The Flower Reader (48 page)

Then Seilie lifted his head and whined softly.

My world shifted and rushed back to normal size. It came too far, in fact, and I saw Seilie as if he were close before my eyes. I heard some of the words the person behind me was saying.

“…Dr. Lusgerie has been tending Jennet, and only stepped out for a moment…Madame Loury was stricken with an apoplexy, but she will recover…Wat Cairnie is gone,
ma mie
, but he fought bravely, thanks be to God, and saved the others…Everyone else is safe, even Seilie; his hurts are superficial…”

I doubled over and vomited bile that burned my mouth like fire, and that was the last thing I remembered.

I
T WAS
G
ILL WHO TOLD
us what had happened. He himself was unhurt, but for a plum-size lump on his forehead.

“’Twas Jennet,” he said. “She went for the master—for Master Rannoch—with a stool, she did, and when she swung it around she caught me a clip that knocked me flat.”

I could not help but smile a little, remembering how we had laughed together over the stools being our chosen weapons. Dear Jennet. Thanks be to God, she would live, despite two serious knife wounds. Dr. Lusgerie had treated them with an ointment of egg yolk, oil of roses, and turpentine, instead of cauterizing them with boiling oil; it was a battlefield technique he had learned in France, he said, from the famous chirurgeon Ambroise Paré.

“She saved your life,” Nico said to Gill. “Rannoch Hamilton must have thought you were dead in the melée.”

“He was stark daft, he was, swinging his dirk and a-swearing,”
Gill said. “And he was mostly going after Wat. Didn’t think a boy or a couple of women would be much trouble. It was Davy who woke me up—he came in and started a-screeching for help.”

“I came back here,” Davy said. He was untouched but white as a ghost. “I didn’t know what else to do, mistress, when ye didn’t come back to the chapel. I came here and found…all this. Called the guard and they fetched the queen’s doctor fellow.”

Dr. Lusgerie had also cleaned the cuts on my palms and fingers, and applied some of his healing ointment. Before he bandaged them, he made me curl and straighten all my fingers, and seemed satisfied. I would have scars, he said, but I would have the normal use of my hands. With that, he had gone out, promising to return in the morning.

The provost’s bailies had taken Wat’s body away to be examined and embalmed; when they were finished we would take him home to Granmuir. Nico had somehow produced the queen’s own priest, Père René, who had said prayers but at first refused the unction on the grounds that Wat was already dead. Nico took him out into the passageway and spoke to him privately; when he returned he looked frightened, and gave Wat the unction without any conditions. Then he scuttled away.

“How did…Master Rannoch…get in, Gill?” I asked. I was crouched down on the floor with Seilie in my arms. With my bandaged hands I could not pet him and feel the warm silkiness of his ears; instead I rubbed my cheek against his soft russet head. “Wat promised to keep the door barred.”

“’Twas a woman’s voice,” Gill said. “A-screaming and a-crying, and calling out all our names. It was the names, mistress—she called for Wat and Jennet, and she even said, ‘Tante-Mar,’ French-like, just the same as ye would have done, and she sounded like she was hurt, and Wat opened the door.”

“It is my fault.”

I swung around. Tante-Mar’s eyes were open. Nico had arranged to have extra pallets brought in and assembled; with exquisite
gentleness he had helped to settle her upon one of them. She looked deathly tired but she smiled at me a little, and my heart blossomed.

“I suspect it was just some girl from the street,” she said. “But he had lessoned her. She said, ‘Tante-Mar,’ just the way you would have said it, and cried for help. I told Wat to open the door.”

She lifted her hand, as if to cross herself, but could not complete the gesture. Her hand fell back onto her breast and she closed her eyes again.

I patted Seilie one last time, then stood up and went to her. “It is not your fault, Tante-Mar,” I said. “Gill was fooled as well, and I am sure Wat would have opened the door regardless. Look, Dr. Lusgerie left a distillation of lily of the valley for you—I will mix it with a little honey and wine if you would like a swallow.”

“Not now,” she said. She opened her eyes again. “Perhaps when I am ready to sleep. I am so happy you and the little ones are safe,
ma douce
, and I simply want to look at you.”

I patted her pillows and made sure she was comfortable. Then I walked over to where Jennet lay in the bed and put my hand on her forehead. Her skin felt hot and moist, and she looked flushed. Dr. Lusgerie had warned us she would experience some fever.

