Nico drew a leaf and colored it with malachite. When he put the brush down and reached for a different one, his fingers touched mine, lightly, so lightly. “And then the
Escadron Volant
separated you forever.”

“And tried to kill you as well.”

“I had asked too many questions, I think. I learned a great deal about the
Escadron Volant
from Duchess Antoinette, though, while I was in France. Her
belle-fille
, the Duke of Ferrara’s daughter, is said to have hired them to kill Coligny, in revenge for Duke Francois’s assassination. Some even say Poltrot, the man who assassinated Duke Francois, was himself
Escadron
.”

I leaned closer to look at the drawing. Our faces were close enough that I could feel his breath in the feathery wisps of hair in front of my ears. I said, “It is like a bryony vine, this
Escadron
, spreading and poisonous.”

Nico finished the leaf and began to draw its delicate veins. His hand was not entirely steady.

“The
navet du diable
,” he said. “A good comparison.”

He placed a highlight on the leaf with a bit of gold. It was a perfect reproduction of my mother’s sketch, but for the single tiny imperfection in the veins. I thought, I will always look at that crooked line and remember this moment.

He began to outline the head of the prince.

“However terribly it ended,” he said, “and whatever agonies you have endured since then, Rinette, you are fortunate to have such a love to remember.”

I was off my guard after our peaceful days together. I said, “Have you never—”

I stopped.

Have you never had such a love?

“Only once,” he said quietly. “Only now.”

“Nico.” I took a breath, then reached out my hand and put it over his hand where it lay on the table steadying the paper. It was the first time I had deliberately touched him since that strange, dreamlike half kiss in the solar, the day he arrived. His skin was warm and I could feel the elegant shapes of his fingers.

“What is it,
ma mie
?”

“Will you come up to the Mermaid Tower with me?”

He did not move his hand under mine. I could feel a fine tremor
in the skin and muscles and all the way down to the bone, and I wondered how much effort it cost him to let his hand lie quiescent, subject to my choice. “I would like to,” he said. “Very much. Oh,
ma mie
, you must know how much. But only if it is what you wish.”

“I think it is.”

I
WANTED IT TO BE DIFFERENT
. If it was different, perhaps it would exorcise the dark emptiness Rannoch Hamilton had left inside me. If it was not entirely different, I could not have borne it.

“Put your arms around me,” I said. I stood with my back to the door, my hand on the latch. “Just hold me.”

He put his hands on my shoulders first, very lightly, and after a moment ran them down over my arms. I flinched and he took his hands away in an instant.

“Rinette,” he said. “You need not—”

“I want to. I want to…wipe it out, all of it.”

He put his arms around me. I could feel the heat of his body, although at first there was a space of air between us. Slowly, so slowly, giving me every chance to pull away, he leaned against me. I gasped once, and then I put my own arms around his waist. For a long time we stood there, simply holding each other. I breathed his scent, clean and bittersweet.

“Now,” I said at last. My voice did not sound like my own at all. “We undress. You first, Nico.”

He stepped back, spreading his hands wide in a gesture that said,
I am at your command
. He took off the plaid and folded it with exquisite care. I remembered trying to fold my mantle— But no. I would not let myself remember.

He put the folded plaid on the chair and unlaced his shirt. Every move was slow, and easy for me to predict and understand. He pulled the shirt over his head. He had the milky-white skin of a red-haired man where the sun did not touch him; his throat and arms were brown. His lean, long-muscled fencer’s chest and flat belly were only
lightly traced with hair; I could see his skin through the interweaving of it. High up on his throat, under his left ear, I could see the scar of the
Escadron Volant
assassin’s dagger.

Different. He was different. He was Nico and he was not Rannoch Hamilton. He looked different. He smelled different. I said it to myself over and over as I watched him.

He unlaced the points of his leather breeches and took them off. Under them he wore linen drawers. Fine linen, gathered on a silk cord and embroidered with blackwork. The one remaining piece of clothing that belonged to the other Nico, the Nico of courts and queens.

I clung to the latch of the door.

He took off the drawers.

He was not like Alexander—Alexander’s body had been perfect, sculpted and sensuous, the body of a marble angel. Nico’s flesh showed the asceticism of his youth in its spareness. He was nothing like Rannoch Hamilton. There was no dark emptiness in his eyes, no sense of the wild animal in his skin or hair. He was alive in every possible way, heart and mind, soul and body, not an animal but a human man with scars and secrets, sorrows and joys, regrets and desires.

Desires…

He did not speak. He stood lightly, every secret revealed, his palms open to me at his sides.

“Let me,” I said. “Let me…do what I want. Let me stop, if I want to. Please, Nico.”