I smoothed her hair back, then walked across the chamber and looked out the window. It faced south, over the park; the stars of Orion and Gemini were low on the horizon, and the silver veil of the Via Lactea divided the dark sky in two. “Laurentin wanted the casket,” I said. “Everything always comes back to the casket. We would all be happy and safe at Granmuir, even Alexander, if I had refused to take it from Mary of Guise that night. If I had just slipped away and left them to quarrel over it. It would have been weeks before the Earl of Rothes thought of me, and Alexander and I would have been long married.”

“If you had not taken the casket that night,” Nico said, “Moray would have had it. The Lords of the Congregation and John Knox would have had it. They would have kept Mary of Guise’s secret notes, and used them against the remaining Catholics to consolidate
their own power, and suppressed the secrets about themselves. Mary Stuart most certainly would never have come home to Scotland, and might well have been quietly poisoned while she was still queen of France. The world would be a different place,
ma mie
, if you had not taken the casket that night.”

I turned and looked at him. He was bone-white and his eyes were dark with…what—exhaustion? anguish? guilt of his own?—in the beautifully made hollows of their sockets. It was one of the moments when I could actually see him as a monk, giving up his life in penance for the sins of the world.

“Yes,” I said. “It would be different. I do not know if the world we have is better.”

He walked across the chamber and took me in his arms, as simply as if we were children. “It is what it is,” he said. “Your daughters are safe. Granmuir stands. Rinette, there is something I must tell you.”

“Is it good?”

“No.”

I put my forehead down against his shoulder. “Then I do not want to hear it. Not now. Not tonight, after everything that has happened today. Please, Nico.”

“Tomorrow, then. It is important,
ma mie
.”

“Tomorrow.”

He pushed back my borrowed coif and ran his hand gently over my hair. What remained of my hair. I had always taken it for granted, because I had always had it—hair past my waist, the glinting dark and gold colors of polished tortoiseshell, pulled straight by its own weight but with a bit of a curl at the ends. Now it was gone. My mother’s turquoises were gone. The short pieces at the back of my head were rough and prickly.

“I might as well be a boy,” I said.

He touched his lips to my temple. “No,” he said. “Not a boy.”

Out in the city I heard the bell ringing the third watch. Midnight. Had it been only this morning that Tante-Mar and Jennet had dressed me for Mary Livingston’s wedding? Was it only now,
perhaps, that Mary Livingston and John Sempill were being put to bed amidst the magnificent scarlet hangings, their wedding gift from the queen?

And Wat Cairnie was dead.

Blaise Laurentin was dead. I had killed him with my own hands.

Rannoch Hamilton was out in the city somewhere. Dead? Alive? I did not know.

At least Màiri and Kitte were safe at Maitland of Lethington’s house.

I put my arms around Nico’s waist and leaned against him. He smelled of bitter orange and myrrh and gold-and-purple nightshade, and he was wonderfully warm and solid. “I am so tired,” I said.

He leaned down, slid one arm behind my knees, and lifted me. “Gill,” he said. “Davy. Fold that extra coverlet, if you please, and my cloak and Mistress Rinette’s mantle. Move one of the pallets under the window. Let us make your mistress as comfortable as we can.”

I closed my eyes. I heard the fabric rustling. Then I felt myself being lowered to the pallet. The coverlet had been stored away somewhere with sprigs of rosemary, and kept a trace of their astringent scent. Rosemary, for memory, an herb of love and marriage. A cold nose nudged my chin, and then I felt Seilie turning around and around before thumping down next to the pallet. I reached out and rested one hand on his fur. I could feel his warmth and his heartbeat.

“I’ll sleep right here in front o’ the door,” Gill’s voice said, as if from a long way away. “Anyone trying to get in’ll have to walk right over me.”

“And me,” Davy said.

“Good boys.” Nico’s voice was close by. I felt him settle himself beside me, his back against the wall. I turned over, wanting to face him, and felt the hard metal shape of Blaise Laurentin’s dagger, still thrust in the pomander chain. I rolled over on my back again.

“The dagger,” I said. I sounded fretful as a child. “I cannot lie comfortably.”

He unfastened the chain and took both the chain and the dagger away. “There,” he said. “Is that better?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I wish you had left it there. Will you allow me to dispose of it tomorrow?”

“No.” I opened my eyes. His face was half in shadow, and I could not quite read his expression. “I want it to be known that a member of this
Escadron Volant
brotherhood has been in Scotland. I want the queen to be warned.”

He had unwrapped the strip of cloth from the dagger’s blade, and held it flat with one fingertip under the guard. It was perfectly balanced. The falcon’s one red eye was lost in the darkness. “It was probably Catherine de Médicis who hired him, but we are still not certain of that. You cannot touch her,
ma mie
.”

“I can show the dagger to the queen, at least. Show her how the ruby fits perfectly into the socket of the falcon’s eye. I can bring the whole network of assassins into the light, and blacken Queen Catherine’s name.”

“It is black enough,” he said. “With sins she did commit, and sins others have committed in her name. Leave it as it is, Rinette; I beg you.”

I closed my eyes again. “I want the dagger,” I said stubbornly. “Give it back to me.”

He picked up my hand, taking great care of the bandages, and kissed my fingertips. Then he laid my arm gently over Seilie’s warm fur again.

“You will hurt yourself with it,
ma mie
,” he said very softly. “I will give it back to you in the morning.”

A
ND HE DID
. It lay on the table as I painfully scratched out a letter to the queen, telling her of Rannoch Hamilton’s attack on my household, and Blaise Laurentin’s plot to abduct me. I did not try to explain Laurentin’s conviction that the silver casket and its contents had not
been destroyed after all; nor did I mention Lord Darnley’s involvement in the whole intrigue. I did not write that I had killed Blaise Laurentin, or that his dagger was the dagger that had killed Alexander, or that Nicolas de Clerac had spent the night with us here. These were things better not committed to paper, and with my bandaged hands I could not write easily. As I sanded the ink, I thought wryly that my letter omitted rather more than it told.

As I wrote, Nico arranged for two men-at-arms to guard us and a brisk bedchamber-woman named Una MacAlpin to help me care for Jennet and Tante-Mar. Then he went out to consult with the provost about murdered bodies in stable outbuildings; he wanted to be certain I would not be blamed for Blaise Laurentin’s death. I gave Gill careful instructions on how to find the queen’s tower on the other side of Holyrood Palace, and sent him off with my letter. I was only just dressed when he returned. I could not help but smile at his expression; he looked like a mouse who had come face-to-face with a lion.

“She actually said words to me,” he said reverently. “The queen herself. Asked me what my name was.”

“Did she read my letter, Gill?”

“So she did, and gave me an answer, too. Wrote it down, so’s I didn’t have to recollect it.”

He handed me my own letter again. At the bottom someone—not the queen herself, probably Mary Beaton—had scribbled,
Wait upon me after dinner, MARIE R
.

“Well-done, Gill,” I said. “Now, I have another errand for you. Run down to Sir William Maitland of Lethington’s house, if you please, in the High Street. Ask after Màiri and Kitte, and make certain they are well. I do not dare bring them here until Rannoch Hamilton is captured, but we cannot move Tante-Mar or Jennet—for now it is best that they stay where they are.”

“Aye, mistress,” he said. He turned to go and ran straight into Nicolas de Clerac.

“Nico,” I said. “Look, I have a letter from the queen—” I saw his expression and said, “What is it?”

“Laurentin. You did not kill him, Rinette.”

I stared at him. “How can you say that? I stabbed him over and over, with his own dagger.”

“The provost’s bailies said no murdered body had been recovered overnight, so I went back to the stable outbuilding where he held you and the girls. I wanted to make sure he was dead.”

My stomach lurched. “And you found him alive?”

“No. I did not find him at all.”

“Could someone have taken his body?”

“There was a trail of blood up the alley to the street. He crawled.”

“But I
stabbed
him,” I said again. I picked up the dagger, despite my bandaged hands, and drove it into the wood of the table. It stuck there, quivering. “He was
dead
.”

“He was badly wounded, I think, but not dead. At least his death is not on your hands. What does your letter say? Has she asked you to wait upon her?”

“Yes.”

“Go, then, and tell her what Rannoch Hamilton has done. She has a horror of violence, and she will be all the more willing to see you divorced. Or to see Hamilton captured and hanged.”